If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

It slows down, stops, erases me from the chief’s sight, pulls out again.

“The thing I’d like most in the world,” I say to her, since at this point I might as well go on talking with her, “is to make clocks run backward.” The woman gives some ordinary answer, such as, “You only have to move the hands.” “No, with thought, by concentrating until I force time to move back,” I say; or, rather, it isn’t clear whether I really

Your attention, as reader, is now completely concentrated on the woman, already for several pages you have been circling around her, I have—no, the author has—been circling around the feminine presence, for several pages you have been expecting this female shadow to take shape the way female shadows take shape on the written page, and it is your ex

They have known her since she was a girl, they know everything there is to know about her, some of them may have been involved with her, now water under the bridge, over and done with; in other words, there is a veil of other images that settles on her image and blurs it, a weight of memories that keep me from seeing her as a person seen for the fi

“Ah, Zeno of Elea came in first!” And at the same time we would disentangle our suitcases, shifting the metal poles, perhaps also exchanging some remarks about horses, forecasts, odds; and we would then go off toward different trains, each pushing his suitcase in his own direction. No one would have noticed, but I would have been left with the othe

Yes, envy. I am looking from the outside at the life of an ordinary evening in an ordinary little city, and I realize I am cut off from ordinary evenings for God knows how long, and I think of thousands of cities like this, of hundreds of thousands of lighted places where at this hour people allow the evening’s darkness to descend and have none of

I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time:

I am not at all the sort of person who attracts attention, I am an anonymous presence against an even more anonymous background. If you, reader, couldn’t help picking me out among the people getting off the train and continued following me in my to-and-fro-ing between bar and telephone, this is simply because I am called “I” and this is the only th