I exercised myself in egomania. He called it an interest in knowledge. At the end of my life, I count sunrises. So little was the feelings harbored, the theories defended, the acts performed, the will that guided them, so little. A small, austere room. Just what you need. Behind the window, a tree whose branches churn in the wind. All the bliss I can long for in this world fits between this tree and my eyes. That peace. And the sunbeam that traces a rectangle of light on the cotton curtain. The Standing Woman is not a treatise, nor is it a fiction. It is an invitation to listen. A story told in three different registers. A story in search of argument. A reflection on illness, fragment, the discontinuity of perception and the illusory belief in a self that gave meaning to existence.