As I mentioned yesterday, last week I inadvertently went without the Internet and without walking. I was visiting an old friend in Stelle, a quaint town just across the Elbe from Hamburg. My friend is a 72-year-old divorced, lonely, extremely German man, whom I hadn’t seen for six years. During the 6½ hour train ride, I just hoped that we would still be the friends we once were.
When we arrived at his apartment, he showed me to my room, then my wife and daughter to theirs. I asserted that we could all sleep in the same bedroom and wondered where he would sleep in his two-room apartment. He said not to worry about it, which I soon realized meant he was sleeping a few floors down in his neighbor's extra room. Every night he left us alone in his apartment, walked down a few flights of stairs, and appeared the next morning with a bag of fresh breakfast Brötchen. It was quite the accommodation. The only problem was that he never left us the key to his apartment, so we were trapped from 9pm to 9am, hence my inability to walk.
Although I took advantage of sleeping in a little longer than usual, one morning I did wake up early to my daughter’s hungry cries. My wife took over as those cries always demand and I decided to go exploring rather than going back to bed. I know it sounds strange to go exploring through somebody else’s apartment, but his apartment was really more like a museum with a couple of beds and thus invited inspection. In our bedroom the walls were covered with paintings and the bookshelves were lined with aged manuscripts and antique organ music to be played on his old-fashioned pump organ and his custom built pipe organ. He later told me that this organ is his most prized possession.
Though the keys remained motionless, it seemed to accompany my exploration with a distant dirge.
As I exited the bedroom and entered the living room, I realized why. The walls and floor were decorated with Testamized animals. (After viewing the commercial I posted a couple weeks ago, I think it’s time, in this year of verbification in the sports world—Jimmer and Tebow—to verbify Chuck Testa.) I first saw this fawn packed into the bookshelf.
It’s hard to imagine that it looked so calm while being hunted. And if so, it is hard to imagine the mentality that would pull the trigger. As I turned toward the center of the room, a similar, sickening image caught my attention, two foxes, mother and child.
My friend affectionately calls them Max and Moritz. The bullet wound in the kit’s back was still visible. Directly above the dining table, two owls peered down at me with their hypnotizing eyes, attesting to the violent scenes that have been transformed into decorations.
The owls’ eyes seemed to force mine to the floor where I found a bearskin rug. I crouched down to examine its face.
Its plaintive features made me fear the hunter more than the hunted.
The animals were only one of many displays in my friend’s living room exhibit. The shelves were covered with statues, fine china, mementos from a lifetime of traveling the world, and relics from both World Wars.
The furniture encasing the artifacts was an exhibit in itself.
The walls were covered with art encased in the most decorative frames from artists around the world. His favorite and my wife’s too, was this English painting.
My friend calls her his girlfriend and his only complaint is that she seldom returnes his affection.
As I returned to my room, I ruminated over the tendency of man to prove his mastery over all other forms of life. It must be a distortion of that same tendency that pushes man to prove his mastery over mankind. Perhaps it is my recent transcendentalist readings that persuade me to argue that fulfillment comes through pursuing a mastery of self. A course of self-mastery would also prove effective in curing man’s propensity to collect substitutes rather than substance, to collect Max and Moritzes rather than real friends table, to collect artwork rather than one capable of reciprocal affection. It would do us good to seek self-mastery and substance rather than others and substitutes.
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