Chapter 16 Section 7

How profound is time?To what depths of physical life must we go in order to understand what time is? Bronzini, an old science teacher, with his head down, moved his feet excitedly and marched on the snow.He carried a cigar case under his arm, which contained scissors, a comb, and electric clippers for the hair on the back of Eddie's neck. We continue to explore space, bravely face space, arrange the best launch timing and launch plan, and surround the earth with singing.However, time binds us to our aging bodies.It's not because he's worried that he's getting old.He makes this an argument, curious to know, at least theoretically, what we can learn by probing the structure beneath conventional models, studying quanta that are smaller than a quadrillionth of what the ancient Greeks saw as the volume of an atom. what.

There was a lot of snow, and huge star-shaped snowflakes, wet like feathers, fell on his eyelashes and melted immediately.He looked up and saw snow piled up on top of the parked cars and nothing moving on the street.The snowflakes fell on the back of his hand and disappeared immediately. He climbed the stairs to Eddie's apartment and rang the bell.No ding-dongs, hums, or whines.He knocked on the metal sheath on the door and heard a snap of shoes as Mercedes came to the door. She opened the door and turned to Eddie and said loudly, "You'll never guess who's here." Bronzini handed her the cigar box—Cassia Vegapan, a boutique cigar founded in 1882.He took off his winter hat, handed it to her, and pulled off the old-fashioned belted coat.Outerwear is a bargain at the big box stores—there's a place to buy factory discounted stuff, such as off-size suits and tops, and mishandled cardigans.They thought the robbery was cigarettes.He handed her the coat and rolled his hands to show that he was not wearing gloves.Then he bent down to unbutton his galoshes.He bent over for so long that he felt dizzy when he took off his shoes.

"Look, Eddie, he's wearing slippers under his goloshes. It's a real joke." Bronzini embraced the woman, embraced the dress she was wearing, and rubbing his hands, walked into the living room, as if on a Persian rug, to the birch-burning fireplace, to a glass of rare brandy.Eddie stood there, smiling—the real Eddie Robles.He lived under the façade of an imposter, within his beleaguered likeness, suffering from arthritis, emphysema, festering veins in his legs, and withdrawn to a certain extent from all social activity. "I woke up this morning and found out about it," Bronzini said.

"You knew already." "Today is Eddie's haircut day." "During a blizzard. You wake up but don't look out the window." "Snowflakes, nostalgic. You should go for a walk." "Let's go," Eddie said. "You know what you're talking about? Sit down, you're making me nervous." "I can't cut your hair when I sit down. Where are my tools?" "I should cut your hair. You are the one who needs a haircut. You should bring a violin, Albert." "You don't want to play chess with me anymore. There is no opponent in this world that I can beat. I can beat——I can beat other people in the same way I beat you. So, you have to behave yourself and follow the rules of your haircut. The snow scene is very beautiful and reminiscent of the past. By the way, where is Mercedes. Where is she? There is something wrong with your doorbell."

The two sat down and drank hot chocolate drinks.What Albert needs is a glass of imported spirits.He imagined the warm, pungent feeling of a sip of scotch down his throat.The aftertaste is long, which is the charm of that stuff.It intoxicates you so it lasts forever.That chairman scotch (shattered) rumors of a takeover.You jam the chocks under the wheels to keep the car from sliding.The kind of wood that stops the wheels from sliding is called a scotch.He thinks that the notch painted on the ground is also called scotch. "Doorbell, is the only problem with the doorbell?" Mercedes asked.

"Of course, there's something wrong with the elevator. But we know about the elevator." "Do you know stucco?" she asked. "I stuffed some newspapers in the cracks. When people find this place someday in the future, they will know exactly when the problem occurred based on the date in the newspaper." "Take it easy," Eddie said. "Let's talk about something else." "My own elevator, it's a problem," Bronzini said, "it breaks down on a regular basis." "Four flights of stairs?" "Five flights of stairs."

