Across Read Free

granite, have been carried away, or, when they are made of wood, have rotted. In the field, I recognize the emplacements of former thresholds by hollows, color gaps, and traces of wood. My work is not merely incidental; once thresholds are located, the whole ground plan can be deduced; they provide boundaries that indicate the original layout of a building or a whole village.
    A glass on my desk contains some sawdust, the remains of a threshold I discovered on the Hemmaberg and wrote my first paper about. Discovering and describing thresholds became a passion with me. During the school year I often devoted an afternoon to it, helping on digs in the immediate vicinity, such as the Celtic Dürrnberg near Hallein or, only recently, the “Roman Road” in Loig. I was usually rather tired the next day, but that actually benefited my teaching; it made me calm and alert, and I listened to my pupils, just as they listened to me.
    My report on the Loig dig was just about finished, including the photographs and the drawings of cross sections and horizontal sections with the small initials A.L. (Andreas Loser) in the lower right-hand corner. The task assigned to me was making measurements of the vestibule; describing and interpreting the floor mosaics
was the work of the professionals. “Access to the villa was provided by a door so-and-so many Roman feet wide, with a masonry base for the formerly present wooden threshold. A space so-and-so many Roman feet wide and so-and-so many Roman feet high was set aside for it at the foot of the east wall.” Time and again, while I was doing this work, the black knotholes in the floorboards of my room looked to me like colored mosaic stones, and once a fresco appeared in the white wall: Iphigenia, holding a statue of the goddess Artemis, on her way to the sea, before escaping to Greece with her brother—a mural from Pompeii, intimating to me that my measurements had not been entirely useless. When toward the end I looked up from my paper for a moment, the Untersberg with its sunlit crest was situated in the ancient world, and I saw the corresponding alluvial cones at the foot of the Staufen.
    My desk had been cleared. It’s a small, light-colored office model with a chipboard top and steel legs, and it blended nicely with its surroundings. Beside the glass with the sawdust in it, there is an elongated piece of wood with holes at one end, rounded edges, and slanting grooves of varying width—a so-called hand fondler, carved years ago by my son (more or less as a school exercise), blackened from handling, but still smelling of fresh wood, just as the brown, fist-sized, hardened lump of clay beside it, whenever I pick it up, takes on the smell of the damp gully from which it was taken years ago. Written in pencil on the clay is the Greek word “Galene,” meaning “the calm, radiant sea,” which, according to the philosopher Epicurus, can be taken as
a model of existence (the man sitting over it interpreted the luminous graphite word more as a kind of call to order). The last in this row of objects is an egg-shaped lump of clay which not so long ago was broken from a dried thornbush on a Mediterranean island: a puzzling object, a mixture of sand and tiny stones that some sort of insect may have built around a branch of the thornbush, which now on my desk is still inside it, forming an arrow, whose tip emerges at the other end of the egg. A number of deep holes give it the appearance of an ocarina, except that the holes have no outlet. They seem, deep inside, to be joined in a single hollow, though the passages are so crooked that the eye cannot follow them. The interior of these passages glows an intense bright red that seems to enamel their walls. Once, when someone blew into one of the holes, the long feelers of an unknown, black-armored insect darted out of a neighboring hole, and immediately retracted. All these objects might be termed my “callers