{"id":20696,"date":"2026-07-08T10:21:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T17:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/?p=20696"},"modified":"2026-07-08T10:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T17:21:12","slug":"a-story-about-looking-for-depth-in-a-container","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/a-story-about-looking-for-depth-in-a-container\/","title":{"rendered":"A story about looking for depth in a container"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume.<\/a><\/em> Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of November, charting the narrator’s exploration of her world. It sits very comfortably beside Samantha Harvey’s Orbital;<\/em> a short novella that is saturated with gorgeous passages of writing, a novel way of seeing time and space, and an almost imperceptible pace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the title suggests, this is a book that investigates depth. Towards the end of the second volume comes the clue that unlocks the plot device: “Time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a container.” Volume 2 ends with a beautiful three page meditation on the world as containers, which I can only invite you read for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Locked in this container of time, the narrator Tara Selter has to discover depth in order to give her life some meaning. The story meanders between longer explorations, that include trying to solve her problem, seeking an experience of seasons, exploring the history of the land in which she finds herself. As she goes she records notes about what is important to her. It’s not clear that there is any reason for that other than that she is consigned to this single container of time as a human, she seeks deeper and deeper meaning in it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One passage that stood with me is a conversation she has with a meteorologist she meets, who explains to her what season are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“…the meteorologist then began to reflect on our strange relationship with the seasons. She talked about astronomical seasons, and meteorological seasons. About the calendar years division into spring and summer months, about people’s surprise when meteorological phenomenon did not occur with the calendar, even though everyone knew that any attempt to synchronize the weather with the predictability of planets and calendars was pointless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She did not believe, however, that seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomenon. Temperature and precipitation are meteorological phenomenon, she said. Cold and heat, cloud burst and drought, but seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomenon. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps. People ask if it won\u2019t soon be summer, even though we are well into July, simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn\u2019t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather. We going to have a winter this year? As if the seasons were a concept of sorts that we dragged around with us. From childhood perhaps, she said, with winter snow and summer sun. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps the human seasons really only existed in films or in our photo albums. Especially if you have children. She did it herself: took pictures of typical seasons. She had noticed that she took more pictures from the seasons that lived up to our expectations of them: pictures of snow in winter and bright sunshine in summer, a hot day on the beach, red and yellow leaves and a child in rain boots in autumn \u2013 and always snaps with sandals in the summer, even in summers when most days were rain boot days. As if we had templates for the seasons, and when everything fits, we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has gotten right. If it is winter in a film, there is always a little snow, she said. Or frost. Even if the film is set in southern Europe, there will always be a sprinkling of white, to let us know that it is winter.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Containers and constraints generate the spaces inside which we make meaning. What we choose to see, what we fit with our predetermined ideas, or what emerges as we explore things that aren’t implied by the constraints themselves. Containers are emergent. Meaning arises within them and about them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Balle’s work is a gorgeous meditation on this, with a gently travelling plot line that takes sudden turns into new landscapes contained ointment the experience of a single day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Volume 3 sits beside me. Volume 4 has just been released in English. There are seven volumes in total. All calculated. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume. Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland. Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of November, charting the narrator’s exploration of her world. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,101,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2","category-containers","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/IMG_1071-scaled.jpeg?fit=2560%2C1920&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-5nO","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20698,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20696\/revisions\/20698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}