Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch

Author:Herman Koch [Koch, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3882-6
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

Sometimes you run your life back to see at what point it could have taken a different turn. But sometimes there’s nothing at all to run back—you yourself don’t know it yet, but the only button that’s still working is forward. You wish you could freeze the picture … Here, you tell yourself. If I’d said something else … done something else.

I went to the beach that evening. And when I came back I was a different person. Not for a while, or for a couple of days. No. Forever.

You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.

If you run things back far enough, the clean pants finally show up. By then, you know that they’re not going to stay clean. I know that I will keep running things back for the rest of my life. Was this where it was? I’ll ask myself again and again. Or was it further back? … There? I hit Pause.

Here it’s still clean.

And here, not anymore.

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