Things a story of the sixties; a man asle georges perec

then it would seem to them, as they sat in the warm, in a close huddle, smoking a cigarette to be stubbed out in a moment's time when the hors d'oeuvres would arrive, that their life was going to be only the infinite sum of such auspicious moments, and that they would always be happy, because they deserved to be happy, because they would manage to stay free, because happiness was within them.

They would sit facing each other, they were going to eat after having been hungry, and all these things - the thick white tablecloth, the blue blot of a packet of Gitanes, the earthenware plates, the rather heavy cutlery, the stem glasses, the wicker basket full of newly baked bread - constituted the everfresh setting of an almost visceral pleasure, a pleasure so intense as to verge on numbness: an impression, almost exactly opposite and almost exactly identical to the experience of speed, of a tremendous stability, of