On a Georgia Landscape with a white Labrador Puppy

1.

Mishka is Ukrainian for “little bear.”  Even before she was born, my wife, Julie, contracted with Northern Lakes Labradors, an animal breeder in Bowersville, Georgia, for the purchase of a puppy then in utero.  Eight weeks after Mishka was born, we traveled to Bowersville to pick up the dog.

2.

In late October 2023, our dog, Frieda, died.  Frieda was a wonderful and loyal dog.  The breeders who sold Frieda to us, moved their operations from Minnesota to Georgia.  By lineage, Frieda was Mishka’s “great-aunt,” if such categories apply to dogs.  Because of this connection, Julie bought Mishka before she was born and, then, followed her progress by watching short videos showing the tiny puppy trotting with her nose to the ground on the sod of a southern lawn.

3.

April 8, 2024, the day on which we were to pick up the dog in rural Georgia (about 85 miles to the Northeast of Atlanta) was also the day of a great celestial spectacle, a total eclipse of the sun.  The so-called “Zone of Totality” swept in a swath of darkness as if applied by a paint brush north by northeast, passing through the Hill Country of south central Texas, Fort Worth, and, then, southern Illinois up through Indianapolis, Cleveland, across the Great Lakes, darkening the waters with the moon’s shadow cast between 108 and 128 miles wide, crossing through Vermont and Maine and, then, passing over the Maritime Provinces of eastern Canada.  This phenomenon attracted, it was reported, between six and eight million people, crowds swarming into the projected penumbra.  The eclipse’s transit of North America began in Torreon, Mexico about 1:00 pm, the zone of totality departing from Maine about an hour and ten minutes later.  

4.

According to my Maps application on my phone, the drive to Bowersville required 17 hours, but, of course, travel time was longer – at least twenty hours coming and twenty hours going.  We left Austin on Saturday morning, April 6, 2024, before dawn.  As we drove though northern Iowa, mighty turbines batted at the sky and the red rays of the rising sun, light mingling with wind over the empty fields.  Drought was ruining the land and roadside grass was withered and grey and the ponds for the livestock were low, showing white, cadaverous lips of gravel and clay.

5.

Forty miles northwest of St. Louis, the deciduous trees are stark without leaves.  Winter has still crucified these woods.  But, at St. Louis, all the hardwood trees are fully fledged with leaves and seem about to lunge into the sky and fly across the land.

6.

There was no traffic on the roads until we reached the freeways passing through St. Louis.  From that point all the way to Bowersville, Georgia, the Interstates were crowded with vehicles.  Heavy trucks crowded the cars and SUVs.  The trucks are required to strictly observe speed limits, therefore, reliably traveling at 65 miles per hour or 70 depending upon the State.  But everyone else speeds and, therefore, the floods of cars and vans and pickups swept by the slower moving semis, creating perilous eddies and vortices as they passed.  It was frustrating and demanding driving: either you found yourself pinned behind the huge, blind piston of truck-trailer or merged right or left to pass, pressed on by the other vehicles urging you down the highway.  And, so, for hours and hours.

7.

Two bridges in St. Louis swallow up traffic and spit it out across the rivers.  One bridge crosses the Missouri; the other spans the Mississippi a mile or so upstream from the great silver Gateway arch.  On the trestles above the bridge deck, digital letters spelled out this message to vehicles crossing the big river from Missouri to Illinois: EXPECT HEAVY TRAFFIC AND LONG DELAYS ON MONDAY, APRIL 8 BECAUSE OF ECLIPSE.  

8,

About five minutes east of the bridge from St. Louis to East St. Louis, the interstate bisects a peculiar neighborhood.  Tiny, squat-looking houses line narrow streets extending along diagonals to the freeway.  The houses have an archaic aspect.  They date to a time before lawns and, possibly, preceding sidewalks.  The houses are so closely spaced that their side eaves seem to touch.  On one side of the freeway, the homes are wood with closet-sized porches and decaying shingles and, although the day was bright, some sort of shadow seemed to have eclipsed them, a taint from the past, as it were, that hung heavy as the scent of magnolias or dying flowers over the neighborhoods.  The perspectives on the neighborhood were blurred.  The freeway cut through, a ruthless zone of speed and concrete.  To the north side of the interstate, some of the homes were brick, little kilns lining diminutive lanes.  Several small soot-darkened masonry churches pitched little mosque-shaped domes into the sky.

9.

These wooden and brick houses, shack-sized and nestling together among a fog of ancient trees, reminded me of something but I couldn’t quite bring the recollection into focus.  Currier and Ives?  But more grim and impoverished.

10.

We stopped at Mount Vernon, Illinois to spend the night at a Drury Inn.  A big twilight-colored bus with Nebraska plates was parked in the lot and rows of luggage were awaiting distribution to the rooms assigned to the tour’s passengers.  Retired men and women wearing lanyards filled the lobby.  Presumably, they were being bussed to some place with clear skies predicted for Monday so as to admire the eclipse.

11.

After we checked into the Drury Inn, I went outside for a walk.  A vacant lot was nearby, beyond an access lane that led to some businesses on the frontage road – a Steak and Shake and a new deli.  The vacant lot was yellow with dry grass and adjoined a cemetery.  Most cemeteries have a fence around them, but this tract of nondescript old graves stood open on all sides, unbounded, the dead, I suppose, spilling out of the acreage dedicated to them and encroaching on the nearby lane, a churchyard, and some morose-looking brick apartments.  I strolled among the stones, looking at dates on the weathered, limestone slabs.  Someone had cut back the nearby wood-lot to reveal a single corpse-sized stone reposing among the chopped up saplings and tree-trunks, a flat slab lettered: MOTHER.

12.

It’s imprudent for the dead to be unfenced.  Their kingdom should be kept apart from where the living abide.  Someone should put up a barricade between the worlds.

13.

Before dawn: early morning.  A factory beside the Interstate.  A sign flashes a jocular, riddling message: What is put on a table but never eaten?

14. 

The next day, we drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee.  The entire way is wooded, with ranks of pines and hardwood trees sealing off the horizons.  Then, there are mountains, running in long east-west ridges that gradually curve like parentheses to wall off the valleys.  For hundreds of miles, there are no rest stops.  But, then, where the freeway labors up over the Cumberland Ridge, a route complicated by huge trucks hauling overwide burdens, there is a hilltop rest stop, walled with semis and ten miles later, down in the gorge, another stop.

15.

The rest stop in the deep valley overlooks an expanse of water where the Tennessee River is impounded into something called Nickajack Lake.  The landscape is exorbitantly beautiful with bays and inlets and shining expanses of crystal blue water cradled between lofty, densely forested bluffs.  The vistas remind me of the Adirondack Mountains.  The travelers stopped at the toilets and information kiosk next to the lake are baffled, even a bit dazed, by all the glory on display.  

16.

Locomotives and iron rails evolved into ubiquity over the course of forty years.  This advance in technology reminds me of cell-phones.  No one used these devices a few decades ago, but, now, they are everywhere, an indispensable tool that was unimaginable except in science fiction when I was in college.  America’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio began operation in 1827.  By the time of the Civil War, trains were vital to transportation and, to a large extent, control of the railroads was tantamount to control over enemy territory.  Chattanooga was a rail hub, radiating train lines across the South and, so, the town became a strategic objective for the federal Army of the Cumberland in the theater of war between Vicksburg and Atlanta.   

 

17.

Chattanooga lies near a tight meander in the Tennessee River, the Moccasin Bend, a point of land directly beneath Lookout Mountain.  The site is dramatic, the river’s channel brushing against the thousand-foot ridge that rises vertically to sheer palisades defending the mountain top.  Across the valley, other mountains wild with hanging forests guard the town.  After the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, defeated Union forces withdrew twelve miles northward to the town, fortifying the place against the siege mounted by the Confederate armies.  Rebel units scaled Lookout Mountain and dragged cannons to the edge of its stony cliffs overlooking Moccasin Bend and the railroad town.  The scene was set for the Battle of Lookout Mountain, sometimes called “the Battle above the Clouds,” fought on a wet, misty day in mid-November.  

18.

The west-bound traffic out of Chattanooga is eclipse-heavy, an endless procession of SUVs and passenger cars punctuated by heavy trucks caught in the vehicular melee.  But we are going the opposite direction, coming down from the forests of the Cumberland plateau to the edge of the high mountains overlooking Chattanooga.  An exit off the Interstate runs to a road that lifts us above apartment buildings and some desolate strip malls, ascending the side of the mountain.  Halfway up the peak, men in florescent vests signal us into a parking lot below a masonry turret, sleek and a little like an air-traffic control tower, rising over the hillside shaft opening into Ruby Falls.  The Falls are a famous tourist attraction in this part of the world, a jet of water falling a hundred feet through multi-colored lights in the black heart of the mountain.  There is no natural access to the vertical limestone oubliette into which the water pours.  For a hundred-thousand years, the stream throbbed like an artery in the dark belly of the mountain, water siphoned out through channels pouring into the river at the foot of the ridge.  A show-cave with an entrance high on the hillside featured an underground stream and the owners of the cavern followed the water downward, blasting open passages to reach the hidden falls.  

19.

I’m not on the mountain to see the Falls, however impressive they might be, and, so, after some misdirection, parking my car briefly on the terraces under the tower-entrances, I figure out that I’m at the tourist attraction and not the battlefield.  So we drive higher up the steep slope, switchbacking upward among forests drowned in green, suffocating kudzu.  Mansions line the lane atop the summit and the road ends at more parking lots beside a castle keep and neat lawns protected by stolid, heavy-looking cannons.  A sidewalk cuts across a small grassy field perched over the abyss and there is an obelisk erected by the State of New York to its sons, some of whom died in the fighting here.  The day is green and blue with enormous vistas over the deep valley, the shaggy hills enclosing the town, and the grid of roads, like crossed fingers between buildings with white roofs – here the aerial perspective makes Chattanooga into a map of itself.  

20.

