October 2005 - Venice (Italy)

It was one of those afternoons charged with an inexplicable melancholy, what the French call " indicible tristesse."
Outside upon the broad canal of the Giudecca, fog-horns are calling from sea-going steamers, and now and then the weird sting of a siren, like a writhing sound serpent or a banshee's cry, shivers from nowhere, nowhither, through the opaque mist. Is it from our nerves, or from something altered and set wrong in Nature, some unwholesome wind, some depression preceding thunderstorm or earthquake, that this sense of a profound gloom settles down quite unexpectedly? Then all life seems wasted: the heart is full of hidden want! We know not what we desire; but an atmosphere of wistfulness is everywhere. What we have achieved, what we possess, shows dull, flat and unprofitable. Only what we have not, or lies beyond the scope of possibilities, gleams before the soul's gaze like a bright particular star...