Seven Nights by Simon Strauß

Author:Simon Strauß
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2019-09-27T22:28:10+00:00

V

INVIDIA

Most likely, we’re not sufficiently possessed by the devil. Most likely, we’re missing what once was the mantra of youth: rage. That and proper stationary. How much was being read—and loved—in the old days. These days we’re constantly running out of time. A visit to an art show has to be prepared weeks in advance with save-the-date emails. Again and again, I tried to read Musil’s The Man without Qualities with three others. We never made it past the first pages. And the Walter Benjamin reading group I stopped after three and a half meetings. There was always something else going on. These things must have been easier back then, in turtlenecks, smoking cigarettes. Or when Theodor Mommsen climbed the library ladder at night, candle in hand. Allegedly his white hair was the first to catch fire, then his forty thousand books. Among them a manuscript that was over a thousand years old. The famous historian had it recklessly sent to his home. The fire consumed everything. Maybe even the fourth volume of his A history of Rome. Or maybe he never wrote it? Even Nietzsche, who despised the Prussian intellectual, was shocked: “Have you read about the fire at Mommsen’s? That all his excerpts are destroyed, potentially the most important preliminary studies made by any living scholar? He is said to have plunged into the flames again and again, until they had to overpower him—already covered in burns—with force.” The next day Mommsen’s students searched the rubble for remnants, collected charred papers and glued them together. They didn’t want to just give up on the last artifacts of universal scholarship.

What kind of a time was that, when the papers were still white and the screens black, when it still meant something to step outside onto the street, into the bars and apartments of strangers? Departure, resistance, slammed doors—I bet nobody asked for sparkling water back then.

What we’re missing most of all today are real spaces. We let ourselves be evicted and fenced into places that were once useful precisely because of their absence of purpose and order. The library where I’m sitting right now, for example, is nothing but a service station.

Instead of bookshelves, I’m greeted by information desks and screens. Everywhere I have the opportunity to extend my membership, get information about dental hygiene or return Club Mate bottles. There’s a repair cafe that revives defective electronics. Sewing machines stand at the ready to mend torn pants, and on the third floor there is a 3-D printer and a recording studio. The Ministry of Health advertises a workshop and there is a poster for a drone flight show.

Downstairs, in the family area, where kids jump around on digital playgrounds and play computer games, there’s a gong that sounds when a new baby is born in the maternity ward of the city’s hospital.

But the books, those stand on the sidelines. They don’t fit into the image of the modern architecture of emptiness. That’s why they’re being relocated and demoted to space holders.

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