#SDQ

She’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel cold: suddenly noticing that she was shivering in her thin dress, looking down in surprise at the gooseflesh of her bare arms, she got up to pull a sweater out of her bag. Absorbed in her thoughts, she hadn’t looked out of the window for some time. Now she did so, and, to her astonishment, the mountain, which had always seemed the same distance away, on the horizon, were suddenly quite close. They seemed to have advanced to meet her with giant strides while she wasn’t looking, and were right upon her. She looked with amazement at the great dark wooded slopes, slanting up overhead, and felt a stir of excitement.

Her home country being almost all at sea level, she hadn’t seen snow mountains till she came to the south. At first they were no more than a part of her wonderful dream. But, later, when things began to go wrong, she found herself gazing at them for minutes together, watching them in a particular was. It got so that she never forgot the mountains for long. Not that she had any definite thoughts about them. They just seemed to come into her head suddenly, and then she would have to look. It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendor; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man’s hectic world wasn’t the only one – that there were others, where her love turned into a chaotic fever-dream, in which she was tossing, hallucinated, frightened and miserable, she had longed to escape to the cold, austere, changeless beauty and peace of the snow.

So far she new nothing of the mountains, having only looked at their exterior from far away: now suddenly she wanted to know them, to see into their inmost heart. She became inpatient with the ghostly cold forest, that seemed to go on and on, interminable, on those lower slopes: sunless, lifeless, only the spectral grey rocks flitting past in the subaqueous gloom. The engine puffed stolidly upward, letting out a screech now and then. Otherwise, silence; no call of bird or animal in the forest; no voice in the train.

Anna Kavan, A scarcity of love

Only from that day on were the children really felt to belong to the village, and not to be outsiders. Thenceforth they were regarded as natives whom the people had brought back to themselves from the mountain.

Their mother Sanna was now a native of Gschaid too.

The children, however, can never forget the mountain, and earnestly fix their gaze upon it when in the garden, when as in times past the sun is out bright and warm, the linden diffuses its fragrance, the bees are humming, and the mountain looks down upon them as serene and blue as the sky above.

From ‘Rock Crystal’ by Adalbert Stifter.

    

Review #1

Below we can see that a weekend's critical moment falls between the hours 6 and 7 on Friday evening, so was decided the course of events over the last two days. A microcosmically complete foreshadowing occurred in this short period, though whether it should have served as warning or invitation is still hard to tell. What is clear is that the pattern was familiar – a coherent addition to weekends past and no doubt future – and in those critical instants the decision to heed or accept, however good or devious my intentions, was utterly arbitrary

Good intentions are, for example, routinely blown out of the window come 4pm. This is when my office indulges in the fuzzy practice of Friday beers. Two hours left on the clock – what harm can it do? On a corporate level, not much; to me personally, plenty. As soon as that first ignorantly-welcome sip touched my lips, I could effectively forget about Saturday's planned trip to the gym, the track I've been failing to make for weeks and, potentially disastrously, a romantic day out with the other half. Two hours later I was in a bar cracking open a bottle of wine, organising a shady rendez-vous with a man by the name of Dirk. The latter took place half-an-hour later and my fate was all but sealed.

Missing Narative

Critical moment #1

For me the crucial hours of a weekend actually fall between 6 and 7 on a Friday evening rather than on Saturday or Sunday themselves. It is hard to write this without sounding like a John Lewis advertisement but, in my view, if you get those hours right in their execution your weekend will inevitably be a success. Why? Well, you will have just finished work, you will ideally have no immediate plans and, for those 60 minutes, the possibilities for both that evening, Saturday and Sunday abound. Friday night has not yet begun and Saturday and Sunday seem a great time away. Sometimes the best thought is that you can do nothing now for a long long time. Other times you might drain a pint with friends. Or maybe restaurant with beauty? Good, no?

However, get this hour wrong - perhaps an irritating conversation with an inconsequential or through indecision in the supermarket aisles - and you are fucked.

Maybe I have thought about this for too long which is something I definitely would not recommend. This is because I know this now. I know how important that hour is and, like a man who fluffs his lines on the first day of hustings, I now run the weekly risk of letting the adrenaline rule. Don't let anxiety rule. Don't let the knowledge be too much.