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.

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 think of catastrophes great and small. I think of my own. I think of fresh catastrophes and of those that have had time to take shape. The catastrophe in the railway compartment is slight and breathless, it possesses details that would be private were they not so fresh. Perhaps she thinks I cannot understand her because I spoke to her in English when I entered the compartment. But it makes no difference. I am not here. I don’t think it matters whether I am here or not. In her world there is only a stunned daughter and a listening mother.

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.

She did not believe, however, that the seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomena. Temperature and precipitation were meteorological phenomena, she said. Cold and heat, cloudbursts and drought. But seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomena. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps.

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.

lie, a white lie, a winter lie, but I only write it here, on a sheet of paper, and in a little while I will go out to buy a bottle of champagne and I will celebrate my little white lies and hope for a new year with winter and spring and summer.

Spring is usually something that comes all by itself. You feel a little cold, you long for it and suddenly there it is, a softness in the air, bright mornings.

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.

My year cannot be governed by the heavens, because the heavens are always the same, I have to find my spring in the fields and on the paths, I have to find my Easter in the shops.

I can’t act as if he doesn’t exist. As if he isn’t sitting in a house somewhere while I lie in the sunshine and watch the bathers. I can’t sit in a bar and speak to one of the beachgoers and invite him back to my house and sit with him on my balcony and drink wine and then take him to my bed. That is not possible because I know that sooner or later he will turn into Thomas before my eyes.

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.

My day is a container filled with a mild breeze and sunshine every day around three. The night is a container with a medlar tree that rustles in the breeze, and the night says danke when the fruit falls.

thought of all the book auctions and my rounds of the shelves in antiquarian bookshops and the coins in Philip’s chronologically arranged glass cases and I realized that it had never been their history that had attracted me. It was the objects themselves. It was the feel of the paper and the indentations on the pages, it was the type on the title pages, the balance between red and black. It was an irregularity in the lettering, the uneven impress of type worn down by the years. It was the saturation of the colors, the intensity of the print. It was the lines of the illustrations, a detail in the engraving, the contrast between a color field and the bare paper. It was the smell and the sounds. It was the differences: the slow flick-flick when you leaf through thick pages, the whisper of thin paper, a gilt edge and the split second’s resistance as the gilding leaves the fingertip, the little turn of the hand as the thumb runs down over the corner of the block. It was the feel of the binding, a frayed corner, a sharp edge.

It wasn’t the history of the objects themselves that attracted me, it was everything that had dropped out of history. The objects of history. In my world, history had not been anything except the period that had produced them. A time line, perhaps, that made it possible to arrange things in a clear sequence, but no more than that. I had never been driven by a desire for insight into historical connections, I had never wanted to find explanations for the peculiarities of a period or information on people’s daily lives, I had not been interested in wars or power struggles or political events, I had not been fascinated by the spirit of the times or the economic conditions.

sestertius.

I have discovered something alarming. Or at least, it’s not a big discovery, but I do now find it alarming: everything in the Roman world is a container.

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.