Unausweichlichkeit

It is late at night when I finish Gilgamesh. 251 resonating pages of “economical prose” exposing the characters, the thickening fog of war and its imminent brutal realism. And on the far side of the tunnel all those stories told to me as a child, the toil of the sugar beet fields in Skåne in the fifties, narratives so dense that I can feel them under my skin.

It is the quality of a good book. The English language fails to provide a word here, between imperious and irresistible. As often, the adjective “unausweichlich” comes to me immediately in German.

03:06, it is high noon along the Eastern seaboard and already six in the evening in Europe. In other words, time to depart for dreamland.