Without Lifting A Finger

You wanted to become pure spirit as a writer, and what did you become? A ghost! True: your quivering writerly language came from wordlessness, a primal wordlessness. Without this primal wordlessness, there would be no writing, or so you believe. (And your writing, then, between guilt and elation.) But wordlessness today? As the basis of a writer’s existence? Old hat, snows of yesteryear, not worth mentioning. Every word and every sentence is available nowadays in advance, as prefabricated components, so to speak. Enough of your guilt and also, granted, your elation. The quivering is over and done with, my friend.

On this particular day he finally succeeded. It happened because he paid no attention to the faces, which in any case could hardly be decoded, and concentrated on the hands on the steering wheels. How differently each of the drivers held the wheel, or did not hold it. The classic model, with one hand on the right and one on the left side of the wheel, marking its diameter, so to speak, was more the exception than the rule. It was more common to see both hands resting at only a slight distance from one another close to the peak or divide of the wheel’s circumference. If the first-mentioned placement of the hands suggested an image posed for a movie close-up being filmed in a studio, with the driving merely simulated, as became most pronounced when the drive r kept turning the wheel slightly back and forth without having to negotiate a curve, the second placement suggested a film being shot on location, as did all the other hands glimpsed on steering wheels. What all the hand positio...

He had never felt a calling to write, and certainly not before that summer. If there was to be a calling, it had to come from him, from him alone. He had to try to discover his calling, and—this at least seemed like a sign, the only sign he had received in his life, as he had already sensed when taking leave of childhood: perhaps this self-determination could be accomplished through writing. * Just as certain images refused to let one go, even when one was far removed from them in time and space, a noise one had experienced as evil and hostile could persist inside one long after it had fallen silent in the outside world. People no longer experienced silence. The buzzing one had heard all day long continued buzzing during the night in one’s dreams. The clang of metal on metal pursued one into the desert. “The rumbling, screeching, crashing, ringing, banging will never cease,” sang the itinerant musician—whose hearing, in his own words, was “completely wrecked”—at the farewell p...

The bus driver’s anger was vocalized as follows: “They have always hated us. They got everything they wanted, and still they hate us. More than ever. In more of a blind rage than ever. More blindly than ever. They have their own country now. They are a nation now, like the Lithuanians, like the Catalans, like the Transnistrians, like Cisnilians, like the Valley Kalmuks, like the Mountain Slovenians, like the Danube and Mekong Delta Autonomians. They are a national people and, now that their great dream has been realized, a one-people state, they still hate us, what remains of the second people, which has no state of its own, hate us as if we remnants were the national people instead of them. And they need not even teach this hatred to their children. It simply gets handed down, from generation to generation, from gene to gene, long past blood feuds and wars. Your hatred of us became baseless ages ago and has taken on a life of its own, if indeed there ever was a basis for it, but no...

They finally filled the holes. My first guess had been trees, but (especially along that dark stretch of the golf course at night) we could've used some lampposts. *