Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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that this silence was probably the first of its kind. In 1931 he added, in reference to the French undertaking of ten years earlier, that it would probably also be the last, excepting of course that one. Nonetheless, no one who has considered the subject can entirely avoid the thought that a like silence could occur at any time. However, the 1915 silence left traces that very few people were in a position to discover, despite the fact that these traces appeared on the scene within the same rather short space of time, namely the following summer, for their appearance occurred in so many different parts of the world that no p o s s i b l e f o r m o f documentation could account for what actually was the case. The events encompassed by the 1915 silence must have

included sexual liaisons, not too many, perhaps, but considering the enormous territory under discussion a number, probably a few thousand by all accounts. Every one of the billions of sperm that on September 7 at 4:09 p.m. soundlessly campaigned for a much more limited quantity of eggs in a modest number of women were doubtlessly effected during those epochal seconds before they either withered away or fulfilled a purpose their progenitor did not necessarily intend, by the aforementioned silence. In the blink of an eye, when silencehappened, immediately following those thousands of ejaculations, hearing heard itself almost metaphorically, and this exorbitant listening, impotently directed at its own device, probably had little to

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