“Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?” — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day (page 72)
The line before her question “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.
— Mark Twain, from A Tramp Abroad
I really love Mark Twain, here he is again, at it indefatigably:
There are people in the world who will take a great deal of trouble to point out the faults in a religion or a language, and then go blandly about their business without suggesting any remedy. I am not that kind of person. I have shown that the German language needs reforming. Very well, I am ready to reform it.
The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did work on the German language with their two wild and precious lives, including by collecting and immortalizing children’s and household tales. Without whose, and H.C. Andersen’s, my childhood would have been different, I would have been different, and this story would be as sea foam, immaterialised.
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The sea foam had last looked grayish-silver in the gloaming, before the night swallowed their signs up. That was the fate that awaited the little meer-maid if she were to waste the stone-knife her sisters traded, and let the prince of Kopenhagen live a happy life with his princess bride.
It was a terrible choice, but also an easy one. She would die, so that he could live, so that she would not have to kill him with her small white hands. It was easier to choose to die rather than to kill, for a certain number of souls, both above and below the water. Emil was one of those souls, too, and were the choice between dying himself and plunging the stone-knife into the sleeping prince’s heart, he would also give up his own life. But that’s not the choice facing him.
Emil would not kill the sleeping prince, whose bride was sleeping head on his arm, married hand over his heart, for himself, but he would for the little meer-maid. Even though Emil knew it was an injustice, and even an evil, for the prince of Kopenhagen had done no more than not-loved the little meer-maid. Which of us hasn’t not-loved someone, or not-loved enough someone? If that were a crime, then the jails would overflow and the cobblestones before the bailiff worn down to sand.
But justice and injustice are not cosmic but partial, and of the four beating hearts in that cabin, weighed on the scales of Anubis and Thoth, Maat the not-loved goddess of truth and justice put down her not-impartial thumb.