...of classical writers today

Algernon would get a lot more credit if he were able to get the thing to speak. He’s been trying for quite some time. Palafox as his own ringmaster, that’s the idea. Thanks to so many of you for coming, Algernon repeats endlessly into his ear. Chirp, says Palafox. Articulate more clearly, Algernon instructs. Chirp? ventures Palafox. Better. Once again. Chirp! Recites Palfox. And Algernon is so happy he could kiss him. (Ovid, Cato, Petronius and Pliny all mention the art of teaching birds the rudiments of conversation, whereas Cicero’s silence on this matter could be seen as a silent reproach of the practice. Later, Clement of Alexandria scolded women who tried to teach their nightingales. And yet look at where we are now. We hardly read Cicero, Clement of Alexandria wouldn’t manage to find a publisher for his Hypotyposes, Madame, Mademoiselle, Monsieur, your work unfortunately does not quite fall within the constraints of our list - but each night, in spring, in the gardens and the undergrowth, rise the sad songs of the Roman and Greek women they found so frivolous.)

[Palafox, Chevillard, E.]

...of a circus in town

The caravan of the Luzzatto circus ungirds before the church, it is early, the little town still sleeps. They silently unyoke the horses, no words are necessary, everyone knows what to do, movement precedes thought. Clowns and acrobats spill into the night - off to pounce on all the key positions - posters rolled up under their arms - then they cover walls and fences with the official notices, surrender, give your weapons to the authorities, eight p.m. curfew. Everyone must act fast. Every minute counts. Everything must be ready by dawn

[Palafox, Chevillard, E.]

...of distraction

But nothing here is real: these eyes and hands have no existence, the guitar, the mist-shrouded landscape, all are illusory. The oscillatory motion reaches down to the deeper points at the back of the mind, dredges up young untroubled voices, afternoons spent leafing through the dictionary, sitting in the pleasant slate-grey common-room, with its leather armchairs and cake at tea-time and bells ringing the Angelus. Noises dwindle away, giving place to a kind of magical silence: soundlessness such as exists under a glass jar, or in telephone booths that let through nothing, almost, except the vibrations immediately beneath them, a hair-fine thread floating on the air that serves to remind us of that other world outside. Then, after a little more time, a little more suffering, one finds oneself enclosed by four walls, a floor, a ceiling; a closed door, two open windows. Continual restriction. Hollow, hollow. Equilateral.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of not-being

So everything is ready: ready for the journey to Purgatory, the journey to the land of black and white. The whole town glows ruddily with matter, with solid substances. In twenty seconds, perhaps even sooner, the crisis may return, and the whole process begin all over again. Things will pass into themselves, like devouring serpents that greedily consume their own bodies. Life will plan itself unaided, and at random, on the first coarse and yellowing sheet of paper that comes to hand. The plan will grow and grow, bursting and pullulating with details, like a kind of lengthy narrative, its handwritten words gradually nibbling away what free space remains. The point of the ballpoint pen moves forward, on and on, very fast and in a small neat hand, tracing a wriggling, broken blue line, from left to right, next line down, and so on. When the whole surface of the paper is covered with this scribbling, the tip of the ballpoint still goes on searching. It finds blank spaces between the lines or down the margins. It fills them all. The words on the page now run in every direction. But the ballpoint still goes on searching indefatigably. It overscores what it has previously written, it crams every cranny, first making fine scratches like tufts of hair, then a whole fuzzy topknot, and finally a large sooty cloud. There are still words, more and more of them, interminable adverbs; the crosses on the t’s trace a kind of straight line from one side of the paper to the other. Too much overwriting has produced the occasional hole. About six inches from the top there is an accidental and quite unbearable row of looping o’s. But the words keep flowing back, and suddenly, after using up several thousandths of an ounce of dark blue ink, after hours on the job, after working through three ballpoint pens, as though a million spiders had wandered over the page, at nightfall only one empty space remains - a tiny star-shaped patch at the bottom left-hand corner, preserved by the slapdash loop of an l, in some word now otherwise obliterated - ‘Iliad’, maybe, or ‘calamity’, or ‘Lilliputian’. Then the hand grips the ballpoint pen, all slippery with sweat now, and closes the loop of the l. During the accomplishment of this act, in silence and fear, something akin to darkness, a sense of solemn peace, like the deepest night, spreads over the paper. The last remaining area of imperfection seems to disappear; and nothing is left now, beneath that bent forehead, before those weary, burning eyes, except this vast page of writing, in which all the words and letters have melted into one another, the perfect work of not-being, a beautiful poem, monochrome and illegible.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of a nave

