Without Lifting A Finger

A letter box in classic yellow, as tall as a man, with two slots, one for local mail, the other for all points of the compass, stood outside on the pavement, within easy reach. From his seat by the window, open to the summer air, he could have thrust his letter through the open window into the ‘all points’ slot. But he just sat there and observed the letter box, as well as the activity around it. As night closed in, the number of people posting letters increased. Then came a period during which they streamed to the box from all sides, one after the other, finally clustering around the box, forming a queue, especially in front of the slot for long-distance and foreign post. Letters to official agencies and so on, with pre-printed addresses, were in the minority; most of the envelopes displayed handwriting. So after an era in which letter- writing had dried up. seemingly for good, letters were being written again. Can you believe it? The crowd grew larger and larger. ‘End of days?’ The f...

 ‘The last human being,’ the actor said to himself, ‘one way or other. Is this supposed to mean that we humans are done for, I and the others, the world of human beings? Is that possible? Is that permissible? Can it be true? No, it mustn’t be true, mustn’t be true.’ And then: ‘Watch what you’re blabbering about, even if only to yourself. Blabbering is not merely blabbering, saying is not merely saying; words, even those that go unspoken, are not merely words. Hush, my friend!’

In my reading I've passed from Ishiguro's Floating World to Handke's Great Fall. Not that Floating World wasn't thought-provoking: I guess I was just too lazy to post any excerpts.:) &&& The bursting of jewelweed if one barely brushed against it: a temporal threshold in the year, in the summer, as the hazel catkins, which had just opened, drifting in the otherwise imperceptible breeze, marked a temporal threshold in early spring, and the gentle crunching of nut shells marked a temporal threshold in early autumn. Once he had been aware of innumerable such temporal thresholds in the year. But meanwhile he had forgotten them all. He no longer knew them, or did not want to know them; for him, they had lost their meaning. There remained only one temporal threshold he could not and did not want to forget: the circling of an eagle, high up and higher still in the sky, calm spirals in the blue, drifting away and finally returning and circling again, while down on th...