All the great themes have been revised and re-revised a thousand times. There is nothing left to be invented. No devices lie uncovered waiting to be picked up. The revolution has happened and happened and happened again.

There is nothing but a single desk lamp. Perfectly formed, lighting its patch of workspace exactly as it was designed to, functioning according to its schematic; it is the saddest lamp in the world. No drama lies hidden in its gunmetal and moulded plastic. It will function: Someone will turn it off and on and off and on again until the day it finally gives up the ghost. It will be replaced. Perhaps it will be replaced long before that day. Someone will decide it is too this or it is too that or it does not match this or that bit of décor and some landfill will inherit its husk. It will be casually tossed aside in any case. It was not made to be treasured.

It is brilliantly and beautifully lighting a typewriter whose letters now barely deign to show up on the paper it formerly so furiously devoured. They still make the oil that lubricates its well-worn machinery but no-one remembers how to make that crucial bit of ink. Soon it too will become an artefact, perhaps even a treasure. It will transition from usefulness to another more sublime existence: It will become something of a museum. You see this, this is how we used to write.

The pages beside it haven’t been touched in years. They pile up one after another after another and no-one dares move them. They grow from the floor and desk and chairs as if planted there and left in the dark like mushrooms to cover every surface. Dense with ideas and fragments of conversations, one might gather them into a book with too many themes and too many characters. One might read them quickly like scanning faces in a crowd. But they weren’t written to be read.

For instance. A city street. The sounds of night time and I am alone. It is better this way. I have crossed the tracks and seen your freight train barrelling past. I have continued. You have continued. There is nothing left to say.

These are the words of a thousand people and of one person. They are a wide brush to paint so many walls which one could name as Oh that was Opportunity, Oh that was Love, Oh that was Death, Oh we ran parallel for a while and then diverged. The hidden artist always has one face and one particular expression but of course you will take his painting and apply your own to it. You may read the pages and sense yourself in them when of course you are not.

He is in the bed across the hall under a different lamp that has been passed down through many generations. It requires a device of its own to connect it to the electrical grid. It requires and adapter, it is that old. He is lying there with his eyes closed but of course he is not asleep.

If he were to burn them the bonfire would go on for days. This is the constant question he asks himself: To light a match is so little effort: To destroy those measured hours would take a mere flick of the wrist.

Those uniformed men might dig through the ashes and gather phrases. They might say, Oh he was writing a novel, Oh one should not keep so much paper in one room, Oh perhaps this was once a typewriter.

If he were to burn them the bonfire would take everything with it. All his memories. They would scatter into the wind and the ground and the lungs of his neighbours. He would never be able to turn to a page and vaguely recall, Oh yes I was there, Oh yes I said that, Oh what was I thinking?

He is beginning to believe this is a good thing.

Tags: fiction