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Six months later, her husband is home by himself when a woman turns up and delivers two large cardboard boxes.
What to think of this intention to box an influenced on the future while dying?
Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of.
Pressed flower petals slip out from between pages, passport photographs stay pinned to pieces of paper,
She has a suitcase of her own, full of letters, carbons, and souvenirs, “flat product” for the most part, as the archivists like to say. Her own diaries and journals. The next day she climbs up the library steps and takes it down from the top shelf, it’s incredibly dusty inside and out. A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time. A suitcase like that, cardboard boxes like that, full of middles and endings and beginnings, buried under decades’ worth of dust; pages that were written to deceive alongside other
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The altered perspective had distracted her from her grief.
Strange, she thinks, all these years a little bit of my life has gone on existing in this stranger’s head. And now he’s given it back to me.
With her there, he is looking into his own room as though it were something unfamiliar.
because of the eternal present of photography this woman is smiling at everyone and anyone who sees the picture, including now herself, visiting the husband.
Come, darling May, and put the buds back on the trees, the piano wishes at the end, but it’s July now, the summer evening outside has turned into a summer night, the bottle of wine is empty.
And now all the crypts are become transparent, and he and she are standing directly in the graveyard, and the island of the living is no bigger than the tiny patch of ground under their feet. While she takes off his glasses and lays them aside, and he for the first time enfolds her in his arms, humankind begs for peace and everlasting light. She takes his face in both hands and kisses him very gently. Then a lone young voice sounds and praises God, because if she praises Him, He will perhaps spare her. The way her bare shoulder feels in his cupping hand during the prayer, the one curve under
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Involuntarily, he sings the Latin words, even as his hands discover that her bottom fits neatly into them, a peach to each.
They are still both standing there, on the blue living room rug, their island, barefoot, with interlocking arms and legs, only at rare intervals opening their eyes, emerging from their blind good fortune to look at one another. Where does the girl get her certainty from? And then they shut their eyes again, the better to see with their hands and mouths.
Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future.
He knows he is making difficulties in order to secure her agreement. “Immortal Victims” is the name of the song he is thinking of. The sacrificial victim is the chosen one.
My grandfather used to take me fishing when I was little, she says. He has a sudden vision of her sitting on a pier, bare legs dangling, holding a fishing rod. The power of a simple sentence like that, he thinks. Makes you see something, whether you want to or not.
He mustn’t forget that he knows this better than she does, she who smiles to hear such a thing. But if he wants to survive the crash, then the certain prospect of it must be kept at the forefront of his mind the whole time that he spends with her, be it short or long. This jagged thought must obtrude through all other thoughts of happiness, love, and desire, through all their shared experiences and any memories they may have, and he must endure it, if the crash, as and when it happens, isn’t to destroy him.
The longing to maintain control must be at least as powerful as the desire to lose it. Fiendish. And one is nothing but the battlefield on which this conflict is fought out. There’s no winning here.
The shared view of some third thing, it comes to her, has something intimate or exclusive about it.
No, she says, mincing the garlic as fine as she can, the way Agnes taught her to do. Really, he says, someone ought to write a book about everyday actions. Can he read her mind? She glances at him over her shoulder, but his thoughts are off on a fresh course: the accumulated wisdom and experience behind each set of actions. What it represents. Effort, repetition over a whole lifetime, the care, even love contained in it, or alternatively the indifference, the tedium.
Making the obvious unobvious is the trick of it.
Funny, isn’t it? he says, the way you supplement what you can’t see.
Whatever the identity of the vanquished, dying is a lonely affair.
At a distance, and coolly rational, he feels closer to her, more intimate than he ever did in a sexual embrace.
It’s bliss, says Hans, a state he’s rarely experienced before with another person: withdrawal from everything around about into one’s own essence. A kind of inner emigration.
Has he gone back to his room and already put the book back? The page she is holding will always be missing from it. That gap, she thinks, is the first trace of her in his world.
Or is this gray station endowed with the power to hold two different sorts of time, two competing presents, two everyday realities, one serving as the other’s netherworld?
The truth is always concrete,
Wanting distorts measurements worse than an oily rag.
Step by step she asks herself whether her leaving the set timetable isn’t the equivalent of wearing a disguise, a mask, or full bodysuit. Can it be that she too is only herself where no one knows her, where she is a complete stranger?
What are you doing in the present that was our future, ask the dead
How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past?
As soon as one writes down what one is helpless to avert, it becomes material.
He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present.
Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it.
What does he hope for? Has his marriage only lasted this long because he and Ingrid have shared board but not bed these past ten years? Is one of these the most one can hope for?
The future trails its loose ends into the present until it becomes the present, settles on one or other human flesh, and its flourishing or brazen regime abruptly begins.
Coming to a new place can have the effect of producing somebody wholly different, someone who just superficially resembles the person one thought one knew.
imperceptibly one layer of time detaches itself from the other.
The dead, linked umbilically to the living by their hope for punishment to be exacted.
Or was a human being just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy?
her hope produces no echo,
There are always two sides to everything. No more than two? Culpability and heroism meet under one name more often than one might think. Careful not to magnify or diminish the one at the expense of the other. Leave them both unsecured, because only through the difference in their respective elevation does movement become possible. There is the source of energy, in the discrepancy, in the waiting. There in silence, hope and rage may grow. To multiply what is unendurable, seen thus, would be a revolutionary act. Or is it opportunism after all?
monogamy is just an arrangement, nothing more. Basically, it was invented to secure the inheritance in a patriarchal system.
even if we’re sometimes fleetingly happy, it doesn’t feel like a new start to me. It just feels like a really long farewell.
The contents are not cut-and-dried, art is a process, not a product. Beauty needs to be interwoven with truth. What you see at a glance and whatever lies beneath needs to be one and the same. As for that beauty, the poet said it is only the beginning of terror anyway. The contradictory nature of beauty. The searching that gives beauty its profundity. The joy of digging under the surface. The joy of questioning. The connection, therefore, between artist and working-class public is one that depends on the shared experience of work.
Thus far, the present only made sense for him when he could see it as a past-in-waiting that he could control. Now the present seems empty. He feels time pushing him forward, but without his participation.
Strange, she thinks, that time, which is invisible, becomes indirectly visible in terms of unhappiness. As though unhappiness were the costume of time.
But in the meantime, time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it, but is never one thing: never indifferent, always taut, always strung between a beginning of which one is not aware because one is too busy with life, and an ending which is in the future, and hence in darkness.
the dusty sunshine of a warm evening
It was three weeks till she set foot in this part of the city, which has come up overnight alongside the city she knew. The element of unfamiliarity in the geography of her own city, with the same name, same language, the architecture even similar, but for all that, a strange city. A second heart, pitter-pat, one too many.