A small museum explains the battle.  The southern forces atop the mountain were defeated by the terrain that they had selected for defense.  The hillsides were too steep to allow cannon fire at attacking troops scaling the cliffs directly under the mountain top.  Dense forests clinging to the mountain’s flanks afforded protection to the attacking forces as well.  As the Union troops assaulted the peak, the Confederate defenders didn’t have clear fields of fire on the skirmish lines, more or less, directly below.  Furthermore, the attacking Federal forces exploited clouds that shroud the slopes of the peak.  Union troops reached the base of the palisades fifty feet below the summit by night fall.  In the dark, the Confederate defenders fled from their entrenched positions, abandoning cannons on the edge of the cliffs.  At dawn, the Blue-coats shivering on the cold heights found the summit abandoned and, so, raised their battle flags as the sun peaked over the top of Missionary Ridge to the east across the watery valley.  

21.

The castle building on the highest point of the ridge was once the entrance into Lookout Mountain caverns, the natural entrance to the labyrinth of limestone passages honeycombing the mountain.  The National Park Service occupies a visitor center next to the heavy, rusticated walls of the castle tower.  In the museum, a big mural (it’s thirty feet long) shows lines of troops advancing into swaths of greyish cloud running horizontally across the grey and brown heights of the mountain.  In the foreground, General Hooker on a white horse greets another commander, turning away from his skirmish lines vanishing into the courses of fog.  A jumble of ironmongery, bullets and shells and stirrups, occupies a display case. 

22.

When the Union troops were ordered to assault the Confederate snipers and artillery on the mountain top, some of them exclaimed with disbelief: “Do you expect us to fly up there?”  One young man wrote in a letter that, before the assault, the chaplain asked the soldiers to leave any small tokens or messages that they would want him to deliver to their next-of-kin or sweethearts were they to die in the battle.  One young man, David Monat, enlisted in the 29th Pennsylvania Regiment, Geary’s Division, XII Corps handed some coins to his friend, Jack MacLaughlin and said: “Jack, I’ve got about 3 or 4 dollars.  If I go, look out for them and, if you get a chance, take a drink and say ‘Here’s to a good fellow’.” 

 

23.

Missionary Ridge is a lower range of hills to the east of the Chattanooga Valley.  An engagement was fought on the steep bare slopes of that ridge (the trees had been cut for building materials) after the successful attack on Lookout Mountain.  Minnesota troops led that attack and there is a dramatic painting of the assault adorning a wall in the lobby to the Governor’s office at the Minnesota State Capitol.  I have known that picture, a pyramidal composition of blue-coated soldiers leaning into shot and shell, since I was a small boy.  In Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, one of the poem’s ghostly interlocutors, Knowlt Hoheimer tells us that he was “the first fruit of... Missionary Ridge”, shot through the heart in the assault.  The dead man says that he ran away to join the army when accused of stealing hogs and that it would have been a “thousand times” better to have been locked in the county jail than to lie under the wings of a marble angel beneath a pedestal chiseled with the words Pro Patria – “what do (those words) mean anyhow?”  Missionary Ridge no longer exists.  The hillside has been eroded by development, tracts of houses and light industrial buildings and the place where the Minnesota boys made their valiant attack and where Knowlt Hoheimer fell no longer can be seen.   

24.

I repeat: What is put on a table but never eaten?  For the answer to this riddle, see the third section in 32.

    

25.

From the hotel room, a little after sunset, a deep pink glow outlines the black, indistinct mass of Lookout Mountain.  Our room is in a place called East Ridge, four-hundred yards from the Georgia border.  (We are possibly on the side of what was once called Missionary Ridge.)  The sky darkens to lavender above some long pennants of cloud dipped in gold.  An indistinct range of hills kneels on the horizon – this is either a bank of clouds or more mountains to the northeast.  

26.

It’s two-hundred miles total:  southeast to Atlanta, then, looping in a catenary bend to the northeast ato an unincorporated place, Bowersville where the Labrador puppy is waiting for us.  The whole route is dense with traffic, mostly bumper to bumper, particularly in the suburbs of Atlanta.  We pass some crashes, congestion on the road clearing beneath soaring concrete causeways jammed with cars.  Forests block the landscape – you can’t see the suburbs or towns from which all this traffic is ceaselessly gushing.  

27.

Northern Lakes Labradors raises dogs on 20 acres located about six-and-a-half miles east of the Interstate.  We arrive early.  An email message from my office instructs me to call my tax preparer.  State and Federal taxes are due in seven days.  The terrain is unimpressive, a few low hills above swampy depressions, tiny farms surrounded by embattled-looking stands of pine and fir bedded in rust-brown fallen needles.  The roads are all named after heroines or places in novels by Sir Walter Scott.  Dirt roads ramble haphazardly through thickets, rutted clay as red as blood.  Near the dog breeding place, several roads collide at sharp acute angles – nothing is square or right-angled out here in this country; the old pikes and lanes are knit together eccentrically.  A dusty truck laden with chickens crushed together in open wire boxes navigates a turn and, for a moment, it seems like the crazy heaps of cages will come crashing down onto the hot, scarred asphalt.  The chickens already look mangled, clots of white paper towel or soiled chrysanthemums stacked on the back of the truck.  It’s a half-mile to our turn; at the next intersection, a Dollar Store occupies a roadside trough across from a 

COOP gas station with its door framed by Christmas tree lights.  At the junction, where a narrow lane leads to Northern Lakes, a big church stands above empty parking lots: Intersection Baptist Church are the words inscribed above a portico upheld by white columns of the kind you might imagine on an ante-bellum manor house.  A pole barn next to the church houses the Intersection Family Center.  A quarter-acre of graves, mostly pillars and pale dwarf obelisks stands in the shadow of the church with its steeple cocked astride the ridge-line like a jaunty little hat.  This cemetery is also unfenced so that the dead can come and go as they like.  A concrete block pavilion set back from the country road marks a township park, although the planners of this place seem to have omitted picnic tables and any other amenities from the small tract of unmown grass lawn.  The sign says that there is a ballfield here, but that’s also been omitted or, if once built, now abandoned.  Trees in a chaotic patch encroach on the open plot.  I find some playground equipment made of sagging plastic next to a swing set, but it’s unclear to me whether these fixtures are part of the public park or on the land of a neighbor who has parked his pickup trucks and lawn-mowing tractor (with a golf cart for visiting nearby folks) in an open shed, an envelope of sun-faded fiber glass.  An improbably heavy, winged creature, some sort of cross between a huge carrion fly and a bumblebee, hovers uncertainly over the turf next to a water-pump.  The winged beast buzzes as it bobs up and down in the warm air.  Storm clouds, perhaps threatening thunder and lightning, tower over the patchwork of small farms, crumpled barns, red lanes, and shacks to the east.  Five-hundred miles to the west of this park, on the prairies of Indiana, the shadow of the moon eclipses the sun and people assembled by the thousands along freeways and atop green knolls and crowding parking lots at Walmarts and near churches and warehouses cheer, first, for the sun’s obliteration and, then, for the diamond beads bursting forth from around the edge of the sun that has been put out like an inconvenient eye, and, then, the crowds cheer again for the corona, it’s rays that make the landscape tremulous like the bottom of the sea where columns of water flicker and shift and, then, at last, the people cheer one more time and clap their hands and praise the sky upon the sun’s return, the light suddenly turned on like a lamp in the heavens so that corners and edges are visible again on the shapes of things.  But, of course, none of this is visible where I am talking to the tax preparer, watching the big black tumor of the bee or fly or whatever it is hovering like a tiny hot air balloon over the dew-damp sod, some cattle lounging near a seep of water among the trees, and a mellow warm light suffusing this landscape that is everywhere small, understated, split into tiny parcels of green woods and green shadow and pale yellow fields moist under the sun and, then, I can hear dogs barking and a woodpecker tapping in the green fog of underbrush between the trees.  It’s time to pick up the puppy.  Julie is sending messages on her cell-phone.  A small, twelve-sided corral, only hip high, encloses some astro-turf – is this an enclosure for children or pets or...?  The panel hinged to offer entry to the artificial grass within the twelve-sided corral has fallen down and lies atop the astro-turf.  Birds are singing.  Unassuming fences crisscross the fields.  In the hollows, agricultural confinement buildings stand among thistles, fans like huge screw-heads penetrating their walls.  Perhaps, the light is mellowed by the half-shadow of the moon blocking the sun.  But the sky feels vague, ill-defined with haze, and hot.

28,

We drove back to Chattanooga.  The heavens are exhausted by the sky-show and, now, clouds are bubbling up from the earth, rising to the zenith.

29.

The next day, driving from Chattanooga to Mount Vernon, traffic oncoming beyond the median is backed-up for miles.  It’s eclipse pilgrims returning from the zone of totality.

30.

You expect to see some trace on the land where the sun was eaten away by shadow.  Something should be engraved in the land, a monument of some sort to an experience that people on the radio say was “spiritual”, astonishing, a testimony to how small we are in the universe and, yet, evidence for something like the fellowship of man, all our warring communities joined together in awe and wonder.  Probably, this is rank idealism.  Nothing marked the transit of the mighty shadow across the terrain.  Not even the idea of the eclipse was palpable on the landscape.

31.

At Mount Vernon, the dead in their unfenced cemetery seem somehow unhoused.  Maybe, they are wandering the fast food joints, the hobby lobby, the Krogers’ grocery store.  The puppy in the hotel room bites my hands and arms a hundred times, bites my toes fifty times, would gnaw on my genitals if this were allowed.  

32.

Crossing into St. Louis, five minutes from the Mississippi, I glimpse the strange neighborhood of tiny houses through which the freeway bores like a mineshaft.  It’s before a lightless dawn.  The sky is now overcast and ran is pouring out of the darkness and the little shacks shimmer under faint street lamps.  The structures are flimsy, wet, like enclosures stacked up from cards extracted from a deck, so frail that the falling rain might undermine them or that they might collapse from a gust of wind.  

33.

I’m thinking about Stephen Foster and, perhaps, Scott Joplin, whose home I visited ten years ago on a visit to St. Louis, a genteel place (as I recall) with a piano in the parlor and cozy-looking calico drapes.  Now, I recognize the shape and disposition of the ancient, battered and tiny houses: they are slave cabins, utilitarian dwellings built post-bellum but, nonetheless, homes for the poor accustomed to living with little or nothing, people so poor that they didn’t even own themselves.

35.

