On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

by Solvej Balle

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. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. 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.

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it’s a chemical reaction, I don’t know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other’s company. Maybe we are a weather system—condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters.

All I have to show for days and days of trying to remember my long succession of days is a pile of paper and a messy room.

I am living in a time that eats up the world.

How long can my little world endure me?

I have stood out there in the belief that I would grow smaller by beholding the staggering scale of the heavens, but that is not how it works. Not with a telescope. You get huge, hungry eyes, you intrude, you invade. You meddle in the affairs of the firmament and I can tell that the more familiar I become with the night sky, the more stars that are identified, the more of the moon’s surface I see, the bigger I get. I invade space, I fill the world.