Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

If I had let myself lie on the earth, among the hundreds of shoots and little plants, each one different from the next, each one shaped in a different way by time and weather, if I had let my inert body be overtaken by sun and shadow, if I had let a poisonous bush’s clusters of red and black berries arch above me, nothing would have distinguished me from the world of the forest. I could have died there, I would have quickly turned into dead wood, with my interior juices hardened, with my eyes covered in cobwebs and my skin cracked, a host for insects, a fertile soil for mushrooms, my carcass more and more decomposed, worn smooth by the wind and by loneliness. It would have rained and snowed on me, and in the spring, there would be some bones and rags spread around, under the grass, growing bells with violet cups and brown saplings. I would have belonged, at last, to a world; I would have been one with it, one with its humid, green air, with its carpet of transparent leaves, with its sweet and bitter smells. I would have died and been reborn there, in a complete lack of consciousness, knowledge, or doubt, only a model in the endless tapestry of the forest.