Traces of a Wet Crowd
A few stray thoughts as they leave my head:
You become your own poltergeist in an empty room. A fidget, a shuffling step, a stray word muttered: they are the afterechoes of some fleeting agent, whose form was just glimpsed (and then lost) the moment before.
Audiobooks—even the longest are very portable now—alleviate the dullness of manual labor, but there are limits to what a fatigued brain can accept. Tristram Shandy becomes heavy and ponderous if it’s orated to you on the way to the junkyard.
Rough sleeping. The word describes homelessness so much better than any progressive euphemism. As the summer drags on and the heat of the day lingers far into the night, texture of rest coarsens, becomes abrasive by its scarcity. Even householders can feel it.
Reactionary writers of the past had the advantage public life. They could use a hostile readership as a ladder and a whetstone. Anonymity breeds shrillness, a need for the voice to carry where other virtues fail. Ernst Jünger could be puffed up and didactic, but the histrionic tone of the online right is something completely foreign to his work.
Adalbert Stifter wanted to embody the natural world in his literary style, to speak as a stone would speak, as he put it. Wolfgang Hilbig wanted to speak if he were below that stone, as if he were buried by it. The first is an author of pastoral fiction, the second a writer of horror. A few feet in any direction can make a big difference.
Poe, translated by Arno Schmidt, was a favorite boyhood writer of Hilbig, a fact that could stand in for Hilbig’s style in general.
Travelling across America, going from forest to desert and then back to forest, you notice increasing density of wildlife by the number roadkill along the highway.
