Zero


[The girl feels like a giant.

She enters a chequered room of flat pack squares in red and white. She understands that to be in here there must be a participation, a conformity, a submersion/subversion. There are a few empty nails hanging on the walls. She realises that some parts are missing. It doesn’t matter. As she walks across the floor the squares start spinning and screaming numbers at her, breaking like glass. LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE. They feel the full weight of her body and her heart and her feeling (fear) of being ‘giant’ grows and grows. She is far too large.

To counteract this problem she lies down slowly across the squares. They gradually slow down and then cease to spin. She spreads her limbs amongst all the squares, lying down, flattening her body out until she does not exist.

Everything reaches zero again. She felt calm.]

[extract/edit]

Faldum


["You've taken the violinist away from me!" complained the young man. "Now the only thing I want from life is to be able to listen and observe, and I want only to think about things immortal. So I wish I were a mountain as large as the country of Faldum, so tall that my peak would tower above the clouds."]


[Only the mountain stood unchanged and ageless, and when the snow on his peak glistened, he seemed to smile and be happy that he was no longer a human being and no longer had to calculate according to standards of human time.]



Herman Hesse
Faldum