It's amazing how you've managed to make me feel outraged for "the man alone" without actually conveying outrage. "Rights and freedoms" really pushed it over the edge. This is conveying without telling; making me feel, not instructing me, which only a skilled writer can do.
"Rights and freedoms" works because it's borrowed too. The women reach for a slogan, off-the-shelf, said a thousand times before by other people. Same as the phone, actually. Language that comes from elsewhere, deployed to defend a body that won't produce its own quiet. I didn't plan that echo but I'll take it. Grateful you clocked the restraint rather than wanting the outrage spelled out, Andrew!
The bilingual mirroring is the real achievement, reading the story replicates the very thing "the man alone" is doing, layering a private continuo beneath the public score. Barthes had a term for this, “le bruissement de la langue”, the rustle of language as ambient texture rather than message. The phone violates the “unintentionality” of sound. Birdsong doesn't address you; a speakerphone conversation, however banal, is addressed to the world whether the world consented or not. That's the real trespass. You’re an amazing writer.
Ohhh, Barthes is the right ghost to summon, and the unintentionality point sharpens my story. Address is the trespass. The bird sings to no one, the wind means nothing by it, even the tourists lowering their voices don’t speak at you. The speakerphone conscripts you into an audience you never agreed to join. It presumes your ear. Thank you for this, Clara!
I'm curious to know is Clara's bilingual mirroring is the reason why also chose to provide the original French version? Only if disclosing the reason doesn't have mystery away.
No mystery spoiled, since the English version was the translation, I wanted to give the original text. I have a lot of French readers too. And I do believe it flows nicely between languages. I write in several languages and I don’t think I should limit my publications to only one.
I love your story doesn't explain the anger but stages it, sound by sound, so the reader feels the garden's silence break before understanding why it matters. The real achievement is making "atmosphere" into a plot. Nothing happens except two women sitting down, yet the stakes feel total. That's the trick worth stealing, tension built entirely from texture, not event. Rare, and precise, Tamara, you are a master.
Withholding the “why” can read as coyness if the textures don't carry real weight underneath. What saves it, I hope, is that the man's whole nervous system has been established as tuned to source before the phone lands. So the break isn't arbitrary. The reader has been trained to hear the way he hears.
And "atmosphere as plot" is generous, but I'd say the plot was always there, just demoted. A man protects one hour. Someone takes it. That's older than the novel. Thank you, Alexander, that means a lot coming from you!
I think I want more stories in French. You obviously love writing in French too. And the bonus….. listening to you. A piece of advice: your readers will adore listening to your voice reading your essays and stories.
A whole ecology of sound, a collective composition everyone unconsciously contribute to, then show how one flattened, tinny speakerphone could collapse it instantly. That's the real subject: ambient shared attention is fragile infrastructure, built by many, destroyed by one refusal to whisper. Contrast the phone's sound not just as loud but as “recorded elsewhere”, the only voice in the garden not actually produced by the garden, which is why it reads as invasive rather than just noisy. Wonderful, Tamara, listening to you in French!!!
You’re right that the fragility is the whole point, but infrastructure gets rebuilt. This doesn't. Once the metallic thing tears the quiet, the specific afternoon is gone, you can't reassemble that exact weave of cries and wind. It was never durable. It was a one-off performance nobody rehearsed…
Merci for listening, Céline, I knew you’d love it :)
The man alone once read rapidly attempting to finish the symphony as fast as possible.
A man alone would read once and tick the box and not sit in the moment of communion between author and himself. Unbeknownst to himself the reading was bereft…
And now.
A man alone is so pleased to be in this moment reading these words again—having read them already. Many times. And the world unfurls differently. With greater weight, a world made manifest in my head rather than another item completed.
To read slow, and with the intention—to escape into the world of another… it is an awesome experience. And one I would never have discovered without Tamara’s writing.
An incredible pleasure to read you…
And someone get this girl a microphone and a podcast!! Reading along with French was a singular experience and a reminder that my brain would need some grand restoration to comprehend the language! But, and I am no expert in this language I don’t understand, the cadence and delivery was exceptional. Incredible.
I got very emotional reading your comment…. maybe because I know the many layers of that man alone, maybe because I am connected to that man and only him, maybe because that man alone read me like no other man. I dislike people who read as errand. But your man didn’t go somewhere, got the thing, came back, the box ticked. Your man reads like company. The words don’t change. He does, each time, so the world he builds arrives heavier, meaningful.
