The Approach of the Barbarians

Alternating with the idea of having smoked too much yesterday and soon to get lung cancer, I busied myself with the idea for a sinister story, in which the hero during an early afternoon like this one, in a mirror house similar to this, appeared to himself so often between two mirrored walls that him being real started to appear doubtful to him and blurred out, eventually getting lost and disappearing forever in them.
No one would have seen him leave the building, least of all the porter battling with sleep and gravity at the reception desk made from polished granite. 
Only sometimes, on specific autumn days, both sunny and windy, seen from a certain angle from a certain point of the building, would his reflection appear  a to a visitor for a moment, sitting on the top step of the interior thoughtfully, to dissolve into infinity after this appearance.

In this state of Daydreaming and distraction reached me, as if from outside, a feeling of the nearness of the barbarians. It was comparable to a faint smell, which, with very fine claws, was reaching into an inner area of the body (as if the perfume of a woman, who moves one, has been buried on the hand under much stronger other odors and unexpectedly emerges when one takes a glass to ones mouth or absent-mindedly strokes ones face). Many, I thought, would die.
The airport interiors would contract into subterranean bunkers in which the corporate world would be condensed to naked terror. 
But then would, beyond the borders of normality, fortified more than ever before, an outside world extend itself. Many would die. Before the reflecting glass walls lay a windy day.

*

Since that experience, I like to sit, during my lunch break, for the duration of a cup of coffee in a small restaurant in that part of the "Sogetsu Kaikan" between the Park, standing upside down on the ceiling and the rocky interior within. 
The whole world lies beyond glass. Perhaps the disaster fears of the West are a yearning for reality. Perhaps the Downfall is the only God that is left; because only with the barbarians we will not do business, we will not be able to sell them anything, we will not even be able to talk with them. No trick will work. The barbarians are not afraid of us because they do not understand us. They will hold no distance from us because they do not admire us. There will be a border we can not go beyond and behind which at least there is not us.

When the barbarians have been long and eagerly awaited enough, I think during the lunch break, everything turned into a sign of their arrival. The historian Prophet then believes only having to write down what he sees:
"One saw a young heifer lying lifeless with intersected windpipe, whose death proclaimed public funerals that lay ahead, which would be the norm across the nation soon" (back on the bus, Book XXXI "Über die Omina des Todes von Valens Augustus und der bevorstehenden Eroberung durch die Goten").  
Nothing recommends the contents of those sentences, with which the historical work of Ammianus is littered, to reason; but the poetic sense can not forget them and in my mind they shine on when the book is folded in my leather bag, next to the stainless steel box for sandwiches (Valens Augustus is then already dead, and the Goths flock endless, unstoppable, over the Border). Even if the stories of the barbarians are not true, they could help to find a truth. 

- From Stephan Wackwitz, Tokyo