Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

around the inner courtyard of golden Ernests. Pascal, who reproached a newcomer for not writing more sublimely, Montaigne, who reproached a newcomer for not writing more independently, Rousseau, who reproached a newcomer for not writing more revolutionarily, Proust, who reproached a newcomer for not writing his shibboleth more like a hermit. Early morning, they tighten the humidity. Voices carry the nails and leave them hanging in the air, the sounds of striking pipes and drills boring. Sometimes one of them falls off a ladder, his scream leaves a shaft in the middle of sentence construction. Long ago, they shaded the windows. But a wall doesn’t grow only next to a wall, wall to wall. Their hammers and wires, shelves and weldings, grow through a window and into a room, tightening the drops that fall from a pipe and the little movements of the suits in a closet. They have tightened my left middle ear, attached my eyelids to my cheeks, evaporated my hand with a cheap trick. I can no longer move. Dates have fastened me. At the same time, I am prey to an evil spell. I sense that they drilled through to my tongue. Never again will I see the first word nor the last subjects of the sentence, whose conjunction I’ve become, never the tenses where there’s this never. As if I was scouring a book of false biographies that might have been written by someone under the pseudonym of my name. The skyscraper in Montparnasse casts a long shadow

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