The sun comes up over a bad accident in the west suburbs of St. Louis.  The traffic bends to a single lane and nothing moves for a while under the wet skies except for an occasional car jumping out of line to seek out a nearby off-ramp.  Ambulances and fire-trucks are lined up next to the side of the road and lights are flashing and there are sprays of broken glass on the concrete, broken fragments of fender and hood, but the vehicles are gone and the injured people hauled to local hospitals.  The crash leaves traces and some highway patrolman are deploying yellow and orange tape-measures against the somber, stained surface of the interstate.  Why didn’t the car wreck between moon and sun leave a mark? 

36.

An hour after dawn: empty roadways stretching out to the horizon – it’s smooth sailing from rain squall to rain squall on the road back to Austin.  

April 12, 2023

On a Curious Dream

Nothing is more obnoxious than someone who grabs you by the lapels and insist upon telling you a dream.  What is remarkable to one person is, often, uninteresting to others and this is particularly true of dream narratives.

But, nevertheless...

In my dream, I was trying a case somewhere on the East Coast, a morbid, gloomy place. The lawsuit involved a woman who had lost a great deal of money in some sort of Spiritualist enterprise.  In other words, she had been convinced to invest her inheritance in a scheme involving contact with the dead.  I represented the unfortunate heiress. 

The trial took place in a vast, dim courtroom.  The Judge was a giant, a huge grim man in a flowing black robe.  He reminded me of the late actor, Fred Gwynn as he appears in the movie My Cousin Vinny, a role in which he plays a judge.  In my dream, the Judge was broader and heavier than the movie star, a brooding, even menacing presence.

After the case had been argued, the Judge instructed the jury, making various comments that I interpreted as critical of my presentation of the case.  It was Autumn with overcast skies and there were solemn grey quadrangles outdoors, public spaces drowned in darkness.

At a chophouse, I was eating my supper.  As it happened, the Judge occupied a nearby table with several cronies and I heard him remarking on my appearance in his courtroom.  The room was dim with dark paneled walls and dimly lit stained glass windows.  I approached the Judge’s table to ask him what he meant by his criticism.  

He said that I had failed to present the conduct of the Defendant as fraud and that I hadn’t argued that my client had been the victim of intentional misrepresentation.  It was true, I recalled, that I had presented the case as one involving an error, but in good faith, perhaps, some sort of negligence but without intentional wrongdoing.  I told the Judge that I had no evidence of the defendant’s fraudulent intent.  

“Oh, yes, of course, there was wrongful intent,” the Judge said.  And he proceeded to tell me of another case involving the same defendant in which a gullible person had lost their life savings as a result of fraud.  I was unaware of the case and wondered whether my investigation had gone awry in not uncovering this evidence, although I was skeptical as to whether it would be admissible.

The Judge rose to his full height and glowered at me and all the darkness of his court and the chophouse with its dark-paneled walls and the gloomy harbor city in which I had tried this case was condensed in his glare.  Then, I knew that I had botched the case, that I had failed my client, and that this was the reason that the heiress would lose the lawsuit.  (It seemed that the jury had not yet returned a verdict and were still deliberating on the outcome.)

Later, I found myself back in the dismal city where I was conferring with my client.  Although I couldn’t perceive her very clearly, she seemed an earnest woman of color with dark skin wearing an old fashioned white blouse and a black skirt.  I thought her name was Florence Newton.  Something led me to conclude that the Judge was secretly related to her, perhaps, her father as a result of a clandestine affair or, at the very least, her uncle.  On the basis of this belief, I questioned the Judge’s objectivity.

I awoke and was unable to fall asleep again.  For a long time, I imagined arguments for my failure to present the heiress’ claim as a matter of fraud.  Perhaps, her reliance on the spiritualist representations made by the defendant had been unreasonable.  In any event, the facts were now becoming uncertain and became more hazy as I thought about them.  I couldn’t recall the identity of the defendant or what exactly he had done.  Perhaps, I was the defendant.  Someone called Dtroner was involved in the case, It seemed that I might have been influenced by Henry or William James, although nothing was clear.  Some of the events involved in the litigation had occurred on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. 

Maybe, I would understand the dream better if I wrote it down and, so, I rose, quickly dressed, and went to my office where I write to type these words.  Snowfall was predicted for the day and it was before dawn, dark, with wet sheaths of snow clinging to the trees and parked cars.  Some birds were singing as I walked to my garage and the cold in the air was moist with the imminent rain.  

The radio was turned-on in my car.  A woman with a British accent said that she would answer the question of a listener named Oscar – could dreams be manufactured to order?  The presenter spoke with someone named Dr. Adam Har, a postdoctoral associate specializing in the neurology of sleep at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He had invented a device called Dormio.  You strap this machine to your wrist and it measures biological factors to determine when the sleeper is entering the so-called hypnogogic phase of sleep.  As hypnagogia occurs, a voice simulator in the machine whispers a preprogrammed suggestion to the sleeper – a word like “tree” or the name of a person.  Dr. Har explained that this was a way of incubating dreams and inserting themes into them.  “We can seed dreams by this technology,” he told the woman with the British accent.  The name of the show is The Unexpected Element. It can be accessed on the web at unexpected@bbc.co.uk.  

My computer advised me that I typed this note on the 150 anniversary of the birth of Harry Houdini, the great magician and crusader against Spiritualism and its hoaxes.

Florence Newton was an Irish maidservant accused of witchcraft in 1651.  Before I looked up her name on the internet, I had no knowledge about her.  Denied a piece of beef in the home where she worked, she mumbled imprecations about the master of the house and he later developed severe stomach cramps.  On the street, she violently kissed a fellow maid in the household where she worked.  That afternoon, that woman became very ill.  While she was imprisoned, Newton seized the hand of guard through the bars of her cell and kissed his fingers.  The guard also suffered an immediate and devastating illness.  Before she could be tried, she apparently died in jail.  She is sometimes called the Witch of Youghai.    

March 24, 2024

On a Haunted Resort north of Brainerd

 

During the week of Valentine’s Day, my wife and I spent three days at a lake-shore cabin north of Brainerd. The weather was unseasonably warm, about 35 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.  At night, it was colder, but still without any discernible wind.  The lake beneath the steep hill on which the cabin was located didn’t seem to be reliably frozen: the ice was glazed with fallen snow, but there were polished blue-grey patches, brushed smooth by the winds, that looked fragile.  Networks of fissures spread over parts over lake like the craquelure on an Old Master painting and far across the frozen water where normally there would be small shack villages of ice-fishermen, I saw only a single black hut, abandoned, perhaps, due to dangerously thin ice. 

The country in this part of the State is more water than land.  Squid-shaped lakes cast tendrils out amidst the evergreen forests.  Dry land consists of narrow ridges between bodies of water, slim promontories and sandy points and this isthmus-terrain dissected by channels lined with brown reeds pushed up through the spongy ice at the margins of the swamps.  Islands clog the narrow passages of these lakes and, if nature were allowed to prevail here, all of the bays and inlets would be connected by marshes pierced here and there by aisles of open water.  To make railroad easements and, later, highways, the corridors of dry land between the lakes have been rationalized, some of the estuaries filled up with gravel and packed earth embankments on which to build train tracks and roads.  Villages are squeezed between big lakes, frozen white as marble at this time of year.  

The resort where we were staying consisted of an event center for weddings, six post-modern cabins, modular cubes with glass walls fronting the lake (or “forest-view” across the clearing), the sort of architecture you see in Iceland or along the fjords of Norway or among the Finnish lakes.  The event center consisted of some austere trapezoids stacked like sea-going storage containers on top of one another.  Bulldozers had been remodeling the land when the Winter stopped work and some shallow pits full of frozen mud were clogged with debris – knocked-over trees, abandoned tires and shattered utility poles, shards of plywood.  Around the edges of the compound, old summer houses built with decaying clapboard and wrap-around porches, screened against warm weather’s mosquitos, occupied high points overlooking the lake.  Some of these structures were small, dour-looking summer cabins but several of the buildings were bigger and had once been impressive although they were now in a state of partial ruin, windows hanging loose from their frames, doors askew, shingles abraded by storms and pierced by sharp, fallen branches.  The post-modern Ikea-style cabins inserted into the landscape were ribbed with aluminum fins and the color of autumnal woods, built to conceal themselves in the forest.  They were screened to hide the light that they emitted at night so that the sky would be dark and laden with wet-looking stars.  The wooden houses and cabins were points of darkness, relics spilling shadow out from their wrecked thresholds.

Although the resort, marked with signs of its lavish restoration, was supposed to be in the midst of unspoiled nature – in fact, the place was called Nature Link – it would be a stretch of the imagination to characterize the area as wilderness or uninhabited.  To the contrary, these lakes are only 150 miles from the Twin Cities and the area has been exploited for summer cabins and fishing bivouacs, bible and scout camps as well as resorts of all kinds, some of them grandiose and expensive others more rustic, for many generations.  The place where we were staying was a resort as early as 1898 with an austere, but large lodge (still visible but now abandoned) above the sandy point of land, an island, channel, and two big bays, each about a half-mile wide. This resort called Minnewawa, undoubtedly replacing a more primitive fishing camp, that was, itself, likely established on this isthmus frequented by woodland Indians since time immemorial.  A station on the rail-line about three-quarters of a mile from Minnewawa provided ready access to the resort.  (The train tracks are gone now, but the open-air stop with a row of benches under a wooden shelter – it looks a pleine-aire  chapel with pews – still stands on fill hauled in to make a earthen dam between lakes and a road-bed for the trains.)  A tourist town with motels and boutiques is located a mile to the east of the resort where several winding forests roads intersect.  Beginning around 1980, the resort was converted into a summer hockey camp.  Boys (and later girls as well) trained in meadows cut into the statuesque fir and pine woods.  Of course, there was no ice on which to skate and, so, the kids, apparently, played hockey with brooms and balls, out-of-bounds represented by the pine forest, mostly clear of underbrush due to the dense evergreen canopy overhead.  White-tailed deer flickered through the woods; the animals always seem to soar and leap as they run.  After drills in the mornings, led by down-on-their-luck, hockey pros, the kids adjourned to the lake to swim or row boats out to the island where fumbling love affairs took place and where there were caches of booze and marijuana stashed among the trees.  Bonfires flared on the point of land.  The professional hockey players stayed in the white frame cottages overlooking the lake, getting drunk and disorderly themselves at night.  The main lodge was already boarded-up, prey to marauding racoons.  Then, the hockey camp failed and the place was left to decay for a few years before being sold to Minneapolis investors and, first, rebuilt as a wedding event center and, then, a sort of woodlands motel for wedding guests and, at last, as the Nature-Link resort.  

