Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke [Handke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780413424006
Google: NDyUQH_eMoUC
Amazon: 0413424006
Barnesnoble: 0413424006
Goodreads: 27894
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1979-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I have always found it hard to differentiate colors and even more so to name them.

The Goethe of the Color Theory, who sometimes made a show of his knowledge, speaks of two persons, in whom I partly recognize myself. These two, for instance, “wholly confused pink, blue, and violet”; in viewing these colors, they seemed to distinguish only slight nuances of lighter, darker, weaker, or more intense. In black, one of them noticed a tinge of brown, and in gray a tinge of red. They were both extremely sensitive to the gradation of light and dark. Their condition was probably pathological, but Goethe regarded them as borderline cases. Nevertheless, when he conversed with them at random and questioned them about the objects round about, he became utterly bewildered and feared that he was going mad.

Quite apart from mere identification, this note of Goethe’s helped me to perceive the unity between my earliest past and the present: in another moment of the “standing Now,” I see the people of those days—parents, brothers and sisters, and even grandparents—in the company of today’s people, all laughing at my remarks about the colors of things around me. A kind of family game consisted of letting me guess at colors; the confusion, of course, rested not with the others but with me.

But, unlike Goethe’s two cases, my disorder is not hereditary. There is no other example of it in my family. Over the years, however, I have learned that I am not suffering from classical “color blindness” or from any of its variants. I sometimes see colors and see them correctly.

Not long ago I was standing on the snow-covered summit of the Untersberg. Not far above me, almost within reach, a crow was gliding on the wind. I saw the characteristic bird yellow of the retracted claws, the golden brown of the wings shimmering in the sun, the blue of the sky. These three moved across the sky like the passing of a large, airy surface, in which at the same moment I saw a three-colored flag. It was a flag that stood for nothing, a thing of pure color. But through it I have at last become capable of looking at actual flags (which up until then had only cut off my view), because now their peaceful prototype exists in my imagination.

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