...of the book to end all books

The preliminary work was painful, Crab admits it; he really sweated over it. More than anything else, it was terribly time-consuming. Neither dangerous nor particularly difficult, mind you, more like child's play or home-work. Crab never had to leave his table, his patience alone was tested. He worked quickly, following an infallible method, both simple and effective, nonetheless requiring close attention and great discipline. Crab kept up the pace, but it was an enormous task, involving, in this first stage, the combination of every word listed in the dictionary, in every possible permutation. He stolidly settled down to the thankless job. It will come as no surprise to learn that he devoted many years to this project, to the detriment of all others.
Crab took the words individually, as distributed by alphabetical; each word was combined with the next, in every possible manner and in all possible declensions, then combined with the word after; next combined with the latter and the one before; combined with a third; with that one and the two preceding ones; with that one and the first alone; with that one and the second alone; with a fourth, and so on. Crab copied all this onto large sheets of paper, and each page, duly filled up and numbered, was added to the stack piled on the carpet. He was soon forced to take out the ceiling and then to make a sizeable opening in the roof.
But one night it was all done. The manuscript was as tall as a mountain. Crab had to hoist himself up to the summit in order to finally begin the second stage of the project, a rather more delicate operation, not so much because of the danger of falling as because of the very nature of the work to be created, a masterwork, the book to end all books, after which the world would enter an epoch of meditative silence - for what more is there to say? what is there to add? - and man would spend the rest of his days reading and rereading these pages, nodding his head.

[The Crab Nebula, Chevillard, E.]

...of classification

Nevertheless, Crab has a good ear. He is not the type to confuse the heavy, imposing silence emanating from a dead elephant with the unique vibration of the air that indicates the presence of a silent bird in the surrounding greenery. And Crab could even tell you the name of the bird.
His long practice of solitary meditation has taught him, if nothing else, to distinguish the many forms of silence, which meet with only an unchanging and obtuse insensitivity in the untrained ear. There is, then - among others - a string silence, a wind silence, a percussion silence, no more alike than the instruments thus classified, but on occasion their sonorities meld into a symphonic silence in which slow, stately movements, or martial ones, alternate with sprightly little phrases and silky arabesques, playing on a variety of motifs and rhythms in order to fully express the complexity of the situation whatever that situation may be.
(Nor does Crab forget the variety of silence derived from flour or soot.)
Judging by the particular grain of a given silence, or the unique crystalline nature of another, he can immediately and infallibly predict by what or by whom it will finally be broken. Gauging their weight, their density, their depth or thickness, allowing for the area and the nature of the terrain they cover, Crab calculates with astonishing precision the duration of these silences, down to the second. Thus forewarned, he can flee and take shelter somewhere else well before the noise erupts, gliding from place to place, already off again as soon as he has arrived, unable to maintain the silence and utterly powerless to impose it; indeed - just as the darkness produced by the eyelids is impotent against a lighthouse and a double row of streetlights - between wax and cotton, you might as well plug your ears with two hornets.

[The Crab Nebula, Chevillard, E.]

...of testimony

I had already said that I hadn't seen her again since the suicide of her father... a little more than a year.

And yet she had preserved a great deal of affection for me. She hoped I was going to carry on with my brilliant work. It's what she said, at the time of the hearings. So, why hadn't I seen her again?

I had no desire to answer. If I had answered, I would have been able to say only: because she didn't want to, because she had needed me for that exact moment, not afterwards. And that she had other dreams. Sometimes things don't work out. I must have made a little bit of a sad face admitting that. I wanted to look sad, in case she might see me live on TV and grow sad too. But trials aren't systematically filmed. When they are, they aren't broadcast live. So I couldn't speak to her this way... but let be understood that I still felt a great longing to be with her, if that had been her wish. Unfortunately, in her eyes, my image had been contaminated by the horrors of Mountain R, horrors that I had at least caught a glimpse of. I hadn't even known how to write that novel, as I wouldn't write the one on Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Definitely, she would see me as desperate! I was beginning to doubt that I could publish other books... The fact that I had told her so little of the drama in which her father had played such a sinister role had obviously destroyed my chances. Stupidly enough, I had scored against my own team. This damned propensity for silence... I can't do anything about it. Upon her return to Boston, and her begrudging kiss at the airport, I felt all of a sudden that I was becoming her father's double, a nasty feeling that made my stomach drop, like when a ship yaws in a heavy sea. I felt as if I didn't exist. As for him, even if he hadn't yet committed suicide, it was nonetheless clear that he had been shrunken, as if by headhunters, and that in the general inventory of humanity there was suddenly lack in an item, gone without trace, something that was neither precisely me nor Muratore, but half of each... She had begun to ask me, in turn, questions that were difficult and insistent - but not aggressive - concerning the white-washing of my record that I hoped would result from my trip to the Pole... She let me see how little she cared for such a prospect.

It was necessary to ask me why I was suddenly so pale.

I passed my hand over my face and rubbed my eyes.

[Mountain R, Jouet, J.]

