Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

He’s only just started his interviews, and now obstacles are being strewn in his path. Even at the university there were bureaucrats like this who thought it was more important to get all your travel receipts stamped, renew your health insurance forms, and record the number of hours you spent in the office on some ledger, than it was to have time to do the work you’d been hired for, such as investigating whether there were ratios that determined the beauty of a line of verse just as reliably as they did the stability of a snail shell. Or finding out where in the literature of the Augustan Age Jesus appears as the last Greek god. Certainly you could spend time changing the password for your work email for the eighth time, or you might ask instead how what an author doesn’t know about himself is nonetheless inscribed in his text. And who is the speaker in passages like these?

Bureaucracy