February 15

No inclination for the world. No story, of course, after such desertion. The ignorant sky in Prussia, more opulent when silence falls, into such brightness, the row of windows, the sea, all along the track, any break or lull. Trapped in the same murmur, flowing, restless sky, still greedy for the ash.

Another evening. All happens in an instant and is sustained, banishing the atmosphere between the flowers, how weak and deadly calm at the heart of that obscure inexplicable space. The vacancy is tempting to those who act and those who think. To everyone, given the same circumstances, the reasons or combinations thereof, still capable of producing labor, to subjugate our higher purposes, to sacrifice what is visible, and perhaps the integrity of the character. The same things recur, concentrated now on the physical, on the materiality that has vanished for lack of concrete evidence. These dry winter months bear witness to this utter trace in the guise of something else, in the language employed, the relevant literature of illness. Severe limits on testimony.

The enormous broken echo of the repressed language of bodies, of sorrow. The dead, still forgiving, generate a long and bitter last gleam on the river. A foreshadowing of the general line. Silent, refusing, women assembled in that flesh or in another, to journey to themselves, or be taken to themselves. To the way out.

The same things recur, then little, then nothing. Old in vain.

Call down any sort of punishment.

To answer simply, without overtones. To recede into the rest, but faintly defiant. Permanently to have come to an end.