Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead
, a
crystal theater
, a golden cock
that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already
be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them
also in other cities. But the special quality of this
city for the man who arrives there on a September
evening, when the days are growing shorter and the
multicolored lamps
are lighted all at once at the
doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's
voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those
who now believe they have once before lived an evening
identical to this and who think they were
happy, that time.