(I wrote this entry a few weeks ago but had to edit it before posting. My apologies for the lack of pictures, etc. I think you'll all survive. Pending any encounters with the end of the world.)
Last week, quite a buzz could be
heard in the mandatory coffee breaks around the library. The topic of the buzz
was the first of May. It was decided that, in honor of the first day of May, a
bunch of us were going to have a barbeque for dinner on Tuesday. At first, this
struck me as relatively innocuous. After all, we normally gather one of the
evenings during the week for some harmless dinner activity or other. But this
activity seemed to be different than the other ones, somehow. There was a
general excitement about it all, where to buy the Wurst, what we were going to eat, etc.
On Monday night, the last night of
April, the streets were aglow with general rowdiness that is very
uncharacteristic for Wolfenbüttel, whose citizens seem to operate on an 8PM
bedtime curfew (much to my liking).
“Tomorrow is the first of May,” F., a German, commented matter-of-factly.
“What do you expect?”
Well, for one thing, I expected the
approaching month of May to be treated with all the decorum normally afforded
the advent of any other new 30-day-cycle—namely, total apathy and lack of differentiation
from the 30-day-cycle that preceded it. What
is it with these people and the month of May? I kept wondering. It’s just a month, for Pete’s sake. I mean, grilling is one thing, but speeding down the
street in loud mopeds at all hours of the night? (All hours of the night,
for Cole and Wolfenbüttel culture, meaning 10:15 PM.) I chalked it up to one of
those odd things about Germany I will never quite wrap my mind around, like how
can they eat so much high-fat cheese and not be bloated with gas all the time?
Or why do they find peanut butter so repulsive, and insist on selling one tiny
jar of it for three euro in the supermarket?
~*~
I work with a very peculiar bunch of people in this archive.
Some of them are doctors, others are teachers, still others are theologians and
philosophers. So far, all of them I’ve gotten to know are men, which really
doesn’t surprise me. Another thing: for as learned as they are, they have
terrible spelling and their punctuation is atrocious. How did they get to the
esteemed positions they occupy? Who knows.
What always strikes me is that they are a pretty variegated group of people, and it’s hard to determine how or why they’ve all ended up here. They’re all very different and sometimes have bitter disagreements over things. Now, Germans like to split hairs. The other day, they were arguing about what exactly the weather is going to be in the coming days. Before that, there was a vehement discussion on how much a person should rely on knowledge versus faith, and what knowledge even is—which would have been really interesting, had they not been throwing around obscure Latin chroniclers from the 3rd century BC.
But as different as they all are, I’m slowly learning that they all have three central things in common.
The first, is that no one has anything nice to say about the
Turks or the Jews. I mean, no one. Well,
that’s not true, I think I heard someone praise the Jewish mathematician Maimonides
one time. Other than this, they are quite a racist group of people. The only
other person they hate more is the pope—at least the popes in the present. The
older the pope is, the less of a bad guy he is.
The second, is that they all firmly believe the end of the world is nigh. Whether it’s a comet in the sky, the appearance of Siamese twins in Silesia, a particularly wet winter, or hearsay regarding a cluster of grapes that suddenly grew a beard somewhere in Italy, the world in which we live is a very old one that is about to die of a heart attack—the sooner the better. Our world has seen so many monumental changes, shaking the political, economic, climactic, tectonic and religious foundations of our civilization that there is only one plausible explanation: Christ is soon to return and call His people home. My colleagues may disagree on the specific symptoms—when exactly this may happen or which astrological sign exactly that comet first appeared under—but the prescription is unanimous: repent, for the day is near. When you are done repenting, repent again.
The last thing they have in common, of course, is that they are all dead. By about 1720, they were all buried in the ground. Sometimes it makes me sad, that I’m the only living person apart of our conversations. Then, though, I just turn the page—there’s always more to read, more to think about, more to notate, more to chuckle about…
I mean, come on, a cluster of grapes that grew a beard? You can’t make these things up.
~*~
My walk to the library Tuesday
morning, the first of may, was a peaceful one, and it occurred to me, as it
often does in the mornings, how beautiful and peaceful little WfB is. But it particularly occurred to me that
morning, because it was particularly
quiet and peaceful. In fact, I daresay it was apocalyptically quiet: no one was sitting outside the cafes
flaunting their culturally-accepted caffeine addictions; no kids were peddling
about, rushing to school. Even the ducks were elsewhere.
