Paromita’s Reviews > On the Calculation of Volume II > Status Update

"...suddenly I couldn’t help laughing, hesitantly at first, but soon so loudly that I was sure that I could be heard all over the backyard and on the balconies around me, but that was okay. A person is allowed to laugh if they find themselves at the bottom of a container with a view of the sky and know they will never learn how they ended up there."

"What do you call a void that sets something in motion? What do you call an eagerness that cannot be ignored? What do you call a search that never stops? I give it names. An urge, a hunger, a longing, a desire, a drive. I call it interest, thirst for knowledge, I think hunger for history and yen for the past, but none of these is quite right. It is an open turmoil, an immeasurable void."

...I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces."

"I have no aim and no plan. I don’t need to delete my dead-ends, they delete themselves. I cannot get a firm grip. I have my memory, I note down titles, names and websites and leave the rest to oblivion.
That is how my days are spent. One after another. I wake up and roam around history...

"It wasn’t the history of the objects themselves that attracted me, it was everything that had dropped out of history. The objects of history. In my world, history had not been anything except the period that had produced them. A time line, perhaps, that made it possible to arrange things in a clear sequence, but no more than that."

...maybe they have all moved on while I am left here surrounded by ghosts, the husks of repetition, imprints of a day long since past, thinking that I can help, that my cage is gilded, that I can reach out."

"Maybe it is me who is lost, maybe they are all heading into the future, the nineteenth, the twentieth, maybe they have moved on and left me with their shadows, and there is only me, standing here watching them grow smaller and smaller: the man outside the supermarket, the little family in front of the station, my busy landlady, the stream of soccer fans,...

...Time is a space. Time is a room. Time is my backyard in afternoon sunshine, with the sound of cars, with trams in the distance. My day is a container filled with a mild breeze and sunshine every day around three. The night is a container with a medlar tree that rustles in the breeze, and the night says danke when the fruit falls."