Status Updates From La invención de Morel

“When all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges. That was to be expected. When Madeleine existed for the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine herself was actually there.”

The habits of our lives make us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world. Now reality appears to be changed, unreal. When a man awakens, or dies, he is slow to free himself from the terrors of the dream, from the worries and manias of life. Now it will be hard for me to break the habit of being afraid of these people.

My love for this woman has become annoying (and ridiculous: we have never even spoken to each other!).

So I was dead! The thought delighted me. (I felt proud, I felt as if I were a character in a novel!)

Fifth hypothesis: the intruders are a group of dead friends, and I am a traveler, like Dante or Swedenborg, or some other dead man of another sort, at a dafferent phase of his metamorphosis, this island may be the purgatory or the heaven of those dead people.

I felt very depressed. The effort needed to kill myself was superfluous now, because with Faustine gone not even the anachronous satisfaction of death remained.

Então era essa a tal invenção!