AN INVENTORY OF LOSSES
Also by Judith Schalansky in English translation
Atlas of Remote Islands
The Giraffe’s Neck
Copyright © 2018 by Judith Schalansky
Translation copyright © 2020 by Jackie Smith
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as Verzeichnis einiger Verluste by Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, in 2018. This edition is published by arrangement with MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Lines from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson,
copyright © 2002 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
First published in cloth by New Directions by 2020
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date
Names: Schalansky, Judith, 1980– author. | Smith, Jackie (Translator), translator.
Title: An inventory of losses / Judith Schalansky ; translated from the German by Jackie Smith.
Other titles: Verzeichnis einiger Verluste. English
Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2020.
| Includes index. | Translated from the German.
Identifiers: lccn 2020004722 | isbn 9780811229630 (cloth ; acid-free paper)
| isbn 9780811229944 (ebook)
Classification: lcc pt2720.a63 a2 2020 | ddc 833/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004722
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
CONTENTS
Preamble
Preface
Tuanaki
Caspian Tiger
Guericke’s Unicorn
Villa Sacchetti
The Boy in Blue
The Love Songs of Sappho
The Von Behr Palace
The Seven Books of Mani
Greifswald Harbor
Encyclopedia in the Wood
Palace of the Republic
Kinau’s Selenographs
Index of Persons
Index of Images and Sources
Landmarks
Cover
Preamble
While I was working on this book, the Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere; the Schiaparelli Mars lander crashed in the rust-colored rocky landscape of the planet it was supposed to be exploring; a Boeing 777 disappeared without trace en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing; in Palmyra, the 2,000-year-old Temples of Baal and Baalshamin, the facade of the Roman theater, the Monumental Arch, the tetrapylon, and parts of the Great Colonnade were blown up; in Mosul, Iraq, the Great Mosque of al-Nuri and the Mosque of the Prophet Jonah were destroyed and in Syria the Early Christian Monastery of St. Elian was reduced to rubble; in Kathmandu an earthquake caused the Dharahara Tower to collapse for the second time; a third of the Great Wall of China fell victim to vandalism and erosion; unknown perpetrators stole the head from the corpse of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau; Guatemala’s Lake Atescatempa, once renowned for its blue-green waters, dried up; the archlike rock formation on the coast of Malta known as the Azure Window collapsed into the Mediterranean; the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, native to the Great Barrier Reef, became extinct; the last-known male northern white rhinoceros had to be put to sleep at the age of forty-five, survived by only two specimens of this subspecies: his daughter and his granddaughter; the only existing sample of metallic hydrogen, obtained after eighty years of fruitless efforts, disappeared from a laboratory at Harvard University, and no one knows whether the microscopically small particle was stolen or destroyed or simply reverted to a gaseous state.
While I was working on this book, an archivist at New York’s Schaffer Library found in an almanac dating from 1793 an envelope containing several strands of gray hair belonging to George Washington; a hitherto unknown Walt Whitman novel and the lost album Both Directions at Once by the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane came to light; a nineteen-year-old intern discovered hundreds of Piranesi drawings in Karlsruhe State Museum’s collection of works on paper; a double page of Anne Frank’s Diary which had brown paper pasted over it was successfully deciphered; the world’s oldest alphabet, carved on stone tablets 3,800 years ago, was identified; image data were successfully reconstructed from the photographs taken in 1966–67 by the Lunar Orbiters; fragments were discovered of two hitherto unknown poems by Sappho; ornithologists recorded several sightings, in a Brazilian tree savanna, of blue-eyed ground doves which had been presumed extinct since 1941; biologists discovered the wasp species Deuteragenia ossarium, which builds multichamber nests in hollow tree trunks for its young, placing a dead spider ready in each chamber as a source of nutrition; in the Arctic the wrecks of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror from the ill-fated 1848 Franklin Expedition were located; archaeologists in northern Greece unearthed an enormous burial mound, the final resting place probably not of Alexander the Great but possibly of his companion Hephaestion; Mahendraparvata, the first Khmer capital, thought to have been the largest settlement of the Middle Ages, was discovered close to the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia; archaeologists working in the necropolis of Saqqara happened upon a mummification workshop; in the Cygnus constellation, 1,400 light years from our sun, a celestial body was found, in a so-called habitable zone, on which the average temperature is similar to that of Earth, meaning there may be or may once have been water there, and hence also life, such as we imagine life to be.
