The Same Sky

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I've told him that. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I told him. It was like a fairytale giant burying his heart in a chest in the middle of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, that's what I said. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in a Swiss chalet style?

I knew something was missing. I knew what was missing in me was in secret accord with the sky above the dry ski slope. I knew it was the opposite, in some sense, of what hid itself in the Octavo Notebooks. I had a sense of things, W. will give me that. I was saturated by the everyday.

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machines. I stared off through the windows. I'd plant myself in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

… the same sky … it has to be the same. Nothing has changed. Except the overwhelming overturning of nothing.