On the first evening that we were at Nature-Link, as the sun was setting under a ribbon of salmon-pink light, I walked down to the point.  It was only a few hundred feet, navigating an asphalt trail laid on a diagonal down the hillside to a barrel sauna erected on the sandy spit next to a wooden shack used, I supposed, to store kayaks during the summer months.  Fairy lights hung in delicate curves overhead, strung between the tall, ramrod-straight pines.  A boy and girl had been sitting next to a smoky fire in a pit by the barrel-sauna but they had departed.  Flame still sputtered and hissed in the pit.  The barrel-sauna was convex on its side facing the lake, a big bubble of transparent plexi-glass.  On the hill overhead, the ruinous lodge and cottages glared down at me with windows like eye-sockets in a skull.  The island thirty yards across the frozen water was still, not even the reeds poking through the ice moving, not a breeze stirring and no birds seemed to be about.  Far out on the level plain of lake ice, veined with obscure corridors and frozen lagoons, I saw the single ice-fishing shack, a black, featureless monad against white that was now turning blue and grey as it became dark.  Something shuddered in the underbrush on the island.  It was the sort of place where you might panic, sense menace in a shadow or the flutter of a branch like an eyelid, and, then, run wildly to flee some imagined danger lurking in the darkness.

The next morning, the sun clawed its way through low-hanging slate-grey clouds and, then, the landscape was flooded with light.  The pines on the steep descent to the frozen lake stood at dignified intervals and we could look down between their scaly rust-colored trunks to the ice.  Near the shore, a line of footprints, each cupping blue shadow, marched out toward the island and some slicks of smooth, wind-polished ice too hard to imprint.  Two parallel lines marked the snow drifted up against the edge of the lake, apparently, left by sled-runners.  I didn’t recall seeing the tracks or the sled-marks the previous afternoon.  Was it possible that someone, pulling a sled had walked out over the frozen lake after dark?  And, if so, why?  The prints in the snow were aimed in the direction of the island although the marks ceased to be visible where ice blistered the lake surface in squashed blue-green domes.  At the edge of the island, indentations in the ice formed a shadowy grey hollow.  An upright boulder, thumb-shaped and crested with snow, jutted up over the crater at the edge of the ice.  The preceding night had been solemn, dark, still – we hadn’t heard voices.  The path of prints in the snow were thirty feet below the level of our cabin, and began at the crumpled shoreline directly under the glass facade facing the lake.  The most likely explanation for the tracks sudden visibility, I thought, was the oblique rays of sunlight raking across the frozen lake.

I put on my coat and hat and walked from the cabin to the entrance of the resort.  Loops of pale, yellow lights were strung like pearls between trees and outlined the name of the resort hanging over the gate entry.  Among the pines, it was always gloomy and the lights shone against the darkness falling from the evergreens.  The clouds had returned and the day was dark again.  The drive-way into the resort joined with other lanes accessing lake cabins along the shoreline.  At the county highway, a third of a mile from the cabin, the two-lane blacktop ran parallel to a snowmobile and bike trail.  The unseasonably warm weather had left most of the asphalt trail bare.  Between the road and trail, stands of fir were interspersed among hay-colored reeds.  I walked for a mile or so and, then, turned around and went back in the direction that I had come.  A couple of crows derided me and my feet were cold.  On the driveway back to the resort, beyond the amber Christmas lights dangling from the gate, I saw a peculiar building or, rather, several buildings.  Two long rectangular houses were linked by an enclosed corridor and a smaller structure between them.  The smaller building seemed to once have been one of the cabins at resort – it had screen windows and the vestiges of a porch.  This squat little building was locked between the much larger and taller sheds, barren utilitarian structures with walls pierced by a few windows asymmetrically (and haphazardly) placed.  The siding on the big rectangular houses was faded blue and water pitching off the overhanging eaves had cut foot-deep trenches in the forest mulch on all sides of the buildings.  I had seen pictures of Shaker dormitories, or cult buildings in Guyana or  Nevada, and this complex of abandoned structures, set back from the access road, intrigued me.  I walked across the field and, then, walked around the dormitories.  They were large, austere, obviously abandoned – when I pressed my face to the cold window-glass, I could see bare joists and damp-looking studs in the shadows inside.  The interior surfaces of the walls were either stripped away or, perhaps, had never existed.  A stench pushed me back from the buildings.  Something was dead here and rotting.   

The night was dark and moonless.  Most of lake cabin were empty this time of the year and the curving shores of lake beyond the long reach of the ice were dark.  Fairy-lights, also yellow and faint, festooned the barrel-sauna.  There was no bonfire on the point of land.  The hillside below our cabin was studded with small lamps, probably solar-powered, and they emitted a faint luminescence in the darkness.  How anyone could use those ghostly lights to illumine their way was mysterious to me.  Sometimes, an unseen dog barked.

Two black-and-white pictures adorned the walls of the cabin, blow-ups, apparently, of old snapshots.  In one picture, a timid-looking girl stood on a dock in the lake.  The shoreline behind her was murky, with stands of trees and dark undergrowth.  The girl wore a one-piece bathing suit and was unwilling to enter the water.  Below her feet, in the lake, some heads bobbed above the white, rumpled surface of the water.  On the wall above the bed, another picture showed a ramshackle bridge crossing to the island from the point of land where the barrel-sauna and the fire-pit were now located.  The bridge looked like something from a wood cut by Hokusai – it appeared to be improvised, low arches of plywood spanning a half-dozen piers lined up in the channel.  The footbridge was already in disrepair when the photograph was taken and it seemed fragile, something that a strong wind or a blizzard or, even, a heavy snowfall might topple into the water.  The island was a black mass of trees and brush, a destination that wasn’t worth crossing the water for – the thumb-shaped rock on the margin of island glowed like a tombstone in the gloom.  

In the morning light, more tracks had appeared on the snow drifts under the shore-line.  Two more sled marks incised the snow and three or more sets of tracks were pressed into the snow, the path lost where the bare ice on the lake was exposed.  The trails pointed in the direction of the boulder and the concave hollow at the edge of the island.  

In the afternoon, I drove into the resort town.  The place consisted of a single road and an intersection.  Most of the shops were seasonal and closed.  Places sold expensive women’s clothing and kitchen plaques with other knick-knacks for lake cabins.  A florist’s place was shut for the season – a sign said it would open in May.  Several realtors had offices on Main Street; there was probably a brisk business involving lake cabin transactions.  A low embankment marked the old railway right-of-way through town that was now a foot-trail and, near the promenade, there were several candy shops and ice-cream parlors, also shuttered for the Winter.  One place sold fashion accessories for Nordic skiiing – it was also closed, possibly due to the lack of any snow in the woods and along the lake shores.  The two businesses selling cabin decorations seemed to be adversaries.  On the door of one of those places, a sign said: We are a profanity-free store – we don’t sell merchandise with obscene writing on it.  The other store had a sign on its door: F-Bombs dropped here.  It amused me to think that both of the stores were, perhaps, owned by the same enterprising merchant.  In any event, neither was open.

I was intrigued by a shop that advertised that it sold fine olive oils and balsamic vinegars.  The shop’s storefront said that it was “tasting bar.”  Inside, a slender woman in her sixties was reading a paperback behind a granite counter-top.  She greeted me with a little skepticism.  Lining the walls were stainless steel canisters, all identical and about the size of a large coffee pot or samovar.  Identical bottles occupied the niches enclosing the canisters, flanking those containers.  I told the woman that I had never seen a place of this sort.  She raised her eyebrows: “Really?” she asked.  I wondered why she wasn’t down in La Jolla or Coral Gables.  She probably wondered the same thing since she looked a little morose.  No prices were listed anywhere – I suppose it would be gauche to a suggest that someone in the market for exotic olive oils or hand-made balsamic vinegars would care about the prices for these luxury products.  I selected a bottle of pomegranate balsamic vinegar.  The woman watched me closely and was concerned, I think, that I would drop the precious stuff and break the bottle on the floor.  

“Can I help you?” she asked.  

I said no.

She asked me if I would bring her the bottle so that I could shop “hands-free.”

I carried the bottle over to the counter and set it on the granite.  She reached out, fumbled the thing, and the glass clicked hard against the stone.  For a moment, I expected the bottle to break but it simply rolled on its side in her direction where she caught it before it toppled onto her lap.

“These counters are so wide,” she said.

I bought a couple more bottles.  The woman asked me if I wanted to taste the merchandise.  I told her that this was unnecessary.  I supposed the balsamic vinegar tasted like vinegar; I presumed that the olive oil tasted like olive oil.   

I drove back to the resort with my precious cargo.  On the way back, I stopped at grocery store on the edge of town.  The food prices at the grocery was shocking.  A can of tomato soup that would cost two dollars at Walmart was selling for $5.99.  Ramen noodles, normally 30 cents a bag, were selling for 80 cents apiece.  I entered the resort offices.  Not one but three desk clerks were crowding around the check-in computer terminal.  This seemed odd to me – there were only six cabins available for rent and only three of them seemed to be occupied.  I asked the clerks about the odd buildings with the faded blue siding across the empty lot from the office.  

“That’s a very sinister-looking building,” I said.

The girl nodded her head: “I agree.”

“What is it?”

She said that when the resort closed in 1980, the place was a Summer hockey camp for forty years.  The big rectangular structures had been a dormitory.

“That’s a scary building,” I said.  “I was wondering what kind of cult lived here.”

“Well, when you return next time, the buildings will be gone.  We’re going to have them demolished this Spring.”

I thanked the three clerks for the information and went to the cabin to show Julie my bottles of vinegar and olive oil.     

