Peter Handke
: ... it was as though a whole nation had set its lips to a giant flute—a long-drawn-out screech so bestial and brutal, but at the same time, what with the billowing clouds of black smoke and the vastness of the Mississippi, so proud, so grandiose, that, embarrassed and yet bodily shaken, I could only look off to one side. So overpowering was that signal that, splintered by fear, I lived a dream of America that up until then I had only heard about. It was a moment of expertly organized resurrection, in which the things around me ceased to be unrelated, and people and landscape, the living and the dead, took their places in a single painful and theatrical revelation of history. Theatrically flowed the Mississippi, theatrically the tourists moved from deck to deck, while an old man’s deep, far-carrying voice told the story of the great riverboats over the loudspeaker: the new era of travel and commerce they had initiated, steamboat races, black slaves loading firewood by the light of the...