Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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

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