North Station by Suah Bae

Author:Suah Bae
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940953700
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2017-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Diary entry from the banks of the Spree River in Berlin, one day in September, 2008. We were in the middle of a long walk by the river. We passed the Berliner Ensemble at the Bode Museum and then continued walking aimlessly, our legs eventually carrying us up to the area around Bellevue railway station. It was evening, and the setting sun, though slightly obscured by clouds, was suspended above the autumn trees, which were dyed with a brilliant golden light. With the shadows of a certain hour, both a chance occurrence and a one-time-only thing. Looking at the photographs from that time, it’s clear that I had been in the center of something. The center of what, exactly—that can’t be expressed in a single word. But clearly the center of some particular world, made up of simple language we had already long possessed, and of simple light, of color, water, voices, footsteps, and hints of evening; some kind of opposite shore of the mind, shining fixedly, staring fixedly at all those things like their shadow or soul, water opposite water, though we can arrive at that place through a singular gesture and expression, a world that cannot be entered arbitrarily, a country of unspecific time that cannot but be called “that certain moment.” Dividing our own place and time from nature and the physical world. Dividing our selves from the realism known as the present. That was something I dared to do of my own volition. I was a traveler. I was a poor uneconomical traveler who had come to that place for the sake of writing a single sentence. In that way I was an extremely self-willed traveler; still more so since my travels were not only geographical. Walk, cry, and write, I said to myself. While we ate hot cakes and coffee at a literature house cafe that afternoon, we talked about Erpenbeck’s new work, Heimsuchung, which had come out that year. And after that, continuing the day’s conversation, you had sent me an email expressing why, as a critic, you couldn’t personally like the writer Martin Walser, or going further, even the person Martin Walser. This was a point of some heated debate between us, specifically relating to Martin’s Angstblüte, a work we both knew well, but whose appraisal we had failed to come to an agreement over. Though you played the extremely pre-determined role of the perfect, “invisible” assistant, up until the time when I was able to complete my translation of that book. You set up my initial meeting with Walser, and even accompanied me in both of my two trips to meet him. At that time I recorded our conversation, along with the essay you improvised and recited in the train. The train rattles along through the landscape of Germany’s southern states, and two people have their faces buried in their two arms, and two people bury their two existences in the eternally parallel tracks and in time, and station after station passed

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