Drive the head like a reluctant bull through the transparent mass at the center of which we take a coffee with milk and open the newspaper to find out what has happened in whatever corner of that glass brick. Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the door knob, the act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex, "See you later, Sweetheart. Have a good day."

Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it to stir the coffee.

And it's not that it's so bad that things meet us every day and are the same. That the same woman is there beside us, the same watch, that the novel lying open there on the table starts, once more, to take its bicycle ride through your glasses. What could be wrong with it?

But like a sad bull, one has to lower the head, hustle out from the middle of the glass brick toward the one nearest us, who is as unattainable as the picador, however close the bull is to him. Punish the eyes looking at that which passes in the sky and cunningly accept that its name is cloud, its answer catalogued in the mind. Don't believe that the telephone is going to give you the numbers you try to call, why should it?

The only thing that will come is what you have already prepared and decided, the gloomy reflection of your expectations, that monkey, who scratches himself on the table and trembles with cold. Break the monkey's head, take a run from the middle of the room to the wall and break through it. Oh, how they sing upstairs!

There's an apartment upstairs where people live who don't know there's a downstairs floor and that all of us live in the glass brick. And if suddenly a moth lands on the edge of a pencil and flutters there like an ash-colored flame, look at it. I am looking at it. I am touching its tiny heart and I hear it. That moth reverberates in the pie dough of frozen glass, all is not lost. When the door opens and I lean over the stairwell, I'll know that the street begins down there; not the already accepted matrix, not the familiar houses, not the hotel across the street, that busy wilderness which can tumble upon me like a magnolia any minute, where the faces will come to life when I look at them, when I just go a little bit further, when I smash minutely against the pie dough of the glass brick and stake my life while I press forward step by step to go pick up the newspaper at the corner.

Preamble To The Instructions On How To Wind a Watch

Think of this: when they present you with a watch, they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren't simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it's a good grand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren't just giving you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you.

They are giving you - they don't know it, it's terrible that they don't know it - they are gifting you with a new fragile and precarious piece of yourself, something that's yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist.

They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a watch, they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you, it'll fall on the street and get broken.

They give you the gift of your trademark and the assurance that it's a trademark better than others, they gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren't giving you a watch, you are the gift, they are giving you yourself for the watch's birthday.

Instructions On How to Wind a Watch

Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now, another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon of air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more did you want? Quickly, strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cranking the cold blood with its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

Douglas Adams:
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Albert Einstein:
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Unknown:
"Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things."

Edward P. Tryon:
"In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time."

John Andrew Holmes:
"It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."

Max Frisch:
"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it."

Kilgore Trout:
"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."

Woody Allen:
"I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown."

Douglas Adams:
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

William J. Broad:
"The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing."

Rich Cook:
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."

Fred Hoyle:
"There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for."

Ray Bradbury:
"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."

Christopher Morley:
"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed."

Edward Chilton:
"I'm worried that the universe will soon need replacing. It's not holding a charge."

Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson):
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us."