Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse.

My fear came especially from the fact that we don’t know what the world is like, we only know that facet our senses illuminate. We only know the world our senses construct inside our minds, the way you might build a dollhouse under a bell jar. But the enormous world, the world as it really is—indescribable even if there were millions of senses open like sea anemones in the untamable flux of the ocean—surrounds us and it crushes us, bone by bone, in its embrace.

I’ve begun to see something that resembles coherence in the charade of my life. Clearly, something is speaking to me, insistently, constantly, like a continuous pressure on my skull, on certain organs, but what is this message, what is its nature, from whom does it come? What does it ask of me? I sometimes feel like a child in front of a chessboard. You’ve grabbed the pawn, wonderful. But why are you sticking it in your mouth? Why are you tilting the board so all the pieces fall off? Or could this be the solution? Maybe the game is won by the person who suddenly understands its absurdity and throws it to the ground, the one who cuts through the knot while everyone else is trying to unravel it?