...of a sales pitch

One weekend during this period my father took me to the hardware store. A man we called the Needle Man was in the parking lot. The Needle Man was deaf and dumb; he went around the city selling packets of sewing needles for a living. He was a short, toothless person of about sixty who always wore a baseball cap; there was something wrong with one of his knees, which bent sideways when he put his weight on it. He approached us and went into his silent sales pitch: he flashed the packet of needles, shrugged, looked away, flashed the packet of needles again, licked his thumb and tested the wind direction, smiled, gummed, shrugged, looked away, looked at us. My father gave him a dollar for the needles. The Needle Man nodded and left us. He never showed gratitude. I connected him with Rumplestiltskin and with Gollum in The Hobbit. We already had five or six packets of needles that we had bought from him, so my father handed this one to me. "Maybe you can think of something to do with them, " he said.

[The Fermata, Baker, N.]

...of a gift

Just as I resumed time after turning the Butterfly up almost to full, she noticed me looking at her, and our eyes caught and laser-locked; I tried to tell her with my look that I understood how good it felt, though she was doing a tremendous job of suppressing it, and that I was the only one in the train who could see what she was going through, and that I was very moved to be able to witness it and would make no sign to anyone else of what she was letting me see. I nodded, closing my eyes, and looked at her again: giving the nod to her approaching clasm. She looked away, up at the adx for temporary agencies over the windows, and then she looked back at me, and I watched her put her lower teeth over her upper teeth, her eyes getting bigger and browner and fuller - and (I am almost sure) she came. Then she took a deep breath and gathered her hair in an O made of her forefinger and released it and reached down again tentatively to her legs, so that I had to fermate quickly and remove the Butterfly from her and wipe it off (using several WetOnes) and put it back in the case so that it looked unused. I put it in a blank manila envelope. Time rolling, I smiled at her again, in a wowed, foolish sort of way, and she smiled uncertainly back, not quite sure how to explain to herself what had just happened. At the Chestnut Hill stop she stood and passed where I was sitting. I said, "Excuse me?" and handed her the vibrating Butterfly in its envelope and then touched my fingers to my lips. I didn't get off at that stop because I didn't want to unnerve her or seem threatening; I reached home an hour later feeling that, in making gifts of two of my sex toys, I had turned the day around.

[The Fermata, Baker, N.]

...of a social studies class

The air is quite close in the Fold and takes a little getting used to, although as long as you wave your arms around every so often there is no real risk of asphyxiation. I was very conscious of my breathing as I walked up the row of desks and chairs, naked, and reached my lovely teacher. "Miss Dobzhansky?" I said, standing right behind her, though I knew that she couldn't hear me. My plan, as I had conceived it in a flash when she had smiled at me a moment before, was to take off all her clothes and then sit back down at my desk and click time back on - that is, turn the time transformer off. When she felt the cooler air on her skin and discovered that she was entirely nude, she would turn toward us, confused and startled, but not really flustered, since I had never seen her flustered - her serenity and ability to adjust to any eventuality in the classroom was an important part of what made her lovely to me - and she would meet this challenge with her usual aplomb. She would turn toward us with her hands shielding her breasts and look inquiringly at our faces, as if to say, "How, class, has this happened?" Her eyes would seek out mine, because she knew she could trust me to help her through difficult moments, and I would look back at her with an ardent, loving, serious expression. I would stand and shush anyone who dared to snicker at the fact that both I and Miss Dobzhansky were completely naked, and I would walk up to her and nod at her as if to say, "Everything will be all right Miss Dobzhansky," and collect her sweater and her dress which I would have left neatly folded on her desk. She would say, "Thank you, Arno," in a voice that communicated how grateful she was that I was in her life and was able to help her through this moment. She and her would retire to the cloakroom for a few minutes, where I would hand her her clothes one by one as she got dressed. She would do the same for me. When we re-emerged, I would take my seat and she would continue her social studies lesson. The class,  docile with shock, would have remained silent through our whole absence.

[The Fermata, Baker, N.]

...of time stood still

I had not expected anyone to notice the cord leading into my desk, since I was in the back corner, and nobody in fact did. I let half an hour go by, watching Miss Dobzhansky discuss a kind of slitted sunglasses that the Eskimos whittled from bone to avoid snow blindness. She began to write the old spelling of Eskimo, with a q, on the board in white chalk. My hands were deep in my desk; my fingertips touched the wrinkle-finish black paint and the smooth toggle switch. As she embarked on the letter m, her back to the class, I flipped the switch. She didn't finish the m. She and the class were without sound and motion.
I said "Hey." I said "Hey" again. Nobody turned toward me. Far from being eerie or disturbing, the silence was, I found, quite comfy. This acoustical coziness, which is a consistent feature of The Fold, is the result, I think, of the relative sluggishness of the air molecules that surround me. Sound diffuses outward only a few feet, as far as I can tell. I'm often reminded of a line in the first stanza of Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes": "And silent was the flock in woolly fold." My Fold is woolly.

[The Fermata, Baker, N.]