In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche observed that, “The degree of the historical sense of any age may be inferred from the manner in which this age makes translations and tries to absorb former ages and books.” The more a culture becomes aware of the real differences of other cultures and other times, as the Germans had become, the less likely it is, he wrote, to try to “take possession” of the other the way “in the age of Corneille… the French took possession of Roman antiquity.”
But what of our own time and our culture? Are we reducing everything we translate to standard English, whatever that might be? Or are we struggling to get close to the otherness of foreign texts?
To many scientists, it seemed implausible that our conscious awareness of a decision is only an illusory afterthought. Researchers questioned Libet’s experimental design, including the precision of the tools used to measure brain waves and the accuracy with which people could actually recall their decision time. But flaws were hard to pin down. And Libet, who died in 2007, had as many defenders as critics. In the decades since his experiment, study after study has replicated his finding using more modern technology such as fMRI.
But one aspect of Libet’s results sneaked by largely unchallenged: the possibility that what he was seeing was accurate, but that his conclusions were based on an unsound premise. What if the Bereitschaftspotential didn’t cause actions in the first place? A few notable studies did suggest this, but they failed to provide any clue to what the Bereitschaftspotential could be instead. To dismantle such a powerful idea, someone had to offer a real alternative.
The deep ocean is the Earth’s last great unexplored frontier. Below the surface, sunlight fades. Soon you are in total darkness. It is cold. Communication is difficult. At 100 metres the pressure is ten times that on the surface; at 2,000 metres, it is great enough to collapse a US Navy submarine. Apart from Vescovo’s, fewer than ten manned craft are currently able to operate below 3,700 metres, the ocean’s average depth, and no other active ones can go below 7,500 metres. At that point, submariners enter what oceanographers call the Hadal Zone, derived from Hades – the Ancient Greek underworld. The ocean’s deepest point, the Pacific’s Challenger Deep, is nearly 11km down. When Vescovo set out, only three men had ever seen it. Twelve have walked on the Moon.
This morning—that morning, rather—two men in my train carriage lift their heads—two men in their fifties in silky, understated ties—then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing, How long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one in chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just on the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriages, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?
My phone vibrates, one time only for texts. “Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.” It’s Vanda. Thank you, Vanda.
Shhh.
A very short story cannot help but associate with other short forms — poems, dictums, parables, and dreams — that are typically ripe with meaning. Encountering such a story on its own, then, means determining its importance, especially when it is a lone sentence engraved in a setting of outsized significance. Does the task change if you are told that the story originated as an email or a dictionary definition? What happens when you have read a dozen very short stories, and then you come across a longer one, full of characters and grief? This may be the lesson of reading Lydia Davis: the origin of writing is infinitesimally mundane, until the moment it is not.