No One Can Explain Exactly

Otherwise, All I Remember Of The Denizens Of The Nocturama Is That Several Of Them Had Strikingly Large Eyes, And The Fixed Inquiring Gaze Found In Certain Painters And Philosophers Who Seek To Penetrate The Darkness Which Surrounds Us Purely By Means Of Looking And Thinking.

One Has The Impression That Something Is Stirring Inside [photographs] - It Is As If One Can Hear Little Cries Of Despair, Gémissements De Désespoir... As If The Photographs Themselves Had A Memory And Were Remembering Us And How We, The Surviving, And Those Who Preceded Us, Once Were.

It Seems To Me Then As If All The Moments Of Our Life Occupy The Same Space, As If Future Events Already Existed And Were Only Waiting For Us To Find Our Way To Them At Last, Just As When We Have Accepted An Invitation We Duly Arrive In A Certain House At A Given Time.

And So They Are Ever Returning To Us, The Dead. At Times They Come Back From The Ice More Than Seven Decades Later And Are Found At The Edge Of The Moraine, A Few Polished Bones And A Pair Of Hobnailed Boots.

This Then, I Thought, As I Looked Round About Me, Is The Representation Of History. It Requires A Falsification Of Perspective. We, The Survivors, See Everything From Above, See Everything At Once, And Still We Do Not Know How It Was.