The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever?

I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as the story of a homecoming. But it is not the story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks, who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

“One never enters the same river twice”

What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.