Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Frédéric Pajak

there is no road. Past the cemetery, there’s nothing else. Just pastures, brush, forests as far as the eye can see. There, the void begins. The village has lost its road and its road was the beginning of the world. A village without a road is a village without a world. Impossible to leave or to return. One is suspended under the church tower, waiting for a time that is pointless because there is nowhere to come from or to go to, aside from the two steps between the salon and the snack bar. The quarter of an hour that has just passed is forgotten. The recent past is forgotten. As is the distant past. No one is interested in the next day or in any day to come because there’s no road, because nothing leads out of the village. Our present era resembles this village. It ’s not missing a road, but a past and a future. Our era knows only the present, a present expelled from its past and deprived of its future or, in Benjamin’s phrase: “a homogeneous and empty time”. There is no more yesterday. There is only today, which will give way to tomorrow, which in turn will forget yesterday. It is through doubt and chance that convictions are shaken, that systems are unraveled, although they are exhausted by their own intrigues at the height of their power and face inevitable decline.

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