Borderliners

  As with their experiment. They wanted to raise the incomprehensible, the dark and dubious children up into the light.

  * * *

  Subsequently I have discovered that it was not just Biehl. That it was not just our childhood, not just the early 1970s. Now I believe most of them were in on it, or all of those who wrote about time, from Augustine to Newton.

  They have detested doubt.

  In his Confessions, Augustine writes that time passes unprompted, regardless of man. He also says that it is linked to human perception. This is a contradiction, he offers no explanation, it is as though, for Augustine, there was nothing wrong with a bit of doubt here and there.

  At the beginning of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton writes, more than twelve hundred years later, that “absolutely true, mathematical time flows according to its own nature, smoothly, unrelated to any external force.”

  Here there is no doubt. In fact, in all of Principia Mathematica no doubt is shown about anything whatsoever.

  What has happened, from Augustine to Newton, is that man has been removed from time. Now it passes whether man measures it or not, it has become objective. In other words, freed from human uncertainty.

  * * *

  But from then on there is disintegration, more or less. Newton is the last one who really believes in a time unconnected to man. Unconnected to things. Unconnected, come to that, to the universe.

  * * *

  Measurement of linear time gains ground in Europe. In real terms, it is only three hundred years old, everything else merely leads up to it. It appears when society begins to change so fast that each new day is no longer recognizable, because it has become too different from the day before. Time measurement appears as society grows more complex, it appears along with communications, the postal service, finance and trade, and the railroads.

  For this, various explanations are given. It is said that time appears with the desire of the middle classes, together with science, to liberate themselves from the aristocracy and religion.

  That, of course, is how it must have been, that must be a key element in the explanation. Whatever an explanation might be. But it is as though there is something else.

  Reading Newton—not so much the Principia Mathematica, because in that he has so far removed man that even he, the author, is hardly there; as though the objective laws of nature, writing themselves, have produced the book—but in the letters, I think how much he has resembled Biehl. Their strictness, their need to remove all doubt, their ruthlessness. As though they are the same person, the same schoolmaster spanning three hundred years. As though time did not matter very much.

  There must be something deeper and greater than the historical explanation. It is as though these scientists and philosophers, people with power and knowledge in Western civilization, all have something in common. As though none of them could stand the darkness, did not want to know doubt and uncertainty. Were, within themselves, unable to cope with unresolved contradictions. And so they have tried to eliminate them.

  Then, sooner or later, it has resulted in a breakdown.

  * * *

  We had been told that, at the school, we should look upon Karin Ærø—our class teacher—as our mother, and Biehl as our father.

  That must have been why the department had asked her. They had asked her to explain the school’s point of view regarding the character of the relationship between Katarina and myself. August was not mentioned, but you understood what they were getting at. They had the idea that, somehow or other, we had driven him to it.

  Karin Ærø had prepared a checklist of what they knew: a list of all the times we had been seen together, from when we were found, that first time, in the library during a period, to when we had attempted to exchange information that did not concern us during the Advent church service, and on until, on the night August died, we had been discovered locked in an embrace in the staff room.

  She made no comment on the part about being locked in an embrace. But, when she said it, her voice changed. It was obvious that this was serious.

  They knew so many things. Where and when we had been in contact with each other. Times and places. But of what mattered they knew nothing.

  There were two from the department, a man and a woman. The woman asked what we had to say to this. She addressed herself to Katarina, but I was the one who said something. I spoke to Biehl.

  “What happened to August?” I said.

  They tried to stop me, but I did not look at them, it was all I could do to keep my attention on Biehl. The only way of coping with so many people was to imagine a tunnel: I was at one end, Biehl was at the other, outside there was nothing.

  “How did you get out?” I said.

  He gave an answer I had trouble hearing. I would have gone down to him but I was attached to something—the policeman behind me, I had forgotten about him. I indicated to him that I needed my hands free, to demonstrate something. In the air I showed how one hand had a tight grip on the other.

  “That’s the kind of hold he had,” I said, “you can’t ever get out of that.”

  August had broken his fingers, such pain is too great for anyone to get away from. They did not understand me. Just Biehl.

  “He let me go,” he said.

  “How did you get out?”

  “By the door.”

  “It has a latch on the inside.”

  He stopped, and looked down at his hands. There was still something not quite right about two of the fingers, he was wearing his wedding ring on the other hand, the knuckles had become gnarled.

  It was as though he was having difficulty remembering. Maybe he had needed to forget. So the memory had lodged in his hands. When he looked up, his face was naked, as you had never seen it before. As though he was surprised and shaken by the question and, also, by the answer he had to give me.

  “He opened it for me,” he said. “He must have repented.”

  I had asked something that touched very closely upon him and he had answered. That was the only time ever that such a thing occurred.

  “He did not burn to death,” said Katarina.