Preface
On an August day a few years ago I visited a town in the north. It lies on one of the innermost bays of a marine inlet that has extended far into the interior of the land since a prehistoric ice age, and whose brackish water is home in spring to herring, in summer to eels, in autumn to cod and in winter to carp, pike, and bream, hence fishermen ply their trade there to this day. For centuries these men and their families have lived in a neighborhood that can only be described as quaint, consisting of little more than two cobbled streets, a drying place for the nets and a monastery now occupied only by two aristocratic old ladies. In short, it is one of those seemingly timeless places that might very well tempt one to believe that some bygone age as vague as it is appealing is still alive today. Yet it was not the flowering rosebushes and leggy hollyhocks in front of the squat, whitewashed houses, nor their brightly painted wooden doors or the narrow alleys between the buildings, most of them leading straight down to the stony shore, that particularly lodged in my memory, but rather the peculiar fact that, in the village center, instead of a market square, I found a graveyard, shaded by the green foliage of young lime trees and enclosed by cast-iron railings, in other words the fact that, in the place where normally goods would be exchanged for money, instead the dead and buried were doing what, out of entrenched wishful thinking, is generally termed “resting in peace.” My astonishment, which I initially took for unease, was considerable and was further compounded when someone pointed out to me the house of a woman who, whi
le she cooked, was able to look out from her kitchen upon the grave of her prematurely deceased son, and it became clear to me that the centuries-old tradition of the guild that takes care of the funeral rites here had resulted in the dead and the living of the same family ending up in the kind of close proximity I had previously only heard of in the case of the inhabitants of certain Pacific islands. Of course I had visited other notable burial sites before: the cemetery island of San Michele, for instance, which, with its high red-brick walls, looms up out of the turquoise water of the lagoon of Venice like an impenetrable fortress, or the garish stalls in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to mark the Día de los Muertos celebrated annually by the Mexican people, with graves decked out in orange and yellow, and skulls made from brightly colored sugar and papier-mâché, doomed by their advanced state of decay to grin in perpetuity. Yet none touched me as deeply as the fishing community’s cemetery, whose peculiar shape—a kind of compromise between a circle and a square—struck me as the very emblem of the remarkable utopia I saw embodied there: a life where death was always in view. For a long time I was convinced that in this place, whose Danish name means “small island” or “surrounded by water,” one is closer to life, precisely because its inhabitants had literally brought the dead into their midst instead of—as is otherwise the norm in our latitudes—banishing them from the heart of the community to beyond the city gates, although these burial sites often became reintegrated into the urban environment only a short time later, the result of unchecked urban sprawl.
Only now, having almost finished work on this book in which the diverse phenomena of decomposition and destruction play a central role, have I realized that this is just one of myriad ways of dealing with death, one that is fundamentally no more crude or caring than that of the Callatiae tribe whose custom, as Herodotus attests, was to eat their deceased parents, and who were horrified when they learned of the Greeks’ tradition of cremating theirs. Indeed opinions differ as to who is closer to life: someone constantly reminded of his own mortality or someone who manages to suppress all thought of it, and likewise on the question of which is more terrifying: the notion that everything comes to an end, or the thought that it may not.
There is no disputing, though, that death and the associated problem of how to deal with the sudden absence of a person at the same time as the presence of their legacy, from the corpse to the abandoned belongings, have, over time, demanded answers and prompted actions that have had a significance beyond their strict purpose and mark the elevation of our early ancestors from the animal to the human sphere. Not simply giving over the mortal remains of the fellow members of our species to the natural processes of decomposition is generally regarded as something peculiar to humans, although similar behavior can also be observed in other higher animals: elephants, for instance, gather around a dying member of their herd, touch it with their trunks for hours on end, trumpeting in distress as they do so, and often try to push the lifeless body back upright before eventually covering the corpse with earth and twigs. What’s more, they return to the place of death regularly, even years later, something that undoubtedly requires a good memory, and possibly even a certain conception of the afterlife that, it is fair to imagine, is no less fanciful than our own and just as unverifiable.
The caesura of death is the point where legacy and memory begin, and the lament the source of every culture by which we seek to fill the now gaping void, the sudden silence with chants, prayers, and stories in which the absent one is brought back to life. Like a hollow mold, the experience of loss renders visible the contours of the thing mourned, and it is not uncommon for it to be transformed by the transfigurative light of sorrow into an object of desire or, as the Heidelberg professor of zoology put it in the foreword to a slim volume published by Neue Brehm-Bücherei: “It seems to be one of the characteristics of western man that defies rational understanding that he prizes the lost more highly than the existing. There is no other explanation for his curious enduring fascination with the Tasmanian tiger.”
