Status Updates From On the Calculation of Volum...

"I have no aim and no plan. I don’t need to delete my dead-ends, they delete themselves. I cannot get a firm grip. I have my memory, I note down titles, names and websites and leave the rest to oblivion.
That is how my days are spent. One after another. I wake up and roam around history...

"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."

...maybe they have all moved on while I am left here surrounded by ghosts, the husks of repetition, imprints of a day long since past, thinking that I can help, that my cage is gilded, that I can reach out."

"Maybe it is me who is lost, maybe they are all heading into the future, the nineteenth, the twentieth, maybe they have moved on and left me with their shadows, and there is only me, standing here watching them grow smaller and smaller: the man outside the supermarket, the little family in front of the station, my busy landlady, the stream of soccer fans,...

...Time is a space. Time is a room. Time is my backyard in afternoon sunshine, with the sound of cars, with trams in the distance. 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."

"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. Every day I lower my body into the eighteenth of November. I move around but nothing runs over the edge...

"the sound of the tree is no longer a whisper, but the quiet rustle of yellow, almost dry leaves... the backyard at night the noise is more nuanced, a welter of sounds unfolds. Leaves against twigs, leaves against leaves, a medlar falling to earth. It lands with a little thud and rolls a short distance across the ground before it stops. It sounds as if the world is saying danke when the tree drops its fruit."

...I am safe, I have nothing to fear, none of the things one has learned to fear: the calamities and catastrophes of real life—loss, betrayal and crime.
My disasters are little ones and my accidents are fleeting..."

"I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that’s what is happening. Perhaps it is the case that you can accept a lot as long as you are spared most of life’s worries. If you are not in danger. If it is a life with no drama, with no poverty or disease or natural disasters...

"I don’t know why it’s so difficult not to think in terms of years and I don’t know why I keep trying to hold on to this microscopic hope. What I can ascertain is that hope does sometimes come calling. A rare guest and not always welcome. I have tried to construct a seasons machine. I have tried to jump-start the year. Haven’t I done all I can to be allowed back into time?"

...My only thought is that I am about to leave my second year, or rather, that I am drifting around in a time where there are no years, because I know very well: I have had no seasons and I am not scouting for locations for a film. Seasons are not scenes and locations. And you cannot construct a year out of fragments of November. Of course you can’t."

"I have nothing against November, though. Not after having escaped from my season lie. Not the way November looks here: warm for the time of year, with sun in the middle of the afternoon, a soft breeze, and I don’t need to travel in search of seasons. I have no urge to travel and there is nothing I wish for...

" I know that everything is surrounded by a gray zone, that this suspension of time is beyond my understanding."

..It’s as if the snow is antisound, as if it casts an additional layer of silence over everything, the sound level drops below zero and I lie in my bed, listening to less than nothing, even my own sounds are gone. Not for long, though, because then I draw breath and then I hear a very faint breeze, a rustling in the treetops, and I hear people in the corridor, little noises outside my room."

"I lost my phone ages ago and I’ve got used to living without clocks, but these days I wake to those luminous numerals and a soundless world. There’s no wind and it strikes me that it must be the silence that wakes me, the absence of sound. It must be because it’s snowing, but I don’t get it, I mean how can the snow muffle the sounds when everything is already silent...

"I will introduce doors and windows to my winter language, I will add forests and roads and towns, new words every year, a language that grows and grows in cold and snow, and winter will come, and spring and summer and autumn again, and I will come back and find more words. Something is growing. I am starting to imagine a future. Thanks, winter language."

"I see myself returning here year after year, hibernating here, and each year I will pick up more words..."

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

and I felt the confusion of the half-grown child: torn between the wish that she would go away and let me get on with a life in which she no longer had any part and the powerful urge to sink into a world in which all the big problems are taken care of by the grown-ups. And probably, in this case, the hope that she, my mother, could set time to rights and then slip back out of the room."

"My mother came into my room after I had gone to bed and sat down in the chair next to me, as she had often done when I was a child—and right up until I left home, in fact—

"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."

"Today I have a goal. I am going somewhere. Home, I could say. But I no longer know what home means. Home was Clairon-sous-Bois, but not anymore, and now I am on my way to Brussels. That too was home. Once upon a time. Home is no longer a place to go. But today I have a direction."

"This is how I pass my days: I throw myself into the crowd, I let myself be carried along, I am in motion, I go with the current, but in the end, once I have followed the streams, once I have boarded buses and trains and stepped off them again, once I have emerged from the metro stations or landed on the sidewalk at a bus stop, I lose momentum. I slow down, stop..."

"But maybe I am simply alone. Maybe I do not belong. Maybe it cannot be any other way. I do try, though."

"I am surrounded by people in motion. Suddenly they are all walking in the same direction. I look around me and, sure enough, there is a metro station and that is where they are headed. There are lines of people pointing towards the way down. I am outside of the lines. If I get too close to their lines I am in the way. I am a foreign body, an error."