  Just as she said it I thought that now she was going to trot out the same story she had given about her parents. That her shell had not been thick enough after all, and now it was crushed.

  “I spoke to the doctor,” she said. “It was blisters on the inside of the windpipe.”

  There were three tunnels. Between her and Biehl and me. Everyone else was on the outside.

  “He could have thrown it at you,” she said to Biehl, “the bottle. But he let you go, he let you out. Then he threw it inside the room. And then he walked into the fire himself, and breathed in the flames. The blisters closed off his windpipe and he suffocated.”

  Everyone was very quiet. But I do not think they understood.

  “It is as though time had gone backward for him. Or as though the past had returned. He could have done it again. Killed someone.”

  She pointed at Biehl.

  “But he didn’t do it. He let you go. And then did away with himself. As though he had been given yet another chance.”

  FOUR

  Jakob von Uexküll, a difficult name. Although it feels good to write it. I write in longhand, quite slowly.

  I have a picture of him, taken from a newspaper. The face is a little heavy, very grave, and yet somehow gentle.

  * * *

  Biehl had an M.A. in biology, yet he never mentioned Jakob von Uexküll, I do not think he had heard of him.

  Uexküll was a professor of biology in Germany. During the 1920s and 1930s he wrote books and articles about the way in which living creatures perceived their surroundings, and particularly about their perception of time and space.

  * * *

  It is not difficult to read what he has written, not compared to some of the other books you fight your way through in your lifetime. At all times he has endeavored to be very clear. And he has had nothing to
hide, and if he has been in doubt then he has said so, straight out.

  At the same time he is, in a way, humble. So humble that he believes that what he does is not so very different from what others before him have done. In the foreword to his book Theoretical Biology, he wrote that he was following the trail blazed by Helmholtz and Kant. They had insisted that it is impossible to perceive the reality that surrounds us—or to perceive ourselves—any way other than through the senses. And the senses are not passive receivers of reality, they process it. That which we perceive is heavily processed. So there is no point in talking about an actual reality, outside of ourselves. That we have no knowledge of. What we know is an edited version. Biology can concentrate on studying the way in which our sensory apparatus is constructed, how it edits. And how the consciousness of other living creatures operates as compared to our own.

  Reading this for the first time, I thought that Uexküll must have stumbled upon the same thing as us, as Katarina and August and me, although in a better, more intelligent, way.

  First we realized that there was a plan, later we came to understand it, just before everything fell apart.

  Biehl’s and Fredhøj’s plan, covert though it might have been, was consciously acknowledged, they had defined it in their applications, it could be put into words. This was the plan for the grand integration, for the abolition of the darkness.

  But behind this there was another purpose, greater, of which they knew nothing.

  Never did we ask them about this purpose, not even Katarina. But if we had done, they would have replied that, beyond the school, beyond their plan, there was time. There was God.

  They believed that, beyond the school, there was reality.

  This cannot be true, even back then we sensed this. In what lay beyond the school, beyond their plan—especially time, which we felt flowing around us and saturating everything—there was a purpose. And in this greater purpose and plan we were, all of us, accomplices. In an absolutely inexplicable way, we were all working to create and maintain time at the school.

  It was this that Jakob von Uexküll had written, in his own humble way, in the mid-1920s. We are not simply left to time. One way or another, it is also something we are constantly involved in creating.

  Like a work of art.

  * * *

  If that really is the way of it, then it is important that people enter the laboratory every now and then, and ask questions of a different kind from those that are otherwise asked. If we are all maintaining time, then you have a place of your own, then it matters that you do something slowly, then even an experiment as transitory as this one can serve to touch time, in such a way that it will change.

  * * *

  How has time become like barbed wire? If we ourselves share the responsibility, how is it that it has closed in around us?

  For this, Uexküll has no explanation, nor could anyone expect one. He wrote about what he believed had to be the simplest building bricks of the sense of time—tempo, rhythm, and the relationship between muscular action and sense of time. To study this was what he saw as his task, this was what he worked on in the laboratory. You can tell, from reading the very first pages, that he has done his best.

  * * *

  Even so, you could not stay with him all the way. For that, people in his world are too alone.

  Once you have realized that there is no objective external world to be found, that what you know is only a filtered and processed version, then it is a short step to the thought that, in that case, other people, too, are nothing but a processed shadow, and but a short step more to the belief that every person must somehow be shut away, isolated behind their own unreliable sensory apparatus. And then the thought springs easily to mind that man is, fundamentally, alone. That the world is made up of disconnected consciousnesses, each isolated within the illusion created by its own senses, floating in a featureless vacuum.

  He does not put it so bluntly, but the idea is not far away. That, fundamentally, man is alone.

  * * *

  When, at Lars Olsen Memorial, I had been isolated from other people for three weeks, the world ceased to exist. In fact, in the end, there was hardly any inner reality. If man becomes totally isolated, then he ceases to exist.

