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 party on the third day, “the noise gobbles
up my love.”
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