:::: Méret Oppenheim: thank you.
:::: The aim of literature, wrote Donald Barthelme, is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
:::: I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden, scribbled Wittgenstein on one of the collage of notes that became On Certainty after his death. The philosopher says again and again I know that that’s a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
:::: One day Joyce Garvin asked us to open Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and read out loud. All the atoms in the room reorganized.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, goes that insanely good first line, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Or in German:
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
It wasn’t until decades later the reason for that atomic commotion hit me: in addition to the obvious, that perfect novella is an allegory about continuous change, which is to say an allegory about travel.
:::: When Andi and I arrive, Berlin’s light is cousin to that in Turku, Finland, where I taught on a Fulbright for six months in 2000.
We arrived in Helsinki on 21 December 1999. When the alarm went off the next morning at 8:30, it was still pitch black. The blurry pale yellow sunball didn’t come into being until past 10:00. It rubbed low across the horizon and exhausted itself by 2:00.
By 3:00 it felt like it was time to eat and crawl into bed for the night.
:::: Once upon a time, travel and travail were the same words.
The O.E.D.’s first definition of the former: to torment, distress; to suffer affliction; to labor, toil; to suffer the pains of childbirth.
:::: Ungeziefer is a word the Nazis employed when referring to the Jews.
:::: One of Wittgenstein’s schoolmates for a time in the Realschule he attended between 1903 and 1906 was a little Jewish-looking boy named Adolf Hitler.
They were born six days apart.
:::: Wittgenstein was and wasn’t Jewish. He was baptized Catholic, lost God as a teen, believed deeply in the act of confession throughout his life (arguably the essence of his entire philosophy), yet during his final years claimed his thoughts were 100 % Hebraic.
For me On Certainty is a much richer philosophical prose poem than Tractatus because of how much of the world the notes in it are committed to unlearning.
:::: The plan Heydrich unfurled at the conference went like this: deport all Jews in Europe and French North Africa to German-occupied areas in eastern Europe and use the fit ones for labor on road-building projects as long as they lasted. Survivors, Heydrich emphasized, according to the minutes taken by Adolf Eichmann (who would be hunted down in Argentina by Mossad and hanged in Israel on 31 May 1962), would have to be treated accordingly, because they would be the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.
:::: One morning as Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself in his bed transformed to an enormous swarms.
Is what you get if you feed the first line of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung into Babylon’s online German-to-English translator.
:::: Pastness in writing is never about pastness.
Rather, it is about the problematization of historical knowledge.
:::: Andi and I sleep with our windows open. The colder and fresher, the better. In what used to be Hans Arnhold’s villa, we slide under listening to waves lapping against boats down the sloping lawn in the marina.
:::: It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books, what other men do not say in whole books.
Aphorized Nietzsche.
:::: When traveling, you always feel like yourself, and not like yourself, and not not like yourself.
That’s the satisfaction exactly.
:::: The remarkable thing is how unremarkable Adolf Eichmann’s minutes sound — how flat, how matter-of-fact, how unremarkable the Wannsee Conference must have seemed to its participants.
For most, it was simply one meeting among many in a busy week.
Everybody knew the decision about Jews had already been made by Hitler in consultation with Göring and Himmler. The participants attended that day merely to hear the Führer’s emissary spell out what they understood was already a done deal.
:::: Fika: both a Swedish noun and verb (employing nineteenth century backslang: fika = kaffi, an early variant of the Swedish word kaffe) that means the nearly mandatory afternoon break over a cup of strong caffeine and a cookie, cake, or roll.
The idea is echt German as well. Between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m. cafés, normally crowded venues, crowd even more, usually with svelte types who seem to have squat business partaking in such a gastronomically opulent social institution.
Once one knows the fika exists, how can one possibly deny its existential insistence?
:::: I remember my Swedish grandfather, in order to attain maximum sugar density, inserting during fikas three cubes between his lower lip and teeth and sucking his tar-black coffee through them.
:::: In her book on Eichmann, Hannah Arendt went to great pains underscoring how he was unconditionally, unquestionably nothing speciaclass="underline" a high-school dropout, a follower who thought in platitudes, a guy who cared more about his family and building his career than, say, the mass extermination of a people.
Before the trial, six psychologists examined him. None found evidence of an abnormal personality — although one did note that the really unusual trait Eichmann exhibited was that he seemed more average than most people.
Miss that point, they say, and you’ve missed the war.
:::: Here is Vladimir Nabokov: I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
:::: We are all astronauts.
:::: When I translated Kafka’s gloriousness into my own novel, Anxious Pleasures, which in a sense wasn’t my own novel, retelling the narrative, not from Gregor Samsa’s point of view, but from the points of view of those around him, the gesture was meant as a thank-you note both to my high school teacher Joyce Garvin for helping me begin to become myself and to The Metamorphosis to show the text how much I cared.
This is why critics write criticism, why philosophers write philosophy, why theorists write theory: every critical monograph, theoretical essay, philosophical tome is ultimately no more and no less than an act of spiritual autobiography.
:::: Insect extermination: the Nazi euphemism for the annihilation of the Jews.