Now, between you and me, rhe bereft reading wasn’t wasted, it became the ground the slow reading needed to stand on. Do you really think anyone can arrive at communion without a stretch of just clocking pages? And the communion between the writer and their reader is divine. Your man knows it and felt it even in a language he doesn’t speak. Thank you, Adam, for reading me this intimately! My precious gift.
P.S. my best friend had tempted me about the podcast before you, so….. pleased to let you know the microphone was bought yesterday, the podcast may come. Also, my best friend told me I read as if I had done radio in my life. Quite the compliment!
Merci pour ce cadeau inattendu, André! Vous avez fait une chose que le texte ne faisait pas, vous avez mis un “je” à la place de “l’homme seul”. La distance tombe. Le jardin devient le vôtre, la colère aussi. Et cette femme secrète en haut de la terrasse, elle regarde, elle ne fait pas de bruit, elle observe. Vous avez glissé mon rôle de guetteuse dans votre poème sans prévenir. Que c’est beau! Vous refusez la jolie chute. Le bruit de notre temps, posé là, sans ornement.
Oui, bonsoir Tamara … merci pour votre réponse à mon petit poème … j’ai vu aujourd’hui le deuxième film de De Gaulle … je suis complètement “chamboulé” … il ne pouvait pas y avoir une autre chute …
merci, Tamara, pour votre attention, et pour votre présence …
The pic at the end, my first impression was that your feet were bound!
I used to carry an extra pair of earphones back when I used public transport. And offer them to anyone sharing their calls or videos for the entire bus to hear.
The bound-feet reading made me look again and smile. The most elegant piece of protest is that spare of earphones. No lecture, no confrontation. I love it. I might do it when I take the métro or the bus. Most people fight noise with more noise, complaints, sighs, the pointed stare. You answered it so much elegance!
“People pass slowly, discreetly, perhaps they feel obliged to take on attitudes dictated by the bourgeois civility of the Second Empire, as if the destiny of the lawns and the flowerbeds, decided back in those days, still taught “good manners”.
Oh I love this passage…such a Merchant Ivory visual and gives a real sense of what’s about to be lost. Thank you for sharing
That passage carries the whole loss in advance though I planted it almost as a trap. The reader settles into the period hush, the Merchant Ivory light you name, and gets comfortable there. Then the phone. The comfort is what makes the intrusion bite. If I hadn't lulled you first, the metallic sound would just be noise, not violation. Thank you for reading me, T!
A slice of life, a brief series of moments, a shattered peace. It's a story that requires exactly what you offer - no more, no less. The reader feels the shattering, and not just for him, but also for all of the others whose peace is gone. Like all great stories, it evokes something in the reader that is more than the reader, the story, or the writer when they are separate.
You wrote it in French and in English, you read it in French, and listening, I hear also your voice reading English and Romanian on other days, and all of it is present. The sound, the words, the voice, all of it is a story expressed in the universal language of truth.
The collective loss matters more than I let on. The man protests, so he takes the foreground, but the sentence that counts is the one where the dozing ones startle and the readers lift their heads. A whole small republic of strangers dispossessed at once. He just happens to be the one who speaks. Everyone else absorbs it silently, which is possibly worse. That thing you name, the story exceeding its parts, I distrust my words for it…. but I feel it from the reading side too. Thank you for hearing across all my languages, Doc!
What an absolute delight to hear your voice reading to us in French. I confess, I only understand a bit of this beautiful language, so after reading the English version, I listened to your audio narration and allowed the music of the tale wash over me, like a delicious afternoon Paris rain. Merci!
Listening without full comprehension might be the truest way to catch what this particular story is after. You got the continuo directly, the sound underneath the sense, which is the very layer the man in the chair strains to protect. The meaning came off the English page, then the French gave you the part meaning can't hold. Rain is the right word for it. Thank you for letting it fall that way, unhurried, Meris!
Thank you, Tamara. I had that same impression, that perhaps the truest way to catch the meaning and music of this story, was to listen with "the ears of my heart" (as Bill Plotkin recommends) and let the continuo find its way to my interiority. These wet notes of goodness are still dancing my cells quite happily.
