But when they were crossing the silent market-place on which nobody was to be seen except the sentry on duty at military headquarters, when the empty place surrounded by the dark houses, in which scarcely a light was burning, lay before them like a crater of isolation, like a crater of silence out of which recurring waves of peace flowed over the sleeping town, then Heinrich Wendling took his wife’s arm, and at that first physical contact she closed her eyes. Perhaps he too had closed his eyes and saw neither the deep summer night nor the white ribbon of the road that stretched in front of them as they walked in its dust, perhaps each of them saw a different firmament…
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Like a Network of Tinkling Glass....
Even the silence that surrounded him was like an end in itself, it might have endured as it was for ever; no one spoke a word, the room, filled with the silence, strangely emptied by the silence, seemed to extend beyond its own walls, and the yellow sunlight outside the open door flowed past like an eternal immeasurable river on whose banks they were sitting.
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…it was in a sense an incorporeal serenity, a kind of etherealized, luminous, almost white serenity that expanded in the dark room and spread over the confusion of voices, like a network of tinkling glass in a strangely abstract simplification. The stream of sunlight shimmered outside like a sharp fiery sword; they were safe as in a haven of refuge, in a cave, a cellar, a catacomb.
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The major may have joined in the singing, but he did not know it, the singing seemed rather to be inside him, a singing behind his closed eyes, like a crystalline drop that falls singing from a cloud.
...
~ Hermann Broch, The Realist, in The Sleepwalkers
