...of the microcosmic

Adam moved away without waiting for the end of the sentence. He did not shrug his shoulders, but walked slowly, dragging his feet. He went past the mammals' cages; the last of these, the smallest and lowest, held three gaunt wolves. A kind of wooden kennel had been set up in the middle of the cage, and the wolves were circling round and round this tirelessly, incessantly, their slanting eyes stubbornly fixed on the bars that rushed past at top speed, level with one's knees.
They circled in opposite directions, two one way and one the other; after a certain number of turns, let's say ten or eleven, for some sudden, queer, unaccountable reason, as though at the snap of someone's fingers, they wheeled about and went on again in the other direction. They were mangy beasts, grey with dust, mauve around the jaws; but they never stopped circling their den and the steely glint of their eyes was reflected all over their bodies - they looked as though they were covered with metal plates, violent, full to vomiting with hatred and ferocity. The circular movement they were making inside the cage became, owing to its regularity, the one really mobile point in the surrounding space. All the rest of the park, with its human beings and its other cages, sank into a kind of motionless ecstasy. One was suddenly frozen, fixed in an unbearable rigidity that spread all round as far as that bell-shaped structure of iron and wood, the wolves' cage; one was like a luminous circle seen through a microscope and containing, stained in bright colours, the basic elements of life, such as chromosomes, globules, trypanosomes, hexagonal molecules, microbes and fragments of bacteria. A structural geometry of the microcosmic universe, photographed through dozens of lenses; you know, that white disc, dazzling as a moon, coloured by chemical products, which is true life, without movement, without duration, so far away in the second infinity that nothing is animal any longer, nothing is apparent; nothing remains but silence, fixity, eternity; for all is slow, slow, slow.

[The Interrogation, Le Clezio, J. M. G.]