The idea that he's going to be called back, reconvened, obsesses him. Whoever walks toward his machine fills him with apprehension regarding unforeseen, indecipherable consequences, nurtured by hilarious, preposterous accounts in which refutation gets contaminated, bogged down.
At other moments, Martin gives it no thought, simply abstains from speaking, grows anxious all the same about what he could have said these last months, what the impassive man over in that place hasn't gotten to yet. Who's the informer here, he asks himself, scrutinising people's eyes.
Mute workshop, mute booming factory, population laid flat as if still under shock, traumatised, amnesiac perhaps, completely conditioned, day and night, in every place, its unconscious colonised.
Martin not alone in wondering about this no doubt, how it was able to happen, in being amazed, things moved so quickly, ten or so years, accelerated lately, retreats, defeats, being surrounded.
A new event really, seizing power across the board, in memories, in minds, public life, private life, vitiated outcome of so many battles and conquests, twenty centuries of culture to reach this point, a contortion, regression, soon the nation besieged, asphyxiated, superior race itself tracing the map of its ghetto.
History led astray, vocabulary brought to heel, parody of reason, perversion of grammar and conjugations, rigged use of tenses, expurgated dictionary, impoverishment of the word, banishment of inflections, of polysemous meanings, of nuances.
This degradation of language gradually overcomes him, feels this strongly, vaguely guilty about using it so, reading newspaper texts, speaking in circumlocutions and euphemisms, the exact words would make everybody roll their eyes and burrow back underground.
[Disconnection, Ollier, C.]
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