‘So you’re not interested in progress, Mr Jastrau. What *are* you interested in?’
It was so unreal, this way of thinking. And it was as if the unreality spread. The buildings on the other side of the street became gathering rainclouds; the oval table, the visiting-card bowl and the hat tree seemed like random pieces of furniture that had been put out on the sidewalk by the king’s bailiff; and there, in those chairs on the sidewalk, sat Vuldum and Father Garhammer, and suddenly it occurred to Jastrau how feminine they both were. Vuldum tall and unrelenting as only a redhead can be, and the priest short and dark, constantly biting his long lips, greedy for a new, bloodless, logical problem; but who are as grim and implacable as old virgins?
‘I’m only really interested in myself’, Jastrau replied cautiously, avoiding Vuldum’s cold smile. ‘That is, in psychology, in what’s at the bottom of the soul, and – well, I’m interested in how I can build up an objective world, a reality.’
— Tom Kristensen, Hærværk (‘Havoc’), my trans.
Notes from a Room 