The ears of the heart… spectacular! Most terms for deep listening are noisy about themselves. This one just quiet and lets you do it.
I will keep "dancing my cells". There's a bodily fact underneath it. Sound is pressure on tissue before it's ever meaning, it moves you physically whether you translate the words or not. You felt the piece at that layer. Thank you so much!
It's a pleasure to correspond with you in this place of quiet deep listening. And because I know it is quite late in Paris, I will leave it there for now, and wish you the best as you go into the dreamtime, whenever it calls to you.
Dreamtime is a better word than the ones I usually reach for at that late hour. Sleep is maintenance but the way you describe it sounds like somewhere you go. I'll try to travel rather than just switch off. I love this! Thank you!
The suede brogues alone are enough to disrupt whatever reverie this man might have been lost in. I would notice the choice, consider the craftsmanship, the perfect pairing, and lose my place. Attempt to reread, then glance again, and again be lost. All this long before two rudes descend on the space. A great pair of Oxfords make more noise in their pitch-perfect silence than any living phone call does.
There's a difference in the two disruptions, though. The shoes pull you off the page and you go willingly, then wander back. The phone shoves you out and bolts the door behind you. One interruption you forgive. And I should confess, I am an obsessive shoe collector… Delighted my shoes carried across a whole garden to reach you, Andrew!
A jaunt suggests he went somewhere. But he sat still and let Paris come to him until two phones arrived and it stopped being pleasant. Right up to that point, though, yes!
It's amazing how you've managed to make me feel outraged for "the man alone" without actually conveying outrage. "Rights and freedoms" really pushed it over the edge. This is conveying without telling; making me feel, not instructing me, which only a skilled writer can do.
"Rights and freedoms" works because it's borrowed too. The women reach for a slogan, off-the-shelf, said a thousand times before by other people. Same as the phone, actually. Language that comes from elsewhere, deployed to defend a body that won't produce its own quiet. I didn't plan that echo but I'll take it. Grateful you clocked the restraint rather than wanting the outrage spelled out, Andrew!
The bilingual mirroring is the real achievement, reading the story replicates the very thing "the man alone" is doing, layering a private continuo beneath the public score. Barthes had a term for this, “le bruissement de la langue”, the rustle of language as ambient texture rather than message. The phone violates the “unintentionality” of sound. Birdsong doesn't address you; a speakerphone conversation, however banal, is addressed to the world whether the world consented or not. That's the real trespass. You’re an amazing writer.
Ohhh, Barthes is the right ghost to summon, and the unintentionality point sharpens my story. Address is the trespass. The bird sings to no one, the wind means nothing by it, even the tourists lowering their voices don’t speak at you. The speakerphone conscripts you into an audience you never agreed to join. It presumes your ear. Thank you for this, Clara!
I'm curious to know is Clara's bilingual mirroring is the reason why also chose to provide the original French version? Only if disclosing the reason doesn't have mystery away.
No mystery spoiled, since the English version was the translation, I wanted to give the original text. I have a lot of French readers too. And I do believe it flows nicely between languages. I write in several languages and I don’t think I should limit my publications to only one.
I love your story doesn't explain the anger but stages it, sound by sound, so the reader feels the garden's silence break before understanding why it matters. The real achievement is making "atmosphere" into a plot. Nothing happens except two women sitting down, yet the stakes feel total. That's the trick worth stealing, tension built entirely from texture, not event. Rare, and precise, Tamara, you are a master.
Withholding the “why” can read as coyness if the textures don't carry real weight underneath. What saves it, I hope, is that the man's whole nervous system has been established as tuned to source before the phone lands. So the break isn't arbitrary. The reader has been trained to hear the way he hears.
And "atmosphere as plot" is generous, but I'd say the plot was always there, just demoted. A man protects one hour. Someone takes it. That's older than the novel. Thank you, Alexander, that means a lot coming from you!
I think I want more stories in French. You obviously love writing in French too. And the bonus….. listening to you. A piece of advice: your readers will adore listening to your voice reading your essays and stories.
A whole ecology of sound, a collective composition everyone unconsciously contribute to, then show how one flattened, tinny speakerphone could collapse it instantly. That's the real subject: ambient shared attention is fragile infrastructure, built by many, destroyed by one refusal to whisper. Contrast the phone's sound not just as loud but as “recorded elsewhere”, the only voice in the garden not actually produced by the garden, which is why it reads as invasive rather than just noisy. Wonderful, Tamara, listening to you in French!!!
