On the Calculation of Volume, Book II

by Solvej Balle

Time passes, but all it does is pour day after day into my world, it goes nowhere, it has no stops or stations, only this endless chain of days.

In the past I have always had good reason to be here, but now I feel superfluous. I walk around the city with no purpose other than my own passage from day to day.

It is the Tara Selter with a future who is gone. It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.

I no longer believe in variation, I don’t look for differences and not even a fire alarm can alter my expectations of a day that comes around again and again.

Home was Clairon-sous-Bois, but not anymore, and now I am on my way to Brussels. That too was home. Once upon a time. Home is no longer a place to go. But today I have a direction.

Wahlverwandtschaften: how I liked the sound of the words, and maybe the rhythm, and that I had read Goethe and given the appearance of making notes on what I was reading because I wasn’t sure whether my fellow passengers were actually telling their stories to me.

He felt, rather, that the broadcasting of private phone conversations in public spaces was theft. Of other people’s peace and quiet, their privacy, possibly even their humanity. As if the speaker was sitting in their own private space and regarded the other passengers as fixtures and fittings: like a door, a seat, a luggage rack, he said. As if fellow passengers were not people but objects.

as if she regarded my intrusion as a sign that the family was still intact and that the place I had usurped would always be mine on special occasions.

But traditions don’t need to harmonize, they simply have to be there. They have to be there as a sort of safety net, to give one something to land on. When the world falls apart. When time fractures.

and I felt the confusion of the half-grown child: torn between the wish that she would go away and let me get on with a life in which she no longer had any part and the powerful urge to sink into a world in which all the big problems are taken care of by the grown-ups. And probably, in this case, the hope that she, my mother, could set time to rights and then slip back out of the room.

I said I was sure that through careful listening you could solve any problem that might arise. If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything. And if you couldn’t find it in people’s conversations you could try listening to birdsong. Or the sound of the wind. You will always find your way to something.

I should be wishing for sunshine and summer after so many days of rain, but what I want is winter. I want December and January. I want a year that will start moving. I want the cold and dark of winter, not just a single day of showers and chilly sunlight, not just mild days with rain and more rain, not just gray skies and a nip in the air.

There is too much November in the air.

The moment I write the first line in the notebook I will have given my November days permission to continue, line after line, page after page, until the book is full of eighteenths of November.

I want the seasons to be set right, for them to be dependable, for them to move with long, slow strides back into their proper order.

But seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomena. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps.

A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather.

As if we had templates for the seasons and when everything fits we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has got it right.

Without seasons, no time. If I want seasons, I will have to build them myself. If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself. I put the pieces together, little fragments of season and I write it all down in my manual: the ingredients of the seasons.

And if it works I will have a seasons machine, that is what I am building. I see myself circulating through these seasons, returning to them, that I will have need of winter again, and of spring. I see myself having to create my own summers, that I am working my way toward a template, a pattern by which to live. I am filled with a strange excitement. There is something to look forward to: to the spring that I will build myself. But first I must have winter. Things have to fit. And in the spring I can look forward to summer.

There is snow on the paths behind the guest house and on the mountain that reaches up for miles and miles, but I am not going any farther, I may already have gone too far.

But I don’t want to rush the year. I won’t go to the airport and cheat my way to spring air, it’s in the waiting that spring becomes spring and so I wait at my hotel until it’s time to go to the station, I wait for small signs of spring, for a thaw and warmer days.

I think of my sister. I have considered dragging her through summer with me, going to see her and telling her the whole story: pack a bag and let’s go. And then I think of Thomas. I think of his gaze.

but my lies are growing thinner and thinner now, they are pale gray and white and pastel-colored, but they are growing more and more transparent with every day. I can always sense November, but I write September. In a museum I study some Roman glasses, colored, milky. That is how it is. My lies have become a thin layer of glass. You can see through them, they have a hint of color to them, a thin layer of past times, of wear, only a touch of pigment, but I can see it: these glasses are full of November.

when I reach November I can start all over again: a year, a template, an open seasons machine that I can climb aboard again and again.

I don’t know why it’s so difficult not to think in terms of years and I don’t know why I keep trying to hold on to this microscopic hope. What I can ascertain is that hope does sometimes come calling. A rare guest and not always welcome. I have tried to construct a seasons machine. I have tried to jump-start the year. Haven’t I done all I can to be allowed back into time?

I can’t come back the next day, it has to be here and now, because tomorrow is today, although I don’t usually tell them that.

Perhaps it is the case that you can accept a lot as long as you are spared most of life’s worries. If you are not in danger. If it is a life with no drama, with no poverty or disease or natural disasters. I am safe, I have nothing to fear, none of the things one has learned to fear: the calamities and catastrophes of real life—loss, betrayal and crime.

When I sit in my backyard I can tell that my time is a container. That is how it is. It is a day one can step into. Again and again. Not a stream which one can only dip into once. Time doesn’t fly anywhere, it stays still, it is a vessel.

If time is a container then it can be emptied, and if I am not careful I will soon start to see traces of myself all over town: things being used up, empty shelves, the tracks of a plundering monster, a beast on the prowl, the bloody trail of a predator.

I don’t want to be a monster. I walk a fine line, I tread carefully through the world, I leave as small a trail as I can. I try to get through the days without stepping too heavily. Stepping lightly. A monster playing at being a butterfly.

In fact if you think about it, it must be one of mankind’s weirdest traits, but it is one of those peculiarities which we simply accept, this need to invest everyday objects—wedding rings, jewelry, as well as lucky coins, amulets, magic stones, relics, and sacred objects—with meaning.

The eighteenth of November is a loose world, I know, it is impossible to get a firm grip on it.

That is how my days are spent. One after another. I wake up and roam around history. I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces.

A person is allowed to laugh if they find themselves at the bottom of a container with a view of the sky and know they will never learn how they ended up there.

I let myself in and I know: I will never find the explanations I seek. I will only find new questions and new answers.