Strawberry Picking (Avec le temps)

Click to play (Ferré)

It is no small irony that we can’t learn lessons from literature at that point in our lives when they might be most useful to us, and through such learning change things to avert future pain. I’m not talking Hamlet here, or Oedipus Rex—most of us do not, could not, live on such planes of extreme experience; rather, the bourgeois tragedies of everyday adolescence: missed chances, hesitant failure, lost love,  the symptoms of obstinate immaturity. It’s not that we can’t relate to it—what twelve year-old cannot understand Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, or the pre-teen protagonists of Kate DiCamillo’s equally wonderful stories The Tiger Rising and Because of Winn-Dixie (both triumphs of modern children’s literature, especially the latter). But it is one thing to empathise with a character, quite another to realize that the character is you—or at least a significant enough part of you that the shock of recognition almost seems physical.

So it was today, several decades too late, that I finally deeply understood the poignancy and ashen heartache of Theodor Storm’s ‘old man’ (the man that Reinhard has become) in the Novelle Immensee (‘The Lake of Bees'), as I accompanied Julian on his nursery excursion to a strawberry-farm, in the wooded countryside behind Rokko not far from Arima. It was a bright, slightly hazy morning, already too hot and bright for those of us genetically deprived of melanin, whose summer hue strikes terror into live lobsters. Julian and I were not alone: we were surrounded by other chattering children, and nattering nursery mums, and every few minutes a country train would shuttle past the farm. A noisy, cheerful, alliterative scene, therefore. And yet suddenly, in the midst of this bustle, rattle and hum, I was transported back, just like Storm’s old man, first to a stuffy mobile classroom in Belfast, circa. November 1979, reading Immensee for the first time (for German A-level), then several years’ forward to a time when I, like Reinhard, failed to seize the moment: remembering the text, but forgetting the lesson yet again.

“…Das brauche ich euch auch wohl nicht zu sagen: wer keine [Erdbeeren] findet, braucht auch keine abzuliefern; aber das schreibt euch wohl hinter euren feinen Ohren, von uns Alten bekommt er auch nichts. Und nun habt ihr für diesen Tag gute Lehren genug; wenn ihr nun noch Erdbeeren dazu habt, so werdet ihr für heute schon durchs Leben kommen…”  

["I probably don’t need to say this: whoever doesn’t find any [strawberries] doesn’t need to bring any to us; but get this into your pretty heads, they can’t expect anything from us old folks either. Now, you’ve had enough good lessons for one day; if you collect as many strawberries, you’ll be set for life, at least for today…”]

Theodor Storm, Immensee (Chapter 3 Im Wald/In the Woods)

In Kodachrome, Paul Simon writes:

When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School

It’s a wonder I can think at all,

And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none 
I can read the writing on the wall.

A great song, except that it’s not all crap.  

Here’s another one, from a slightly later time: BAP Für ne Moment... 'Un su manche Liter Wasser floß sickdämm ahm Dom vorbei.'). Hardly Ferré, but diverting nonetheless...