The Burrow Read Online

It is immediately attached to principles we haven’t even heard of, and in the course of scientific disputes, launched into the ether on these same principles. How could we understand? When we listen to such a debate, we may think it’s a matter of the discovery, but in fact it’s about something completely different.’

‘Very well,’ said the village schoolmaster, took out his pipe and started to fill it with the tobacco he carried loose in all his pockets, ‘so you freely undertook an ungrateful task, and are now just as freely resigning from it. Everything is in order.’ ‘I’m not pig-headed,’ I said. ‘Do you object to anything in my suggestion?’ ‘No, not at all,’ said the village schoolmaster, and his pipe was already billowing smoke. Not being able to stomach the smell of his tobacco, I got up and started to pace about the room. From our earlier meetings I was used to the fact that the village schoolmaster tended to be rather taciturn with me, and yet, once he had come, wouldn’t leave my room. Sometimes it had antagonized me – he wants something from me, I would always think, and offered him money, which he regularly accepted. But he still never left until he was good and ready. Usually his pipe was smoked by then; he stepped around the back of his chair, which he pushed tidily and respectfully up to the table, reached for his ashplant in the corner, eagerly took my hand, and left. Today, though, his silence simply irritated me. If you have offered someone goodbye in an ultimate form as I had, and this meets with the other’s agreement, then you get through the rest of what needs to be got through between you as quickly as possible, and don’t burden the other with your mute presence to no good end. Whereas if you looked at the tough old man from behind, the way he was sitting at my table, you might have thought it would be quite impossible to get him out of the room at all.

A Young and Ambitious Student …

A young and ambitious student, who had taken a great interest in the Elberfeld horses* and had diligently read and thought about everything that had been published on the subject, decided spontaneously to conduct his own experiments in that line, and to do so, moreover, in a wholly different, and as he thought, incomparably more correct way than his predecessors. Alas, his financial means were insufficient for him to conduct his experiments on any grand scale, and if the first horse he bought turned out to be mulish, which is something that can only be ascertained after two weeks of the most solid work, then that would have meant the end of his investigations for quite some time. But, because he backed his methods to cope with any degree of mulishness, he wasn’t unduly deterred. At any rate, as accorded with his cautious nature, he proceeded methodically to calculate his expenses and the means he would be able to raise. He concluded he would be unable to do without the sum that his parents – poor tradespeople in the provinces – sent him regularly every month to defray his living expenses, even though of course he would certainly have to give up his studies, which his parents were anxiously following from a distance, if he was to have any hope of the expected success in this new chosen field he was about to enter. That they would have any understanding for this work, or willingly support him in it was out of the question, so, difficult as it was for him, he would have to keep quiet about his intentions and leave his parents thinking he was pursuing his studies as before.

This act of deception was only one of the sacrifices he was prepared to accept in the interests of the cause. To defray the expectedly large costs that would be involved in his project, his allowance from them would not be enough. Henceforth, then, the student decided to devote the greater part of his day, which thus far had been for his studies, to the giving of private lessons. The greater part of the night, meanwhile, would be devoted to his new work. It was not merely because he was compelled to it by financial exigencies that the student lit on the night-time for the training of his horse: the new principles he hoped to introduce pointed him for various reasons to the night. In his view, the merest break in the animal’s concentration would do irreparable damage to the project, and at night he could be reasonably safe from such a thing. The sensitivity that comes over man and beast both waking and working at night was an integral feature of his plan. Unlike other experts, he had no fear of the wildness of the animal, he positively encouraged it – yes, he sought to produce it, not through the whip admittedly, but by the irritation of his constant presence and constant teaching.

He claimed that in the correct training of a horse there must be no incremental progress; incremental progress, for which various trainers had claimed such absurdly excessive credit of late, was nothing but a figment of the trainers’ imagination, or else – and this was actually worse – the clearest possible sign that there would never be any overall advance. He himself swore to avoid nothing so strenuously as incremental progress. The modesty of his predecessors in thinking they had achieved something with the teaching of pretty arithmetical tricks was incomprehensible to him. It was as if you wanted to make it your end in the education of children, to teach the child nothing but multiplication tables, no matter if the child was deaf, blind and insentient to the world beyond. All that was so foolish, and the mistakes of the other trainers sometimes struck him as so revoltingly obvious, that he would end up almost suspecting himself, because it was surely impossible that a single person, and an inexperienced one at that, albeit driven by a deep and positively wild, though still untested conviction, could be right in the teeth of all the experts.

Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor …

Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor, was one evening climbing up to his flat, which was a laborious process, because he lived up on the sixth floor. As he climbed the stairs, he thought to himself, as he had quite often lately, that this completely solitary life was burdensome indeed, the fact that he had to slink up these six flights of stairs to arrive in his empty room, there, secretly still, to slip into his dressing gown, light his pipe and browse a little in an issue of the French magazine he had subscribed to for several years now, while sipping at a cherry brandy of his own manufacture, and finally, after half an hour of this, to go to bed, which, to make matters worse, he had to comprehensively remake, because the cleaner, impervious to instruction, always left it any-old-how. Some companion, some spectator at these activities, would have been very welcome to Blumfeld.