6
Take the person out of the picture and you get a landscape. Take the landscape away, and you are left with bare canvas, and then you can draw whatever you like with the bushy brushes of your imagination.
That evening N. opened his notebook. It was yellowing reproachfully. He began to fill its pages, thirsting for ink, with a tractate on the idler’s role in history. The idler is a joker, he wrote, a joker who can take the place of any card. At first glance, the joker seems a good guy, neat, with a cheery grin. But he is not a card, he is an empty space, and cannot do a damn thing. When you need to go somewhere, or do a card trick, or gather the harvest, the joker lies down like a stone which doesn’t roll, and that stone presses everything to the ground with its weight – the sprouting gr
