You want to hold back fate, as always

A photograph, or was it a television picture, of a little girl who looked wide-eyed at the train window and pressed her hand against it and another hand was pressed against it from the outside. Her father’s.

All that parting that takes place in this near war, of brothers, fathers, sons, lovers, friends. All those worries that stay behind and travel along, about each other.

Like in that famous scene from the Iliad, the last conversation, but they don’t know it yet although they fear it, between the Trojan Hektor and his wife Andromache. Hektor is going to fight and Andromache would rather he didn’t, for she is terrified that he will die. Hektor fears for her fate. “Hopefully I’ll be dead and under the earth before I have to hear you cry.” He wants to hug his son as a goodbye, but the child is terrified of the large helmet that Hektor has on his head. His parents laugh and the hero takes off that helmet for a moment and kisses his child.

I know well that the world is different now, but at the same time it is the same and people say the same things to each other about that which is unbearable and unimaginable, except that it is not unimaginable at all. They think very precisely in what is going to happen, and it does.

As always you want to hold back fate when you read something like this, like looking at the little girl on the train now. And as so often you shudder and don’t want to empathize too much because oh! how unbearable — “Hopefully I’m already dead.”

But recently I spoke to someone about all those people on the run and of course she also said things like ‘extremely’, but she also said: ‘I think: if all those people can do that, then I will be able to do that too if necessary. .”

That actually sounds quite logical. And you also know that you can endure a lot if you have to.

Thomas Mann wrote in Joseph and his brothers that it is easy for bystanders to talk about ‘unbearable’ when someone suffers something, but that this is rather nonsensical if the suffering has to be borne anyway. “The compassionate-rebellious man,” he wrote, “is in a sentimental and impractical relationship” to suffering. “That is the protest of humanity in revolt, well-intentioned and a benefit to the suffering man. Yet it also has something ridiculous about him for whom that is ‘unbearable’ reality.”

That’s true. That woman I spoke to didn’t act like that. Why did she know she could bear that fate if need be, however uneasy, and I refused to trust it and got stuck in a shuddering fantasy? What did I think I would do then? Throw me to the ground and scream?

Thinking now I am strong but not later, is that an underestimation of your future self?

When I have to go somewhere by bike, I always find it very annoying if I have a tailwind on the way there, because then I will have to deal with it later. Conversely, I don’t see a problem, on the contrary, I kick it with some pleasure. I recently spoke to myself about this. Why I thought I wouldn’t be able to withstand that wind in the future and now I can? It’s completely illogical. Or do you always think: now I am strong, but not later, is it a constant underestimation of your future self? Again that ‘sentimental and impractical relationship’ to the future, to headwinds, literally and figuratively. Rather, your overly anxious fantasy is playing tricks on you.

“He may have said: I break, but you don’t break, because you don’t break,” wrote Robert Anker. And so it is. Hopefully.