Status Updates From On the Calculation of Volum...

"...suddenly I couldn’t help laughing, hesitantly at first, but soon so loudly that I was sure that I could be heard all over the backyard and on the balconies around me, but that was okay. A person is allowed to laugh if they find themselves at the bottom of a container with a view of the sky and know they will never learn how they ended up there."

"What do you call a void that sets something in motion? What do you call an eagerness that cannot be ignored? What do you call a search that never stops? I give it names. An urge, a hunger, a longing, a desire, a drive. I call it interest, thirst for knowledge, I think hunger for history and yen for the past, but none of these is quite right. It is an open turmoil, an immeasurable void."

...I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces."

"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."