Dark Back of Time

Начало книги

I believe I’ve still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one. Anyone can relate an anecdote about something that happened, and the simple fact of saying it already distorts and twists it, language can’t reproduce events and shouldn’t attempt to, and that, I imagine, is why during some trials — the trials in movies, anyway, the ones I know best — the implicated parties are asked to perform a material or physical reconstruction of what happened, repeating the gestures, the movements, the envenomed steps they took, the way they thrust the knife to become the accused; they’re asked to simulate seizing the weapon once again and delivering the blow to someone who, because of it, ceased to be and is no more, or rather to empty air, because it isn’t enough for them to say it, to tell the story impassively and as precisely as possible, it must be seen, and an imitation, a representation or staging of it is required, though now without the knife in hand and without the body — sack of flour, sack of flesh — to drive it into, this time in cool detachment and without racking up another crime or adding another victim to the list, but only as pretense and memory, because what they can never reproduce is the time gone by or lost, nor can they revive the dead who are lost within that time and gone.

Читать дальше →