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248
per højholt
have come up empty-handed.
A Bulgarian agronomic journal
briefly mentions it in an aside
to a discussion of windmills in
the northeastern provinces,
and the pseudonymous
Ludwig Renn affords the
phenomenon misplaced irony
in his 1936 novel
Vor grossen
Wandlungen
. It is also worth
mentioning that on the French
side of things there was an
attempt in 1921 to recreate
the event on its sixth
anniversary, though the effort
remained a local undertaking,
thwar ted by a dog in
Containcourt and doves in
Honfleur. In 1944, however,
the exper iment was
successfully conducted as
fiction in Argentina. The
original silence, explored here
for the very f irst time,
occurred in the middle of the
afternoon just after 4:09 p.m.
At that moment, and in the
following seconds, Europe
was dead still. Every European
heart was caught betweenc
one beat and the next, every
clock between a tick and a
tock, breakers all along the
coast abruptly drew back and
the next swell simply did not
surge. A ridiculous windstill
bid every European leaf quiet
and many steps taken
remained uncompleted.
Thanks to a million different
causes, purely by chance no
one in Europe made a sound.
An unprecedented, utterly
unglimpsed snapshot. When
one considers the array of
c o i n c i d e n c e s
a n d
coincidences’ coincidence and
the mind-blowing number of
correspondences this event
must have required, it is
difficult to contradict Jorge
Guillèn, who in 1928, while
living in Murcia, though in
1915 in Switzerland, suggested