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Authors: Peter Handke
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brown than those strewn over the forest floor, and not soft or rotting like them but firm and healthy, with fresh, pale-yellow flesh. What, edible chestnuts in January? Yes. She to the author: âWhat is time? I am still as puzzled by it as long ago in the village.â The magical emptiness of a Monday, the emptiness of the weekâs onset in the forest.
But remarkable walking, too, because the forest had been destroyed a few weeks earlier by a December hurricane such as even this northwestern region, accustomed to powerful storms, had never experienced. The hurricane came in the night, and although it raged for hours, she slept on, slept and slept, more soundly than ever. As had happened quite often in her life, she missed the event. After that, going into the forest was prohibited. âBut of course I went in.â The first time, the destruction looked to her far less extensive than what was shown in the newspapers and on television, and not only because around the small section depicted she could see the rest of the wooded area. But each time she returned, the destruction seemed more drastic. Did trees continue to hurtle to the ground after the storm was over? On the other hand, didnât the long period of frost that followed the hurricane anchor the loosened roots in the soil? And yet each time there were more trees, limbs, crowns that had apparently fallen overnight. Or had her eyes merely shied away from taking them in all at once?
Not a wood-road that was not blocked by trees or scattered debris. One had to scramble over, or slip under, or take a tedious detourâwhich
brought one smack up against the next obstacle, and then another, with the result that one might inadvertently end up outside the forest. So she decided in favor of scrambling and crawling. Decided? No, it went without saying that she would court obstacles and danger, as she always had. Danger? Some of the trees she dove under were not yet resting completely on the ground, but were still hung up on splintered limbs sticking in the earth, often only one support, and not a sturdy one.
But what was there to look at amid this devastation? There is no secret to devastation, she thought on her first sortie into the forest after the millennial storm. Only with repetition were her eyes opened. Where the trees had been uprooted, huge masses of soil had been heaved up. These were almost perfect half-spheres or else pyramids of sand, clay, and scree, cross sections tipped up perpendicularly, from whose midsection the lateral roots stuck out like rays, their ends sheared off and shredded, while the middle consisted of a much thicker fragment of root that projected toward the viewer, the mother root, so to speak. The trees torn out of the ground by the hurricane had thrust thousands of such former root balls up into the air.
The cleanup had not yet begun; it would require a ten-year plan, an entire army: but even if all the tree corpses were to be sawn up over the course of ten or twenty years and turned into neatly stacked woodpiles, it would be out of the question to level the densely scattered halved balls, pyramids, and earth cones that now reared up before one throughout the forest, like primeval yurts; all the layers of subsoil dragged out of the depths into the light with the roots, from the horizontal to the vertical, would probably remain this way forever.
That would create a new landscape, an area such as had never been seen before, with new, crazy-quilt horizons here, there, and everywhere. And because the wood of the roots was particularly durable, it would continue to portray the spokes of a wheel, with the hub in the middle becoming even more unmistakable later on, when sculpted by wind and weather. She had little curiosity, a trait she shared with most of the inhabitants of her native region: but she was curious to see how the transformed landscape would look.
And then the craters in all the places where trees had stood before the
But remarkable walking, too, because the forest had been destroyed a few weeks earlier by a December hurricane such as even this northwestern region, accustomed to powerful storms, had never experienced. The hurricane came in the night, and although it raged for hours, she slept on, slept and slept, more soundly than ever. As had happened quite often in her life, she missed the event. After that, going into the forest was prohibited. âBut of course I went in.â The first time, the destruction looked to her far less extensive than what was shown in the newspapers and on television, and not only because around the small section depicted she could see the rest of the wooded area. But each time she returned, the destruction seemed more drastic. Did trees continue to hurtle to the ground after the storm was over? On the other hand, didnât the long period of frost that followed the hurricane anchor the loosened roots in the soil? And yet each time there were more trees, limbs, crowns that had apparently fallen overnight. Or had her eyes merely shied away from taking them in all at once?
Not a wood-road that was not blocked by trees or scattered debris. One had to scramble over, or slip under, or take a tedious detourâwhich
brought one smack up against the next obstacle, and then another, with the result that one might inadvertently end up outside the forest. So she decided in favor of scrambling and crawling. Decided? No, it went without saying that she would court obstacles and danger, as she always had. Danger? Some of the trees she dove under were not yet resting completely on the ground, but were still hung up on splintered limbs sticking in the earth, often only one support, and not a sturdy one.
But what was there to look at amid this devastation? There is no secret to devastation, she thought on her first sortie into the forest after the millennial storm. Only with repetition were her eyes opened. Where the trees had been uprooted, huge masses of soil had been heaved up. These were almost perfect half-spheres or else pyramids of sand, clay, and scree, cross sections tipped up perpendicularly, from whose midsection the lateral roots stuck out like rays, their ends sheared off and shredded, while the middle consisted of a much thicker fragment of root that projected toward the viewer, the mother root, so to speak. The trees torn out of the ground by the hurricane had thrust thousands of such former root balls up into the air.
The cleanup had not yet begun; it would require a ten-year plan, an entire army: but even if all the tree corpses were to be sawn up over the course of ten or twenty years and turned into neatly stacked woodpiles, it would be out of the question to level the densely scattered halved balls, pyramids, and earth cones that now reared up before one throughout the forest, like primeval yurts; all the layers of subsoil dragged out of the depths into the light with the roots, from the horizontal to the vertical, would probably remain this way forever.
That would create a new landscape, an area such as had never been seen before, with new, crazy-quilt horizons here, there, and everywhere. And because the wood of the roots was particularly durable, it would continue to portray the spokes of a wheel, with the hub in the middle becoming even more unmistakable later on, when sculpted by wind and weather. She had little curiosity, a trait she shared with most of the inhabitants of her native region: but she was curious to see how the transformed landscape would look.
And then the craters in all the places where trees had stood before the
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