Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

There, however, the boy has never been. He has never been elsewhere. And although several people who have been elsewhere before have told him that it’s exactly the same there as here, he can’t stop wondering where you would end up if you just kept going on and on, not merely to the next village, but farther and farther still.

Earlier was now, and now is now, and in the future, when everything is different and when there are different people and no one but God knows about him and Agneta and Claus and the mill anymore, then it will still be now.

When you close your eyes, you are by yourself, no one else is there to hurt you, you are inside, you yourself are the only one there.

On the other hand, he tells himself often, life simply leads you somewhere or other—if you weren’t here, you would be elsewhere, and everything would be just as strange.

But you must simply snatch knowledge wherever it can be found.

Memory is a peculiar thing: it doesn’t simply come and go as it pleases; rather you can light it and extinguish it again like a pitchwood torch.

doesn’t that mean that…all this here and there and elsewhere is only a web that God has woven so that we won’t penetrate his mysteries?”

“Do they treat you better there?” “No, but there I’m at home. To be treated badly at home is better than to be treated badly elsewhere.”

“A book is a possibility,” he says. “It is always prepared to speak.

There are only a few moments when two things are possible, one path as much as another. Only a few moments when you can decide.

All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true.

People stood on the stage and dissembled, but she had grasped at once that this was not so at all and that the dissembling too was merely a mask, for it was not the theater that was false, no, everything else was pretense, disguise, and frippery, everything that was not theater was false. On the stage people were themselves, completely true, fully transparent.

This was the way of the world. There were a few real people, and then there were the rest: a shadowy army, a host of figures in the background, a swarm of ants crawling over the earth and having in common with each other that they were lacking something. They were born and died, were like the flecks of fluttering life that made up a flock of birds—if one disappeared, you hardly noticed it. The people who mattered were few.

Nothing passed. Everything was. Everything remained. And even if things changed, it always happened in the one, same, never-changing now.

The nature of marriage consisted not only in the fact that you had children, it also consisted of all the wounds you had inflicted on each other, all the mistakes you had made together, all the things you held against each other forever.

Look! Understand people. It’s not so hard. They’re not complicated. They don’t want anything unusual, everyone just wants what he wants in a somewhat different way.