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.

That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all.

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.

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.

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.

It was not simple—it was almost as if the things themselves were in doubt, as if they hesitated, as if they wavered between the different possibilities offered by time, teetering on the line between time that passed and time that rewound.

Thomas was caught in eternity and I was slowly but surely moving toward my grave.

It is merely time that is broken. We are together.

I am safe. From the days that pile up between us. From Thomas and all his forgetting.

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

He is a ghost and ghosts haunt. They return, again and again. Monsters rampage through the world and leave it devastated.

Nothing comes of my days. They merely pass and I follow them and eat up my world and listen to the ghost in the house.