Frost - pg. 11

"If you walk the way I'm pointing with my stick, you'll come to a valley where you can walk back and forth for hours, without the least anxiety," he said. "You don't have to be afraid of being found out. Nothing can happen to you: everything has died. No minerals, no crops, nothing. You'll find traces of this or that period, stones, vestiges of masonry, indications, no one knows what of. A certain arcane relation to the sun. Birches. A ruined church. Traces of wild animals. Four or five days. Solitud, quiet," he said. "Nature without any human interference. The odd waterfall. It's like walking centuries before human settlement."

Evening falls very abruptly here, as if with a clap of thunder. As if a great iron curtain suddenly cut the world in half. Any way, night falls between one step and the next. The sour colors are drab. Everything is drab. No transition, no twilight. The Föhn wind sees to it that the temperature doesn't drop. An atmosphere that causes the heart to tighten, if not to stop altogether. The hospitals know all about this air current: ostensibly healthy patients, full to the brim with medical science to the point that there is hope for them, suddenly sink into unconsciousness, and cannot be reanimated by any human agency, however skillfil or ingenious. A climate that engendered embolisms. Bizarre cloud formations, somewhere far away. Dogs chasing pointlessly through lanes and farmyards, sometimes attacking people. Rivers stinking of corruption all along their length. Mountains like ridged brains, overly palpable by day, blackly invisible at night. Strangers suddenly getting into conversations at crossroads, asking questions, giving answers they never asked to hear. As if just then everything was possible: the ugly approaches the beautiful, and vice versa, the ruthless and the weak. The striking quarter hours drip down on cemeteries and rooftops. Death takes a deft hand in life. Children fall into sudden fits of weakness. Don't shout or yell, but walk under a train. In inns and stations near the waterfalls, relationships are formed that barely last a moment, friendships are struck up that never come to life; the other, the you, is tormented to the point of murderousness, and then strangled in pettiness and meanness.