Calling in

A Dutchman on a Spanish island
and an American woman in Dub-
lin talk on the telephone. 
There are seven billion people 
in the world, so these two in-
dividuals speaking to each oth-
er might seem like an extreme
coincidence. But, as the phi-
losopher rightly said, all that
is real is rational ..

Yesterday's conversation -

across the Pyrenees, across

the Irish Sea - was about

what they were reading at

that moment. She is reading

a biography of Nureyev; he

Volume iii of Chateaubriand's

Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe ..

The man in Spain is reading
not so much for the politics
and the history, but for Cha-
teaubriand's magnificent, con-
cise French, in which he ana-
lyses European relationships
like a game of chess. She, in
Dublin, has read the 782 pages
of Julie Kavanagh's 'beautiful-
ly written' biography deep in-
to the night ..

Both have penetrated, at a

particular point and a par-

ticular moment, into the

endless series of manifes-

tations of our existence on

earth, and are reporting back

to each other. There is noth-

ing remarkable about that, 

and yet there is.

Cees Nooteboom
Letters to Poseidon
  Telephone
  [fragment]
Laura Watkinson
  translation
op. cit.

ii  Azamat Akhmadbaev
    Night Lights
    2014