O’Legg:
Is it true that when you’re not pursuing excellence in philosophy, you produce sentimental verses?

Jasen:
Those verses are pure philosophy, my learned friend. My philosophic texts are mere commentaries to them.

O’Legg (continuing):
Because I’ve just stumbled upon something reminiscent of that your melancholic sub-personality. And guess where? In that quiet Freiwald
newspaper a filing of which I dug out in your archives.

(Reading)

Once
the boundless sea was here.
The white dove
was circling over the raging waves
on the wings of desire
healing the hunger of waves
laying the foundations of the land
that will not shimmer
till the Last Day.

Now
tiled roofs shine red
washed by the morning rain
horses graze the valley
before the long road
blossoming cherries
whisper about nothing
shimmering in the small pond
of my passing life
till the Last Day.

Jasen (thoughtfully):
It reminds me of something—perhaps from the time when I was still an Ash tree…

(Listening)

Nope. Nothing there — except cherries rustling and wind moving through grass. So why this sense of déjà vu? Don’t tell me these are memories from my human past!

(Listens again. Suddenly:)

Unbelievable! That was me. I wrote these lines—half a millennium ago—here, in what was Freiwald back then and what is known as the Purple forest now.

I clearly remember how I’ve been looking out of a train window, free-writing what passed before my eyes.

O’Legg:
Keep the nostalgic memories at bay for a while — there’s also a weird story to which the poem is merely the epigraph…

(Forwards the text that follows)

“The manuscript arrived at the Linz Bruckner Conservatory in 1923, discovered during the demolition of a church destroyed beyond repair in the Great War. Inside a black glass bottle lay a score in faded ink, titled in German Freie Kirsche Violinen and signed Adele von Gratzen, 1913.

No composer by that name was ever known, and at any rate Freiwald dwellers were notorious for avoiding records.

Only the music remained: twenty-two pages of medieval square notation describing restless, circling figures, obsessively repeating a melodic fragment that perhaps gave the piece its chant-like title. The cover was written by an archaic hand, as if its author had learned penmanship in another epoch altogether.

In the spring of 1976, an aspiring composer, Gerhard Schwendener, discovered the manuscript while researching his dissertation. Inspired by the mystery, he spent that summer feverishly reconstructing the hitherto unknown music from square notation (as approximate and allowing multiple interpretations as it is).

The premiere at the Brucknerhaus in Linz in 1977 lasted eleven minutes and ended in an eruption no one could restrain. A standing ovation, tears openly shed. No rational explanation followed.

The piece sounded like hundreds of birds trapped in a cathedral, begging for release—finally granted. Had the audience been peasants or forest dwellers rather than concertgoers, they would have sworn it was a spell.

Schwendener never learned who Adele was. And in 1989, amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, both the manuscript and the reconstructed score disappeared during an exhibition in Dresden.

What remains is an amateur AI reconstruction from fading memories a melody as simple and persistent as a child’s song, or perhaps a plea: “free cherry violins.”

Jasen:
I know who Adele is. It’s a long story, but now l start getting the main story better. But who—if not she, and not me—copied a poem I wrote in 2014 onto a manuscript sealed in a bottle in 1913?

O’Legg:
The journalist who wrote the Freiwald article in 2026?

Jasen: Perhaps. That is, if we exclude the only other explanation possible, however insane it may seem at first sight…

O’Legg: which one?

Jasen: That, in addition to being actors in our own lives, we are also characters playing in a someone else’s theatre.

(They keep silent for a while, entertaincing the idea, then burst out laughing.)

Curtain.