Sounds — Book 1

Here, nothing happens. Nothing will be fixed, nothing torn down. No interpretation is coming. No conclusion. This is the loose end of a thread of words that were once sounds. Sounds that once wound their way here and there through the universe, in some corner of space, or perhaps only in some corner of a human mind. Now, as these lines pass before your eyes, the energy of those sounds has long since died away, and only their phantom trace remains on the page. All of them have fallen silent. All the sounds, and perhaps that whole world too, and all its people. It may even be that the mind that once traced these sounds onto paper has not drawn breath for a long time. Just as this very moment passed as you read this sentence, all the moments of this book have passed. Moments and images that would have been lost in the feverish murmur of the world's events if they had not been written down here. They were set down to become a bridge between my world and yours. A bridge from my world, in the moment I am writing these sentences, to yours, in the moment you settle in to read them. From this side, I unwind the thread of words, and from the other side, you gather it up. As in childhood, when Maman would unravel the yarn from old clothes, and we would take the thread and wander through the house so the yarn would not pile up. Perhaps your generation came a few years too late for that world of yarn, but imagine: once, somewhere in the world, children played this way. Now I unwind the thread of words, and you take it up and carry it into your own world, so it will not pile up here, in mine.