Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November–14 December 1974

by Werner Herzog

The teenagers on their mopeds are moving toward death in synchronized motion.

The children are devoured by the school. Sparrows are melting from the roof in drops.

Why is walking so full of woe? I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me.

I’ve probably made several wrong decisions in a row concerning my route and, in hindsight, this has led me to the right course.

What’s really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don’t have the nerve to turn back, since I’d rather correct myself with another wrong decision.

quantitative maths.

A ladies’ bicycle, nearly brand new, was thrown into a brook; it occupied my thoughts for quite some time. A crime? The scene of a fight? Something provincial-sultry-dramatic has taken place here, I suspect. A bench painted red is half-covered with water. A cat has jumped up on the lantern above the front door of a house and doesn’t dare move any further, feeling that she is too high above the ground. She gently sways with the lantern in the wind. The recent storm, so the newspaper says, had hurricane winds of up to one hundred miles per hour in the Swabian Alb and peak gusts exceeding eighty miles per hour on the Feldberg. Now it’s much milder, veiled by clouds, like late autumn, wet, dripping water everywhere, drooping clouds, sticky grass. I saw pigs beneath some apple trees, no grass there any more, just a swamp, and the gigantic mother sows very carefully lifted one foot from the sloshy morass, then set it very softly back again and sank on their bellies as before. I quench my thirst by drinking from rivulets that flow across the meadows. Left turn in Biederbach, therefore westward; later somehow over the mountains. 1:30 p.m.

The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation. A dense cloud of flies and a plague of horseflies swirl around my head, so I’m forced to flail about with my arms, yet they pursue me bloodthirstily nevertheless. How can I go shopping? They’ll throw me out of the supermarket, along with the insect plague swarming around my head. A flash of lightning bolts across the orange-black sky far below me, striking Francis the Miller, of all people, dead. He whose only friend was Stormy Joe. Francis the Miller has passed away the years in a wooden shack on the roof of the farm, as Francis’s wife was having an affair with Stormy Joe down in the house. They nailed him in with boards and he didn’t resist, since they’d bring him soup to eat.

Is the Loneliness good? Yes, it is. There are only dramatic vistas ahead. The festering Rankness, meanwhile, gathers once again at the sea.