Sublime

What, I asked myself, said Austerlitz, might be the significance of the river never rising from any source, never flowing out into any sea but always back into itself, what was the meaning of veverka, the squirrel forever perched in the same position, or of the ivory-coloured porcelain group of a hero on horseback turning to look back, as his steed

He hears his dead undergrad mentor quoting Mark Twain. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. “In the field. I seem to have gotten a little lost.”

I rested for a while on a park bench beside an aviary not far from the big cats’ house, where the lions and tigers, invisible from my vantage point and, as it struck me at the time, said Austerlitz, driven out of their minds in captivity, raised their hollow roars of lament hour after hour without ceasing.

Nichts mehr von früher war da, nichts mehr von ihr, keine Puppenkleider und keine ohrenlose Gliederpuppe, die sie mit allen anderen Spielsachen verschenkt oder, wie die Plüschkatze, selber in den Kirchbach geschmissen hatte.

Tomas Espedal touches on this in his book Tramp: Or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life.

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode.

Non-Places,