When I got to the library, I
couldn’t help but notice how all of the doors were completely locked and
barricaded (the building I work in used to be an armory in the mid 18th
century), and all of the windows had their nighttime shutters on. I suddenly
realized that there may be a reason why everything had been so quiet that
morning, and why the library was locked: no one had gotten out of bed this
morning. I looked around me. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping,
everything was gay and happy, that is: gay, happy, and completely void of any
human being besides myself. What could possibly cause a general populace to refrain
from waking up in the morning?
Unless… I began thinking. No, that
can’t be. I was about to think, “Unless I’ve been left behind. I mean, you
know, Left Behind.”
Now, to be fair, I am an academic. I
did critically analyze the situation from all possible angles before settling
on the apocalypse idea. For example, one reason why everything was so eerily
quiet was that my life (unbeknownst to me) the real story that the Truman Show
movie was based on. For some reason, on this first of May 2012, the director forgot to cue “places” to all my
friends/ hired actors before I left my apartment. That didn’t seem realistic,
though, because who would want to watch a TV show about a woman who sits in an
archive reading dusty books written by dead people all day. Not me, and I am that woman. I have to watch that show
everyday. To make matters worse, I have to blog about that show. Trust me, it
doesn’t draw a crowd. So that possibility is out.
And so, reality began to sink in. The
only fathomable reason why this many people would fail to show up at work, or
cafes, or bakeries on such a beautiful day, is that they had all been raptured
up to heaven, and the time of great tribulation was upon us who remained.
It is going to be a long summer, I
thought, heading back to my apartment. A long, apocalyptic summer.
~*~
One of the biggest taboo topics to
talk about with dead people from the past is the weather. I should know,
because that’s what I’m trying to pull out of the sources right now. When you
ask about it, they hush up, like you just said a four letter word (and “rain”
in German doesn’t even have four letters. Neither does “snow,” so that’s no
excuse.)
Like I said, I am dealing with the
weather right now. That is, I’m trying to find out how people in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries thought about the weather, natural seasons, how they
experienced it, where they thought it all came from, what types of weather they
witnessed, etc. This is important, because my wider dissertation topic involves
how people perceived the passage of time, or the year. A major way that people
experience time—then as now, but more so then--is through the rhythm of
seasons, sunlight, and stars (back then, stars were a really big deal because
that’s where you looked to see if time was about to end, i.e. the apocalypse).
Now, the weather is my fall back
topic of choice at awkward dinner parties and other mandatory social
gatherings. “How about this weather we’re having, huh?” This is always a safe,
appropriate, culturally-relevant question to ask in any situation. I once posed
this question to a man I didn’t know in Cincinnati. It was raining out, and we
were in the waiting room of the ER. I had a pretty bad cold, he had a
potentially fatal head wound. It was fine, we had a lovely conversation.
For some reason, though, asking
people of the past about the weather is somehow not as reliable. They didn’t
have TV weather shows I can look at, they didn’t have the same kind of
newspapers we have today. They didn’t have books with titles like This Book Will Tell You Exactly How People
In the Early Modern Period Thought About the Weather, Specifically for the
Purpose of Informing Nicole Lyon’s Dissertation Topic in the Year 2012 (I
know, because I checked the card catalogue on that one. Negative.)
So how do I figure out what people
back then thought about the weather? How do I get to the bottom of this
mystery.
I circumlocute, or rather
circum-inter-locute. I trick the people I work with—the dead,
grape-beard-believing folks—into talking about the weather the same way you
trick a kid into telling you who really broke the vase. That is, I don’t ask
about the weather at all. I pretend I don’t even care about the weather. I read
other materials, materials that don’t appear to have anything to do with
weather patterns—like pamphlets about the war, or comets, or diseases. And then
I ask the person writing it what kind of job they had—were they a farmer? A
doctor? What year was this published in? Were there any big floods during that
time? I ask how their crops are doing. I ask if there is inflation on the price
of wheat in the city where they reside, and if so, why. War? A dry summer? A
wet spring? I pay attention when they
talk about the moisture in the air (which is all the time, because they hated
it), rain, or the skies, or the future, or past snow storms, or waking up to
the sound of birds, or how cold they’ve been feeling.
And the more you listen, the more
you don’t ask how the weather is
doing, the more they get tricked.
Slowly, they start to tell you
things.
~*~
By the time I made it back to my
apartment, the reality of the rapture had become an evident truth. (I know what
you think about the rapture, Fr. Steven, and yes I thought about that, too.) Everyone
must have known the end of the world was coming, I thought. That’s why they
planned the grill party, to celebrate.
