Afternoon, the office. Another afternoon, the office ... What day is it? What was I supposed to be doing? Administration, endless administration - but isn't it a relief to have an excuse? To say: what chance did I have to do anything else? To say: I was too busy, I didn't have the time.
A kind of eternity breaks in nonetheless. Breaks apart from moment from moment, separates them and breaks the forward movement of time. The moment droops, falls. The moment contracts into itself and draws the past and future with it. A present without present.
No one here. The afternoon, another afternoon. Who's left here to do anything? Who's left to finish this task, and that one? So I try to gather myself together. Read, I tell myself. Pick up a book. Follow a line of prose. Follow a sentence as it binds itself to another. Follow a little arrow of sense that opens up again the past (what you have read) and a future (what you are going to read).
But that fails, too. I had that little Michael Chion book to read. On The Thin Red Line. I thought, it looks simple enough, I'll read that. Text and photographs. A line of argument (quite free associative, it's true, quite informal, but refreshing for that).
On the desk, far more forbidding: a book on Messianism. A book on Rosenzweig, on Cohen. I pick it up, read a few lines and put it down. What did I read? What did I understand? Nothing, nothing at all. I couldn't be bothered. I wasn't up to it. The book streams above me. The succesion of time streams above me ...
Anyway, I've written this kind of thing before. Over and over again, a thousand times. Until it seems I've written nothing else. And worn writing away. And worn everything away. A thousand blank pages. A million sentences written in the wrong direction.
When's The Kindly Ones going to arrive? When's that going to bind the past and the future for me? When's the moment going to turn, roll, into another moment? When, like a waterwheel, time filling the hollow and rolling it on?