On the street full of boxes, the loaders are cleaning the street. One by one, with laughter and wisecracks, they are putting the boxes on the trucks. From the vantage point of my office window I watch them with slow eyes on which the lids are sleeping. And anything subtle, incomprehensible, ties what I feel to the shipments I see being made up; any unknown sensation makes a box out of all this tedium of mine, or anguish, or nausea, and carries it on the shoulders of a joking man to a truck that is not here.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet