the days

He saw himself as a stranger wherever he was and wherever he went. He could hardly distinguish between his homeland in which he grew up and other foreign countries with which he was familiar. Because that thick, hateful veil that had been placed between him and the world since his early childhood was surrounding him, taking him from all sides in every place, so the people, in comparison to him, were the people whose voices he heard and felt some of their movements, but he did not see them and did not penetrate beyond these voices that... He could hear her and the movements he could feel. He was a stranger in his homeland, and he was a stranger in France, and he saw that what he encountered in people''s lives were nothing but phenomena that hardly substituted anything for him. The night. Taha Hussien