You’re right that the fragility is the whole point, but infrastructure gets rebuilt. This doesn't. Once the metallic thing tears the quiet, the specific afternoon is gone, you can't reassemble that exact weave of cries and wind. It was never durable. It was a one-off performance nobody rehearsed…
Merci for listening, Céline, I knew you’d love it :)
The man alone once read rapidly attempting to finish the symphony as fast as possible.
A man alone would read once and tick the box and not sit in the moment of communion between author and himself. Unbeknownst to himself the reading was bereft…
And now.
A man alone is so pleased to be in this moment reading these words again—having read them already. Many times. And the world unfurls differently. With greater weight, a world made manifest in my head rather than another item completed.
To read slow, and with the intention—to escape into the world of another… it is an awesome experience. And one I would never have discovered without Tamara’s writing.
An incredible pleasure to read you…
And someone get this girl a microphone and a podcast!! Reading along with French was a singular experience and a reminder that my brain would need some grand restoration to comprehend the language! But, and I am no expert in this language I don’t understand, the cadence and delivery was exceptional. Incredible.
I got very emotional reading your comment…. maybe because I know the many layers of that man alone, maybe because I am connected to that man and only him, maybe because that man alone read me like no other man. I dislike people who read as errand. But your man didn’t go somewhere, got the thing, came back, the box ticked. Your man reads like company. The words don’t change. He does, each time, so the world he builds arrives heavier, meaningful.
Now, between you and me, rhe bereft reading wasn’t wasted, it became the ground the slow reading needed to stand on. Do you really think anyone can arrive at communion without a stretch of just clocking pages? And the communion between the writer and their reader is divine. Your man knows it and felt it even in a language he doesn’t speak. Thank you, Adam, for reading me this intimately! My precious gift.
P.S. my best friend had tempted me about the podcast before you, so….. pleased to let you know the microphone was bought yesterday, the podcast may come. Also, my best friend told me I read as if I had done radio in my life. Quite the compliment!
Seul dans le jardin …
Bientôt il y aura foule … foule du samedi
Le vent qui agite les feuilles autour de moi
Vient à moi comme une chanson
Un enfant pleure … un oiseau piaille
Une jeune femme secrète m’observe du haut de la terrasse
La fontaine coule, comme poussée par l’amour
Les statues se blottissent sous la pénombre
Mon livre m’offre poèmes et fantaisies
Mots d’amour, mots farfelus … mots de liberté … liberté chérie …
Tout est chuchotement … tout est velours … délicatesse et grâce …
Le vent s’agite …
Sur le banc en face, deux femmes se sont installées
Leurs mots ne connaissent pas cette douceur
Refusent toute élégance
Ils grincent, se moquent … ignorent tout
Sons métalliques … agressifs … rugueux
Symbole à déchiffrer …
Le bruit discordant … de notre temps
🦋😎💕
Merci pour ce cadeau inattendu, André! Vous avez fait une chose que le texte ne faisait pas, vous avez mis un “je” à la place de “l’homme seul”. La distance tombe. Le jardin devient le vôtre, la colère aussi. Et cette femme secrète en haut de la terrasse, elle regarde, elle ne fait pas de bruit, elle observe. Vous avez glissé mon rôle de guetteuse dans votre poème sans prévenir. Que c’est beau! Vous refusez la jolie chute. Le bruit de notre temps, posé là, sans ornement.
Oui, bonsoir Tamara … merci pour votre réponse à mon petit poème … j’ai vu aujourd’hui le deuxième film de De Gaulle … je suis complètement “chamboulé” … il ne pouvait pas y avoir une autre chute …
merci, Tamara, pour votre attention, et pour votre présence …
Merci aussi, André, toujours un plaisir!
The pic at the end, my first impression was that your feet were bound!
I used to carry an extra pair of earphones back when I used public transport. And offer them to anyone sharing their calls or videos for the entire bus to hear.
The bound-feet reading made me look again and smile. The most elegant piece of protest is that spare of earphones. No lecture, no confrontation. I love it. I might do it when I take the métro or the bus. Most people fight noise with more noise, complaints, sighs, the pointed stare. You answered it so much elegance!
