On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

by Solvej Balle

The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other—the one person who makes everything simple—a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.

That is why I began to write. Because I can hear him in the house. Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.

That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.

The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.

We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.

time must surely always revert to its eternal forward progression. People have always had to allow for certain disruptions in life, rivers flooding their banks, road accidents, twisted ankles, hard winters or droughts, but in the end, he said, here we were, as if nothing had happened. No one had died, no one had been hurt.

Often, we would simply come to the conclusion that you cannot know everything, that you have to accept some displacement in life, that you have to expect inconsistencies, and that was what we encountered: patterns and inconsistencies, two worlds trying to merge.

We could find patterns and we could find inconsistencies. Thomas was the pattern, I was disturbance.

I am not saying I have lost hope, I am simply saying that it seldom comes to call. I cannot sit down and wait, safe in the knowledge that it will turn up, I cannot summon it to me, but sometimes, nonetheless, hope comes back. Unexpectedly, out of the blue.

It is the loss that staggers me. It is the longing for what is lost and there is nothing I can do about it.

It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world.

I insisted on making plans. He thought we should wait. You can’t plan for everything, he said. Sometimes you just have to be ready. Take each day as it comes, be on the alert. Something will turn up.