"Make it easy," Eddie said. "His heart, to climb five flights of stairs?" "Let's talk about something else." Mercedes was stocky and gestural, swaying in his chair and waving his hands.However, she took care of Eddie, the frail imposter, who was aching, stiff in the joints, and out of breath.Back then, Eddie was strong and strong and worked in the subway.He sold the tokens in the dark kiosk, ignoring the bad air, the cacophony of the trains, the hellish sound of the express trains passing by.Today, Messedis cares for Eddie with undivided love, knowledge, and authority.When she was annoyed by something, Albert wanted to hide—he was timid, emotionally insensitive, and dealt with things in a direct manner.

"They installed barbed wire to protect us from the drug dealers. But what if it rains? The rain just flows in. The snow melts and the water drips. I don't want to see the end of winter. I'd rather be frozen than use a Newspapers to plug those cracks." "The man is happy, let him live," Eddie said. She fetched a high chair from the kitchen, put Eddie on it, took the cigar box, placed it on the table, and opened it.She found a bath towel and wrapped it around her husband over his knees, fastening the corners of the towel loosely behind his neck.Then, she turned her gaze to Albert.These preparations are very important to a haircut, and he is deeply satisfied with them.

Albert took out the tools from the cigar box, placed them on the table, and spread them out one by one.The short black comb, which has been glued, is used to comb the sideburns.A tortoiseshell comb with a handle, missing three teeth, is called a wide-toothed comb.A beautiful pair of shears, made in Italy, an heirloom used for generations.That thing was one of the objects left behind by an old man, and it suddenly appeared in a new way.It has a finely crafted filigree handle with a steel needle in a circle and a curved protrusion to support the middle finger.To use, put your index finger into the circle, and your middle finger just rests on the protruding part.What else?A shaving brush, no need for it.Nose hair clippers, let Eddie do it himself.The electric clippers, dark and heavy, made in Elk Grove, Illinois, still had a small lock of Eddie's hair, which they had cut six weeks earlier, on the blades.What else?A tube of clipper lube, and a small soft-bristled brush from a thrift store.

He didn't know how to cut Eddie's hair. He had cut Eddie's hair many times, but he still couldn't find a way to satisfy him.He often stops to observe the effect carefully, sometimes snapping trims, sometimes stepping back to examine.He trims slowly, trying to get the hair off the guy's head and onto the floor.Mercedes, who was not in the room, seemed not to feel the need to watch. "Somebody came up with a new idea, you've probably heard of it," Eddie said, "called a space burial." "I've grown to love it." "Send the ashes to space."

"Let me make a name," said Bronzini. "You can choose various orbits. There is one orbit around the equator. In this orbit, you rotate with the earth. Oh, not about you, it's your ashes." "Is there a waiting list?" "There's a waiting list, I've seen it on the news, plus a good launch. It's very roomy." "Deep space." "Very spacious. You sleep with the stars." "But you're not the only one going up." "You launch with seven hundred other boxes of ashes, people's and pets'. You call the company and they put your name on the waiting list." "What if the person is already dead?" "Your kids call, your lawyer calls. The big question is how much the ashes weigh, and that's how much you pay — guess what?" "Can not guess." "Guess," Eddie said. "You have to tell me." "Ten thousand dollars a pound." Eddie said it with certainty, with pleasure, that was terrifying. "Pound per pound. How much do our ashes weigh when we die?" Albert asked. "I think that sounds like a reasonable price." "You think it's a reasonable price. So you're undermining what I hoped to achieve by telling the story." "It's a pound of ashes, Eddie, that's probably the weight of a family. Buried in space, forever." "You've spoiled what I hoped to achieve by telling this story." Albert picked up a wide-toothed comb and ran through the top of his friend's hair.He combed repeatedly to give the hair its shape, then brushed it again.He likes to do it.He used the scissors as little as possible, because mistakes would show up if they were not careful.He brushed Eddie's thinning hair lightly, holding it up with the comb and