The change in atmosphere was instantaneous. Throughout the vast and shadowy nave, empty now, and up in the deep, grotto-like vaulting silence reigned, the atmosphere had a dim grey profundity about it. Fine near-transparent clouds drifted slowly round the walls, dissolving into wisps, moving above the varnished pews, spreading across the stained-glass windows. Besson caught the terrifying smell of incense, and for a moment, because of something that stirred inside him, he thought his hunger had come back. But it was not hunger. There was no name one could put to the unfamiliar feeling of distress that surged to and fro between these dank walls, that set a bell tolling, on and on, echoing away deep into the earth, telling the beads for the dead, there was nothing about it that could be known or expressed. It was the fear induced by footsteps advancing over the hollow-echoing flagstones, it was the crushing weight of the vaulted roof overhead, pressing down with ton upon ton of stone, it was the power of everything obscure and ominous, of terror made into a dwelling place. Shuddering, Besson advanced down the nave. On either side the rows of empty pews faded into semi-darkness. Great pillars soared up like tree-trunks, and lost themselves in the pearly white and foliated radiance of the vaulting. At the end of the nave, moving towards him as moved towards it, was the pyramidal outline of the altar, glittering in candle-light.
Besson took a few more steps down the centre of the church; then he stopped, sat down in a pew, and listened to the silence. The bustle of the streets could not penetrate those stony ramparts. And yet it was not really silence: there was too rich and dense a quality about it. Rising amid the floating particles of incense, sliding through the shadows like a thief in the night, there came a muted yet resonant murmur, a continual hum like the roar of a distant waterfall, vibrating in the ground underfoot. It was exactly as though some terrifying full-dress quarrel had taken place inside the church just a few seconds before Besson entered it, and what remained now was the mere memory of the shock-waves, the last fading tremors, the atmospheric disturbances that follow any seismic upheaval. Though silence had replaced the previous deafening uproar, it was still quivering, muttering under its breath, filling dark nooks and corners with whispered blasphemies and stifled oaths and obscene phrases.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of mineral inactivity

On the third day, Francois Besson had a date with this woman called Josette, at six o’clock, on the corner by the Prisunic. He got there a little early, and waited standing by the kerbside, smoking a cigarette. It was just dark, and the street-lamps were shining out, sharp and clear-cut points of light. The crowd were still swarming inexhaustibly down the street: not one day’s respite, not an hour’s rest. Even on Sundays and public holidays, they were still there, out in the street, moving ot and fro, idling, ogling, picking up and purchasing goods. In the evening they went to the cinema, came out of cafes, banged car doors. In the morning they went to work, queued in pork-butcher’s shops, or stood gossiping on doorsteps. No, they never rested, never stopped moving.
But only a few yards above the ground it was utterly deserted. The houses reared their tall silent facades, and there was nothing in the air save empty solitude. The trolley-bus wires crossed and recrossed continually, but nothing happened. The walls, the branches of the trees, the cowls of the street-lamps, roof-tops interspersed with garretts - it was all so still and quiet that no one could have deduced what a crawling ant-hill existed down below. The same thing applied underground. Beneath that carapace of tarred asphalt, hammered by marching feet, worn away by tyres, the desert began again: an immense, pitch-black, softly opaque desert, with every ten years or so a gravelly rattle - stopped almost before it had begun - as a mass of fine, close-packed scree shifted its position, after which things returned to that state of boundless mineral inactivity which represented the world’s true dominion.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of that behind all things

Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain-drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world he had designed. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a cautious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music. A series of deep pulsing vibrations arose from the heart of darkness, out of flatness and obscurity, and then through him, through his conscious body, they became movement, throbbing, powerful movement, measuring time. They mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earth’s crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street-lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations. The void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the substance of the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went on growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers, gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its patterns on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistible feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there, for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceive the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare, skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tunes that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch infinity; to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you the actions you perform, the song of all that is, that’s triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephemeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of an absence of words

Besson got up and stopped the tape-recorder. Silence suddenly descended on the room again, mingling with the chiaroscuro, so palpable now that it was no longer distinguishable from the areas of shadow. Then it slipped and shifted, moving sideways with an indescribable pendulum-like motion. It penetrated even to Besson’s inner self, filling the secret recesses of his mind, stifling thought. Silence began to reverberate through his head and chest, with a sound not unlike the roar of a large cataract. He could feel its breathing, too, a gentle up and down motion. There was no room for anything else, neither sound nor colour: nothing but illimitable silence, here, in the night, amid this surrounding darkness: a silence that clung to every object, a horrible vast chill calm, clammy, tangible, that left you lying flat and helpless on the floor of an empty room, all alone, moving towards death.
For a long time Besson continued to stare at the motionless objects in front of him. He stood and scrutinized them with a gaze of fixed and burning intensity, which neither saw nor made any attempt to comprehend them. The words just spoken had entered his skull, and it was they that now swarmed in the silence. Like so much furniture, like a row of heavy, useless, ornamental vases, they had dragged on, vacant, floating, unattached; and now they were back in their own proper domain, that mute kingdom from which they would never re-emerge. From nothing they came, to nothing they returned. The world of insanity, the filthy sewer flow of battering words, syllables chopped from distorted human lips, pointless and interminable chatter. And what, truly, was the object of it all, what was it after? To try and hook on somewhere, put out tentacles, infiltrate other people’s minds, though with all this they never achieve personality. Accursed, accursed be the tongues of mankind! Had they never existed, had they not duped humanity century after century, how much happier would life on this earth have been!

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

...of the external

So, cleaving through the air on her moped, the young girl advanced towards the end of her journey. A damp film covered her eyes. Her half-parted lips looked as though they were drinking some invisible liquid, and light shone from the glass of her head lamp. This was how she looked as she passed through the various barriers and bridges, the multiple layers of sounds and odours, smoke and ice. She rode through them all, supported by the single wire of that harsh, sawing noise, then dwindled away and vanished at the bottom of the street. At the same instant as I, or we, saw this door (as it were) opening for her between two solid blocks of houses, the siren stopped. There was absolute silence. And nothing, nothing remained in our minds, not even a living memory. From that day everything began to go bad, rotten. Today I, Francois Besson, see death everywhere.
From time to time (I may either be up or in bed) I stiffen, and stare out through the window, forehead pressed against the cold glass. Behind the closed shutters I see a long curving street with people walking up and down it. A violet shadow has fallen across the ground; and it is on this shadow that men and women walk, not saying a word, slip away into oblivion and are gone. The glow of the lighted street-lamps and the glitter from the shop-windows are both reflected all around: the shadows retreat reluctantly, like fringes of dark fur. Everywhere twinkling points of light are visible.
They are dead, I know it, no question about that; they are dead because everything external to myself is dead; a faint aura in the semblance of a winding-sheet hangs about their silhouettes as they pass. I feel as though I were casually leafing through some vast periodicals that had ceased publication, and that it was on its pages I saw these printed names and faded photographs, the headlines and dates and figures, the blunted rubrics. Buildings and images have now been replaced by a bare and silent cemetery, some ten thousand yards in extent. I see future generations arriving here. I see funerals and memorial plaques. Today the world is finished. Nothing lives any more. Ecstasy and pain are mere geometrical expressions.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

