Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

What one generation sought to forget imposed itself on the next as a taboo, and what the older generation missed out on was performed, with a fifteen-year delay, by the younger generation, who never stopped to ask themselves why.

How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past?

Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it.

Culpability and heroism meet under one name more often than one might think. Careful not to magnify or diminish the one at the expense of the other. Leave them both unsecured, because only through the difference in their respective elevation does movement become possible. There is the source of energy, in the discrepancy, in the waiting. There in silence, hope and rage may grow. To multiply what is unendurable, seen thus, would be a revolutionary act. Or is it opportunism after all?

Something begins, something ends — or it finds its fulfillment. But in the meantime, time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it, but is never one thing: never indifferent, always taut, always strung between a beginning of which one is not aware because one is too busy with life, and an ending which is in the future, and hence in darkness.