letting it fall.In the kitchen, Mercedes listens to the radio as she prepares dinner — lunch, perhaps.Recently, Albert's concept of time has been somewhat fuzzy.A heartbeat, a pulsation, a footstep, these are recognizable times.He held his hair up with a comb, then let it go. "You miss the kiosk you used to be in, Eddie." "I love that job." "I know you like it." "For so many years, not once." "They never robbed you." "Not even trying." That was New York City genius.Eddie Robles practiced with a small chess set at two o'clock in the morning at the kiosk where he sold tokens.Don't think that no one puts their face in front of Xiao Kong, challenges him, and wants to play chess with him.Don't think that if he plays chess behind five layers of bulletproof glass at night, and the train roars by, no one will play chess with him. "It never occurred to me then that they would rob me today. I never thought of it, and it never happened. Once, a woman vomited into the small hole in the ticket booth, which was my personal experience. Worst thing ever. I never thought about how to deal with a robbery. My thought was that if you have a plan, things will happen. She put her hands on the ledge and threw up." "at midnight?" "Just her and me. If you can't help throwing up, why don't you throw it up on the tracks? It's just her and me in the whole station. She's throwing up at the coin slot, like that's for throwing up." He plugged in the clipper and pushed the hair off the back of Eddie's neck.He ran the clippers under the towel, into the collar of his shirt, and pushed the hair off his shoulders.He cleaned his neck thoroughly with a brush, then asked Mercedes to get some body powder.There was only one necessary thing missing from his cigar box, and he silently remembered that some should be prepared for the next use. Space funeral.He thought of the trail clouds in the blue sky—if he remembered correctly, they had appeared over the Atlantic Ocean two years ago.After the propulsion rocket separates, a terrifying letter Y is drawn in the tranquil sky.That cloud of steam remained intact for a long time, and the astronauts fell into the sea, but the steam hung in the air, buried in the frozen smoke.He stayed up all night, looking at the deep sky over the Atlantic Ocean, thinking about it.Such death is a sublimated thing, sailing, clear, troubled body into steam and fire, forming a monogram Y above the world for premature death. He wasn't sure if people wanted to see that, to see the system fail, to see the astronauts die?But how could that beauty, that sublime belief in space, that quality be associated with death?Seven men and women.Their beauty, our beauty, both revealed in a failed mission, something unheard of in hundreds of successful launches before.Worship as a god.Yes, they were given the form of gods, turned into that stripe of swans pure and beautiful, poetic, fleeting, the only gods he recognized.That experience, he felt, was more meaningful than the first moonwalk.The moon walk sparked interest, but it was only a radio conversation.Astronauts on television images performed eerily, their movements appearing to have been computerized.He never quite dismisses the skepticism of the paranoid elite, the gray-haired Gurkha veterans—the entire scene was filmed on a ranch outside Las Vegas. In the spring, they—Albert and Laura—were still there.How could it be that his sister didn't suffer from some catastrophic disease?You sit there and know that your body is getting weak, that you have lost your energy, that you don't walk, you don't see people, you have no interest in anything, and it seems like everything is lost. However, he was still grateful to her.He had been around women, at least one woman, a woman or a girl, and they shared bathrooms, kitchens, and beds a long time ago.He needs company, a woman and her sense of pride in time, her sense of vitality about the future.He married a Jew and loved her, but Clara's future plans were without him.He takes care of his mother.My mother is a Catholic, and she can't stop talking about the past.She was wearing a monk's scapular, and she put her thumb-knuckles to her lips, beseeching herself.He loved her and died for her.He raised his daughter, taught her to take control of her own destiny, to be a human being of worth without being bound by religious rituals.He loves his daughter very much and she now lives in Vermont.His sister wanders between the past and the present from time to time, but she always understands his