Strange self emerging from strange self
Jenny Erpenbeck:
Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves — a fact that’s hard to grasp. We know that time also separates us from circumstances that might have turned us into very different people. We know it, but we don’t understand it. … We know only one thing: That behind everything we can see, hear, and touch, another reality is concealed — a reality that we can’t see and can’t hear and can’t touch, a reality made of time. We know that transformations lie behind us, and we know, according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers.
Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, pp. 42f
