by Karel Capek (translated by Norma Comrada)

Why is he, the one I'm thinking about, who is leaning over a writing table, why is he so motionless, why does he wait and listen for something to happen outside of himself; how could anything give him instruction in sorrow or bring an end to the endless succession of doubts moving through him? All around him are mere routines of veiled melancholy; and the opposite side of the street, in its formless silence, wears an statement so uncommonly empty and so unpleasant that in his suffering he gratefully seizes on the rattle of a carriage on the paving stones as the point of departure from this moment to the next.

The clop-clop of hooves amidst the rattling, the drawn-out rhythmic progression and clatter turn the corner, ringing off the paving stones; the sound rolls on like a ball of yarn, at a distance now, ever softer, an extended ticking like a slender, elongated thread, so slender that perhaps it is no longer, perhaps now it is no longer anything more than elongated distance, an impossible length, then silence.

The silences within and without are fused together like two unruffled, utterly homogenous surfaces. Everything is utterly homogenous, like a surface that is taut, motionless. The man at the desk holds his breath and his heart lies still, like a surface. The silence is stretched taut like a canvas, and all is silent, all things are bits of silence ironed into a smooth, motionless plane. The desk and the walls, all things around him are like a drawing on a smoothed sheet, clear, without foreshortening or shadow. They are stretched taut on the area of the plane, on which there are neither creases nor irregularities; everything is incorporated into the incorporeal plane like straws frozen in ice. Nor is the man at the desk outside of it: he is there, motionless, in the vast surface of things, and he cannot break free from it; were he to move even slightly, he senses it would bring about the disarrangement, the warping of all its parts, a terrible corrugation of the taut planes. Without awe, without time, without within. An anguish that might be death, departure, effacement. To not feel is the positive feeling of non-existence and the powerful suffering of non-existence; the motionless conflict of non-awareness of thought, and of pressure at he edges of the void. Surface everywhere, with its sad, dead planes. What is standing still is time; if it were possible to move it even slightly, time would shatter instantly into thousands of seconds, which would fall downward, dead, like dust. But the man at the desk is afraid to move; with his multitude of anxieties and infirmities he is embedded in silence like an insect in transparent amber; he is utterly stopped.

And then footsteps on the sidewalk, fine, loud, regular. The world on the motionless plane falls to pieces in unvoiced explosion; out of the bursting rise things angular and massive, the man at his desk is sent flying in all the directions of space, feeling how abundantly he branches, how his movements thrust out into the world. The edges and angles of all things make themselves heard in the jagged buzz of space: quickly, quickly they go in their directions, with self-assurance and rigidity. The man's heart takes up its old pain with powerful, powerful beats; the one I'm thinking about stands up, so that he may bear the weight of his grief, and the great wheel of existence turns in ever wider, ever faster circles.

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