man, I feel inexplicably sad today. the following two sections in Life, A User's Manual nearly made me weepish:

For Smautf, who used to see them covered over by a black cloth on the big square table when he brought his master tea (which the latter most often forgot to drink), an apple (which he nibbled a little before letting it brown in the wastepaper basket), or mail which he only opened now as an exception, the puzzles remained attached to wisps of memory - smells of seaweed, the sounds of waves crashing along high embankments, distant names: Majunga, Diego-Suarez, Comoro, Seychelles, Socotra, Moka, Hodeida... For Bartlebooth, they were now only bizarre playing-pieces in an interminable game, of which he had ended up forgetting the rules, who his opponent was, and what the stake was, and the bet: little wooden bits whose capricious contours fed his nightmares, the sole material substance of a lonely and bloody-minded replay, the inert, inept, and merciless components of an aimless quest. Majunga was neither a town nor a port, it was not a heavy sky, a strip of lagoon, a horizon dog-toothed by warehouses and cement works, it was only seven hundred and fifty variations on grey, incomprehensible splinters of a bottomless enigma, the sole images of a void which no memory, no expectation would ever come to fill, the only props of his self-defeating illusions.

/

Sometimes Valene had the feeling that time had been stopped, suspended, frozen around he didn't know what expectation. The very idea of the picture he planned to do and whose laid-out, broken-up images had begun to haunt every second of his life, furnishing his dreams, squeezing his memories, the very idea of this shattered building laying bare the cracks of its past, the crumbling of its present, this unordered amassing of stories grandiose and trivial, frivolous and pathetic, gave him the impression of a grotesque mausoleum raised in the memory of companions petrified in terminal postures as insignificant in their solemnity as they were in their ordinariness, as if he had wanted both to warn of and to delay these slow or quick deaths which seemed to be engulfing the entire building storey by storey:...

[Perec 126-127]

*

On a slightly cheerier note, at least there's this, although total suspension would be more blissful.