We All Have Appointments With The Past.

There Is Something Peculiarly Dispriting About The Emptiness That Wells Up When, In A Strange City, One Dials The Same Telephone Numbers In Vain.

It Seems To Me Then As If All The Moments Of Our Life Occupy The Same Space, As If Future Events Already Existed And Were Only Waiting For Us To Find Our Way To Them At Last, Just As When We Have Accepted An Invitation We Duly Arrive In A Certain House At A Given Time.

I Wonder Now Whether Inner Coldness And Desolation May Not Be The Pre-condition For Making The World Believe, By A Kind Of Fraudulent Showmanship, That One's Own Wretched Heart Is Still Aglow.

How Happily, Said Austerlitz, Have I Sat Over A Book In The Deepening Twilight Until I Could No Longer Make Out The Words And My Mind Began To Wander, And How Secure Have I Felt Seated At The Desk In My House In The Dark Night, Just Watching The Tip Of My Pencil In The Lamplight Following Its Shadow, As If Of Its Own Accord And With Perfect Fidelity, While That Shadow Moved Regularly From Left To Right, Line By Line, Over The Ruled Paper.

The More Images I Gathered From The Past, I Said, The More Unlikely It Seemed To Me That The Past Had Actually Happened In This Or That Way, For Nothing About It Could Be Called Normal: Most Of It Was Absurd, And If Not Absurd, Then Appalling.