Holiday Journal:
German Gymnastics
Thursday, 30 December 2010
At the beginning of Daniel Kehlman’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005), the mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss journeys to Berlin, accompanied by his son, Eugen. The dyspeptic Gauss asks his son for a book.
Eugen gave him the one he had just opened: Friedrich Jahn’s German Gymnastics. It was one of his favorites.
Gauss tried to read, but seconds later he was already glancing up to complain about the newfangled leather suspension on the coach; it made you feel even sicker than usual. Soon, he explained, machines would be carrying people from town to town at the speed of a shot. Then you’d do the trip from Göttingent to Berlin in half an hour.
Eugen shrugged.
It was both odd and unjust, said Gauss, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-à-vis the future.
Eugen nodded sleepily.
Even a mind like his own, said Gauss, would have been incapable of achieving anything in early human history or on the banks of the Orinoco, whereas in another two hundred years each and every idiot would be able to make fun of him and invent the most complete nonsense about his character. He thought things over, called Eugen a failure again, and turned his attention to the book. As he read, Eugen in his distress turned his face fixedly to the window, to hide his look of mortification and anger.
German Gymnastics was all about exercise equipment. The author expounded at length on this or that piece of apparatus which he had invented for swinging oneself up or around on. He called one the pommel horse, another the beam, and another the vaulting horse.
The man was out of his mind, said Gauss, opened the window and threw the book out.
This passage has been much on my mind this year, because it pinpoints a truth about life in history that most people have no reason to attend to. They grow up in the world they’re born to, and it always seems natural. For tens of thousands of years, it’s true, human beings had no reason to imagine the possibility of other ways of life, but already by Gauss’s time (the early Nineteenth Century) the difference of a century or two in the timing of one’s arrival on earth could have a baleful effect on one’s opportunities. Today, differences appear much more rapidly. Had I been born a decade earlier, I might well have died, years ago, of colon cancer: my continued existence has depended upon the invention of fiber-optic cables, one of which detected a pre-cancerous tumor that turned out to be tricky to remove.
Far more palpably, as an everyday matter, I’ve lived long enough to make use of the Internet. To blog, even. If there’s one thing that I’m sure of, it’s that I was born to blog.
Here is a portion of the foregoing passage (translated by Carol Brown Janeway above) in the original.
Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauẞ, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, daẞ man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit and mache eine zum Clown der Zukunft.
Sogar ein Verstand wie der seine, sagte Gauẞ, hätte in frühen Menschheitsaltern oder an den Ufern des Orinoko nichts zu leisten vermocht, wohingegen jeder Dummkopf in zweihundert Jahren sich über ihn lustig machen und absurden Unsinn über seine Person erfinden könne.
“Seltsam sei es und ungerecht” … “unziemlichen Vorteil” … “Clown.” I will continue to try, in the New Year, not to throw German Gymnastics out the window.