Early January, a few days after New Year's Eve. It was cold, and sunny. A bright, crisp weather. The redbrick houses, the skeleton trees, were delineated with an extraordinary precision. They seemed to have acquired more reality, or a reality of another kind, more solid, like the water of the canals that had turned into hard ice.

I was nineteen. I had a girlfriend. We had planned to spend a few days in Amsterdam but she had just dumped me. Unexpectedly. And unexpectedly I felt an immense relief. I was lonely, but I had a sense of freedom I never knew before. I was staying in a youth hostel in the old district. I slept in a dormitory with some twenty other youngsters. I did not make friends with anyone. I went to museums, and walked around the city. I spent hours in the museums, and hours walking along the canals. I only stopped long after dark.

At the time, coffeeshops in Amsterdam casually offered hashish or marijuana to visitors. There was nothing special about it. Nothing even to advertise. I sat by myself in a place called the Yellow Submarine. It was crowded, but the room was badly lit so I couldn't look at the people. The music was awful. I had ordered tea, herbal tea. The story is well known, of how, for the inexperienced, the stuff seems to have no effect at first. Baudelaire tells it already.

The fact is I did not feel a thing. Except that the place was extremely noisy and unbearably boring. I sipped my tea and left. My hostel was right beside a church with a high bell that was all lighted up at night: the clock was shining in bright orange. I could see it, a few blocks away. I walked slowly, my mind filled with the pictures I had stared at all day, portraits of merchants and their wives, and marines with vessels leaving for India, and lines of redbrick houses where the wives remained, reading the letters of their husbands, or playing guitars with their lovers. These, I imagined, were French. A small French colony had settled in Amsterdam in the second half of the 17th century. Even Descartes lived there for a while.

When I looked up, the bell was on my right several blocks away. In fact, it was further than when I had started. I must have passed it, absorbed in my dreams, and the winding canals had lead me away from the place. I turned towards the church. It was a quiet street with these same redbrick houses. The night seem to erase all the details that mark our time. Descartes could have stayed in this very street. In his letters to his friend Balzac, he describes the port, and the merchants obsessed with their trade, so that no one noticed him. The philosopher was like an invisible man.

I suppose my thoughts took some metaphysical turn. Or maybe they did not, and I pondered for hours on the houses, the vessels, the merchants and their wives. It is difficult now to reconstruct my thoughts, and explain my carelessness. Not only because it happened more than twenty years ago. I remember walking endlessly. Along quiet streets, and frozen canals, and noisy market places full of bars and drunken lads. As for myself, my head was clear as the air. I had just had tea. Only I was cold, extremely cold in fact. And the bell was never where I had left it when I last looked up. It was not that it was moving, of course. I knew bells did not move. It was rather as if some magnetic power repelled me from the tower. Or made the streets bend the other way. Strange city, Amsterdam, where no street, no canal, leads you to the place you are aiming for. But I was not worried, not at all. I was thinking my thoughts. Slowly turning into a bourgeois in a black coat from centuries ago, a ghost of some kind. For I was cold as dead people must feel. Literally, I was freezing.

I walked for several hours before I realized my mistake. I found myself at the foot of a church: the bell was all lit up, the clock shone in bright orange, but it was not the one neighboring my hostel. In fact I could see another bell at a distance with the same clock, and yet another further to my left. There could be no doubt: all churches in Amsterdam had bells, clocks, and similar lighting. I was completely lost.

I walked at random, just trying to get closer to the old district, for it seemed I had mostly walked the other way, into the outskirts of the city. I hoped that at some point something would give me a clue.

As the night passed, streets became even quieter. There was hardly anyone out. Sometimes I could hear brisk footsteps, echoing between houses, or laughter, a couple coming back to their hotel. The small needle of the clocks I had been following had long turned past midnight, into the small hours of the night. I remembered a passage in the objections to the Metaphysical Meditation. Father Bourdin wrote to Descartes that the evil genius, who turns everything into an illusion, was like the folly that makes the sleeper, only half awake, mutter: “strange, the bell has struck four times one o'clock,” when it rings for four o' clock. Descartes' answer, in brief, is something like: “Sure.” The passage seemed to acquire a profundity I could not quite explain.

I can see now how that the evening could have turned into a nightmare full of the paranoid visions that hashish often gives to the user. But I was only cold, and tired. I felt I was turning into a statue, colder than marble. Moving my legs cost me more effort at each step: they were turning into something hard, they were freezing into stone, and soon I would not be able to walk at all. I would have to stop and sit on a bench where the metamorphosis into a statue would be complete. But there was no fear.

However, something in my mind, something I was not aware of, must have been on the lookout. For suddenly I was standing in front of my hostel. I let myself in. I found my bunk, and just lay in my sleeping bag. I did not feel any warmth. The reason for that was obvious. I was sleeping outside on a terrace overlooking the city. From my bed, I had a view of the whole city, with all the street lamps, the church bells and their orange clocks. The moon was floating in the sky, round and white. I remember thinking how strange it was that when I had chosen my bunk in the morning I had not noticed that it was situated outside. Yes, it was strange but it did not really matter. The view was beautiful, and I just stared into the night. Until it was morning, and daylight filtered through the drawn curtains of a small window. At no point did I seem to fall asleep, though I had to acknowledge that my surroundings had changed without my being aware of it.

It was nightmare without fear, and a philosophical walk too, if you follow Wittgenstein: lost in the old city of language and obsessively looking for something that kept eluding my pursuit. Except the obsession was dreamy.