Words: November 2007 Archives
Peter Schneider’s superb novel, The Wall Jumper, reminds us that, even in difficult times - in this case a city gripped by the effects of the Berlin Wall - there’s plenty room for a little imagination, creativity and determination. This excerpt makes the point, albeit with a decent helping of irony...
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
“In the early sixties a circus acrobat had used a high-tension wire as a tightrope to walk into the West. And hadn’t a pole-vaulting champion used the Wall as a bar and cleared it with room to spare? There was no end to the list, and on the basis of sheer imagination, it would be difficult to select candidates for a hall of fame (of wall jumping).
The suppression in the DDR of sports that might lead to border crossing - ballooning and scuba-diving, for instance - had loosed a tide of fantasy and produced a generation of inventors. Snorkels, diving masks, and oxygen tanks had hardly disappeared from the stores before hobbyists of all kinds began fashioning replacements out of bicycle inner tubes, home heating gas containers, and rubber aprons. Where in a hall of fame would one place the auto mechanic who developed a miniature motor to pull him across the Baltic under water? And how would one rank the engineer who, after searching the specialty bookstores in vain for textbooks on aerodynamics, rediscovered the principal of the hot air balloon?
The one sure thing - and here the dialogue on the Wall could take a philosophical turn - was that every improvement in the border system had spurred the creative drive to find a new loophole. The urge to master the Wall didn’t differ in substance, perhaps, from the impulse to climb K2: the Wall, like the mountain, was there; and the challenge would persist as long as the Wall remained standing.”
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Cyclists. Unnecessarily tight clothing. Difficult to get past in your car. That’s about as much as I knew about those who choose to cycle mile after mile on their beloved weekends. But that’s because I didn’t understand the sport at all. And not understanding something invariably means it means nothing.
So I began Tim Krabbé’s much acclaimed cycling classic The Rider with some hesitation. I’d enjoyed The Vanishing, but a book about cycling? Please.
A hundred and fifty short pages later, I was thinking about getting some tight shorts myself while browsing through lightweight bike frames online. Through the story of a single mountain race (the Tour du Mont Aigoual) and all its little nuances - the strategy, the relationships, the climbs, the descents, the flats - seen through the eyes of a rider, and interspersed with intriguing anecdotes plucked from the annals of cycling history, Krabbé perfectly describes what is, in fact, a wonderfully rich and complex sport. The structure of a single race lends itself ideally to a narrative such as this, and with his story - based on fact, with a few details elaborated - we experience the slightly disturbing tactical ingenuity required to succeed, all played out on a unique canvas of peer-to-peer etiquette.
But besides all that, what makes cycling all the more extraordinary is the sheer will of the riders who partake. Surely there are few places where determination is made more explicit than on a mountain climb, four hours into the race, aboard two wheels and a saddle - in a pair of tight shorts...
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I get angry when I can’t sleep. I start trying really hard, as if closing my eyelids tight, squeezing them shut, will help. I become so determined to sleep that I forget how to. But when I forget determination and return to the beginning, to my imagination, is when I start to drift into slumber. I start to think about all the things I ever want to do; and it calms me. And I sleep. For me the imagination is a constant refuge, by day or night. I like listening to it. In my imagination, it’s as if I can do anything and go anywhere. Emily Bronte says it better than I ever could:
When weary with the long day's care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost, and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While then canst speak with such a tone!
So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty...
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