I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.

Today, while I was writing a letter, it struck me that I have been here [Paris] just three weeks. Three weeks anywhere else, in the country for example, would be like one day; here they are years. And I don’t want to write any more letters. What’s the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I’m changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it’s obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can’t possibly write to strangers.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge