The Pencil World

He had set out to transfer everything from the perceived world into the pencil world, and with the help of millions of tiny slips of paper, to document quite literally everything—no exceptions. A monumental project, of course, but earnestly undertaken. The moment a memory surfaced, it would be put to paper and then placed in the correct pocket of the archive hutch, a procedure that naturally was documented as well, and stored in a separate hutch, which he jokingly called the meta-hutch, reserved for all thoughts about the project and its origins.

He devoted every day to his papers and observations, old or new—it made no difference. It could just as well be the feeling of getting to buy the most expensive ice cream on Karlavägen (1988, the weather dreary, porn magazines prominently displayed) as playing the second level of Super Mario Land (music like drifting around Jupiter), or the taste of coffee that time he had quit drinking it (the caffeine rising to the brain like a fresh palette of color to the retina).

It became vast, then, and everything—truly everything—had to be documented. Without totality, the project would be stillborn. How could one depict everything without having actually depicted everything? Almost everything wasn’t good enough. So he had to milk his memory for more and more detail, and alongside this he wrote about the process itself, in a method that grew increasingly refined over the years—a true stream of consciousness in the literal sense of the term. Day and night, like a beleaguered office clerk lashed to his chair, he carried out the work of his life.

When at last he felt he was finished, after four decades of relentless labor, the archive filled a warehouse outside Strängnäs, naturally fireproofed and monitored around the clock. This will do, he decided, setting down his pencil without giving the act more weight than that, and drove the ten kilometers to the archive, where he pulled out slips of paper at random. He had to squint to make sense of what he could still decipher—for all of it had been written in the most illegible hand, now nearly obliterated by dull pencil and time—but it didn’t matter, he thought. That had never been the point.