For a long time, I would drink a lot of coffee. There were times when I could barely open my eyes, but I would tell myself: Just a few more lines of code. And only a little while later I could feel the desire to sleep overtake me; I would slowly drift away while I imagined my hands typing on the keyboard that I was no longer touching; and I would think of what I had written: a for look, nested within an if, itself contained in a while that I had foolishly forgotten to write the necessary closing conditions for, stuck forever in trying to distinguish between the lemmatized writings of Charles V and Francois I. It seemed to me, after I woke up, and I lay staring at the monitor, that the program still had not finished running. But it would then seem unintelligible, as though I had found myself stuck in that loop, doomed to forever see only glimpses of the traces of the previous iterations that had remained in my memory; yet then the code would separate itself from me, leaving me with the ability to close this eternity of forgetfulness, calming in its single-minded foolishness, but for perhaps even more, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed.
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