IC Contact Post

[mathemagier]

[Screened calls go straight to voicemail, where an impatient recording answers]

You've reached Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. Leave your name, number, and business if you expect a return call. Thank you.

Comments

June 9, 2018

[justaskalice]

[Newt isn't home when it happens; he hasn't been home most of the day, despite it being his husband's birthday. THEY don't want to be home.

But there's a knock at the door and a delivery person holds out a bright bouquet of flowers and a small box. Both are addressed to Hermann in Newt's hurried, awkward handwriting. It's clear he had to fight for this moment, whenever it was that he put in the order for the flowers. It may have been yesterday, it may have been weeks ago. Either way, he anticipated not being in the right mind to deliver the present himself on the day intended.

The box, whenever he opens it, contains a familiar-looking watch (the same style and make, but newly bought) and a page torn from a book. The page is mostly blocked out by a thick marker pen except for the following passage:

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one's dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one's dreams from one's life which so often produces good results

Here the page ends.

At the bottom of the paper is a page number and what might be the title of the book: À la recherche du temps perdu]