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.

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.

Now, sitting on the train, I think of my family as a solid core with friable edges. Something seems always to be crumbling away.

I had intruded on their eighteenth of November. I had to be careful, I told myself. I already know that I leave a mark. I consume my world. I sustain burns and sprained ankles. But I also put other people in danger. I drag them out of their eighteenth of November. Out of their routine. I risk killing someone. I don’t imagine that the world will repair itself, that if I lead people off course they will simply wake up again the next morning. I have to be careful. I am a danger to my surroundings, I tell myself, as I roam around in the snow. I drag people with me along snowy paths.

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.

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.