2
" After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. "
― Ali Shaw , The Girl With Glass Feet
9
" Und dann die Negative. Wie er die Negative vermisste. Sie waren die tatsächlichen Lichtstrahlen, die eine Landschaft, einen Gegenstand, eine Person reflektierten und die sich in den Film einbrannten. Fotonegative waren die wahrhaftigsten Zeugnisse, die man von seinen Erinnerungen bekommen konnte. Sie waren die Asche, die das Feuer hinterließ, der Bluterguss, der auf der Haut zurückblieb. Dasselbe Licht, das einem an dem Tag, als das Foto entstand, das Bild der Mutter, des Vaters oder des besten Freundes auf die Netzhaut projezierte, blieb für immer auf dem Film gespeichert.
Und jetzt, als er auf das Foto von Idas durchsichtigen Zehen auf dem Bettlaken starrte, erkannte er, wie sehr ihre Füße Negativen glichen: Beide gehörten jener Halb-Welt zwischen Erinnerung und Gegenwart an. Das waren keine echten, beweglichen Zehen, mit denen man laufen konnte, sondern ein Spiel des Lichts, das andeutete, wo einst Zehen gewesen waren. "
― Ali Shaw , The Girl With Glass Feet
14
" Then there were the negatives. How he missed negatives. They were the actual rays of light, bounced straight off a landscape, an object, a person, and scarred on to the film. Photographic negatives were the hardest evidence you could get of your memories. They were the char left by the fire, the bruise left on your skin. The same light that carried to your eyes, on the day of your photograph, that image of your mother, or your father, or your close friend, had recorded itself on the film. And now, staring at the photo on the wall of Ida's transparent toes against the bed sheets, he thought how similar her feet were to negatives: both subjects of that half-world between memory and the present. These were not real, flexible, treading toes, but a play of light that showed where toes had been. "
― Ali Shaw , The Girl With Glass Feet
