"Prushevksy suddenly felt like visiting a faraway central city—where people go without sleep for a long time, where they think and argue, where food stores are open in the evening and give off a smell of wine and confectionery, where you can meet a strange woman and talk with her all through the night, experiencing the mysterious joy of friendship and wishing you could live forever in this alarm, and then, come morning, having said farewell beneath and extinguished gaslight the two of you go your ways in the emptiness of dawn without promise of anything."