You Should Have Left

by Daniel Kehlmann

everything as always, everything as if for the first time,

everything as usual, everything as never.

In a movie it’s funny when a life falls apart, because the people say clever things while it’s happening, but in reality it’s only dismal and repugnant.

and only when she looked at me seriously and calmly and said that she didn’t want to deny it at all did I realize how much I had hoped she would.

and thought with a clarity as if someone else were speaking to me: You should have left. Now it’s too late.

And this infinite universe might be only one of an infinite number of infinite universes, each with different laws. One is unreachable from another, they are strictly separate. Normally.

It’s the place itself. It’s not the house. The house is harmless, it’s simply standing where nothing should stand.

I know now why they all have faces like that. Why they look the way they look. It’s because of the things they have seen.

The place isn’t evil, but it’s a trap—like a crevice out of which you could at first climb, but you see the sky above you and think, it’s not dangerous, and so you dawdle and look around because there are interesting crystals there, and when you finally do want to climb out, you realize too late that every movement brings you down deeper.

I think it has to do with consciousness. That’s why it doesn’t hold everyone with the same strength,

Otherwise they’ll consider it a clear case: Marriage broken, screenplay failed, so he looked for an abyss for himself and his poor kid. And if they find it? Well, they’ll still think that.

It’s not easy to put into words. At least not these words. With new words it would be possible. But why bother?

But to whom am I supposed to explain this? To the others who are here forever too? They’ve known it for a long time, they already know far more.