I suppose there are cults lurking in the North Woods.  Once, I visited my father-in-law’s cabin on a more remote lake northeast of Duluth.  If you’re not a “lake cabin” person, the pleasures of being “up north” as it is said pall quickly: after an obligatory tour of the shoreline in the row boat powered by an outboard Evinrude motor, you sit on a porch and watch water-skiiers; inside, people are napping or frying something or reading dog-eared mystery novels – flies slip through the screen door every time it is opened and kids amuse themselves swatting them.  Bored with these tepid amusements, I went for a drive.  The road running north toward the Canadian border was suspiciously smooth, well-maintained, and straight, grinding its way through tamarack swamps and endless forests in which pine and fir trees planted by logging companies stood in obedient, perfectly straight ranks lining the polished black top. After thirty miles, the highway came to a dead end.  At the turn-around, underbrush veiled a lake, a prism of water green with algae.  An extension of the asphalt curved through the trees to a stout gate that was padlocked.  Beyond the fence bearing a shrill spiral of razor wire at its top, I could see part of the lake on which a twin-float plane was bobbing off-shore.  Some aluminum docks slipped down into the water and I could see a compound of steel sheds near a nondescript house covered in blue siding with several clapboard cottages attached.  What kind of place was this? – at the end of the road with nothing between this compound and the north pole but several thousand miles of forests, one of two lonely roads and a vast, empty tundra stretching to the Arctic Sea.

I recall that once I attended a family re-union for which an out-of-use Girl Scout camp had been rented.  There was no electricity at the site, but the buildings were reasonably well-maintained and someone had cut the lawns in the clearings where there were flagpoles with cottages standing under the tall, straight columns of the pine trees.  During the day, the place was cheerful with curved trails leading down to a small oval lake on which a wooden dock floated on pontoons.  Picnic tables stood in the shade and there was a fire-pit on the bluff above the water where a shelter made from field stone and heavy timber with a shingled roof had been erected.  It was all pleasant and convivial and the sunset over the lake lingered for a long time as if the summer sky was unwilling to surrender it’s light and, then, when it was finally dark, a bonfire hissed and crackled and threw its orange light at the edges of the great forest.  Someone carrying a lantern led us to our cabin and there it was pitch-black and the inside of the sleeping area smelled of pine-resin expressed from the log walls by the heat of the day.  In the corners of the cabin, there were rustling noises and I supposed that the overhead beams and joists were swarming with spiders and centipedes and, perhaps, the sounds under the iron bedframes and springs were made by mice or bats or, even, marauding raccoons.  In the modern world, we are accustomed to electrically powered light and it was strange and disturbing to be in the middle of the vast forest without any light any where to be seen.  

I was grateful that we had missed the first day of the reunion and that we had to spend only one night in the girl scout camp cabin.  Early in the morning, when the first light of dawn drew me outside, I walked along the soft, pillowy trail covered in pine-needles up to the fire-pit where a wan, greyish swirl of smoke was rising.  My sister-in-law was sitting at the picnic table with a mug of coffee in front of her, the drink also emitting a little coil of steam.  It was chilly and my sister-in-law, who lives up north and likes to camp, was wearing a tattered sweater.  She told me that the night before we came to the reunion, the family’s sleep was disturbed by a pulsing sound, a sort of rhythmic humming from across the lake that some interpreted as chanting.  The next morning, a couple of the men took a canoe and paddled across the water to a landing flagged with “No Trespassing” signs.  They ignored the signs, beached their canoe and walked up into the woods.  In a small clearing, the men found some folding chairs arranged around a sooty fire-pit and a dead cat.  

“What do you think?” my sister-in-law asked.

“I didn’t hear anything last night,” I said.

“No, it was quiet last night,” my sister-in-law said.  “It’s a satanic cult,” she added.

“I’m glad I didn’t know about it,” I said.

We left the camp around noon, a little after lunch.  It was a long drive back to our home in the southern part of the State.

The next morning during our Valentine’s Day get-away, dawn lifted the darkness over the lake below our post-modern cabin and I saw that there were new sled marks in the snow drifted against the edge of the frozen lake.  More tracks had appeared below the hillside.  After I dressed, I gingerly walked the path leading down the steep slope to the ice.  There were patches of ice on the trail and I didn’t want to slip and fall and roll down onto the ice.  At the edge of the lakeshore, I saw that the ice was in disarray next to the bank, mottled with blue transparent windows showing through the veins of snow.  The marks made by sled-runners (at least, so I interpreted them) curved in parallel out across the ice, visible where there were patches of snow, but otherwise not discernible an the plates and shields of frozen lake.  All of the marks angled toward the island and the place where the thumb-shaped boulder stood like an apparition at the edge of the underbrush.  It was probably just a trick of the light slipping obliquely over the lake, but the tracks looked as if they had been made by bare feet.  Sole-marks sprouted little toe impressions.  It may have been that the sun from the previous day had somehow melted around the footprints and distorted them.  

On the night-stand next to the bed, a machine offered noise in different hues to assist guests in falling asleep.  The noise could be tuned to “white,” “brown” or “green.”  As Julie packed for out check-out, I tinkered with device.  The “white” noise was a faint sizzle, like rain falling on metal roof.  “Brown” was more granular, sandy, something like the feeling of a beach underfoot.  The “green” noise was the color of algae in a lake simmering under a hot sun, iridescent dragon-flies with great rainbow-colored wings hovering over the moss-colored glaze floating on the water.  I wondered if the noise machine had been placed to keep people from hearing the rhythmic chanting coming from across the lake.

When checking-out, I asked about the footprints in the snow covering the ice.  

“People see those all the time,” one of the clerks told me.  (Today two young women wearing ski-sweaters were manning the front desk.)

“I thought they were barefoot,” I said.

“Probably people using the barrel sauna and, then, cooling down with a trot over the lake,” the other clerk said.  But she looked a little disturbed and glanced to her colleague.

The other clerk asked me where the footprints led.

“Over to the island,” I said.

The young woman said that there was a natural spring at the edge of the island, near a big rock on the bank.  

“It doesn’t freeze in that place,” the young woman said.  “Many years ago, a couple of kids drowned next to the island.  They pulled them out of the water, but they were dead.  Then, they dragged them over the ice on sleds.”

“When was that?”

“No one knows, but a long time ago,” the young woman said.     

We checked-out and drove home.  We made good time from the pine forests to there corn and soy-bean fields, unplowed and lying Winter-fallow near our town.

Leipzig: Enchiridion and Scholia

 Leipzig: Enchiridion and scholia

1.

An enchiridion is a small volume printed so that it can be readily carried, or, even, concealed in one’s garments.  Generally, such books are spiritual manuals of some sort, hymnals or prayer books or collections of useful aphorisms.  But there are many examples of enchiridions (or plural enchiridia in some sources) that are not religious.  One of the most famous enchiridions from the ancient world is a handbook on Greek prosody.  

Think about why such a volume, properly described as a “handbook”, would need to be inconspicuous and readily hidden.

2.

The Leipzig museum of Phillip Reclam’s Universalbibliothek is not easy to find.  I don’t need to give you walking instructions as to how to reach that place.  I don’t expect you to seek out this collection of old books and so you won’t need directions. 

With Martin and Angelica, I walked from our Hotel, the Seaside, near the Leipzig Bahnhof to the Reclam Museum on Grimmischer Strasse.  The sun was setting and the chill of night well-advanced when we set off, crossing the big plazas near the train station, an arc of open squares left over from bombing and the removal of the city’s medieval walls.  We passed an opera house with white pillars and windows displaying lofty and grandiose stairways.  An obelisk in a shabby park celebrated the inauguration of the Dresden to Leipzig railroad in the 1840's and there was a canal in which a well-regulated river flowed under slightly hunchbacked bridges.  Then, the streets were uniform and barren, mostly empty between completely nondescript modern structures: research facilities (the Max Planck institute has laboratories here) and sterile-looking hotels.

The Reclam Museum is inside a parking ramp.  You walk along a cold sidewalk next to the entrance ramp and, then, a sign directs you through some grim, concrete corridors, lodged between levels of parked cars, to the small museum.  On one side of the brightly lit room, an enormous bookshelf holds every Reclam edition published prior to 1945.  On the opposite side of the chamber, another equally enormous bookshelf lines a wall and contains Reclam editions, arranged in chronological order from World War Two to the present.  Glass cases contain rare editions and books noteworthy for one reason or another.  The small books are displayed next to typed labels on glass shelving, standing upright against frames of the sort you might find in someone’s bedroom enclosing pictures of family members, or a boyfriend, or a beloved pet.  Some vertical shelves that rotate on a central access are in the middle of the room where there are a couple chairs and an old, plush couch.  

The proprietor of this museum is Hans-Jochen Marquardt and, fortunately, he was present when we showed up at his door.  Marquardt is 70, a distinguished-looking man with a cheerful face in a halo of white hair and whiskers.  He seems a bit heavy-set, but isn’t fat – it’s just the shape of his body.  When we came to the museum, there were two other visitors, both of them sitting rather uncomfortably on the sofa.  These were also tourists, possibly from Scotland or Australia (I couldn’t figure this out), English-speaking like us, and, obviously, anxious to escape Marquardt’s hospitality to attend some other function, a place that they had to reach at a specific and imminent time as the woman, a lean girl with stringy blonde hair and woolen mittens tacked to her sleeves, kept reminding her boyfriend, using a loud enough voice to make sure the message was understood by our host.  The young man looked sullen and resentful as if he couldn’t believe that he had been dragged to a place like this and, then, lectured by the proprietor as to the history of the little books in glass cases – a lecture that seemed capable of telescoping itself through time to be an hour or ten hours long or, even, long enough to last your entire lifetime.  When we entered the room, Herr Marquardt brightened visibly, happy to have additional visitors to attend to his tour and, after a half hour, the Australians or Scottish students (whatever the case) exploited our interest in the lecture to slide out the door sideways, making faint protestations of regret.  

As I have remarked, the better a Germans English, the more apologetic the speaker.  Herr Marquardt disclaimed any real facility in English, making these disclaimers in elegant, grammatically precise words.  He told us that his wife is English-speaking, a native of South Africa (although he met her at the University of Wisconsin in Madison); however, he said he speaks only German at home and, as a consequence, his English had deteriorated somewhat.  Of course, Herr Marquardt was easily understood and faltered only with respect to esoteric English terms, words that I could readily supply him when he stuttered a bit and paused.  He was a charming and voluble fellow and not in any hurry to depart from his museum for other pursuits; it’s a place that is his labor of love.  

In Homer’s Odyssey, visitors (xenia – or strangers) are greeted with hospitality that includes slaves washing the guest’s feet and bathing his hands, roast meat on skewers, and “sweet, strong wine.”  After these amenities, your host asks: “What is your name?  How have you come to this place?  Who is your father?”  And, so, after an initial walk around the room, and after Herr Marquardt told us that he had collected every Reclam edition known to exist, a total exceeding 10,000 volumes, all displayed on the huge shelves bookending the room, he made polite inquiries as to our identities and why we had come to visit his museum.  

3.

I began acquiring Reclam editions myself in college, now 45 years ago.  Lower level German classes used readers with glosses (scholia) in the margins or footnotes.  These were books designed for elementary and mid-level instruction in German literature.  But more advanced classes invariably were assigned Reclam volumes.  The books were, then, and remain now, very affordable.  They are light, readily carried in a pocket, and well-edited – indeed, the Reclam textural and editorial apparatus is renowned; most German literature exists in definitive, carefully annotated Reclam editions.  For instance, if you want to read Gottfried Benn’s shorts stories published as Gehirne (“Brains”), you will likely encounter the work in a Reclam edition, with textural variants identified in the end-notes and a critical essay by a leading critic specializing in the work explaining the context and meaning of the writing.  These are not necessarily student editions, although they are often assigned in that setting, but rather full-fledged scholarly versions of the text under consideration.

As you progress through German studies, more and more of the required reading consists of studying Reclam volumes.  Students are poor and move a lot and most people studying German don’t keep their books.  As a result Reclam editions pile up in used bookstores near campuses and can be easily purchased for coins when I was younger, or a few dollars now.  I have a hundred or more of the little books, easily recognized by their size (they are about 3 x 5 inches) and color – the books are a bright vibrant yellow.  Often the used books that I have acquired show little sign of being read – generally, there is a name inscribed on the first page of the text, a few light underlinings in the afterword by the critic, but no trace otherwise that the writing so lovingly edited has been read by the former owner of the book.  When a friend of mine left the country in something of a hurry, she abandoned her Reclams to me, a stack of little volumes including poetry by Ludwig Uhland (a favorite book), essays on the “Aufklaerung” (“Enlightenment”) focusing primarily on a famous text by Kant, plays by Lessing and Schiller, collections of modern and baroque lyric poetry, several volumes of novella by Theodor Storm, Benn’s Gehirne, and so on.  Years ago I read Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissius Simplicimmus in a Reclam version.  The first book of this sort that I bought for a class was not even originally in German – it was a translation into German from the Latin, Tacitus’ Germania.  The course that I was taking involved medieval German literature and I also had to buy a copy of the Latin vita of Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne) once again translated into German as well as an abridged Parzival by Wolfram von Eschebach and a picaresque poem, written in doggerel (“Knittelvers”) called Meier Helmbrecht.  I continue to acquire these books even today.  During the Covid quarantine, I bought a copy of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and read a few pages each day until I had completed that long and maddening novel.  

To my eyes, Reclam Universal Bibliothek editions, the compact yellow volumes with tiny print, epitomize what books should be and, so, I understand the impulse to collect these things.  Despite their small size and the light paper on which they are printed, the volumes are surprisingly durable.  I own a copy of Theodor Storm’s novella Aquis Submersus that lost its cover due to being crushed in someone’s pocket.  The covers on these things, all alike in any event, are unnecessary.  The book held together fine even in mutilated form and I still have it on my shelf. (You can’t shelve the little Reclam editions with normal sized books – they get swallowed up and lost; instead, you pile up about a dozen of them and put the stack at the front of your bookcase.)  A much-thumbed version of Hamann’s Aesthetica in Nuce (or the Socratische Denkwuerdigkeiten) that I translated when I was about thirty – almost forty years have passed from that time – is still in good enough condition to be read and, sometimes, I peruse this old friend.  When I decided to read Eichendorrf’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts this last Spring, I used a Reclam edition, handy, easily carried, with small legible print, something I could take with me to the Nature Center and sit and read on a bench on a remote bench two miles by woodland trail from the parking lot.  Birds sang while I read and the trees rustled and a little box-elder bug explored my sleeve.  What could be more wonderful?

Although I treasure these books and like to handle them (if I’m sad or lonely I will deal the books out on a table like cards and, then, shuffle and re-shuffle them), I don’t have any illusions as to their fate after my death.  I presume someone will gather them up and toss them in a waste-bin and that will be that.   

4.

Herr Marquardt took my enthusiasm for Reclam editions for granted.  Needless to say, he shared my interest and his passion surpassed mine by many orders of magnitude.  He showed me his favorite books.  Of course, there is the first volume in the Reclam Universal-Bibliothek series, predictably Goethe’s Faust,  printed in 1867.  (For some obscure reason, the first actual text in the series, published a few months earlier, is Shakespeare’s Romeo und Juliet, demoted to number 5 to give Goethe’s classic pride of place.)  There are rare volumes, for instance, Heine banned and burned by the Nazis, also rare books in the series that were suppressed by the Communist authorities.  Reclam editions had such authority in Germany that during both world wars there were so-called “Tarn-Editions” (that is, counterfeits) printed by the Allies and dropped by the thousands onto the front lines.  One example is a slim book called Zwei Fragen (“Two Questions –that is “Why are you fighting?” and “What is your objective?”)  The notion was that soldiers would be demoralized to discover anti-war messages in their beloved field editions of the German (and world) classics.  Herr Marquardt pointed out several ammo boxes stuffed with Reclam editions, circulating libraries as it were to distribute books in the trenches.  The display cases are full of autographs on letters or signed galley proofs – you can see the signatures of Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rilke and others.  Black and white pictures show dignitaries greeting authors.  People wear tuxedos and stand with hand’s extended toward the writers in front of ranks of German academics, professorial types with medals on their chests and long white beards.

Anton Phillip Reclam (1807 - 1897) was a Leipzig bookseller.  At age 21, he acquired a press and issued small books and pamphlets of a Leftist revolutionary persuasion.  (In the political agitation preceding the uprisings of 1848, Reclam ran afoul of the authorities and was sent to prison for publishing a translation of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.)  When the revolutions were suppressed, Reclam focused on printing literary classics, primarily Shakespeare.  In 1837, the Austrian legislature, the body with authority over Leipzig, enacted a law allowing copyrights to pass into the public domain after the lapse of thirty years.  It’s for this reason that Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek was inaugurated in that year with the publication of Goethe’s Faust, a work then in the public domain.  Reclam, then, initiated a series of books making German classic literature, mostly Schiller, Lessing, and Goethe, available to the general public in very cheap “little yellow editions.”  By the time of his death in 1897, Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek boasted 3500 separate volumes.  By 1908, the Bibliothek had expanded to 5000 volumes.  By this point, the Leipzig publishing house was printing not only world classics but works by modern German authors such as Mann, Hesse, and Hoffmanstahl.  In 1927, Thomas Mann, then regarded as Germany’s greatest writer and a Nobel prize winner, delivered an address commemorating the hundred year centenary of the publishing house.  

During the Nazi era, the regime forbade the publication of Jewish writer such as Heine and suppressed works by Mann, Franz Werfel, and other emigre authors.  On December 4, 1943, Allied bombers destroyed Leipzig and with it the Reclam publishing enterprise and warehouses – reportedly 450 tons of books were incinerated.  After the War, Reclam’s headquarters were moved to Stuttgart in West Germany to avoid the restrictions and censorship imposed by the Soviet-backed East German government that controlled the Leipzig facility.  The East German branch of Reclam was nationalized by the government and continued as an influential publishing house based in Leipzig.  Meanwhile, the Stuttgart (West German) division also continued printing books in the Universal Bibliothek series in the West.  Hans Marquardt, an influential broadcaster in the Eastern zone, was appointed the chief executive officer and director of Phillip Jr. Reclam Verlag (as the Leipzig operation was known).  Marquardt, the father of our tour guide, operated the enterprise for 26 years, specializing in the Universal Bibliothek’s publication of Russian avant-garde writers and contemporary DDR authors.  (He also supervised the printing of coffee-table books on the arts, the so-named “schoene Buecher”, and, a literary scholar himself, edited no fewer than 100 volumes for publication.)  Hans Marquardt was awarded every literary prize available in the East and was a famous man in Leipzig and the DDR.  He was considered a liberal and sufficiently powerful (and courageous) to periodically oppose the regime’s efforts to suppress books in the DDR.  His son, Hans-Jochen Marquardt, showed me an edition of Jerome Salinger’s Fanger in der Roggen (J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), a novel detested by the East German Communist authorities but championed by his father.  The last volume published by Herr Marquardt’s father was a book printed by the Verlag about the time of the October 1989 rebellion in Leipzig against the Communist regime.  The book is on display in the museum and is called Der Uebergangs Gesellschaft (“The Transition Society”).  On the cover of the book a woodcut in the style of Barlach or Kaethe Kollwitz shows a burly giant on the threshold of a burning house.  The giant, Herr Marquardt told me, is Prometheus, the divine figure who taught the first men how to use fire.  There was a polemical battle over the volume’s cover.  Is Prometheus running into the burning house to extinquish the flames?  This was the interpretation preferred by the Communist authorities – the house was on fire but the flames could be extinguished and the structure saved.  Or was Prometheus fleeing the fire that he had set himself to free the inhabitants of a building that was doomed to burn to the ground.  This meaning could also be read from the cover of the book which is, in fact, ambiguous.  Herr Marquardt assured me that his father intended the latter interpretation – the house was on fire, the blaze had been set by the God to liberate men, and the structure would burn to the ground.  For a year after the destruction of the Wall in Berlin, there was a uncertainty as to whether the political and social institutions in East Germany would be preserved in a State within the State or as a federation of some kind.  But this uncertainty was resolved in favor of the complete elimination of East Germany – the Communist State and its structures were wholly dissolved.  

Hans Marquardt died at his estate on the island of Ruegen northwest of Hamburg, on November 11, 2004.  Part of his wealth was used to found an institute for the preservation of culture and the arts on Ruegen.  

