After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel

Author:Guadalupe Nettel
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781566895330
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2018-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

As I listened to the record, I made another mint tea and stood for a long time in front of the window. I thought of the lives of those million or so people now buried over there: I thought of the intensity with which many of them would have passed through the world, struggling to leave something valuable behind so that they would be remembered forever; and I thought of all the other people whose names did not feature on the list of celebrities and whose biographies had passed into oblivion. Did they feel anything? Did they think, as Tom claimed they did? What if our existence were a kind of mold, a mold like the one a sculptor or a metal worker uses? I wondered. If each experience we have while we are alive, each emotion, each thought, were equivalent to a record made just once and then listened to passively, again and again, with no possibility of modifying anything—would we waste time in the way we do, tormenting ourselves with painful thoughts and ideas to be repeated for all eternity? I stood and thought about this for a good while before concluding that we would. The most likely scenario was that, even if we knew this were the case, we would not stop doing it. I am afraid it is a kind of inertia, I told myself, an uncontrollable behavior like that of insects, which we like to think of as so stupid—and which, at the same time, seems strangely familiar—when we see them carry out their repetitive routines, not to mention flying close to a flame or smashing into windows (an image, incidentally, which appears with suspicious frequency in literature). But supposing that, on the contrary, informed of the definitive nature of our time on earth, we could choose how we wanted eternity to play out, what would we choose to do, to think or to say? What would our final judgment look like? I could not find an answer. That night I received another message:

It seems that exactly the same thing happened to us both. I know what that recognition is, Cecilia. You’ll know it too, when you see me again.

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