Lance Olsen: There

Throwing a red rubber ball through gusts of coppery haze.

:::: We land at Tegel on a Thursday and Sunday morning I sit down to begin polishing an interview about the illusions inherent in the terms historical and biographical fiction , continue working on a novel inspired by earthwork artist Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and write this, the book you’re holding in your hands as you read the phrase write this, the book you’re holding in your hands .

:::: My impression is that my two sisters recall Venezuela as an existential affliction. I recall it as strange elation.

My father, an intensely Lutheran man sans the religion (rigid, misanthropic, a captain at home as well as on his ship, yet acutely committed to the promise of family) went on to skipper supertankers. He would be away for three months, home for two, much to the confusion of our household rhythms. When he reappeared, it was always with stories from the front, Polaroid photographs of Istanbul, the Strait of Hormuz, waterspouts rising from a wide ocean desert.

One of his favorite overused sayings: Home is where I hang my hat.

That one, if none of the others, seems to have stuck.

:::: A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Reflected Rebecca Solnit.

:::: Through a pair of French doors off the living room perches a balcony that overlooks Lake Wannsee, today so foggy that the woody island on the far side edged by a narrow ribbon of villas seems constructed from a dream you had several months ago.

:::: When J.F.K. declared Ich bin ein Berliner on 26 June 1963 from a platform erected on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg in front of an audience of 450,000, almost exactly five months to the day before Lee Harvey Oswald lifted his Italian Carcano bolt-action rifle for the last time, something was gained in the translation.

He both announced he was from Berlin, as he had intended, thereby underscoring his support for West Germany 22 months after the Wall went up, and, apparently unintentionally, announced he was a type of jelly donut known in Berlin as a Pfannkuchen , but elsewhere as a Berliner.

Ich bin ein Berliner.

:::: In high school most of my friends aimed for classy northeastern colleges. Classy northeastern colleges never crossed my mind. Partly this was because my grades weren’t good enough, and partly this was because I knew almost nothing about classy northeastern colleges, and partly this was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

I knew one thing, though: there were possibility spaces on the far side of the parochial one in and around New York and I wanted to visit them.

:::: [[It always takes O. longer than he anticipates to acclimate to a place his body doesn’t believe it should be in.]]

:::: Because of the huge apartment windows, everything is spectacular light.

:::: Almost directly across the lake from Arnhold’s villa among that thin ribbon of others sits one that looks more like a modest palace than someone’s residence. Something called the Wannsee Conference took place there on 20 January 1942. Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler referred to admiringly as the man with the iron heart , presided.

The topic of the conference, which lasted 85 minutes, and was attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi regime, was the intellectual and ethical suicide for German culture called Die Endlösung , or The Final Solution.

:::: In the States everyone tells you most Germans know English. My experience files a dispatch concluding something less convincing. It may have been otherwise when this country was swarming with American soldiers, when it was divided between those who learned Russian as a second language and those who didn’t. Now most people you bump into outside the tourist and university districts in and around central Berlin answer Nur Deutsch when you shamefacedly ask Sprechen Sie Englisch?

Yet unlike, say, the cliché concerning the French, even those who do know a little English are more than happy to let you try out your German as long you both feel you’re making headway.

Only when you begin to fluster yourself, display the international facial expression broadcasting I’ve run out of language , do they politely switch over — often to almost creepily accentless, fluent American.

:::: At the refinery on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, there was the tapeworm room — a room filled with metal shelves filled with formaldehyde jars filled with tapeworms, some several feet long.

The American kids were brought there shortly after arriving to learn a straightforward lesson: if you don’t want such things to happen to your insides, wash your hands and food thoroughly and never, ever eat anything that touches the floor.

I’ve always been a good student: I got ringworm and tinea versicolor, a duet of fungus infections, instead.

:::: It still surprises me I didn’t read much, didn’t much enjoy reading, until eleventh grade, when I took my first of two English classes with Joyce Garvin, a woman barely five feet tall, skinny as a cocktail straw, all green tortoise-shell glasses and red hair, these days in her eighties and retired.

She was, no contest, the best teacher I ever had. I suspect this was because she was super smart, super well-read, and super sensitive, but it was also because she could wiretap her students’ minds, gauge what might interest each, and slip the right book and/or assignments into their hands.

She introduced me to Barth, Beckett, Kafka.

She introduced me to caring about close reading and big ideas.

I visit her and her husband, Aaron, at their split-level in Paramus, New Jersey, nearly every year, just to remind her how grateful I am.

:::: On 21 November 1811, Heinrich von Kleist, standing on the shore of Lake Wannsee, first killed his lover, Henriette Vogel, who was dying of cancer, and then turned his gun on himself.

He was 34, one year younger than Robert Smithson would be when the plane he was riding crashed near Amarillo, Texas, on 20 July 1970.

:::: Jet lag as a state-of-being: I usually finish writing for the day around one in the afternoon, power down my computer, walk out of the bedroom into the wider galaxy, and feel like I’ve just been hurtled through ten time zones.

It takes me another hour to adjust, re-tune to the channel everyone else seems to be watching.

:::: 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.