Vol. 30 No. 15 · 31 July 2008
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Looking
through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of
Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired
electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and
dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his
right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of
the wall, which comes up to his waist.
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- Homecoming
by Bernhard Schlink translated by Michael Henry Heim
Towards
the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is
pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his
former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a
concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a
15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him:
‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging
was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.’ He has lost his belief in
post-Enlightenment law as enacting a gradual but steady progress towards
‘greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks
and retreats’. Now the law seems to him more like Odysseus’ journey – a process
that endlessly circles back to its original starting point only to set off
again. In this reading, the Odyssey is a story of motion, at once successful and
futile, driven and without aim: ‘What else is the history of law?’
If
you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our
most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow
ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a
dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give
up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for
paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a
person when they’re not looking? As chief scientist in charge of making the
world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least
lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the
dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time.
Also
in this issue
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