mind and sees his simple inner world directly, in a way that makes him feel incredible.The reason why he loves her and loves his sister is unclear and unclear.She summed up her life in a few sentences, which he found very moving. He has a record player.Once upon a time, it was sophisticated and stylish, but now it is unremarkable.Still, after all these years, it still plays music.He found the record he was looking for, used a treated cotton cloth, wiped the polyethylene film on the surface of the record, and placed it on the record player.Saint-Saëns' piano works are soft, soothing, and contemplative, which are quite different from the operas that Bronzini often listened to.The latter has a cheesy tone, tortures emotions, and can shatter teacups.He turned to make sure that Laura was not in the room, then lay down in the armchair with his head propped against the hand-woven upholstery, and lifted his head for the chorus.He turned the adjuster and watched as the tonearm lifted and the record lowered onto the turntable.Then, the tonearm slides toward the edge, and the record begins to spin.There was a slight pause between this series of movements, staggering, clumsy, and making some noises, making him feel as if he was in a mechanical age that had passed away, back to the era of pendulum clocks, and the era of starting motorcycles with cranks . There was a jerk of the stylus, and the sound was muffled, but he was used to it.He sat down against the wall so he could feel the sunlight from the kitchen and see Laura's face.Music connects them at the edge of two rooms.He believed that he could enter her reverie, understand her through music, or almost understand her, feel her innocence, rediscover the old girl, the twelve-year-old girl who followed her parents.He could spot the shadow of the girl on his sister's melancholy face.She was almost there, the girl in her eye sacs, in her birthmark, in her sooty hair.In one piece of music, after a transitional bar of reminiscence, there is a brief moment: something dark seems to float in, and the soloist's left hand drives the tempo.She raised one arm, very slowly, in a somewhat nerve-wracking gesture, thoughtfully—she heard the ominous presence of the bass, and was frightened within.That's another thing they both share, the sadness and clarity of time, the deeply mournful time in the music.That music—the concrete vibration of the hammers striking the strings—felt a strange sadness to both of them, not because of something concrete, but because of time itself.A year or an era gives people a concrete feeling, that unmeasured time has a texture, and they no longer have it.She turned her head, her gaze flicked over her raised arm, into something transparent.He felt that that thing could be called her life. "Albert, you've got to tell me when you're going out. That way I'll know." "I already told you." "I didn't tell me." "I did tell you." "I don't know if you forgot, or for some other reason." "I'll tell you." "If you tell me, then I'll know." "I'll tell you, I'll tell you." "But I forgot, didn't I?" "Yes, sometimes." "You tell me, I'll forget." "Sometimes. It doesn't matter." "But you have to tell me." "I will. I will tell you." "That's how I know," she said. In the morning, he drinks sugar-free coffee with just a little rye whiskey, a little, a little drop.In the afternoon or evening, he added a little ouzo, a sip, a sip of licorice juice.Before bed he might have another shot of whiskey rye, no coffee this time.Of course, it was forbidden by the doctor, but just that, a tightly controlled sip, the shortest swig in the history of guilt-ridden drinking. "You have to tell me so I know." "I'll tell you, I promise." "That's how I know." "So you will know." "If you tell me, then I'll know." "That's fine." "That's all right, isn't it?" "Yes, that will do." "But you have to tell me. That's the only way I'll know." He cleaned the kitchen window sill, sweeping away dust, hair, fly heads, chips of plaster—little bits of stone. As the two prepared dinner together, whenever Albert stood in her way, she touched his hand, tapped him lightly on the back, to remind him not to come into her jurisdiction. He placed three pills next to his own plate, one inch apart, for taking.His medicine for heart disease, medicine for constipation, medicine for liver disease. When there are many people in the aisle, he spends more time indoors.He once saw a hypodermic syringe on the second-floor landing.Then there were people in the aisle, busy