Michael > Recent Status Updates

“We were not allowed to call it ‘war.’ Linguistic regulations prescribed that, correctly speaking, it be called a ‘surprise attack.’ For which, strange to say, we were not in the least prepared. We did not know what we intended to do, and so we did not really try to learn the Greeks’ intentions.”

“You can tell when a war starts, but when does the pre-war start? If there are rules about that, we should pass them on. Hand them down inscribed in clay, in stone. What would they say? Among other things they would say: do not let your own people deceive you.”

“What was happening? What kind of place did I live in? How many realities were there in Troy besides mine, which I had thought was the only one? Who fixed the boundary between visible and invisible? And who allowed the ground to be shaken where I had walked so securely?”

“Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal. Deeper than any other feeling, deeper even than my fear, this imbues, etches, poisons me: the indifference of the celestials to us on earth.”

To pass the time
I dreamed of paradises

“I am writing these pages the way one compiles a report or resume, as documentation and to have done with a life that was not my own. It’s just a simple film of deeds and facts. I have nothing to confess or elucidate and I have no interest in soul-searching or self-reflection. On the contrary, the more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interesting I found them.”

“I was relieved every time I discovered the actual address of those places I only vaguely remembered, but which appeared in my nightmares over and over again. If I knew their exact location and studied their facades, I was convinced they would become less threatening.”

“The lights went on and off, on and off, and I found it soothing as I slipped off to sleep. Why had I rented this room, when I could have chosen one in another neighborhood? But it wouldn’t have had red and green flashes, as regular as heartbeats, which I ended up telling myself were the only traces left of the past.”

“… You may live here, but you know it is temporary and that sooner or later you will return to your own country, to better conditions and a worthier life. You will wake from this nightmare and be freed from it, but we never shall be, for it is the only life we have.”

“The world seemed to him now more than ever full of traps and dangers, those vague black trepidations which war spreads through the land and into people’s hearts, particularly the hearts of the ageing, the weakened and the weary.”

“From his childhood a man may dream like this about great cities and glorious battlefields, but the real, decisive battles for the preservation of his being and the realization of everything concealed instinctively within it, must be fought wherever destiny happens to cast him, in who knows what narrow, nameless space with no splendour or beauty, with no witness or judge.”

“All right, but until I am convinced, allow me to stand by my view that both the ill-will and the goodness of a people are the product of the circumstances in which they live and develop. It is not goodness that drives us to build roads, but the need and desire to extend profitable communications and our influence, and many people regard that as ‘ill-will on our part.”

“I feel as if I am alone in making the link between Paris then and Paris now, alone in remembering all these details. There are moments when the link is stretched to breaking-point, and other evenings when the city of yesterday appears to me in fugitive gleams behind that of today.”

“Life was very, very strange, but David Kelsey had an invincible conviction that life was going to work out all right for him.”

“Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.”

“You are not an isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable… Even as you lie perfectly motionless, you are shifting, and the chemistry that constitutes your imagination and consciousness is altered infinitesimally every moment.”

“You will not swim twice in the same river, nor will you live the same summer twice, nor will there be a room that is identical to another, nor will you walk into the same room you left five minutes ago, the same darkened doctor’s office where you were only once, sitting across from a doctor who spoke slowly and asked shocking questions…”