Hans-Jochen Marquardt told me that he wasn’t close to his father.  His mother and father divorced when he was 14.  Nonetheless, he attended many of the gala functions associated with first editions printed by Reclam and met most of Germany’s leading writers.  A photograph in one of the display cases shows a group of young people bowing slightly to the famous anti-Fascist novelist Anna Seghers.  Seghers was Jewish and fled Germany for Mexico in 1937 – there she wrote the novel The Seventh Cross (1939) adapted into a Hollywood movie promoting American intervention in the European war.  (The movie was released in 1944 and stars Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy, and Agnes Moorhead).  Seghers returned to Berlin in 1947 and, a Communist supporter, voluntarily moved to the Eastern sector of the city.  She was one of Hans Marquardt’s leading writers and, in the picture, the grand dowager holds a book and a pen.  The young Hans-Jochen Marquardt is reaching forward to shake her hand – “they made me wear a tuxedo to meet her,” Marquardt recalled to us.  Marquardt said that Seghers was a terrible reader of her own work; she spoke in a hurried, soft monotone and made no attempt to dramatize the text.  By contrasts, Marquardt said, Guenter Grass was a fantastically effective reader, theatrically highlighting his work and employing various accents and dialects to establish differences between characters.  Marquardt told me that he heard Grass read several times and that the writer was always fantastic.  

My readers can interpret Marquardt’s obsessive project, acquiring every single volume of the ten-thousand published by Reclam as a reflection of his vexed relationship with his father.  It seems no accident that Marquardt’s collecting activities commenced when he was 14, the year that his father divorced his mother.  A larger divorce loomed over the collection.  The division of Reclam into two competing entities, one East and one West, required Hans-Jochen to acquire not only the books released by the Leipzig operation, helmed by his father, but also the editions printed in Stuttgart in the Bundesrepublik.  Herr Marquardt resents the implication that his father assisted him in acquiring the books that comprise the collection – to the contrary, Hans-Jochen told me, his father didn’t help him at all with regard to locating and purchasing rare examples in the library of the Reclam Universal Bibliothek.  When Hans-Jochen told his formidable father that he was collecting Reclam editions, the older man sniffed at him and said: “I prefer to collect fine art, not cheaply printed mass-market books.”  Our interlocutor was a good East German, a supporter of the regime, and, presumably, rewarded for this loyalty.  He told me that he was elected to city council and provincial parliament seats on several occasions and that he traveled widely as a young man, attending literary conferences frequently in Moscow.  (In school, of course, he was taught Russian not English, hence, his anxiety about the quality of his spoken words to us.)  Hans-Jochen is seventy.  He looks like a German version of me.  He is my brother. 

5.

During our conversation, I told Hans-Jochen Marquardt that we went to see the Stasi museum at the Runde Ecke, that is, the Staatssicherheit or “state security (secret police) headquarters.  He seemed a bit discomfited by that information and looked away from us, glancing out from his bunker under the cement parking lot, to the facades of the houses across the street.

The Stasi Museum in Leipzig is a place that is alternatively horrible, comical, and inspiring.  The museum documents the intrusive and surreal surveillance of East German citizens and the Staatsicherheit’s repressive measures – this is the horrible aspect of the exhibition.  The comedy lies in the Stasi’s bumbling efforts to conceal their activities, their ridiculously obsessive repressive measures, and their bizarre overreach – Hitler had something like 50,000 Gestapo; the DDR had over 200,000 agents to scrutinize a much smaller population and, ultimately, more than half the population was informing on the other half, measures that were documented with thorough, and inadvertently hilarious, Teutonic efficiency.  The inspirational aspect of the museum is its documentation of resistance to the Communist regime, the fearlessness of some of the Lutheran pastors and students who opposed the authorities, and, ultimately, the mass demonstrations that brought down the government.  I toured the museum when I was in Leipzig a few years ago and found the experience intensely interesting but, also, emotionally disturbing and, so, I vowed not to go to the Runde Ecke again.  But, on this visit, Martin was with me and I thought that he should see the museum and so we spent an hour-and-a-half there.  

People who worked in this office building, returning twenty years after the regime collapsed, report that the place preserves its characteristic odor – it smells, it is said, like it did in the seventies and former employees (or prisoners) are immediately transported back to the DDR by the scent in the air in the building.  There’s an odor of steam heat volatilizing dust on radiators, the faint smell of cigarettes imbuing the drywall and doors (everyone chain-smoked here), an odor of sweat and fear, the smell of carbon-paper and typewriter ink combined with the stench of mildew – the place feels damp and noisome.  (In a recent essay, Timothy Garton Ash recalled the perfume of the old DDR, a combination of diesel exhaust from inefficient Trabant vehicles, the stink of cheap Chinese-made cigarettes, disinfectant, and body odor – he notes that this was the aroma that met him when he first crossed the Berlin Wall into the rubble-strewn lanes and empty lots of old East Berlin.  The smell is gone now, but older people, Ash observes, recall it with a certain bitter nostalgia or “Ostalgia” as it is sometimes called.)

If you disregard the horror, the Runde Ecke has a clownish, Monty Pythonesque aspect.  The small rooms are full of displays cluttered with bombastic medals and ribbons, banners of all sorts, plaques embossed with Marxist-Leninist slogans, an entire surreal world now cast aside and rotting in the dust-bin of history.  Stasi operatives once flounced about in unconvincing wigs and moustaches.  Leipzig’s streets were full of weird-looking figures wearing leisure suits and jackets padded with cameras and recording devices; these apparitions looked like they had stumbled out of a High School theatrical production, faces made-up and sporting improbable wigs and whiskers.  Briefcases and brassieres were fitted out with tiny cameras.  People suspected of subversion had their body odor captured and stored in zip-lock bags.  Archives of underwear and sweat-stained tee-shirts were on file so that savage dogs could be pressed into service literally sniffing-out subversives.  Every letter received from outside the DDR, and, ultimately, it seems every piece of intra-state correspondence as well was laboriously steamed-open and inspected by secret police goons.  (Equipment for this purpose is on display in the museum – it looks like the gear in some infernal laundry.)  This practice led to an entire genre of gallows humor: one young man sent a letter to a friend remarking that he had concealed a gun in the garden behind his house; predictably, Stasi agents appeared and dug up the entire garden, leaving the lawn ripped apart and gouged full of holes – the kid is, then, said to have written to his grandmother to tell her that she should send the tulip bulbs previously ordered for planting since the garden “has now been tilled and carefully dug up and is ready for cultivation.”  Apparently, everyone kept pictures of Marx and Lenin on their walls as insurance against persecution.  Armies of finks, rats, stool-pigeons and informers (Mitarbeiter) were recruited to file reports on their neighbors – as the regime collapsed into rampant paranoia more than 300,000 informers were busily spying on each other: of course, with this number of rats in the population, the informers spent most of their time informing on the suspicious conduct of other informers. Spies spied on spies who spied back on them, creating weird and paranoiac Moebius loops of clandestine data.  Registries were created to document sexual encounters of people under surveillance.  The polity was so intensely involved in gathering information on its own citizens that it really didn’t have resources to do anything else.  

Things in the DDR changed after Helsinki Human Rights Accords, 1975 conventions to which the East German government was signatory.  The old mobster paradigm of beating people to death in basements yielded to something more sanitary, if equally, brutal.  This was the policy of “Zersetzung” – a word that means something like “ripping apart.”  To avoid accusations of hypocrisy after the Human Rights Accords were inked, principles devised largely to decry repressive practices in the Capitalist West, DDR’s Stasi had to refrain from direct blood-letting.  Instead, they conspired to damage their victims by a death of a thousand cuts.  A salary man, ostensibly on the way up, when under state suspicion would find that he was suddenly excluded from important business conferences, that his girlfriend had inexplicably lost interest in him, that government papers required for licenses or travel had gone missing, that tax filings had been misplaced while anonymous memoranda suddenly appeared at work accusing him of deviation from party principles.  A loan necessary for the purchase of a new home might be denied without explanation and the victim’s children found themselves receiving failing grades and were excluded from all the better schools notwithstanding their diligence and best efforts.  Invitations to birthday parties and other celebrations dried-up.  Bills for purchases never made appeared in the mail and phones rang at all hours although there was never anyone on the other end of the line.  “Zersetzung” consisted of a million minor dirty tricks and its objective was to harass and exhaust the victim and, if possible, drive him or her mad.  People can be destroyed without spilling their blood or busting apart their skulls, particularly when half the population had been enlisted to participate in this harassment of other half.  Promising academic careers simply evaporated into thin air.  Successful businessmen found themselves filing bankruptcy.  Your wife was cold and quarrelsome and, soon enough, she was filing for divorce and your children watched you suspiciously as if awaiting your lapse into some terrible crime.  The larger apartment for which you had yearned for years was no longer available.  The summer cabin at the lake was sold to someone for far less than you would have offered for the property.  

Just before the DDR collapsed, a 14 year old boy with good grades, some athletic ability, and promising prospects wrote a brief essay about passion for cars.  The boy imprudently suggested that the best cars were made in Italy or America and showed some disdain for the badly engineered and noisome Trabants that working class people (if they could afford a car) drove.  The boy’s teacher was a Mitarbeiter, a stool-pigeon, and he photocopied the short essay, obligingly sending his student’s text to some harried bureaucrat at the Runde Ecke, that is, the Stasi building now occupied by the museum.  The bureaucrat faithfully read the essay, wrote some marginal comments on the photocopy as to the boy’s politically incorrect opinions, and, then, typed a short apercu indicating that the young man would be barred from admission to any type of higher education and, even, prohibited from vocational school or working on automobiles – denying the kid access to cars was a sadistic frisson to the plan to thwart the young man at every turn in his future life.  One week after the secret policeman wrote the memo intended to destroy the student’s future, the Berlin Wall collapsed, the East German regime imploded, and, no doubt, the young man, who is now almost fifty lives in Dresden or Prenzlau or, perhaps, Hamburg even, where I hope that he owns his own car dealership or, at least, service station.   

6. 

Hans-Jochun Marquardt, proprietor of the Reclam museum, told me that he had written his doctoral dissertation on Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kolhaas.  In the opening sentence of the novella, Kleist tells his readers that the title character was einer rechstschaffendesten zugleich und erschrecklichsten Menschen seiner of Zeit – that is, “one of the most honest and, at the same time, most terrible men of his time...”