and dull at the same time--busy eyes, but rigid bodies, barely able to move their arms in the air.It seemed to him that when the rain stopped they would go to the playground or some open space.However, the elevator was stuck between two floors.He'd better not leave the apartment, it's not a good idea for him to take the stairs. He took off her glasses, wiped them with a tissue, and put them on for her. They sat on stools by the door when he went out, muttering about Wall Street or something, which Albert eventually surmised was some sort of off-the-shelf heroin.Wall Street, Wall Street, he heard their voices—strangers in the building—in the hallways, heard their breathing. He told her he was going to make a long-distance call to his daughter Teresa.He liked to announce things out loud, telling Laura every time he called, to get her involved, for example, to chat about the weather or the changing of the seasons. His daughter ran an expensive nursery in a small town, raised two children, and her once misbehaving husband tried a new career.Albert sometimes sent her a little money, saved from his teacher's pension. The long-distance call was a well-prepared act, and he spent more time in his head than the length of his conversation.He spent the entire evening waiting for the time for the change of call charges, and then moved a chair to the telephone, face down, facing the dial, and carefully dialed the number. He heard their breathing in the hallway and knew he had enough food for two days.When the milk went sour, he could open a can of peaches and pour the fruit and sweet juice into his breakfast cereal.It's the same as eating fresh peaches, canned peaches have gummy pulp, the pulp stuck to the pit.He heard their voices at night and knew he could chop up meat and make tomato soup out of macaroni.They don't live in this building and will find another place. When his daughter answered the phone, he cast his gaze across the room to Laura, and nodded, indicating the connection was successful—and the century of progress moved on. Mac and cheese, they had mac and cheese, and that was a meal in itself. This is another spring or early summer day that feels refreshing.He went to the library to return a book and saw a familiar figure crossing the street towards the convent, which was part of the grammar school of the Catholic Church.It was a familiar figure from long ago, a figure from the land of the past.He hadn't realized she was still alive, and she surprised him a lot.Sister Edgar's face was still thin, her hands were still dry, her steps were still in a hurry, her skinny body was covered with clothes, and she walked with a rustling sound.She is dressed in a traditional nun's attire, with a long black veil wrapped around a white turban, a piece of starched cotton around her neck and shoulders, and an iron cross dangling from her waist - she may be from a 16th-century A part of the masterpiece of a painting master. He saw her open the door of the monastery and disappear through the doorway.The nun gained notoriety for perpetrating acts of terror among her students.She brutally treated fifth and sixth grade students, beating, swearing, detaining students after school, and forcing students to beat blackboard erasers outside in a storm.He had never spoken to Sister Edgar, and he really wanted to knock on the door of the convent and talk to her, and ask her whose idea she had been following all these years.He has always prided himself on serving in the public schools and has never had to worry about poor student discipline.He worked with loving colleagues, heard of the nun's reputation, and heard of her brutality in her daily work. Now, he walks with a cane, which gives him an emeritus emeritus vibe.The local library is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, whose portrait hangs on the walls alongside the original model of the first atomic bomb.many years ago.Albert liked to compare himself to the great Fermi, to find certain similarities: sickness as a child, marriage to a Jewish woman, and of course science itself, the inheritance of cultural traditions, the slight smile on the face of the Italians when they were proud Redness, though, is a slightly different story when it comes to Fermi's research being linked to destruction.In the past, the building was a movie theater with sour smells and garbage, and the neighborhood kids called it Dirty House.He thought to himself, let's not forget, things will get better.Today, the place is full