— Information? My dear good girl unless perhaps du ernst German Mädel or my sweet more likely how naïve can you get? After what three, four years on congresses and commissions you should know better than that.
— Yes, well they might at least make a show of listening. Each speaker waits impatiently for his turn to read an interminable paper that has nothing to do with anything said before, you know, each one more concerned with output than intake.
— Ah, output, intake, god, verr god mademoiselle. May I use that in article? My card. Buan Ching cultural correspondent please.
— So you call this culture?
Of course of course natürlich selbstverständlich und so weiter weiter gehen through the freedom of the air and the imprecision of the mouthpiece at thirty-five and plus madame not mademoiselle despite the fact that on a day he leans against a column in a Renaissance palazzo, his grey hair surmounted by a cherub talking to the dark lady of not a single sonnet but smooth words allusive with his eyes on her low décolletage or maybe on the smoke blown down over it from her delicate olive nostrils. Have you anything to declare such as love desire ambition or a glimpse that in this air-conditioning and other circumstantial emptiness freedom has its sudden attractions as the body floats in willing suspension of responsibility to anyone, stretching interminably between the enormous wings towards the distant brain beyond the orange curtain and behind, no doubt, the little door.
The concrete corridor encased in cedar-wood slopes up from the tarmac where the blue bus has stopped and up into the lounge where yellow messages wait on a turntable of boards covered with criss-cross lattice-work in alphabetical order. No one calls out no name unanswered at one level, no one comes in offering anything. The airport hall makes up an abstract study of glass galleries hot air continuous murmuring and teakwood stairways with space between the steps to fall into down by the gleaming weight-machines in rows like robots for the queueing plastic luggage of those about to leave, to vanish past the booths containing the half-hidden men who consult secret lists with a quick shift of the eye. One day even airports will have no frontiers and no passports per assistere anche una persona priva de conoscenza. Aber natürlich. He stands by his pigskin hold-all his thick black briefcase in his left hand, shaking the right with the president of the congress the secretary the most important delegates male elderly female and doesn’t introduce his team of three interpreters English-German French-German English-French besides himself French into English and they simultaneously stand about and smile in English German French.
They praise, yes mademoiselle, also.
Soon some dark waiter will enter with a breakfast-tray and the rest of the story will have to come out. What story? Oh you know as the Holy Ghost said that scandal spread by St. Peter about me and the Virgin Mary. He likes ready-made stories the schmutziger the witziger with a burst of crude laughter tout de suite and the tooter the sweeter. Was suchen Sie, die Toilette, nein den Aufzug, so, immer geradeaus dann links Ascenseur Lift or else a change in the expected person 
for sous-sol and the one about the Auvergnat who pronounces S as sh and when asked the whereabouts of l’évéché says au shou-shol. Oh, you ernst German Mädel don’t you see, les W.C., l’évéché do you have to have everything explained?
The light pours through the slatted shutters making a slatted pattern on the left pale green wall. San Pellegrino, Acqua litinica alcalina antiurica anticatarrale. Battericamente pura. Trams clang through the asthmatic gasps of an engine that won’t fire in Italian not very far down among the poop-pip-hoot of cars below the several floors of waking dreams. The face reflected in the bathroom mirror neon-lit looks what thirty-four, forty-three below the greying strand broader sandier than the rest that tumbles on the shoulders needing nevertheless that Glint with a Hint of a Tint above the small medallion of St. Christopher almost in the cleft between the breasts and the neon light floods OMO on the glass shelf. Da oggi con PERBORAL. Lava ancora più bianco. Or else che cerca, signora, ah, l’ascensore. In fondo a sinistra. And the divine principle descending into matter through the earphones and out into the mouthpiece at the Congress of Gnostics in Brussels, Bonn, Beirut, wherever angels and ministers of grace and meaning come down to land upon a pinpoint unless at the Conference on Teilhard de Chardin where the flaxen-haired young lady in the audience holds a flaxen spool like a second oblong head and spins, manually spins as she listens without earphones to ideas all having equality before God no rising en masse of noussphere to point omega comme nous répète ce grand génie as she spins, spins a circle round him thrice so that he falters in the booth, loses the thread in the spun rhetoric and old Bertrand takes over on his microphone in his accented English.
Manhattan’s lit-up post-war fairyland recedes below into the night. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard this minister of grace floating upon a pinpoint rising to a height of fifteen thousand feet speed two hundred and fifty miles an hour. You may smoke now and give me a drink before announcing things like that. Like what? Like that you love me. Oh, did I say that?
I should like to remind the delegates that the Economic and Social Council has not asked the Committee to discuss the report of the Commission on Human Rights in detail but merely to formulate the principles which should guide the Commission’s work in the future. May I suggest therefore that the Commission reexamine the question at some later stage. Or else in the Dakota on the long metal bench fixed to the curved metallic wall inside the fuselage, the round ribs all exposed as if inside the skeleton of a giant centipede. No. He says marry me my sweet and take me as you find me we’ll have fun.
— Not that you followed him in all things mein Lieb.
— Well, the descent into matter.
Helsinki, London, Lisbon, Milan, Warsaw.
And language. Allo? — er, dígame? Muchas gracias.
— Wejście. Wyjście. Just one letter’s difference. Which do you suppose means exit?
— Or gentlemen.
— Pas ici my sweet. Immer geradeaus up the corridor turn left and take me as you find me. Or irgendsowas Witziges unless perhaps gents have their exits and their entrances and please adjust your dress before leaving. Or even have you the time please yes but not the inclination.
Wherever particular people congregate Siegfried reads from the packet of cigarettes brought by the air-hostess in a wine coloured skirt and white blouse you smoke too much.
— La lune vous rend particulièrement sensible. Vous vous sentirez obstinés, prêts à mal interpreter les intentions des autres.
— Why do you read that stuff?
— Nothing else. Oh yes, the pamphlet,
— Well, we could talk.
— The Museum also contains statues, fragments of sculptures and other interesting works of art from the temples and constitutes an interesting collection. Why, we missed that.
What else? London and sometimes Wiltshire where stones talk and walk and make semblance of love have fun until they come to a standstill. All ideas have equality before God remember where you stumbled so why can’t you commit yourself wholly to one of them?
— Ideas? Great Scott, nothing deserves a flow of rash enthusiasm my sweet. For fifteen years or more I have conducted my higher education by transmitting other people’s ideas, not to say platitudes, from one microphone into another. No one expects me to produce my own as well.
Et comme l’a si bien dit Saussure, la langue peut se contenter de l’opposition de quelque chose avec rien. The marked term on the one hand, say, the feminine, grande, the unmarked on the other, say, the masculine, grand. Mais notez bien que le non-marqué peut dériver du marqué par retranchement, by subtraction, par une absence qui signifie. Je répète, une absence qui signifie eine Abwesenheit die simultaneously etwas bedeutet.