Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online

bottles, planks, and strips of metal fashioned devices with which to measure the wind and water erosion on the riverbank, the movements of slopes (underground “creep” or “flow”), and the frost in the ground.
    Lauffer, the student of slopes, even forgot in the end to lace himself up in the stiff professional garb that gave him, it is true, the look of a scientist, albeit a strangely uninspired one, and converted himself, with a checked flannel shirt, wide suspenders, and light linen trousers baggy at the top but tapering toward the ankles, into the rather bulky sort of figure one was likely to meet in this region.
    What he built was chiefly “sand traps” of different kinds, horizontal with juxtaposed compartments (with which to measure the horizontal movement of the sand), and vertical, on several levels, with which to measure the lifting power of the wind. He also made use of a “sand bottle,” which he buried in the ground, so that nothing protruded but a sand-catching device attached to the neck, with the opening turned toward the ground wind. To avoid the admixture of secondary debris, which
would have masked the true movement of the slope, the conscientious Lauffer attached long plank gutters to the rubble boxes he placed at the foot of the slopes. And in order to register the “heel clicking,” as he called it, of the stones in the subsoil of the slope, he sank strips of lead vertically into holes in the ground, which he had made with a drill the exact size of the strips, and then measured the movement of rubble by carefully uncovering the strips and observing their inclination. Having planted the area with these devices, he stalked about like a trapper, waiting for results.
    But his special interest was the ground under the raised huts, where the miniature geological formations, sheltered from the effects of precipitation, differed from the originally related but subsequently ruined forms in the outside world.
    This little discovery had greatly excited him: here civilization, instead of destroying natural forms as usual, had preserved them almost entirely from the action of time. Conversely, in a South American desert where there had been neither wind nor rain nor dew for more than a century, human footprints and the marks of horses’ hoofs dating from a time long past had remained untouched by nature. (The rocks in that desert had weathered to so dark a color that the heat radiating from them served as a barrier against the wind.) Lauffer was planning to write a paper comparing the two phenomena: “It won’t be a study,” he said. “More like a description of pictures.”
    Sorger said: “Sometimes when I try to form an idea of the age and genesis of different forms in the same landscape and their relation to one another, the incredible diversity of this one broad canvas starts me daydreaming. I’m not a philosopher, but at such times I know that it’s natural for me to philosophize.”

    Lauffer: “I’m sure your thoughts in the matter are not what the professors would ask for, and there would be no place for us in a discussion among professional philosophers. I for my part can boast only momentary bursts of philosophical imagination, and these exclusively for my own benefit. My science gives me daydreams that no one else could equal even in his sleep.”
    Sorger: “Then you should have things to tell me.”
    Lauffer: “About the landscape?”
    Sorger: “About the landscape and about yourself.”
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    Accumulation of passion; enjoyment of order (of a rectangular table, for instance); the joy of just living somewhere; rediscovered pleasure in study; enjoyment of my body, its needs, even its mere activities. Nothing more to desire; no harm in that. Nothing supernatural about fulfillment. Not thought out of existence, but stripped of individual meaning. A feeling of constant warmth in my head: no personal or