Voices from a foreign quarter

In the very teeth of winter, when your life drifts and billows about you, it is not unusual to hear voices from a foreign quarter as you make your way slowly in your suit toward the office through the ice – as you make your way slowly from the room in which you live across the frozen paving of the town – as you make your way slowly in your slowness, since everything is at the mercy of all things, and you must wrap your reasons fast about you.

Sometimes the voices are peppermint in their freshness, and you feel their brief warmth in condensation on a glass, as they crackle past the school gates; sometimes, again, they are drawn out from the early morning, like the clean rustling of silk against a sky – drawn out like cars passing softly in the snow. And sometimes they are no more than recollections from the night before that have slid a few inches from the roof, and now, as if to test themselves, heap up in their height and overhang the gutters.

It is against all this that a woman passes by and says: Good morning.

And suddenly you wonder how it would be if all we strangers started to say “Good morning.” Good morning, and also good night. And not only that, but to invite one another in for coffee, for example. And not just coffee, either, but many other things about which one can only speculate.

“You, in particular, would have asked if I wanted to go out for drinks, and I would have said: No. Because whoever disdains the small part wants the whole and I cannot forswear my ambitions toward you, my beloved, ungovernable world.”