They went slowly, walking through a landscape expectant in its stillness, and yet which had nothing to expect save the rain and the evening. The sky hung softly over it, sometimes united indissolubly to the earth by a veil of rain, and for them too, wandering through the stillness, there seemed to be nothing left but expectation, and it was as though all the life in them had flowed to their fingers […] Shoulder leaning against shoulder, from the distance resembling the two sides of a triangle, they walked upon the river-path in silence, for neither knew what it was that drew them together.
~ Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers
5 comments:
mmmmm lovely passage.......
i especially like expectant stillness
Yes, expectant stillness is nice!
broch might possibly be my favorite writer of all time. there are probably 10 that would battle it out to be at the top of the list, but he just might be the one. it's too bad artists don't retire, because i'd really like to spend my retirement re-reading all of his books as slowly as possible...
Your copies of Walser must be so densely marked as to be unreadable :)
Wow! I don't know if I could choose a favorite... though, I agree, he would be up there with the ten to twelve I could not do without...
And, Cheshire, yes the Walsers are somewhat insanely marked (though this is a Broch quote, which may suffer the same), and as I use those copper arrows to mark pages, the books often weigh considerably more than when they first came to visit...
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