the way of the world

The way the world carries on, in a stream of light/time/light, is the world. 

When all the distances have been measured, explored, down to the n th degree, you find there's one distance that fails the test. It slips out of the book and there is no word for it. It is like a word found in nobody's heart (Celan).

You struggle with the lists, the tying up of things, the settling of (old) scores/chores. You sit in your car having completed your exchanges. A man briskly walks to the bank, thirty minutes late, and adjusts his tie as he extends his neck upwards. For him the day is just starting and you're out of the equation, looking at everyone and everything out of the rear window; already your thoughts narrow down to practicalities, to the avoidance of sentimentality...and your heart is a stranger once again.

There is something utterly plain and mundane about how the world continues without you-and because of that it is also like something that doesn't sound right or something that catches your attention, the way you note out of the corner of your eye a door that is usually permanently closed but now suddenly ajar. And because of the awareness of all that is fantastically simple and familiar, the seamless continuity of other people's lives, you get a rare glimpse of the fascinating and the mysterious. It is like seeing the mirror and not the image.

~~~

In the morning you had noticed with some alarm the vast number of ants (with their death-wish) in the bathroom, eating away at the walls, finding all sorts of angles of attack, making their way through the cracks and thereby extending them. You casually wondered to yourself: left to their own devices how many years would it take for them to gnaw away at this structure? How many generations? You'd caught them at it, seen a part of the process with your own eyes.

Suddenly you had a great desire to be like the main character in The Time Machine and to see the whole building, from its first bright day under the sun to the day when a dark wind blows through the ruins...ruins that suggest no structure and that offer no clue whatsoever as to the function of the building or to the nature of its inhabitants. No future being would wistfully look back and ask herself: was there once a person living in this place who thought like me? At most she might think mechanically, scientifically, about causes-large and small.