The Journey Read Online Free

off balance as readers as we try to appreciate that experience. Adler accomplishes this by asking us to see beyond his metonyms in order to imagine the experience they represent for ourselves. In this way, Adler’s work is both about Theresienstadt and not about it at the same time. Indeed, in some essential way it can never be about the misery endured there, but instead about the imperative for the imagination to attempt to imagine the unimaginable, be it Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, or the next mindless atrocity destined to cross our television screens as we look on, helpless and aghast.
    Vitriolic, yet possessed of discipline and artistry; tender, yet refusing self-pity; accusatory, yet knowing the dignity of compassion and forgiveness,
The Journey
is Adler’s attempt not at restitution, perhaps, but at the restoration of memory through the fluidity of consciousness evoked through language rather than the fixed edifice of a monument. Only within the music of our consciousness do we connect and reconnect, harken and repeat the disparate elements of our lives, and literature remains the deepest evocation of that process. Through this act of preservation H. G. Adler becomes an “entity capable of remembering itself,” as the journey “arrives at a sense of peace.”
Die Reise
is the tale of that journey and the apex of Adler’s art.
    Peter Filkins
December 15, 2007
    * For a discussion of Adler and Adorno, see Jeremy Adler, “The One Who Got Away” in
The Times Literary Supplement
, October 4, 1996.
    * Quoted from Norbert Troller’s introduction to his book
Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews
, translated by Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 1991).
    * Collected in
Campo Santo
, edited by Sven Meyer and translated by Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005).

 

For Elias and Veza Canetti

The Journey

Augury
    D RIVEN FORTH, CERTAINLY, YET WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING, MAN IS SUBJECTED to a fate that at one point appears to consist of misery, at another of happiness, then perhaps something else; but in the end everything is drowned in a boundlessness that tolerates no limit, against which, as many have said, any assertion is a rarity, an island in a measureless ocean. Therefore there is no cause for grief. Also, it’s best not to seek out too many opinions, because, by linking delusions and fears to which we are addicted, strong views keep you constantly drawn to what does not exist, or even if it did, would seem prohibited. So you find yourself inclined to agree with this or that notion, the emptiness of a sensible or blindly followed bit of wisdom, until you finally become aware of how unfathomable any view is, and that one is wise to quietly refrain from getting too involved with the struggles to salvage anything from the rubbish heap, life’s course demanding this of us already.
    Thus some measure of peace is attained. It’s a peace found in endless flight, but nonetheless genuine peace. It is to be sure not an escape from yourself, no matter how much it may seem so, but rather the flight thatconsists of a ceaseless progression along the winding paths of a solitary realm, and because you abide in this realm you can call it peace, for upon time’s stage everything remains fixed in the present. You’re still a part of this. You travel many roads, and in many towns you appear with your relatives and friends; you stand, you walk, you fall and die. You don’t believe you’re still on the stage, even when you acknowledge you were once on it. But you’re wrong, for they took you away and set you back onstage amid the fleeting journey. You didn’t escape, even when you seemed suddenly sunk, figuratively and literally.
    Yet what happens onstage? Many analogies are sought that often capture something essential, but none serves us better than the metaphor of the journey, which we can think of as flight. But what entity is it amid all these travels