Your alarm clock goes off, you do not stir, you remain in your bed, you close your eyes again. It is not a premeditated action, or rather it’s not an action at all, but an absence of action, an action that you don’t perform, actions that you avoid performing. You went to bed early, you slept peacefully, you had set the alarm clock, you heard it go off, you waited for it to go off, for several minutes at least, already woken by the heat, or by the light, or by expectation itself. You do not move; you will not move. Someone else, your twin, conscientious double is perhaps.. perhaps performing in your stead, one by one, the actions you have eschewed: he gets up, washes, shaves, dresses, goes out. You let him bound down the stairs, run down the street, leap onto the moving bus, arrive on time, out of breath but triumphant, at the doors in the hall. You get up too late. You will not set down on four, eight or twelve sheets of paper what you know, what you think, what you know you are supposed to think, about alienation, the workers, modernity and leisure, about white-collar workers or about automation, about our knowledge of others, about Marx as rival to de Tocqueville, about Weber as an opponent of Lukacs. In any case, you wouldn’t have said anything, because you don’t know a great deal and you think nothing at all. Your seat remains vacant. You will not finish your degree, you will never start your diploma. You will study no more. You make , as you do everyday, a bowl of Nescafe; you add, as you do everyday, a few drops of sweetened condensed milk. You don’t wash, you hardly bother to dress.

(…)

Something has broken. You no longer feel some thing which until then fortified you until then, the feeling of your existence, the impression of belonging to or being in the world, is starting to slip away from you. Your past, your present,  and your future merge into one: they are now just the heaviness of your limbs, your nagging migraine, the bitterness in your Nescafe. (…)

— From Un homme qui dort (1974) by Georges Perec (Dir. Bernard Queysanne).