“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. IV” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This fourth volume by Balle continues with Tara Selter being stuck in the eighteenth of November. But now she is very much not alone. At their villa in Bremen, those who met there eventually settled into a routine of formal meetings where various topics would be submitted and then debated, “This morning there were twenty-nine of us around the table. We had got hold of more chairs, and the rest of us perched on the sills of the bay windows overlooking the garden, in the gray light from the sky. There was no end to the possible topics of discussion, no end to the suggestions for our decision-making procedures and agendas, no end to the digressions and additions and ideas that branched out in all directions…. It turned into a meeting about the names of things, about the words for the peculiarities of the eighteenth of November, about the chances of ever finding terms that truly fit, about precision and the spaciousness of language.”

Tara continued with her explanation,“Someone proposed we name the world we came from—the life we had lived before the eighteenth, TOL, for example, The Other Life. Gita suggested DAL, Das andere Leben, but Henry didn't like that…. One of the Val Benoît residents suggested that we call time before the eighteenth La Vie Avant and the time after La Vie Maintenant; that way we could talk about LaViA and LaViM. This led us back to the difference between acronyms and syllabic abbreviations, until Gita's group pointed out that we also needed to address time after the eighteenth, La Vie Après, but that too would be LaViA, introducing unnecessary confusion—unless, of course, we could expect these two to be the same: that the world we return to after our life in the eighteenth would be exactly as before. Then they could share a name…. There are those who refer to us as loopers and the others as noopers, and some speak of repeaters or returners, but that raises the question: Who are the repeaters really? Isn't the difference simply that we know we are repeating the eighteenth while the others believe everything is normal? But we see them going about their business, again and again. So who is the repetition?"

Finally, the group decided it would put on a special conference with the aim of making a more systematic exploration of their situation, “Many pointed out that our explorations lacked a theoretical foundation, that attempting to build hypotheses or explanations would be futile without a thorough understanding of past theories of time—from the pre-Socratic period to the twenty-first century. Should our foundation not be in place before we start indulging in fantasies? Others, however, believed it was precisely the temporal theories of the past that had fallen short, that the prevailing conception of time itself was fundamentally flawed.”