On, On, On

Another day! Another one! Aren't I supposed to be doing something? Shouldn't something be drawing these minutes and hours together? Read that, write that. But read what? Only The Kindly Ones is left on the office desk.

How far am I in? 750 pages. My God, 750! It's too much, too vast. There are too many horrors, and too few reprieves from horror. At least there is the girl he's seeing. At least there is what he calls her grace. But all around him, horror. Bombed Berlin. The concentration camps.

Why go on reading? Why, page after page? Because there's nothing else to bind the minutes and hours together. Because at least there is narrative, the power of narrative. A kind of necessity. The task – which is a sign of there being no other tasks – of finishing the book.

And when I finish it? When I stare up through the office windows? I will want another kind of book. A shorter one. A narrative I could imagine extrapolating upon, carrying on in my own way. A narrative that says, write your own narrative rather than exhaust narratives, burning them up like The Kindly Ones.

It's unbearable, really. That book – that monumental book – open on the desk. It takes up too much space. It's too much itself. And who am I beside it? Unequal to it, less than it, but at it least it's there. It is my constant as one day passes, then another.

One day! And then another! How does it go on? What is it that is going on. That passage in Rosenzweig: not an event that moves in time, but time itself moving. Time itself in movement. But what does that mean? Finish the book, I tell myself. See it through to the end. That's the answer. On, on, on through the unbearable pages.