…of vexation

Several bottles were soon filled from the great cask, which promised a supply for many days, and they were sitting drinking and jesting round the glowing fire, feeling comfortably secured from the raging storm without. Suddenly the old fisherman became very grave and said: “Ah, great God! here we are rejoicing over this rich treasure, and he to whom it once belonged, and of whom the floods have robbed it, has probably lost this precious life in their waters.”
“That he has not,” declared Undine, as she smilingly filled the knight’s cup to the brim.
But Hulbrand replied: “By my honour, old father, if I knew where to find and to rescue him, no knightly errand and no danger would I shirk. So much, however, I can promise you, that if ever again I reach more inhabited lands, I will find out the owner of this wine or his heirs, and requite it twofold, nay, threefold.”
This delighted the old man; he nodded approvingly to the knight, and drained his cup with a better conscience and greater pleasure.
Undine, however, said to Hulbrand: “Do as you will with your gold and your reimbursement; but you speak foolishly about the venturing out in search; I should cry my eyes out, if you were lost in the attempt, and isn’t it true, that you would yourself rather stay with me and the good wine.”
“Yes, indeed,” answered Huldbrand, smiling.
“Then,” said Undine, “you spoke unwisely. For charity begins at home, and what do other people concern us?”
The old woman turned away sighing and shaking her head; the fisherman forgot his wonted affection for the pretty girl and scolded her.
“It sounds exactly,” said he, as he finished his reproof, “as if Turks and heathens had brought you up; may God forgive both me and you, you spoiled child.”
“Well,” replied Undine, “for all that, it is what I feel, let who will hate brought me up, and all your words can’t help that.”
“Silence!” exclaimed the fisherman, and Undine, who, in spite of her pertness, was exceedingly fearful, shrank from him, and moving tremblingly toward Hulbrand, asked him in a soft tone: “Are you also angry, dear friend?”
The knight pressed her tender hand and stroked her hair. He could say nothing, for vexation at the old man’s severity toward Undine closed his lips; and thus the two couples sat opposite to each other, with angry feelings and embarrassed silence.

[Undine, de la Motte Fouqué, F. H. K]

…of newly-weds

Huldbrand conceded the point; he went to the aged people and talked with them over the journey, which he proposed to undertake immediately. The holy father offered to accompany the young married pair, and, after a hasty farewell, he and the knight assisted the beautiful bride to mount her horse, and walked with rapid step by her side over the dry channel of the forest-stream into the wood beyond. Undine wept silently but bitterly, and the old people gave loud expression to their grief. It seemed as if they had a presentiment of all they were now losing in their foster-child.
The three travelers had reached in silence the densest shades of the forest. It must have been a fair sight, under that green canopy of leaves, to see Undine’s lovely form, as she sat on her noble and richly ornamented steed, with the venerable priest in the white garb of his order on one side of her, and on the other the blooming young knight in his gay and splendid attire, with his sword at his girdle. Huldbrand had no eyes but for his beautiful wife Undine, who had dried her tears, had no eyes but for him, and they soon fell into a mute, voiceless converse of glance and gesture, from which they were only roused at length by the low talking of the reverend father with a fourth traveler who in the mean while had joined them unobserved.

[Undine, de la Motte Fouqué, F. H. K]

...of a spectre

“It is just,” said the workmen to each other in astonishment, “as if the water within had become a springing fountain.” And the stone rose higher and higher, and almost without the assistance of the workmen, it rolled slowly down upon the pavement with a hollow sound. But from the opening of the fountain there rose solemnly a white column of water; at first they imagined it had really become a springing fountain, till they perceived that the rising form was a pale female figure veiled in white. She was weeping bitterly, raising her hands wailingly above her head and wringing them, as she walked with a slow and serious step to the castle-building. The servants fled from the spring; the bride, pale and stiff with horror, stood at the window with her attendants. When the figure had now come close beneath her roo,, it looked moaningly up to her, and Bertalda thought she could recognize beneath the veil the pale features of Undine. But the sorrowing form passed on, sad, reluctant, and faltering, as if passing to execution.
Bertalda screamed out that the knight was to be called, but none of her maids ventured from the spot; and even the bride herself became mute, as if trembling at her own voice.
While they were standing fearfully at the window, motionless as statues, the strange wanderer had reached the castle, had passed up the well-known stairs, and through the well-known halls, ever in silent tears. Alas! how differently had she wandered through them!

[Undine, de la Motte Fouqué, F. H. K]