That’s why everyone was so excited.
As I walked the quiet, cobblestone
streets, I surmised that the rapture had happened sometime around midnight.
There was not even the smell of bread dough in the air from the countless
bakeries that line the streets, which I happen to know starts getting baked a
little after midnight. On the side of the walkway to my apartment, a bike lay
tipped over. Someone had probably been out riding late at night, I thought, and
suddenly their body was raptured so the bike tipped over. Somewhere in the
distance, a dog was barking incessantly, which I’d never heard in WfB because
the dogs are uncommonly well-behaved. But I would bark, too, if my owner had
suddenly disappeared without leaving me any breakfast. I unlocked the door to my building, still no
sign of life anywhere.
~*~
Most of the time when I don’t ask
about the weather, and the sources tell me things about the weather, it’s
actually about the end of the world. To say that these people were apocalyptic
would be an understatement. They know what it means to be left behind: their
old documents have been left behind for centuries for people like me to pick
endlessly through and tease endearingly on obscure blogger sites. But, to their credit, the generations of
folks whose writing I read were living in the wake of societal changes the
likes of which were unprecedented. The invention of the printing press, the
Protestant Reformation and breakdown of a unified Christian Church, political
fragmentation between nobles and other elites, a changing calendar, intense and prolonged religious warfare that
devastated the a whole host of villages and cities, the Copernican revolution,
widespread economic panics, new inventions like the telescope and microscope, a
climactic change known as the little ice age, the scientific revolution and
Newtonian physics, the early Enlightenment, and many other changes. As silly as
bearded grape clusters sound, it’s no wonder that many people—for various
reasons, especially Protestants—grasped for something bigger to make sense of
their fluctuating, unstable surroundings. If you can’t have any security in any
normalcy around you—if you can’t even have faith in the calendar you use
staying the same—then at least you can have faith in the Apocalypse. Belief in
the impending end of time was the umbrella under which all the confusing twists
and turns of their seemingly crumbling civilization could be fit. Things were
falling apart, but at least they were falling apart with a purpose, and at
least someone—or should I say Someone—was in control of it all.
~*~
And as I faced the dawning of a new,
apocalyptic era, my first activity was to checked my email (this is my normal
strategy to withstand the usual existential crisis of the day). Betwixt the
usual University of Cincinnati crime announcement about the latest person to be
robbed on McMillan street at 2AM yesterday, there was a pleasant email or two
from coworkers (living ones, not dead ones) wishing everyone at the library a
happy first of May.
Once again, the usual question
flooded my mind like so many showers of apocalyptic-foretelling rains. What is with these people and the first of
May? The more obvious question that should have entered my mind but didn’t
was: How can I be getting emails from
people that were supposedly raptured? Because, by then a light bulb had
gone off in my mind. That light bulb took the form of randomly recalling some
helpful tips in an information packet a German academic organization had sent
me in preparation for my research. It was a bit of advice I had swiftly
shrugged off my shoulders like so many bearded grapes rolling down a steep
hill.
“Before departing, print off a list
from the internet of all federal holidays in German, as some are different from
American federal holidays.” I guess that pretty much says it all right there. So,
I had been spared being Left Behind… For now.But… that means… Oh no. Perspiration formed upon my brow. My heart started racing, because I knew. I knew what I was in for. I knew that the only thing worse than being Left Behind in Germany is trying to get through a Federal Holiday in Germany with no prior warning.
Now, federal holidays in Germany are
a different species of federal holidays in the US. My impression that the rest
of the town had been raptured should give you some indication for the type of
dynamic we are talking about. At least if it had been the apocalypse, looting the grocery store around the corner was a possibility for
necessary vittles. Apocalypse= no laws, no currency exchange rate= survival is
a highly likely possibility. Federal Holiday, on the other hand= EVERYTHING is
closed including the meaning of life and any form of transportation out of this
city= no chance of looting because police will be on duty the very next day=
I’m going to starve to death. I am going to starve to death on the first of
May.
Luckily, I found a bin of tomatoes
in my fridge, yogurt and I think some bread. I would live another day, pending
the eventual apocalypse which could come at any moment, even on a federal
holiday. I decided, though, it would be a good idea to repent anyway. Which I
did, the sardonic tone of this blog post notwithstanding. I repented for my
sarcasm, too, don’t worry. Lord have mercy.
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