There are moments that do not pass, that lose their bearings. Lost moments that ask to be abandoned to the past, to fall back into time, and the streaming of time. The inconsequential: why should I remember walking from Holborn to the London Review Bookshop? Why do I remember crossing that road by the scooter shop?
I was on the way to the bookshop, true, but I can locate that moment only by way of the bookshop; in truth, the moment was indifferent to my destination, and to my point of origin. It detached itself; it was lifted from the course of time. How was I to live what would not settle? The moment passed – how could it do otherwise? – but it did not pass.
How is it that when I remember it, it is only by way of what occludes it? In truth, I am unequal to the moment; I who always know what to do next am unfit for a moment that admits no ‘next’. Now I understand why Peter Handke’s books are growing larger and larger: he would write of the moment without succession, not to catch it, but to allow it to fall back into time.
But what time? The epic – a new kind of epic, the great recounting of the insignificant everyday, which fills our lives, even by vacating our lives of content. The insignificant? No: the infinitely significant, the moment which promises everything, that clothes itself in every event in the world. Handke, writing of the day to day, steers the moment into a succession of diaphonous moments.
It is not continuity he seeks (his novels have purged themselves of plot, of character, of incident), or suspense – unless it is to suspend one course of time in favour of another. The epic of moments, of the momentary everyday: how is it I know he has no words of his own, and not even a name? How is it I think of him as the translator, as the one who lets speak the moment without fixing it in any particular language?
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