Claudio Magris, in his book "Danube", goes out in search of the source of Europe's major artery - very much the Danube, though the Swiss, Germans and Dutch would claim the Rhine - and finds it in a tributary in western Germany; he then follows the tributary back to its source and discovers a spring that spills into a meadow; finally he follows the spring to its source and finds... only a tap, with a pipe drilled into geology. No source at all. No ultimate source anyway - and even the tap may be just a literary metaphor.
And in the same way, when the scientists at last complete their voyages in space, millennia from now, I suspect that they will find that the absolute beginning was just a whimper, or at the most a very small bang, issuing from the nostrils of whoever, or whatever, by that epoch, they have decided to rename the great trinity of father-God, mother-Psyche, and the human Babel-song of E that doesn't quite, or only relatively in some corners of the cosmos, equal MC squared.
At his best, Magris is the precursor of Sebald: a historian who exploits the investigation of history for the purposes of philosophy and literature; a voyager whose outward journeys are intended to reveal the inner landscape; a novelist who never ceases to be a poet manqué working in the wrong, but still the more comfortable form, of prose. As all great literature is always great despite and not because of its plot and characters, so the writing of meaningful history rests in tone and ambiance and rhythm, in its drawing of paradoxes or its challenging of conventional conclusions, in its drawing the reader into a mirror-realm where the real subject of the book becomes the reader's own perspective of his life; every great book is thus the book of the reader's soul, transformed into allegory through the process of starting out as the book of the writer's soul: a different sort of tap, drilled into a different sort of geology. And this too may be a large bang or a mere whimper.
Elsewhere in "Danube", Magris points out that a desire to change the world is as contextual as any other human phenomenon. Had he been born into it, he observes, rather than creating it himself - had he, that is to say, been a plebeian and not a patrician of the new world order - Stalin would have detested and resisted what was taking place in Communist Russia, just as Hitler would have hated and rebelled against the atmosphere in Nazi Germany (Leonard Cohen says exactly the same thing, in exactly the same words, in the 1966 CBC documentary "Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen" - I cannot help but wonder which of the two was quoting the other, though it may simply be coincidence).
Amber pages
Hubertine
Auclert: “the
first French feminist” (Flora Tristan
on April 7 might disagree with that descriptor!),
born today in 1848. She founded the militant "Société le droit des
femmes" in 1876, and in 1881 the feminist newspaper "La cito-yenne",
later known as "Société le suffrage des femmes", advocating
for women’s voting rights through civil disobedience.
Bio here and here; there is also a Center named for her, under the aegis of the Council of Europe, so clearly she is now recognised and respected: click here
József (Joseph) Pulitzer, Hungarian journalist and publisher, the man who gave his name to all those American prizes, born today in 1847 (see June 4)
Buchenwald liberated, today in 1945, and see Jan 27.
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