Beginning in 1912, Reclam placed book-vending machines in train stations and hospitals.  These machines were designed by the great architect and industrial engineer Peter Behrens, famous for the massive AEG Turbine-House in Moabit (Berlin) and other iconic structures.  Behrens’ book-vending machine is about 15 inches wide a three feet tall.  Behind a glass pane, Reclam editions are available for purchase, displayed three books across and in four registers (a total of 12 titles available in the device).  The machine is labeled RECLAM in an oval cartouche above the books on display.  The purchaser puts a coin or coins in the side of the automat and, then, punches in the number of the selection shown under each book available for purchase.  At Herr Marquardt’s urging, we put a half-euro coin in the device, typed in our selection, and the machine (dating back to1912), wheezed a little, a screw turning somewhere behind the slender volumes to push a book to the fore where it dropped into a tray at the bottom of the display.  The machine, now 112 years old, was a little cranky but it delivered the goods.  Out of respect for the old DDR, I bought Heiner Mueller’s Revolutionaerstuecke (“Revolutionary Theater Pieces).  Mueller was a renowned avant-garde East German playwright, a generation younger than Bertolt Brecht and completely uncompromising – his proletarian works involve recondite references to Greek mythology and lots of copulation, vomiting, and shit.  (Mueller, who seems to have been a disagreeable person, flourished in parallel with the East German regime that he served; when the DDR collapsed, Stasi files made open to the public showed that the man had been a nasty collaborator with the communist thugs and, of course, an informer; the volume of Mueller’s Revolutionary Theater Pieces includes an afterword, written after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, conscientiously denouncing the author, after praising him fulsomely for ten pages, for his complicity with regime.  The first ten pages were written before the DDR collapsed; the last four paragraphs were composed in 1991.)  Hans-Jochun Marquardt looked at me a bit suspiciously when I bought the Reclam book collecting Mueller’s writings.  Was I making fun of him or his museum or the late lamented DDR?

Herr Marquardt told me that I could use the vending machine to buy a copy of Goethe’s Faust, of course, Reclam’s most popular title, for 1 ½ euros.  

“If you buy the same exact book at Auerbach’s Keller,” Herr Marquardt told me, “it will cost you six euros.”  Auerbach’s Keller is a very old restaurant in the center of Leipzig, a place where student’s gathered in the late medieval period – it’s near Leipzig University – and Goethe frequented the place.  A rambunctious comic episode in Faust is set in the tavern: Mephisto gets everyone drunk on beer and, then, one of the student’s flies around town riding bareback on a big cask or tun of booze that the devil’s emissary has animated.  

Herr Marquardt is the author of a scholarly book called Reclams Universal-Bibliothek: Vollstaendiges Verzeichnis nach Bandnummern 1867 bis 1945 – that is, Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek: Complete index of all volumes from 1867 to 1945.  The publisher of this book?  It’s a handsome bright yellow Reclam edition. 

7.

At the Stasi museum at the Runde Ecke, the entrance to the building (the structure is modeled on an Italian renaissance palazzo) opens into a loggia with a fan-shaped grand stairway leading to a landing.  Panels of text on the walls memorialize victims of Stasi violence and repression and there are some displays about the demonstrations that toppled the regime in the Fall of 1989.  As you climb the marble steps, the entrance divides: the museum is to the right with its information desk and ticket sales behind a double glass door; on the left, a single glass door opens into a reading room where visitors can access files from the Communist era.   A middle-aged woman sits at a reception desk studiously viewing her computer screen.  At cubicle stations behind her, some shadowy figures were stooped over files spread out on their tables.

In the eastern territory of Germany, you might wonder what came between you and your wife, or why your children suddenly became distant and remote.  You might wonder about meetings with your boss at which you were denied promotion or not given the raise that everyone else in the bureau enjoyed.  You might have questions about why your car was unreliable and about bill collectors dunning you for obligations that you didn’t recall having incurred.  Maybe, the answers are in your Stasi file, although, of course, it is sometimes good counsel to not look too closely into events in the past.  Perhaps, you were betrayed by your parents or the woman you loved or your best friend.

After the fall of the DDR, of course, it was revealed that the editor-in-chief of the Reclam Verlag, Hans Marquardt, a man universally respected and, indeed, feared, had been an enthusiastic informal Mitarbeiter with state security police.  The files were open and available at the Runde Ecke for everyone to see.  Marquardt reported to authorities under the title “Hans,” not a particularly inventive official pseudonym, and we should not be surprised that he was entrusted with surveillance of East German literary figures.  His role was to attend gatherings of writers and authors and report on their allegiance to the Communist state.  When German writers in the Bundesrepublik visited the East, Hans was supposed to spy on them and record their contacts with DDR intelligentsia.  For instance, he made memo reports on each occasion that Guenter Grass, reputed to be Germany’s greatest writer in the sixties and seventies, came to the DDR.  No doubt, he made inventories of the people who spoke with Grass after public readings from his books that Hans’ son, Hans-Jochun remembered as being so impressive and memorable.  

Although the comparison is unfair and inexact, it’s pertinent: when the DDR collapsed, its leading writers and artists were profoundly compromised and had a status similar to that of leading Nazi poets and novelists and painters after World War Two.  No one was “de-nazified” as it were after the DDR’s absorption into the German federation, but the darlings of the discredited Communist regime were regarded with suspicion and some degree of contempt.  (The same phenomena vexed Heiner Mueller and the DDR’s greatest painter, Werner Tuebke – both of whom were exposed to some level of derision, despite their accomplishments, based on their association with fallen regime.)  Hans Marquardt had been the chairman of PEN in the DDR, an affiliate branch of the international organization that advocates for free expression and political autonomy for writers.  Of course, Marquardt’s membership in this enterprise in the context of the profoundly repressive and censorious East German regime was more than a little problematic.  Nonetheless, after the DDR collapsed, Marquardt applied to membership in the united Germany PEN organization.  Initially, he was denied membership on the basis of his previous activities involving the DDR Stasi.  It’s possible to construct several narratives about Marquardt.  One might accuse him of complicity with a regime that censored literature and conspired to ruin writers who opposed the Communist government.  But, one might also argue that Marquardt used his prominence in East German literary circles to ameliorate and mitigate harms that might otherwise have been worse if he had not softened government response to writing that the Stasi and its apparatchiks deemed subversive.  This issue of Hans Marquardt’s application to the PEN club for the united German was briefly a cause celebre.  In the end, Marquardt was admitted, primarily on the basis of advocacy by Guenter Grass.  

8.

St. Augustine in his Confessions tells the story of his conversion.  For eight years, he had studied Manicheanism.  During this time, he was intellectually troubled and slid into sexual licentiousness.  Weeping over his transgressions one afternoon, the young Augustine heard voices, “like little children, either boys or girls” reciting again and again the phrase Tolle lege – that is, “Take up and read.”  Augustine had Christian scripture at hand and, commanded by the sing-song voices, opened the book at random.  On the page, he saw verses admonishing the followers of Christ to “walk in the daylight and renounce orgies and drunkenness.”  Augustine construed the text as selected for him by the Holy Spirit and this incident, as he recalls in his memoir, was instrumental in his conversion to Christianity.  

While writing about my recent trip to Germany, I had occasion to recall my German teacher in college, Wolfgang Taraba.  I remembered a party that he had hosted at his home near the University and how he had encouraged my study of German lyric poetry.  I visited him once after graduating from the University after I had been practicing law for a couple of years.  Professor Taraba expressed interest in my career and said that he had been engaged by a downtown Minneapolis law firm to translate internal messages produced by Volkswagen in the context of product liability litigation.  (This was a lawsuit prosecuted by the lawyer David Fitzgerald and Rider & Bennett, a now defunct firm; I had been in the margins of several cases involving Fitzgerald and knew him slightly).  Later, I wrote a letter to Professor Taraba thanking him for his influence.  The letter was ultimately returned to me unopened.  As I recall, Taraba had gone to Germany to visit places in Poland where he had grown up when that territory was part of the Reich.  (“Taraba,” of course, is not German name, but Polish or, indeed, Sarmatian – Professor Taraba’s favorite poet was Johannes Bobrowski, an East German writer, whose first volume of lyrics was called Sarmatische Zeit (“Sarmatian Time”.)  Somewhere in Germany, Professor Taraba died from heart failure.  I don’t know if these facts are literally true, but I believe in them.

I found on my bookshelf a bright yellow Reclam volume containing poems by the German romantic writer Eduard Moerike.  The book was in mint condition, never opened, it seemed, and I had no idea how I acquired the volume or when.  In fact, I was surprised to find this book among the hundred or so Reclam editions that I own.  About four days ago, I opened the book at random and this is what I read:  

(Commenting on the meaning of Moericke’s poem Um Mitternacht (“Around Midnight”), the author’s exegesis of the lyric states – ) “It has always and repeatedly been observed that an opposition between night and the springs (or fountains - Quelle) is embodied in the poem.  Whether this opposition, however, expresses a rigid polarity or signals a conflict between the terms or whether this can be even be decided in favor of one side or the other remains controversial.  (See, for example, Pracht-Fitzell at page 215 contra. Taraba, footnote at page 48.).  

The citation directs the reader to Taraba’s dissertation on file with the University of Muenster (1953), a paper entitled “Past and Present in Eduard Moerike”. 

9.

We left Hans-Jochun Marquardt’s museum, walked to the street corner nearest the parking ramp in which the place was embedded, and, then, went in the exactly wrong direction.  Martin had misread the map on his cell-phone.

We walked for a half-hour along spacious avenues lined by large marble buildings that might have been palaces or the homes of the very wealthy or, perhaps, business enterprises and research institutes too secretive to publish their names street-side.  The villas stood in gardens that would have been fragrant but for the sleet and mist in the air.  At a public park, grassy mounds sloped down to a canal and statues on chest-high plinths gestured to us.  We retraced our steps and reached the Seaside Hotel about forty-five minutes later.

10.

The original meaning for the word “enchiridion” is “small, concealed dagger.”  Greeks and Romans carried enchirdions in their chitons and togas.  The blades were like small hidden books.  Julius Caesar, I think, fell under the thrusts of enchiridions wielded by his fellow Romans, including his friend, Brutus.