Indigo by Clemens J. Setz Read Free Book Online Page B

nice, Frau Häusler-Zinnbret finally said, that you’ve actually read up on the subject a bit before you came to me. A lot of visitors don’t, you know. But I receive them all, of course, without exception, unless they get really impertinent. I mean, really, truly impertinent. But that rarely happens, thank God.
    She leaned forward and picked up the book she had offered me as a gift. From the side pocket of her knitted vest she pulled a pen. She opened to the first page.
    â€“ Shall I inscribe it for you . . . ?
    Because I didn’t know how to respond to that, I just nodded and closed my notebook. Frau Häusler-Zinnbret wrote a dedication, affixed a bold signature somewhat reminiscent of Spirograph designs, and then asked me the date.
    â€“ Today is the . . . ?
    â€“ Twenty-first.
    She wrote the date, inexplicably blew on the page, and presented me with the gift.
    â€“ Thank you very much.
    â€“ As you can see, cursive has certain advantages, she said, gesturing to her signature. You should practice it. Half an hour or just ten minutes a day, it makes no difference, as long as you really do it every day.
    â€“ All right.
    I stood up. We shook hands.
    Frau Häusler-Zinnbret accompanied me to the door, this time it was the other one. Her apartment had, as I now realized, separate entrance and exit doors, like a supermarket or a hall of mirrors at a carnival.
    Outside the sky was so blue that you could hear a pin drop in it.
    Two Truths
    After the conversation with the child psychologist I flipped a bit through the book she had given me, the new edition of her standard work. I had borrowed the out-of-date version from the university library. I had photocopied some interesting pages and put them in my red-checkered folder.
    The new edition differed only slightly from the earlier one. The tone seemed in some places somewhat sterner, and there was an expanded appendix in which Frau Häusler-Zinnbret provided a sort of overview of her previous studies. In her typical vivid and illustrative style she writes:
    A lone bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stares into the polar night. The monument is located on the so-called southern pole of inaccessibility, the geographic point of the Antarctic farthest from the coastline (about 500 miles from the South Pole). A few buildings of a Soviet research station used to stand around the statue, now it is all by itself. It faces north, i.e., toward Moscow. The bust itself stands on the chimney of a hut now completely submerged in snow, in which a few ghosts of the past might still be living, bent in endless discussion over antiquated world maps . . . As in the case of this lone bust, when we consider phenomena such as dingo pride or the call for an uncivilized solution to the Indigo problem, we are always confronted with two competing truths. The evolutionary truth (the invisible, submerged foundation) has largely shaped the European cityscape: exclusion and custody of the sick, contagious, abnormal, etc. Similar to the way meerkats deal with a sick member of their species who might endanger the successful progress of the clan, by joining forces to bite it to death or simply leaving it behind. Sick cats withdraw to die alone, because there’s no other way to carry out this process anyhow. Evolutionary truth thus intends for some of the population to die in order to make possible the existence of the rest. Human truth (the visible head) says: Everyone must survive, or rather: Everyone has the right to survive. It’s pointless to ask: Why? The question cannot be answered, except with auxiliaries like compassion and the avoidance of pain. The reason lies in our brain, which can identify with and empathize with everything, particularly the things it has to protect itself from: sickness, suffering, and death. It’s a strange consequence of the evolutionary cultivation of our cognition, our capacity to have a nuanced sense of other existences, that a way of thinking