of books, and there is silence between the shelves. He walks into the club.He sometimes played cards in it and had an occasional drink.I don't play as much now as I used to.The pictures on the walls, of fishmongers in aprons and hats, of waiters with their hair parted outside restaurants, have shown the signs of time.He heard the church bells from Mount Carmel, poured himself a glass of red wine, sat alone at a table covered with plastic film, and watched the wine poured into the glass-the swirling trickle Down the wall of the wine glass, tell you how mellow the wine is.This wine has legs.It is covered in legs.It has the legs of a sumo wrestler. There is a TV set in the corner of the room, and the video is playing on it.He had only seen this video once before, and it was here.He knows, and they let it play over and over for everyone on the planet to see.He knew that if it started playing again after a pause, it meant that the killer had shot someone else, a new victim.If there's no new film or tape of the shooting, they'll play the original tape, the only tape.They're going to let the whole world see it. Come Steve, Steve Silvera, one of the Silvera brothers.He wore a suit and drove a funeral car.Albert always asked: who died? "Do you drink this kind of wine?" "I want to talk to it, but it doesn't make a sound," said Albert. "Sit down and have a drink with me." "I have to go to the funeral." "Who's dead?" "What's his name? He used to be at the fish market." "Burial or cremation?" "Now it's popular to put urns in the walls." "Harvest." Albert said with satisfaction. The church bell rang again, and Steve hurried out.Albert only needed to bend down a little, and he could see the other drivers and pallbearers put out their cigarette butts and leave quickly. It was time to carry the coffin.Another fishmonger—another photograph—had hung there for decades, apparently, in a kind of dignified innocence, of sweet times long past and gone forever.Memory conspires with artificial objects to flatten time and evoke a memory full of tenderness. Later, he walked into the deserted church and took a seat in the last row for one last moment alone with Eddie Robles.A pigeon flew across the transept and landed on the edge of the swing window near the row of candles.He had an admiration for the old church, flanked by Corinthian columns, saints in niches and lit candles in rose-colored glass vessels.The nearby streets changed, the church remained the same.In the days after Mass was held for Eddie, he began to see again, in a way, that losing friends, losing anything in life, was an aspect of Clara's departure, and it repeated that effect, Repeat that destruction. The pigeon soared into the air again, fluttering around the dome.He thinks he recalls that the Holy Ghost came in the form of a dove, right?Every ghost is holy, he thinks, but I won't kneel until you point out one.But he likes to sit here alone, in silent contemplation and deep mourning, in the details of the building, in the faith of stone and wood, in the colors of the glass. Clara left him, releasing something, a cry, a sound without words.The sensations it evoked were so varied and varied, and so strongly resisted separation and scrutiny, that he felt utterly bewildered and utterly helpless in that turmoil.It is a barrier to living, making him question the image of himself he used to be: soft-spoken, soft-spoken, soft-reflective.Humph, that bitch, it's not worth it for him to look at her like that.Later, his sister counseled him out of despair, and another voice, that of an introverted woman trapped in a predicament of isolation.However, in a wonderful way, she was full of love for him. He needs to walk and let his muscles relax.He went out of the church and into the street.Nice, people chatting and eating.Loyal shoppers come from other districts and counties, and cars are parked in two rows.He could feel the beating of excited hearts in the nearby streets.He walked west, across Arthur Street, and then slowly north, along an old road that had recently been abandoned, to the secondary school where he had taught for thirty years. Eddie died, and Mercedes went to Puerto Rico.Stop walking and you will die. He walked into a street behind the school and was surprised to find that the road was closed.A game street, with coordinates painted on the sidewalk, numbered squares for hopscotch, and a field for toss.Albert was pleasantly surprised.He had thought that the old practice of closing streets for children's