All manner of strategies are used to keep hold of the past and ward off oblivion. If tradition is to be believed, our historiography begins with a series of devastating wars between the Persians and the Greeks, while the now almost forgotten art of memory starts with an accident in which many perished: it was in Thessaly, where in the early fifth century B.C. a collapsing house buried an entire party of festive revelers and the only survivor, the poet Simonides of Ceos, succeeded, with the aid of his trained memory, in reentering the destroyed building in his mind’s eye and recalling the seating arrangement of the guests, thus enabling the bodies crushed beyond recognition by the falling rubble to be identified. It is one of the numerous paradoxes inherent in the either-or of life and death that, by labeling the deceased as something irretrievably lost, the sorrow at this loss is at once doubled and halved, whereas the indeterminate fate of a person missing or presumed dead keeps the relatives trapped in a confused nightmare of anxious hope and denied sorrow that makes it impossible either to come to terms with it or to get on with one’s life.
Being alive means experiencing loss. The question of what the future holds is presumably nearly as old as the human race itself, given that one feature of the future, as inevitable as it is disquieting, is that it defies prediction and hence gives no clue as to the timing and circumstances of death. Who can deny the protective magic of bittersweet anticipation, the fatal urge to forestall the feared event by mentally preempting it? We picture the cataclysm ahead of time, imagine possible disasters, and believe this renders us immune to nasty surprises. In ancient times, dreams promised consolation: the Greeks said of them that, like oracles, they prefigured what was to come and thereby rid the future not of its immutability, but at least of the terror of the unexpected. Quite a few people take their own life out of fear of death. Suicide seems perhaps the most radical means of conquering the uncertainty of the future, albeit at the cost of a curtailed existence. It is reported that the gifts presented by the Indian delegation that Augustus once received on the island of Samos included not only a tiger and an armless youth who was able to use his feet as hands, but also a man named Zarmarus from the Brahmin caste who was intending to end his own life for the very reason that it had turned out the way he wanted. To make quite sure that no calamity could ever befall him, he leaped onto the pyre in Athens, naked, anointed, and with a smile, was burned alive, undoubtedly in excruciating pain, and in staging his self-determined death, went down in history, if only as a curious anecdote in one book of Cassius Dio’s once eighty-volume Roman History, the content of which happened to be passed down to us. In the end, all that remains is simply whatever is left.
A memory that retained everything would essentially retain nothing. The Californian woman who, without the aid of mnemonics, can recall every single day since February 5, 1980 is trapped in the echo chamber of the memories that constantly overwhelm her—a modern embodiment of that Athenian general Themistocles, who knew the names of every single citizen of his native city and who told Simonides, the father of mnemonics, that he would rather learn the art of forgetting than that of remembering: “I remember even what I do not want to remember, but am unable to forget what I want to forget.” However, the art of forgetting is an impossibility because any allusion represents a presence, even when it refers to an absence. Encyclopedias claim to know the names of almost every person condemned to damnatio memoriae under the Roman Empire.
To forget everything is bad, certainly. Worse still is to forget nothing. After all, knowledge can only be gained by forgetting. If everything is stored indiscriminately, as it is in electronic data memories, it loses its meaning and becomes a disorderly mass of useless information.
The organization of every archive may, like its prototype, the ark, be guided by the desire to preserve everything, but the undeniably tempting idea of transforming, say, a continent like the Antarctic or even the moon into a central, democratic museum of the Earth in
which all cultural products are accorded equal status is just as totalitarian and doomed to failure as the re-creation of paradise, a tantalizing primal object of longing kept alive in the beliefs of all human cultures.
Fundamentally, every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction, and the same is true of the work of all those disciplines and institutions that claim to be preserving the legacy of humanity. Even archaeology, however cautiously and soberly it may profess to probe the debris of past ages, is a form of devastation—and the archives, museums, and libraries, the zoological gardens and nature reserves are nothing more than managed cemeteries whose stored specimens, as often as not, have been plucked from the life cycle of the present to be filed away, allowed to be forgotten even, like those heroic events and figures whose monuments populate urban landscapes.
It should probably count as a good thing that the human race is not aware of all the great ideas, the poignant works of art and revolutionary feats that have already been lost to it—willfully destroyed or simply vanished over time. What we do not know cannot weigh us down, we might think. It does seem surprising, though, that quite a few European thinkers of the modern age saw the periodic demise of a culture as a reasonable or even beneficial occurrence. As if cultural memory were a global organism whose vital functions could only be maintained by a brisk metabolism in which each intake of food was preceded by digestion and elimination.
It was this world view, one both limited and autocratic, that enabled the uncontrolled occupation and exploitation of foreign territories, the subjugation, enslavement, and murder of non-European peoples and the obliteration of their scorned cultures to be regarded as part of a natural process, and the evolutionary principle misunderstood as meaning the survival of the strongest to be used as justification for crimes committed.
An Inventory of Losses Page 1
