Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And from time to time, when I stood there by the railway cut and no train was passing at the moment — if it remained that way for more than a minute, it could mean only that there was a strike on — contemplating at my feet these chalk-gray, swooping etchings of something no longer there, something from before, so much more powerful than if the growths themselves had actually been present, being whipped back and forth by the trains, I had an experience of massiveness, tension, movement, wild goings-on. In that pattern of shrubs and wind at the railroad cut, past, present, and future became interwoven and spoke to me.

The ornamentation on the ancient city walls of Ecbatana in Persia would have revealed to me something great, as it did to Flaubert when, dreaming of an epic, he became lost in contemplation of it, but unlike to him, the wall would have seemed to me ineffable rather than epic. Here and now, in the ordinary world, grandeur and beauty finally appeared to me describable, as they had not been in the Gobi Desert, at the Lion Gate at Mycenae, at the pilgrim’s portal in Santiago de Compostela. And a few steps later they became completely inaccessible again. What had I seen there?

And the more I tried to brood it back, the more meaningless it became, and at the same time more uncanny. Don’t try to make something of it, I resolved. Experience grandeur and beauty and then leave it in peace. It does not want to be described. Or not by you. It is not material, not narrative material anymore.

It was fine with me that during those years I was not merely idle but also experienced no pressure from imagination or inventiveness. For the way I lived there seemed at certain moments close to perfection, especially when I stopped and became all ears. All that was missing was a little push, a mere wisp of something, a pinprick — but of what? — and it would have been the longed-for merging with the surroundings, with the treetop, with the curved space, the bay between the wings of the swallow.

But by way of compensation for having not the slightest spark of a conception of the future, I now wanted to know things. In the evening I would wait impatiently for Valentin to fall asleep so I could make headway with my studies. I had a telescope there, good enough for an observatory, and with it I looked at the sky, which even there in my first suburb, closer to the periphery, was less polluted by light than in Paris; I traced the deserts of the moon, dotted in Orion’s belt (and in between lowered the instrument and counted up the day’s receipts with the pharmacist, who, far away at the other end of the street, was staying late to balance his register).

Above all I studied from books. I read word for word and picked out only works that lent themselves to such reading. I soon set aside the local chronicles and histories because they made the region seem sadly diminished in contrast to the greatness, however undefined, of which I daily became conscious there. What was merely worth knowing or interesting did not satisfy me.

On the other hand, I was filled with a steady warm glow from studying the earth’s forms and their interactions, no longer merely those of this place; and I could follow best when the textbook contained only key words, rather than complete sentences.

Mountain cirques, alluvial terraces, shifting dunes thus became living images. Coming to understand them lifted all my weariness from me; I felt absolutely clear in the head, as previously perhaps only when I was studying Roman law, and I felt at one with the planet, and vice versa.

Sometimes, late at night, when I was already asleep, I was filled with such burning desire to know more that the urge itself woke me; I switched on the light, and, sitting up in bed, went on puzzling out the explanations.

It was sheer pleasure. I understood the term “morphological diversity”: the morphological features on which I was reading up, including those at the ends of the earth, were waiting for me, tomorrow, and each corresponded and responded to an as yet undiscovered vein in my body.

It happened more than once that the sheet I was lying on, with its folds and bulges, took on the relief of the landscape I was studying just then. The landscape seared itself into my memory by way of the sheet. Then I wanted to lie without a blanket, with the light on. And something similar happened to me on those nights when I sat there deciphering old books from classical antiquity. It was in fact a kind of decoding, for with the help of my boarding-school dictionaries I was cracking the Latin and Greek words to make them yield a sentence, and that alone, before any particular meaning emerged, could vitalize and refresh me as much as any adventure. I saw myself as a hairsplitter and since then have never viewed that as a defect in anyone.

But there was even more in the verses of Homer and Heraclitus; it was no accident they had survived the avalanches and floods of history. One phrase after another brought me face to face with a sun that did not blind me, and also never set as long as someone was reading that way. And if I opened a newspaper or turned on the television afterward, I could follow current events effortlessly. Completely alert, I took an interest in what was going on, at the same time without being surprised at anything, unmoved, prepared in advance for the worst. Afterward I sat in the dark, with a goblet that I held at the very bottom, by its foot, as I had seen it done in paintings of French peasant families from a century long past, surrounded by the suburban night’s silence and the presence of my son asleep upstairs, at the heart of time.

Why couldn’t my life go on this way indefinitely, the life of an anonymous person in an anonymous suburb, with my crisscrossing the area during the day, my hairsplitting and contemplation of word-suns in the evening, with my sitting bolt upright, and with the small, quiet sleeper for whom I performed an easy night watchman’s service? Now that certain branch is brushing the window on the west side again, the uppermost one, in the gable. Now the furnace is switching off until the next morning. The wind must be from the north; otherwise the mail train, all its cars windowless and painted yellow, would not rumble so through the house. This now is the moment of the piles of coal way in back of the railroad station, now, with the falling moon. And tomorrow I shall again do nothing! We will go up into the forest, past the standing stone, from under which the spring may be trickling again, after the rain, and then, on the other side of the highway, check to see whether the strawberries are ripe at that particular spot. We will eat, my friend, by the ponds of Villebon, and meanwhile observe what is happening on the water. Then I must not forget again to pick up Valentin after school. And in the evening, my dear fellow, we’ll experience the bifurcation of the Orinoco and then work through twelve more hexameters in our Odyssey.

Incidentally, it did not strike me as at all strange to see myself, perhaps more than ever, as someone from an Austrian village, then as now almost completely untouched by the outside world, and yet to have found the way of life most suited to me in a hinterland like this, more foreign than the most remote place from my years of travel. In this sense I viewed myself as a modern, one of the first in a series, in an avant-garde.

In various parts of the world I had run across one person or another from this avant-garde, almost always a stranger, and each time I had seen this person as my model. One time perhaps he was sitting in an outdoor café by a railroad station on the border, and amid the natives and the foreigners he stood out as a third type, who, without specifically looking at anything, was entirely caught up in what was going on; in spite of his large knapsack and his ankle-length coat, he seemed to be in camouflage (he was the one whom the patrolling border guards gave a wide berth); and with his untouchability I felt I was in good company with him, and went looking for it, though in vain, the following evening as well.