below where the factory ceiling met the wall, there was a window. Light filtered through the entire factory from that single point, making visible the particles that floated in the air. One night, a little while after getting off the bus, Delia told me that she couldn’t remember how she had started working there. This made sense, given that she considered anything related to the factory to be a virtue; it was a point of pride and was doubtless what endowed her with her fullest and most complete identity, the trait that allowed her to feel like herself when confronted by the outside world, without shame. A feeling akin to omnipotence, or something like it: the world could threaten to end, to stop existing from one moment to the next, and the worker would be the figure best suited to prevent its collapse.
I’ve read many novels in which people live in a world without time; I mean, one without linear, psychological, or cosmological time, or any other kind. Reduced to acting on a few instincts, an animal of any species has a more tangible effect on time than man does. A person closes a book and is surprised by the abyss of the day to day, with the varying scales and speeds of time, fast or slow, which leave a fine, invisible layer on the surface of things. Like dust in an empty room, these layers settle uniformly and without hurry; the difference is that they accumulate without building up, so they are always the same thickness and can be lifted as one, regardless of how much time has passed. Like time, which cannot be seen, these are invisible layers that cannot be touched. I’ll give you an example. The character in this book is an immigrant laborer who has reached his twilight years. In his home country, he worked from the time he was a child, but a complex process of mental ellipsis has led him to believe that he only started doing so after he emigrated. The fact that, from the time he was eight, he left his soul on the bleached, unpredictable soil of his village from Monday to Sunday, is stored in his memory in a different form, not under the heading “work.” He thinks, for example, of the wheelbarrows of shit he used to have to cart around, and what they evoke isn’t the hardship—the missteps, the frustration, the cold, the dark—but rather the time that, suspended, refused to pass. It was a rickety old wheelbarrow, heavier than what it could carry, overflowing with whatever his family had unloaded into the latrine over the course of the year. He knew that his father’s steps had left their mark on the path, prints too big for his own feet. Each time he stumbled, the experience confirmed that he was walking a course someone, none other than his father, had followed before, leading him to think that time advanced only through the repetition of actions. These were not the repeated actions of the deranged, the absentminded, or the desperate, but rather a repeated representation, the footstep that conceals the one before it and anticipates the one that follows. As though the subject were the action itself (carting shit, chopping wood, weeding the garden, and so on), and not the person who carried it out. This gave the boy the feeling of inhabiting a static, lasting, monotonous time. Nonetheless, he realized that this immobility was relative, because just a bit farther ahead he would use the last of his strength to tip out the contents of the wheelbarrow. This thought, simple and undeveloped from various perspectives, indicated to him that irreversibility permeated the base and the sublime in equal measure. It wasn’t that he was especially moved by cyclical things—seasons, gradual variations in the landscape, work in the fields—it was that he felt himself part of a time that was free, compact, and tightly bound; impossible to break apart.
Now we return to the present. Many years after this “not working,” as he sits in his pensioner’s armchair he inadvertently overhears one of his sons allude to
I’ve read many novels in which people live in a world without time; I mean, one without linear, psychological, or cosmological time, or any other kind. Reduced to acting on a few instincts, an animal of any species has a more tangible effect on time than man does. A person closes a book and is surprised by the abyss of the day to day, with the varying scales and speeds of time, fast or slow, which leave a fine, invisible layer on the surface of things. Like dust in an empty room, these layers settle uniformly and without hurry; the difference is that they accumulate without building up, so they are always the same thickness and can be lifted as one, regardless of how much time has passed. Like time, which cannot be seen, these are invisible layers that cannot be touched. I’ll give you an example. The character in this book is an immigrant laborer who has reached his twilight years. In his home country, he worked from the time he was a child, but a complex process of mental ellipsis has led him to believe that he only started doing so after he emigrated. The fact that, from the time he was eight, he left his soul on the bleached, unpredictable soil of his village from Monday to Sunday, is stored in his memory in a different form, not under the heading “work.” He thinks, for example, of the wheelbarrows of shit he used to have to cart around, and what they evoke isn’t the hardship—the missteps, the frustration, the cold, the dark—but rather the time that, suspended, refused to pass. It was a rickety old wheelbarrow, heavier than what it could carry, overflowing with whatever his family had unloaded into the latrine over the course of the year. He knew that his father’s steps had left their mark on the path, prints too big for his own feet. Each time he stumbled, the experience confirmed that he was walking a course someone, none other than his father, had followed before, leading him to think that time advanced only through the repetition of actions. These were not the repeated actions of the deranged, the absentminded, or the desperate, but rather a repeated representation, the footstep that conceals the one before it and anticipates the one that follows. As though the subject were the action itself (carting shit, chopping wood, weeding the garden, and so on), and not the person who carried it out. This gave the boy the feeling of inhabiting a static, lasting, monotonous time. Nonetheless, he realized that this immobility was relative, because just a bit farther ahead he would use the last of his strength to tip out the contents of the wheelbarrow. This thought, simple and undeveloped from various perspectives, indicated to him that irreversibility permeated the base and the sublime in equal measure. It wasn’t that he was especially moved by cyclical things—seasons, gradual variations in the landscape, work in the fields—it was that he felt himself part of a time that was free, compact, and tightly bound; impossible to break apart.
Now we return to the present. Many years after this “not working,” as he sits in his pensioner’s armchair he inadvertently overhears one of his sons allude to
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