The Book of Disquiet

"I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. new things are distressing to my sensibility; I'm at ease only in places where I've already been.

after I'd sat down in the chair, i happened to ask a young barber, occupied in fastening a clean cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. i didn't ask this because i felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question, 'he passed away yesterday,' flatly answered the barber's voice behind me. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me... Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets -if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life..."