From The Archive of Feelings, which was published this month by Other Press. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.

It’s a source of joy every time, to find the right place for an event. A natural disaster, a celebrity divorce, a new public building, a plane crash, the current state of the weather, of anything, there is really nothing that doesn’t have a place in the system, or for which a place couldn’t be found. And when something is fitted into the hierarchy of subjects, it becomes understandable and governable. If everything is equal, the way it is on the internet, then nothing has any value.

Files on current events, which are often completed and added to on a daily basis, lie on my desk or on the floor of my office; other items are stowed away in the shelving in the basement, until the moment when a subject comes bobbing up to the surface again, and with it its file.

In the immediate wake of my dismissal, it may have been embarrassment that kept me from going out in public. I didn’t want to be one of those wretched beings that you can tell from a distance are no longer needed for anything, so I stayed home and did my work for myself. When I am outside, I feel uncertain and somehow compromised; at home I am shielded from the confusion of the continually changing world, which only disturbs me in my thoughts and memories, and my daily routines.

I get up at half past six, shower, read the data on my little weather station, and copy them down. I make coffee and work in my office until twelve. For lunch, I will eat a sandwich and listen to the midday news on the radio. I have a little lie-down for half an hour, but by half past one at the latest I’m back at my desk. In the evening I cook for myself, one of a few simple dishes I know how to make. After supper, I open a bottle of wine, take a book down from the shelf, and read until the bottle is empty, and I feel tired enough to sleep. I used to listen to music, but that had the effect of making me feel sentimental, and that was disagreeable to me.

All my days pass off in the same way, workdays, Sundays, holidays, it makes no difference.

I can’t remember ever being carried anywhere; I probably wouldn’t have wanted to be. Since I was a toddler, I have wanted to stand on my own two feet and be left alone. Presumably, I never really cared for human society, I expected nothing from it, and soon understood that the way they would most likely leave me be was if I did what they expected. And you could ask me for anything—just not excessive proximity. Even if I liked someone, a teacher, a fellow pupil, a relative, or a friend of my parents, I did so more in thought, and was careful not to give myself away and possibly awaken feelings I might not have been able to cope with. I was my only confidant.

To get a little order into my life, I set up rules for myself. To this day, I don’t step on cracked paving stones, or if I do, then I do it with each foot equally. If I happen to fail, I feel an almost physical unwellness.

I did a lot of counting—my steps, fence posts, cars, men and women I passed on my way to school, the number of letters in words and sentences, regardless of meaning. I kept the figures in my head, some I grew fond of, and would repeat endlessly, others I disliked, heaven knows why.

I liked ordering things, packing them up, I liked all kinds of containers, files, desk drawers, mason jars. For a while I made boxes of all sizes and lined them with marbled paper or fabric. Some I gave away, the others are still around somewhere.

My college years were difficult for me. I had left home and was living in an efficiency apartment in a hospital personnel wing. It was all pine furniture, narrow bed, shelf, a school desk with two drawers, which I soon replaced with something bigger, a vast old desk that someone had wanted to get rid of. A friend gave me a small fridge that had gone through I don’t know how many sets of owners and had been painted dark blue. On top of that I set an electric kettle and a hot plate, so as not to have to use the communal kitchens where all kinds of people were hanging around, preparing some very strange dishes.

From my window I had a view of part of the city, but much of the rest was obscured by the main hospital building, a discouraging-looking multistory lump with numberless windows behind which people were busy being born, suffering, and dying. Sometimes a light would go on in one of them in the middle of the night and I wondered what that signified, if a patient had rung for a nurse in his agony, if there was a sudden emergency, someone was dying, or just couldn’t sleep and was frightened of the dark.

Many of the inhabitants of the accommodation wing were shift workers, and for long periods I sometimes wouldn’t see a soul. I hardly knew anyone at college either, and for the first time in my life I suffered from loneliness. All around me people were flirting and laughing and debating, but for some reason, which to this day I am unable to say, I was unable to join in their little games.

During college vacations I found temporary jobs, I worked in offices or on building sites, and once I worked in the press archive, where I made such a good impression that I was offered a permanent job upon graduation, and where I ended up staying until I was let go.

I liked life in the agency, the taut atmosphere in the editorial rooms, the telex machines spitting out the news in the form of endless ribbons of paper, the journalists who came and went, always in a hurry, always wound up about something. What I liked best of all was the late shift, as the editorial deadline approached, and the tension got even higher. Then, if there was some big event on top of that, an election, a revelation, a scandal, even back in the archives we got a little euphoric, felt fevered, had the sense that we were feeling the pulse of history. But I also liked the quiet mornings and the weekend shifts, when all you could hear in the section was the turning of newspaper pages and the clack of scissors as we cut out the articles that concerned us.

In our pomp, we employed a score of people at the archive, but when computers came in, they were all gradually let go, photo archives and text were amalgamated, and that too was something our boss had to break to us, along with the decision of who was going and who could stay.

The traffic outside the house has almost stopped entirely, I hardly even see pedestrians go by when I sit at the window watching the birds at the feeder. I could have stopped feeding them long ago, but I’m going to keep at it until early summer, I like watching them, and I like their company, especially now, when the world seems to have fallen into a deep sleep. When the rain stops, I make up a list of things I need, and pick up my backpack a little earlier than usual.

I’m the only customer in the grocery store. The owner makes a few pithy observations about the state of the world. I want to give him what I owe, but he shakes his head and points to a dish next to the till. I wonder what that’s about, but I don’t say anything, put my bills in the dish and take out the change and put it in my pocket. While I stow my shopping into my backpack, the grocer disappears among his aisles without a word to me.

There’s no one outside. Maybe that’s the reason why, after months of inertia, I suddenly feel the impulse to go for a walk. So instead of going home, I head down the hill, in the opposite direction. There’s barely any traffic on the main road, and when I get to the river and follow the path that leads up into the valley, I’m all alone.