“People pass slowly, discreetly, perhaps they feel obliged to take on attitudes dictated by the bourgeois civility of the Second Empire, as if the destiny of the lawns and the flowerbeds, decided back in those days, still taught “good manners”.
Oh I love this passage…such a Merchant Ivory visual and gives a real sense of what’s about to be lost. Thank you for sharing
That passage carries the whole loss in advance though I planted it almost as a trap. The reader settles into the period hush, the Merchant Ivory light you name, and gets comfortable there. Then the phone. The comfort is what makes the intrusion bite. If I hadn't lulled you first, the metallic sound would just be noise, not violation. Thank you for reading me, T!
A slice of life, a brief series of moments, a shattered peace. It's a story that requires exactly what you offer - no more, no less. The reader feels the shattering, and not just for him, but also for all of the others whose peace is gone. Like all great stories, it evokes something in the reader that is more than the reader, the story, or the writer when they are separate.
You wrote it in French and in English, you read it in French, and listening, I hear also your voice reading English and Romanian on other days, and all of it is present. The sound, the words, the voice, all of it is a story expressed in the universal language of truth.
The collective loss matters more than I let on. The man protests, so he takes the foreground, but the sentence that counts is the one where the dozing ones startle and the readers lift their heads. A whole small republic of strangers dispossessed at once. He just happens to be the one who speaks. Everyone else absorbs it silently, which is possibly worse. That thing you name, the story exceeding its parts, I distrust my words for it…. but I feel it from the reading side too. Thank you for hearing across all my languages, Doc!
What an absolute delight to hear your voice reading to us in French. I confess, I only understand a bit of this beautiful language, so after reading the English version, I listened to your audio narration and allowed the music of the tale wash over me, like a delicious afternoon Paris rain. Merci!
Listening without full comprehension might be the truest way to catch what this particular story is after. You got the continuo directly, the sound underneath the sense, which is the very layer the man in the chair strains to protect. The meaning came off the English page, then the French gave you the part meaning can't hold. Rain is the right word for it. Thank you for letting it fall that way, unhurried, Meris!
Thank you, Tamara. I had that same impression, that perhaps the truest way to catch the meaning and music of this story, was to listen with "the ears of my heart" (as Bill Plotkin recommends) and let the continuo find its way to my interiority. These wet notes of goodness are still dancing my cells quite happily.
The ears of the heart… spectacular! Most terms for deep listening are noisy about themselves. This one just quiet and lets you do it.
I will keep "dancing my cells". There's a bodily fact underneath it. Sound is pressure on tissue before it's ever meaning, it moves you physically whether you translate the words or not. You felt the piece at that layer. Thank you so much!
It's a pleasure to correspond with you in this place of quiet deep listening. And because I know it is quite late in Paris, I will leave it there for now, and wish you the best as you go into the dreamtime, whenever it calls to you.
Dreamtime is a better word than the ones I usually reach for at that late hour. Sleep is maintenance but the way you describe it sounds like somewhere you go. I'll try to travel rather than just switch off. I love this! Thank you!
Yes, the dreamtime is indeed a place I go. It is simultaneously a portal to the imaginal realms and a place of deep renewal. I recommend!
The suede brogues alone are enough to disrupt whatever reverie this man might have been lost in. I would notice the choice, consider the craftsmanship, the perfect pairing, and lose my place. Attempt to reread, then glance again, and again be lost. All this long before two rudes descend on the space. A great pair of Oxfords make more noise in their pitch-perfect silence than any living phone call does.
I swell with envy. Love the shoes.
There's a difference in the two disruptions, though. The shoes pull you off the page and you go willingly, then wander back. The phone shoves you out and bolts the door behind you. One interruption you forgive. And I should confess, I am an obsessive shoe collector… Delighted my shoes carried across a whole garden to reach you, Andrew!
Ici! Sounds like a pleasant jaunt for the man alone.
A jaunt suggests he went somewhere. But he sat still and let Paris come to him until two phones arrived and it stopped being pleasant. Right up to that point, though, yes!
Then I revise: it sounds like a pleasant jaunt for *a* man alone. Until the phones. ☺️
Ha! Better :)
Is the French audio your voice?
Yes.
I don't know French but it sounded so good :)
Glad you liked it :)