Without Lifting A Finger

“What will happen now?” Barlach whispered. “Nothing will happen,” replied the Jew, grabbing the old man by the shoulders and pulling him up so that their faces were close together, eye to eye. “Nothing, nothing at all,” the giant whispered again. “No one knows, except for you and Hungertobel, that I was here; inaudibly, I glided, a shadow, through the corridors, to Emmenberger, to you, no one knows that I exist, only the poor devils I have saved, a handful of Jews, a handful of Christians. Let the world bury Emmenberger and let the newspapers publish their eulogies and memorials for this dead man. The Nazis wanted Stutthof; the millionaires, this hospital; others will want other things. We can’t save the world as individuals, that would be a task as hopeless as that of poor Sysyphus; it is not up to us, nor is it up to any man of power, or any nation, or the devil himself, who is surely more powerful than anyone; it is in the hand of God, who makes his decisions alone. We can only help...

“I think you’re used to that,” the old man retorted. Emmenberger was taken aback for a moment. “I’m pleased,” he finally said, shaking his head, “that you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Let’s start with Fortschig. He was sentenced to death and executed. My dwarf did a good job. Climbing down the light shaft of the house in the Kesslergasse, after a strenuous promenade across wet roof tiles, cats purring all around him, then squeezing through that little window and landing a truly powerful and deadly blow with my car key against the skull of our poetaster on his throne—this was not easy for my little Tom Thumb.

Thus I, Edith Marlok, a thirty-four-year-old woman, commit the crimes that are demanded of me in exchange for a colorless liquid which, injected beneath my skin, gives me the courage of contempt during the day and the beauty of dreams at night, a fleeting illusion of being in possession of what no longer exists: this world as God created it. C’est ça.

“All it takes to hear this story is a little nerve; less nerve than it did to live through it,” continued the Jew in his old musty caftan in a singing tone. “It’s time to forget all these things, they say, and not just in Germany; there’s cruelty in Russia too, and there are sadists everywhere; but I don’t want to forget anything, and not just because I am a Jew—six million of my people the Germans killed, six million!—; no, it’s because I am still a human being, even though I live in basements and cellars with the rats! I refuse to make a distinction between peoples, I refuse to speak of good and bad nations; but I do have to make one distinction between human beings, this was beaten into me, and from the first blow that cut into my flesh I distinguished between the torturers and the tortured.

The city lay there, a white shell, sucking up the light, swallowing it into her narrow streets in order to spew it out after nightfall as thousands of lights, a monster perpetually busy with spawning and poisoning and burying an ever-growing quantity of new human beings.

D. had listened to F.’s report and absently ordered a glass of wine, even though it was just eleven o’clock, gulped it down with an equally absent air, ordered a second glass, and remarked that he was still pondering the useless problem of whether the law of identity A = A was correct, since it posited two identical A’s, while actually there could only be one A identical with itself, and anyway, applied to reality it was quite meaningless, since there was no self-identical person anywhere, because everyone was subject to time and was therefore, strictly speaking, a different person at every moment, which was why he, D., sometimes had the impression that he was a different person each morning, as if a different self had replaced his previous self and were using his brain and consequently his memory, making him all the more glad that he was a logician, for logic was beyond all reality and removed from every sort of existential mishap, and so he would like to respond to the story she had ...

“​‘You rightly wondered,’ he finally continued, ‘that I’m still living in a hotel. I didn’t want to confront the world. I wanted to deal with it skillfully, I’d almost say mechanically, but I didn’t want to suffer with it. I wanted to be superior to it, not lose my head, control it all like a technician. I looked at the murdered girl, and that was bearable; but when I stood in front of her parents, I suddenly couldn’t bear it any longer, I had to get away from that godforsaken house, and so I promised by my eternal soul that I would find the murderer—just to turn my back on those suffering people, and I never gave a moment’s thought to the fact that I couldn’t keep this promise because I was going to Jordan. And then I allowed the old indifference to rise up in me, Locher. That was so horrible. I didn’t fight for the peddler. I allowed everything to happen. I became my old impersonal self, “Nobody Home,” as some people call me. I slipped back into the calm, the superiority, the formali...

This case gave me a bad feeling; everything had somehow gone wrong; I didn’t know exactly how, but I felt it. I withdrew to my ‘boutique,’ as I called it, a smoke-filled little room next to my office. I ordered a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape from a restaurant near the Sihl bridge, drank a few glasses. There was always an awful mess in that room, I won’t deny it, a jumble of books and files. I did that on principle, because in my opinion it’s everyone’s duty in this well-ordered land to maintain little islands of chaos, even if only in secret.

“To be honest,” Dr. H. began later, as we were approaching the Kerenz Pass—the road was icy again, and beneath us lay Lake Walen, glittering, cold, forbidding; also, the leaden weariness from the Medomin had come back, the memory of the smoky taste of the whiskey, the feeling of gliding along in an endless, meaningless dream—“to be honest, I have never thought highly of crime novels, and I rather regret that you, too, write them. It’s a waste of time. Though what you said in your lecture yesterday was worth hearing; since the politicians have shown themselves to be so criminally inept—and it takes one to know one, I’m a member of Parliament, as I’m sure you’re aware . . .” (I had no idea, I was listening to his voice as if from a great distance, barricaded behind my tiredness, but attentive, like an animal in its lair) “. . . People hope the police at least will know how to put the world in order, which strikes me as the most miserable thing you could possibly hope for. But unfortunate...

Tried to get my mate to rewatch the movie with me last night, but she wasn't in the mood for sad she said. The book is largely bloodless, if the subject is a bit dark and sad. We watched Anthony's last Hurrah instead (a very fragmented side of NYC I was not that interested in). Anyway ... * It was in the Kronenhalle, on a Saturday evening, I remember it exactly. The place was full—everyone who was anybody in Zürich and up for a meal was there. Waitresses scurrying around, the food on the trolley steaming, and the rumble of traffic sounding in from the street. I was sitting under the Miró, all unsuspecting, eating my liver dumpling soup, when the sales representative of one of the big fuel companies came up to me, said hello, and sat down at my table, just like that. He was slightly drunk and in high spirits, ordered a marc and told me, laughing, that my former first lieutenant had changed his profession; that he had taken over a gas station in Graubünden, near Chur—a bu...

I ordered a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape from a restaurant near the Sihl bridge, drank a few glasses. There was always an awful mess in that room, I won’t deny it, a jumble of books and files. I did that on principle, because in my opinion it’s everyone’s duty in this well-ordered land to maintain little islands of chaos, even if only in secret.

Knight, Death and the Devil, Albrecht Durer, 1513 , a photo by New Visions2010 on Flickr. From Durrenmatt's Suspicion :    "Knight's a goner," said the man in the blue work clothes, pressing the words out of his obliquely twisted mouth: "Knight's a goner, knight's a goner!"    Not until the worker had left the room and clumsily slammed the door behind him did the old man realize that he had been talking to a deaf mute. *** Also by Durer: "Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat":  [From WikiPaintings: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/albrecht-durer/witch-riding-backwards-on-a-goat-1500 ] 

My sunrise service: a cold walk to Peets and Durrenmatt's Barlach Mysteries (I finished The Pledge in Montreux). Lots of "fodder" for the weeks to come (I didn't lose my camera this time, so I've got lots of pictures), but I'll start with two works from the great Albrecht Durer, which I came across on my trip: Knight, Death, and Devil (from Durrenmatt's Suspicion ) and Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (one of many artworks alluded to in a special exhibit on Sorcery and Witches I saw at the Chateau de Chillon near Montreux).