He knows I'm busy with my notebook, the poet says. He knows my drive to narrate, to account for things. It's my Danishness, he says. I am a kind of book-keeper, he says. A balancer of accounts.
Why don't I understand?, he asks. Narrative is the enemy, he says. Narration, all that. My desire to record my conversations with him, for one thing, the poet says. Madness! My desire to array every one of our encounters along a single line. Madness again! I am an auditor of the spirit, the poet says. I have an accountant's soul, a bureaucrat's soul.
'You Danes want to round everything off', he says. I want to round off, which is to say finish off, each incident, each event – each of our conversations, for example, he says. Each of our walks. I want to take a kind of revenge on the indefinite, he says.
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