# Prologue — The Night Before *Draft 1 · 1,630 words · target 2,000–3,000, so it runs short — see note at the end* --- The video was eleven seconds long and I watched it four times. I want to be accurate about this, because the accuracy is the point. It was not that I could not look away. I looked away easily. I put the phone face down on the desk and some interval passed, a minute, probably less, and then I turned it over and watched it again, and each time I did it my body did the same thing it had done the first time, which was to go cold across the chest and tighten somewhere under the jaw, as though something were about to be required of me. Nothing was about to be required of me. I would like to get that down clearly before anything else in this book happens. It was half past eleven on a Tuesday in June. The rain had come on around nine and was still going, loud on the flat roof of the extension, and there was a cup of tea by my left hand that had been hot when I made it and was now the temperature of the room. On the screen behind the video my work was still open — a document I had been meant to finish, with the cursor blinking somewhere in the middle of a sentence I no longer remembered the end of. The window was black. In it I could see the room reflected, and myself in the room, lit blue. The video was from a city I have never been to, in a country I have never been to, eleven hundred kilometres away. A street after something had happened in it. Dust still in the air, which is how you know it was recent, because dust settles. A man carrying a child who was too big to be carried, and doing it anyway, running badly. Somebody filming instead of helping, which is a thing I thought about for a while afterwards and about which I have decided nothing. I do not know what happened to the child. Here is what I did about it, which was: nothing. There was nothing to do. Two years earlier, in response to something similar, I had sent money to an organisation with a good reputation, and I do not doubt the money did some good somewhere, and I could not point to any part of the world that was different because of it. That is not cynicism. It is just the shape of the thing. A hundred euros and eleven hundred kilometres do not add up to an action in any sense my body recognises. My body wanted to go to the street. My body was extremely clear about this. It had gone cold and tight and ready in the way it would have gone cold and tight and ready if the noise had come from the end of my own road, and it was not going to the street, and it did not know what else to do with the readiness, and so it kept it. I scrolled up. Above the video, in the same column, in the same typeface, at the same size, arriving through the same rectangle with the same small sound: a former colleague announcing she had resigned, with a photograph of a cake. An advertisement for walking boots, which was well targeted, because I had been looking at walking boots. A man I have never met being wrong about tax policy, at length, to eleven thousand people. Below the video: a friend's daughter, three days old, red-faced and furious, in a hospital blanket. Below that, an automated message telling me that a payment had gone out. Below that, someone I was at school with had died, and there were forty comments, and I read some of them. All of it at the same weight. All of it with the same small sound. I do not think I noticed this at the time, or rather I noticed it the way you notice the hum of a fridge, which is to say I had been noticing it for years without once turning to look at it. What I noticed at the time was only that I felt terrible, and that I had felt terrible on a lot of Tuesdays, and that I had begun to think of this as a fact about the world rather than a fact about anything I was doing. There is a standard explanation available for the way I felt, and I knew it well. I had read the books. Attention is being harvested; the machines are engineered to take it; the scroll is bottomless by design and the reward is variable by design and we are all, in the useful and slightly self-flattering phrase, addicted. I believed most of this then and I believe a good deal of it now. It is not wrong. But it did not fit, and it had not fitted for some time, and the place where it stopped fitting was this. Three weeks before that Tuesday I had read a long, difficult, badly translated book about the Thirty Years' War, six hundred pages of it, over four or five evenings, and I had enjoyed it, and I had not once reached for my phone. My attention was fine. My attention was, if anything, in better condition than it had been at twenty-five. Whatever was wrong with me on that Tuesday night, it was not that I had lost the ability to concentrate. I had concentrated on the video four times. And the standard explanation had nothing at all to say about the thing that was actually bothering me, which was not the scrolling and not the hours and not the fragmented feeling, but something I could not name and which sat underneath all of those, and which I am going to try to put into a single sentence now and then leave alone for a long time. **Why do I feel implicated in everything and capable of nothing?** I went to bed at one and did not sleep well, which is not interesting, and in the morning I did what I had been doing for about a year, which was to look at a map that has been on the wall of that room since we moved in. I should say plainly that I did not decide to go for a walk in order to think about any of this. I want to be honest about the ordinariness of it. It was June, I had a week owed to me and a second week I could take if I was quiet about it, my wife was going to her mother's, and the map had been on the wall for two years being a decoration. Some part of it was that I was tired. Most of it was that I wanted to be somewhere else and I could not afford to fly and I have always liked walking. If you had asked me at the time why I was going I would have said, in the tone of a man being asked an obvious question, that I was going because I had the time. The route I settled on took eight days, if the weather held and I did not get lost. It began in the Beskydy, in the last village the bus goes to, and it went east and then south along the ridges into Slovakia, and it ended somewhere I could get a train from. I planned it badly, in two evenings, with the map on the kitchen table and a beer and a pencil, drawing a line and then rubbing it out and drawing it again slightly differently, in the way that is most of the pleasure of any journey and which nobody has ever improved upon. I packed on the Thursday. A tent I had not used in three years and which smelled of the last time I had used it. Too much food, which everybody does. Boots that were properly broken in, and I remember being pleased about the boots. The paper map, folded to the first day, and a second map for the Slovak section that I had to order and which came late. A phone, off, at the bottom of the pack, for emergencies, and a battery pack I never used. I like walking on my own. I have done most of my walking on my own, and I talk to myself when I do it — out loud, at ordinary volume, to nobody, sometimes for hours — and I mention this here only because it will matter later. I left at four in the morning on the Saturday to catch the first bus, and by then the rain had stopped, and the street was that colour streets go before dawn when the tarmac is still wet and there is light in the sky but none of it has reached the ground yet. The door made the noise it makes. I stood on the step for a moment adjusting a strap. I would like to be able to tell you that I set off with the question in my head, that I went up into the mountains to think about why the world had begun to feel like a weight I was carrying without ever being able to set it down. But I did not, and it would be a lie, and this book has enough uncertainty in it already without me inventing a shapeliness that was not there. What I set off with was a pack that was four kilos too heavy and an argument with a colleague that I had not finished having. The bus came at twenty past. --- ## Note on this draft **Running short** at 1,630 against 2,000–3,000. Two things are missing and both are yours: a paragraph of ordinary domestic life to establish what is being left (the house, whoever is in it, what Monday would have held), and more texture on the packing. The prologue currently moves from the desk to the door slightly too fast, which makes the walk feel like an escape. It shouldn't. The whole book depends on the walk having been unremarkable in intent. **What is invented and must be replaced.** The video and everything in it. The Tuesday, the rain, the tea. The former colleague, the friend's daughter, the schoolmate who died. The Thirty Years' War book. The map on the wall, the two years, the wife going to her mother's. The four a.m. bus. Every one of these is a placeholder for something real, and the chapter is only worth anything if they are real — the reader can tell, and this is the page where they decide whether to trust you. **The one structural thing to preserve.** The pile — colleague, advertisement, stranger, video, newborn, payment, death — must stay in one unbroken paragraph, in one typeface, with no commentary. It is the same image as the notification column in chapter 6, seen before the reader knows it is an image. If you break it up or explain it here, chapter 6 loses most of its force. **Beats check.** All seven present: the physical response rendered before it is explained (1), nothing required of you, stated flatly (2), the undifferentiated pile (3), the wrong question and why it doesn't fit (4), the real question, once, then abandoned (5), the walk decided without significance (6), talking aloud planted in one unremarked sentence (7). No apparatus, no second person, no thesis promised. **The last line** is doing deliberate work. The book's real subject has just been raised and then dropped for two hundred pages, and the reader should be slightly annoyed by the bus.