play was dead, dead for decades.It's a relic that lives on in the psyche, a reminder of a life not dominated by cars and trucks.He stopped and looked at the children playing games, holding a cane across his waist in his hand, as if he was holding on to the railing in a gymnasium.Many of the young children were lanky and quick, and some of their voices had the rhythm of Jamaican speech.A girl with freckles on her face may be Malaysian or South Asian.This is his guess.The girl was hopscotching with deft, well-placed movements, light pirouettes in the air, barely messed up hair--bronze skin that alternated between darkening and lightening, a smudge of olive green beneath her eyes.He would have liked to stop her in mid-air, to suspend all activity for half a second—atomic clocks, biological clocks, the microcosm in which physicists explored time.Then, turn back time, turn back that girl's jumping action, turn back life, and give everyone a chance to enjoy life again.He thought hard, how to say the word that means do it all over again?The child said the word aloud when play was interrupted by a passing car or a woman pushing a stroller.It was called, because - all.Is the pronunciation Indo or Indy?He wasn't entirely sure, it was the Indian girl in sneakers and jeans who was yelling. Thick-skinned, play enough.This is what children say when they are given a second chance to continue a game that was interrupted.Hit a home run, kick the can, through the dust of the gutter, and hit the bull's-eye.Thick-skinned, play enough. He saw a peddler standing beside a van with the side open, selling fruit.Mangoes are packed in crates and sugarcane is laid out in bundles.Albert said in his heart that some things are going to get better.A library, a game street, let his sense of optimism increase with each block. But what does it mean to do it again?He doesn't want to lose his soul by compromising, a second chance to expose his inner world.We end up not relying on time anyway.There is a balance, an equilibrium, between the time continuum and the human reality, the fragile union of body and mind.True, we are all ultimately succumbing to time, but time also depends on us.We carry time in our muscles and in our genes, passing it on to the next custodian of time, to our brown-eyed daughters, to our protruding-eared sons.If not, how does the world keep going?Never mind the theorists who study time, never mind the silver cesium device that measures life and death in tiny trillionths of a second.He feels that we are the only clock that counts, that our minds and bodies are the stations that distribute time.Think about it, Einstein, the man whose name was also Albert. He turned around and came to the school gate, longing to go into the porch and talk to the boys and girls standing there.But no, they didn't know him, they wouldn't talk to him.So why come here?The mound of limestone and bricks holds the materials of his teaching career, and a million words he uttered hang in the warm air.There was no reason for him to feel that he needed to pass by here again.This is a glimpse that was faithfully documented in order to freeze the scene.He walked around the block where the school was located and walked slowly towards home. On a deserted street, he came across a very large stray dog.It looked sickly, bony, and drooling, and he sideways away.In a culture that favors guard dogs, there are always some dogs who fall out of favor and end up on the streets.The trick to encountering this type of dog is to avoid it carefully and not show fear. Festina lente (speeding up slowly).Let the fast pace slow down. He wiped the window sill with a damp rag to remove the fly's wings--the stump of the fly, the crumpled shell left by the transparent green beetle. He has a teacher's pension and a small tax-deductible annuity.He also has a bank passbook showing interest amounts printed in a cozy font. The four seasons are mixed together throughout the year, and these years are blurred and dizzy, just like the time in a book.在书本里，时间在一句话之间便过去了，有时是几个月，有时是许多年。写下一个单词，跳过一个十年。在他这个岁数，生活在这个没有余地的世界上，现实的时间与书本上的情况已无大的差别。 他把一张唱片放在电唱机上。劳拉坐在椅子上，那样子与其说在听音乐，毋宁说在看音乐。 面包是可靠的，几乎每一餐都吃面包，刚从砖炉中取出来的面包。他把从图书馆借来的书籍堆放在面包盒子旁边，这样就能确保在到期之前归还。 “我们要搬家吗，阿尔伯特？” “不。我们哪儿也不去。” “有人告诉我，我记不得是谁说的，我们要搬家。” “也许，我们会再去看特雷萨。我们坐大客车去，路途景色不错，这是我们唯一要动的时候。” “你是不是说你要出去？” “你喜欢坐车到那里去。佛蒙特州。树叶变色的时候，我们就动身。你喜欢那时去。” “阿尔伯特。” "what?" “如果你告诉我，我就知道。” 四季交替，年复一年。尽管电视机很久以前——另一辈子以前——就开始闪动，劳拉依然阅读肥皂剧的剧情概要，以便跟踪电视上的那些角色的变化。 麦片粥在炉子上鼓起了气泡，扑扑作响。 他走过来，取下她的眼镜，用薄纸擦拭，然后重新给她戴上。