EXCERPT In this mean world of wretchedness and misery, I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me […] In its light, in the course of a second, of a single moment, I beheld all the wretchedness of my existence and apprehended the glory and splendor of the star. After, that brightness disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear. I was unable to retain that passing gleam. —Sadeq Hedayat We encounter our first augomaniac facing the robbed sublimity of a light which is no longer a universal constant but rather an atypical tinge of counter-universal experience (something that should never have happened). Light appears as a sudden infiltration of the continuous, an emergent force that violates the supposed essence of world. Our narrator, in turn, is a creature removed— a ‘blind owl’, in his own words—ultimately displaced amid the four bare walls of a faraway shelter, gnawed at by internal and external solitude, and yet awaiting (against all odds) the invasion of some incredible glow.…