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I start working when other people still sleep.

I eat only when hungry.

I do not go shopping when hungry.

I am walking (nordic) without snow.

I stopped talking.

These are some of the few habits (atomic) that saved me time.

And last one for the day (Quote): I do not have time for you now, sorry  …

I might have time for year later like next year.

If you like this, let me know.

Am busy enjoying my last few years.

Kindly from OZ

The Wizard.

—
I. The River

Nick Adams goes back to the river alone. Not to fish, not really — the trout are almost an alibi — but because something in him needs the discipline of a task performed exactly, in order, without hurry: pitch the tent square to the ground, drive the pegs true, boil the coffee the way his father once did, or did not, we are never quite told which. Hemingway never says why the boy has come back changed from the war he never names in *Big Two-Hearted River*. He shows us the burned-over land instead, the grasshoppers blackened by fire, the trout holding themselves motionless against the current in the one pool of clear water. The wound is never mentioned. It sits below the surface of the prose the way the trout sit below the surface of the river — visible, if you know to look, and otherwise simply water.

This is initiation without ceremony. No elder speaks the words that mark the passage; the boy marks it himself, alone, through the exactness of small tasks. It is a peculiarly modern rite — one without a community to witness it, without a name for what has changed. And yet it is still a rite: something is entered into, and something is left on the other bank.

I think of my own fathers and grandfathers, the ones who taught by not teaching, who handed down the discipline of a task and let the meaning arrive, if it arrived, unannounced. Forty-three years in a classroom taught me that this is usually the only kind of teaching that holds.

II. The Songline

Bruce Chatwin walked into the Central Desert believing, or wanting to believe, that the Aboriginal songlines were something close to what the West calls literature — an epic, sung, that mapped the continent in verses passed hand to hand, or rather mouth to ear, across tens of thousands of years. He was corrected, gently and not so gently, by the people who actually held the law of the land he was walking through. The songline is not a poem about the country. It is not *about* anything. It is the country, sung — the difference being the whole of the difference between European and Aboriginal ways of holding knowledge.

What Chatwin got right, whatever else he got wrong, was the walking itself as the vehicle of meaning. Not the arrival, not the destination — the *Wanderung* itself, and the fact that the meaning is not stored in a book or a monument but re-enacted, each time, by the body moving through the specific country that carries it. A song without the walking is not the song. A walk without the song is only exercise.

This is where Chatwin and Hemingway’s Nick Adams, who could not be further apart in almost every other respect, meet without knowing it. Both understand that the body walking, alone, through country that has already been marked by those who came before, is a technology of meaning older and more reliable than the sentence. The song and the river both hold what cannot be said directly. You have to walk into them.

III. The Waterhole

But the desert has no river, or only the memory of one. The riverbeds of the Namib, like those of the Australian outback, run dry for years at a stretch and then, without warning, flood — a wall of brown water arriving overnight from rain that fell three hundred kilometres away, in mountains the valley below never sees. You cannot build a rite around a river that is absent nine years in ten. What you build it around, instead, is the waterhole: the fixed point, the place that is always there even when it holds no water, the station the track always returns to.

I remember, or I have been told so often that the telling has become a kind of remembering, a grandfather at such a place — call it Voigtskirch, call it any farm on the edge of country too dry to forgive carelessness — laying a hand on a small boy’s shoulder and saying nothing at all. Not *hush*. Not *quiet now*. Just the hand, and the silence that followed it, and the animals that came, eventually, to drink because the boy had learned, in that instant, that the waiting itself was the lesson. Nobody explained this to him. He was simply made, by the weight of a hand and the length of a silence, to feel the shape of a rule he would spend the rest of his life trying to articulate and never quite manage.

This is the first of the silences I want to set beside the songline and the river: silence as instruction. Not the absence of communication but its most concentrated form — a silence so charged with intention that the boy who receives it never afterwards mistakes quiet for emptiness.

IV. The Pause

Harold Pinter understood something adjacent to this, though from the opposite direction — not the desert but the sitting room, not survival but menace. The Pinter pause is famous precisely because it refuses to be filled: two characters sit in a room and the thing that is not said accumulates a weight the dialogue itself never carries. Actors are trained to hold it, to resist the very natural urge to rescue the audience from discomfort. The silence is doing the work. The words, when they come, are almost an afterthought — a release of pressure that has built during the pause, not the source of the pressure itself.

Where the waterhole silence teaches through calm — the hand on the shoulder, the animals eventually arriving — the Pinter pause teaches through threat: something *might* happen in this silence, and the not-knowing is the theatre. And yet the underlying claim is the same in both cases: that silence is not a gap in meaning but a container for it, perhaps the largest container available, larger than any sentence.

I have watched young actors — and young students of German, for that matter — reach for a word too quickly, out of the same discomfort Pinter’s pause is built to exploit, and lose in that instant everything the silence was about to say. Teaching a pause is, I have come to think, harder than teaching a text.

V. The Given Silence

Jenseits der Stille

Caroline Link’s 1996 film about a hearing girl raised by deaf parents — introduces a silence of a different order altogether, one that must be handled with more care than the others, because it is not chosen. The grandfather’s silence at the waterhole is pedagogy; he could speak, and does not, and the not-speaking is the lesson. Pinter’s silence is dramaturgy; the actors could speak, and the audience’s whole attention is bent on when they will. But the silence of a deaf household is neither instruction nor tension withheld. It is simply the medium the family lives in — not a gap to be filled or a threat to be resolved but a full and entire way of being in the world, communicated instead through hands, faces, the whole grammar of the body.

To fold this silence into the same essay as the waterhole and the Pinter pause risks a kind of theft — taking a condition that is not a metaphor and making it one. I want to resist that, even while including the film, because what *Jenseits der Stille* actually offers is not another variety of chosen silence but a correction to the very idea that silence is always, in the end, a communicative choice. Sometimes it is simply the weather one lives under. The daughter in the film becomes the family’s translator into the hearing world — a role that is itself a kind of songline, carrying meaning across a border in a body, without a text.

VI. The Raised Baton

And then the fourth silence, the smallest and the most civic: the concert hall, the child told — usually by a look, sometimes by an actual whispered word — not to rustle the sweet wrapper as the conductor’s baton rises. This is silence neither as survival instinct nor existential condition nor dramatic weapon, but as *cultivated* discipline — the thing forty-three years in front of a classroom spends itself trying to install, one raised hand, one waiting pause, one *Ruhe bitte* at a time.

It is, on the surface, the most trivial of the four. But the raised baton and the raised hand at the waterhole are closer cousins than they look: both ask a room, or a boy, to withhold the small, easy noise in favour of the larger thing about to arrive. Hans Werner Henze knew this in his bones — a conductor’s authority is built entirely from silences he creates and then breaks at will, the orchestra and the audience both trained into the same held breath.

Four silences, then, and not one of them empty: the grandfather’s, the actor’s, the deaf family’s, the concert hall’s. Nick Adams walks alone into the first. The songline is sung across all four at once, without the singer ever needing to name which kind of silence he is walking through. Perhaps that is the only honest ending available here — not a resolution, but a return to the waterhole, dry most years, full when it is least expected, and always, whether it holds water or not, the place the track comes back to.