Opening

Here, nothing happens. Nothing will be set right, 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 echoed here and there in the universe, in some corner of space, or perhaps only in some corner of a human imagination. Now, as these lines pass before your eyes, the energy of those sounds has long since faded 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, with its people. Perhaps even the mind that once traced these sounds onto paper has not drawn breath for a long time. Just as this very moment — the one in which you read this sentence — has passed, all the moments of this book have passed. Moments and images that would have been lost in the feverish murmur of world events if they had not been written down here. They were written 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 sit down to read them. From this side, I unwind the thread of words, and from the other side, you gather them up. As in childhood, when Maman would unravel the yarn of old clothes, and we would take the thread and walk around inside the house so the yarn would not pile up. Perhaps your generation came a few years after that world of yarn, but imagine: once, somewhere in the world, this was how children played. Now I unwind the thread of words, and you pick them up and carry them into your own world, so they will not pile up here, in my world.