Isolated from the world in his Canton of Ticino home, at the mercy of the weather and in the shelter of his diminishing physical strenth, already in decline and heading toward the abyss, Mr. Geiser confronts his loneliness and boredom with meditations on the most minute daily occurences in his life: the regularity of the mail bus, the minestrone soup that needs to be heated, the blonde butcher, and his elderly cat that no longer hunts mice. To hold on to the memory of those fragments that make up an entire life and that constitute his footprints in history, he covers the walls with pages from old dictionaries and encyclopedias, which remind him what the first settlers in the Alps were like or how to draw the golden section--things that should not be forgotten. Mr. Geiser faces the cycle of life and his own mortality, noting the insignificance of man as his memory slowly begins to fade.