The World Viewed: The Silverfish and the Broken Planets

Abstract

I was some way through Albert Camus’ novel A Happy Death before I realised that I had the capacity for self-reflection. Not that I knew that this was an existential classic, or that the pages I was chewing my way through were a rather strange English translation published to catch the emerging market that fed the paperback publishing revival of the nineteen eighties. All I really knew was that the pages were warm and soft and woody; just sufficiently damp to support a rather sweet bacterial bloom that made this book a quite special pleasure. It was perhaps three or four weeks since I started on the book, working my way through it steadily, mostly at night when there is a particular sort of quietness and the temperature drops a little which makes moving around is more enjoyable. At night this special quiet somehow delivers a fresher feel as one slips between the pages; less to catch the throat so to speak as the air cools and the exotic gasses become memories. I had just passed what I later understood to be the halfway mark, more or less, when I became aware of the workings of something that I can only call memory. I have no real sense of what it was like before I became aware of this, it felt like a positive decision; as though at a certain moment I had decided to remember what it was like to be me when previously the very concept of recollection had no part in anything that I did