  So it is not fundamentally possible to be alone. Fundamentally, man has to be with other people. If man becomes totally, totally alone, then he is lost.

  * * *

  Johan Asplund, Swedish professor of social psychology, began, in his book Time, Space, Individual, Collective and in many other places, to examine the way in which time, as an entity, is maintained collectively by people. Just as Uexküll attempted to uncover the underlying rules for each individual’s awareness of the world, so Asplund applies himself to describing the rules governing collective awareness; coexistence. In a way that no one has ever done before. And in a way gently and humbly, like Uexküll.

  The subject of his books is fellowship. Even so, in many ways they, too, stand alone.

  * * *

  Johan Asplund and Jakob von Uexküll. You read what they have written, and it is like a friend reaching out a hand to you, even though you will never get to meet them. They have known something special about time, maybe they themselves have been ill. They have known that there are limits to how tightly you can hold on to a person without them cracking.

  * * *

  Uexküll and Asplund: Time is not something that flows independently of the individual and of human fellowship. It is also shaped and maintained by the way people coexist, and this is linked to the sensory apparatus.

  * * *

  When the bell rang, the woman from the department got to her feet and looked at her watch.

  “I think we’ve reached the end of the road,” she said.

  The end of the road. It was so deep. She meant that it was now clear that we—not August alone, but also Katarina and I—had been unaccountable. That it was impossible to get any further by spending more time on it. That they had covered the distance they had set for themselves. That they had punished Biehl and the school enough by putting a stop to the project.

  She also meant that the time was right for terminating the proceedings at this point. The bell had rung. As though urging that the confrontation ought to come to a close.

  Everyone stood up, including Biehl and Fredhøj and Karin Ærø and all the others, even grownups who had not gone to school for thirty years. It was a reflex. The moment the bell rang, time began to flow. It would carry everything with it, out of the room.

  Against this stream, all hunched up, came Katarina. They did not try to stop her, but they froze. She came right over and stood in front of me.

  I thought she was going to say something about the experiment, that it continued for always, that it never stopped, and then I would have nodded.

  But it was not that.

  “I’m going to Svarrø,” she said. “It’ll only be for a few months. I’ll leave an address for you.”

  If you belonged nowhere, and if you became separated from each other, then it was as though you ceased to exist, even in a country as small as Denmark; then you never found each other again, this I had witnessed often before, this she knew.

  She looked up at me, her face was screwed up. With love, I could not stand it.

  “I’ll come, you’ll see,” I said. I knew it was a lie, she knew it, too.

  If it had just been her and me. But there had always been August, too, now he was obliterated, it was as if you had lost your own child, I could no longer see her.

  When people are going to be taken from you anyway, then it would be better if you had never come to care for them.

  “Try to remember the bit about the pain,” she said. “And the light of awareness.”

  No one laid a hand on her. But the stream of time grabbed hold of her and carried her out and away.

  FIVE

  What does it mean, to fail a child?

  Over the years that I have been writing this, Prin
ceton University, where Einstein held a post, has embarked on the publication of his collected works. The first volume contains his correspondence with Mileva Marić, his first wife.

  In November 1901 they had a daughter, Lieserl, out of wedlock. Eight months later they gave her up for adoption, possibly to a family in Hungary. Most likely because she stood in the way of Einstein’s appointment, and his career. At that time Mileva Marić was once more pregnant. The whole affair was kept secret. No one, subsequently, could find any trace of Lieserl, the only clue to her existence lies in these letters.

  Most of Einstein’s letters from this time, including those in which he inquires after the daughter, follow the same pattern: a few lines taken up by inquiries about mother and child, after which he immediately switches to news of what really occupied his mind. During these years, mostly questions on thermodynamics; questions which were to lead, not long afterward, to the special theory of relativity, published in 1905, in which he propounds the first part of his theory on time.

  He was divorced from Mileva Marić in 1919, by which time they had had a son. The rift lasted until the late 1920s, after which they resumed the relationship, as friends. From the next twenty years, several hundred of the letters they exchanged have been preserved.

  In these the daughter given up for adoption is not mentioned once, not even in the spaces between the lines.

  What causes people to abandon a child? And what impact will it later have on them, that they have done so?

  * * *

  When Einstein has become world-famous, and journalists ask about his youth, he himself refers to it several times as “the corpse of my childhood.”

  He says he is referring to the strict, inhibiting bourgeois mentality that surrounded him.

  It is clear from his letters to Mileva Marić that his scientific theories are developed in protest against this bourgeois mentality, which he also encounters at the Polytechnic in Zurich.

  He himself has later said that for him the theory of relativity and its view of time and space was also an act of rebellion against authorities that inhibit thought. In his letters it is quite clear that his cosmology has also been developed as political action and psychological protest.