Silence: a fable
A few days ago I offered a picture of my immediate surroundings: far from London indeed, the expanse north of our apartment is a wilderness of grasses and mountains, a pair of skeletal factory-stacks and some roads in the foreground.
And it has grown quiet, too. No longer that mysterious distant roar which swelled up in the small hours of the morning; no more the engine revving outside for half an hour at dawn. The whistles of the freight-trains crossing Rural have ceased too, or at least, perhaps, I no longer notice them. The jovial cries of our Asian neighbours splashing about in the pool downstairs have stopped for the winter. And rarely is there bird-sound out here in the half-desert. We still hear each evening the klaxon of an itinerant Mexican vendor passing by, honking doggedly, and now and then the sweet and drunken mariachi of a tequila party down the street. But mostly the place is quited, quieted.
A tetter or morphew is encroaching upon me also, sheathing the flesh of my arms with hives, blotches, welts, petechiae, infernally itchy. Still, I refuse to see a doctor.
This weekend I prepare an attempt to improve my German by Englishing Der Prozess, page by page. Last semester I had a go at Leibniz's De arte combinatoria, written at only 19, purely because I wanted so badly to read the untranslated opuscule, but alas! I gave up after the first paragraph. So much is lost in the movement of words. The Byzantine pharmacologist Nicolaus Myrepsus compiled from Muslim sources a handbook of natural remedies, translating the Arabic darsini, which means cinnamon, as 'arsenic'; for centuries it was thus believed in the West that arsenic had medicinal properties. So it goes.
And it has grown quiet, too. No longer that mysterious distant roar which swelled up in the small hours of the morning; no more the engine revving outside for half an hour at dawn. The whistles of the freight-trains crossing Rural have ceased too, or at least, perhaps, I no longer notice them. The jovial cries of our Asian neighbours splashing about in the pool downstairs have stopped for the winter. And rarely is there bird-sound out here in the half-desert. We still hear each evening the klaxon of an itinerant Mexican vendor passing by, honking doggedly, and now and then the sweet and drunken mariachi of a tequila party down the street. But mostly the place is quited, quieted.
A tetter or morphew is encroaching upon me also, sheathing the flesh of my arms with hives, blotches, welts, petechiae, infernally itchy. Still, I refuse to see a doctor.
This weekend I prepare an attempt to improve my German by Englishing Der Prozess, page by page. Last semester I had a go at Leibniz's De arte combinatoria, written at only 19, purely because I wanted so badly to read the untranslated opuscule, but alas! I gave up after the first paragraph. So much is lost in the movement of words. The Byzantine pharmacologist Nicolaus Myrepsus compiled from Muslim sources a handbook of natural remedies, translating the Arabic darsini, which means cinnamon, as 'arsenic'; for centuries it was thus believed in the West that arsenic had medicinal properties. So it goes.
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