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wrong path.
    At any rate, the dolphin-shaped tube I saw, which could have been thrown out by a father who was angry at his child, or by a child who was disappointed in, or felt betrayed by, his father, or by someone in the family who was angry for some reason or angry at nothing other than the tube itself, which caught the person’s eye at that moment, or which was floating down the winter river for some other obscure reason, did not come to me as some kind of a revelation, because to the end, I did not let the tube, which hadn’t come to me as a revelation from the beginning, come to me as a revelation. Nevertheless, the dolphin tube gave me enough motivation to leave the city—perhaps I took the tube, which hadn’t come to me as a revelation, as some kind of a suggestion—which was perhaps because I was occupied with thoughts about the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” composed by a linguist, which I’d read around that time but hadn’t understood the precise meaning of, and vaguely thought, when the tube had floated down the meandering river and could no longer be seen, that I may end up writing something, something about the difficulty of existence, the difficulty of talking about the difficulty of existence, the double difficulty of it, and that it would begin with me leaving the city. (How easy is it, though, for such words to be without truth? Thinking about the colossal gap between truth and falsehood, the gray area that can’t be named, and thinking that the gap must be filled by fabrication, as inadequate as it is, I think that this story, too, will consist mostly of such fabrication.)
    Watching the dolphin on the river, which was disappearing from my view, I regretted that I wasn’t wearing a black fedora, because it seemed that the act of taking it off, hanging it on a branch of a bare tree on the winter riverside, then leaving the spot—I have a habit of calling up specific objects when I can’t carry on with abstract thoughts—would serve as a gracious farewell to the dolphin that could no longer be seen, and would perhaps, if lucky, reach the sea, which would suit it better, and float around among real dolphins, triggering their curiosity, as well as a farewell to a certain period in my life. Furthermore, I liked to think, although it wasn’t true, that the dolphin tube I saw floating down a winter river made for me a decision that I myself had difficulty making, and that the course of my life had thus changed slightly, indeed ever so slightly, because it was a good thing, at least in my mind, for the course of my life to change, be it slightly, by a dolphin tube I happened to see floating down a river one day, or by something that had nothing to do with me, like the tube, something that was almost nothing at all.
    I myself couldn’t say whether or not this was true. But there are thoughts that, despite having occurred in the mind, become more real in the mind than things that have actually taken place, which is the case for the thoughts above. And the thoughts may be telling me that I already know that what I’m writing will be about things that tell me nothing. And talking about things that tell you nothing is probably the same as thinking about things that remain obscure to the end.
    In effect, what I really want to talk about is something that’s nothing, or things you can’t talk about. Although most of them are difficult to talk about, you can talk at least about the ways in which you can’t talk about them, and how inexpressible they are, or how inexpressibly expressible they are, in which, perhaps, lies the ultimate something of speaking.
    Or perhaps these words were conceived in my mind and had their beginning in the moment I felt severe dizziness as I watched a number of black birds, which had been sitting on a tree, suddenly soaring all at once into the darkening sky when I absently threw a rock while