You get the soup and they get the marrow. You get the pfennig and they get the mark - Kurt Tucholsky
It is summer and the end of the last lesson of the academic year. The teacher wishes a pleasant holiday to his student. The student replies, the holiday begins now but with each passing moment, its end also approaches, and all too soon we shall be back here, and all will be the same. The teacher says, we will return but not as we were. The student says, the return of the days is like an ulcerating wound that may be dressed but never heals, and recites a line: Sir, why do you suffer so? I was wounded by the spear and it alone can heal me. The teacher has put his papers away and turns to close the classroom window. He says, negativity is not a wound but a doubling of oneself within the conditions of one’s life, and he recites a line, oh time you will do as we wish. The holiday is set by the school year and we must live contained within the boundaries that are set upon the passing of the days; we may not extend the holidays by adding more days, we may not dictate terms to the school calendar according to our preferences. We are forced by circumstance to make a fundamental adjustment to our instinct towards resistance, and he recites a line, for it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. So, if a longer holiday is not an option available to us, then we may still conceive a holiday that escapes the constraints set purely in terms of quantity of passing days. We are free to take a holiday which might be found by directing the negativity that is bound into ourselves. In a sense, we may double ourselves in our relation to the school holiday - there is another holiday that we may take from, within, or even against the given holidays. We may take a holiday from the holidays, we may find an immeasurable vastness in it that we can carry away, a vastness beyond the numbered passing days and which causes us not to return here as we were but by which we may seize the days yet to come. The teacher closes the window. The fence outside rocks slightly as it absorbs the impact of a pigeon landing there. The teacher says, it is not the weight of the pigeon that rocks the fence but the pigeon’s force of will. It looks a heavy bird but its bones are hollow. It is the fierce energy at the pigeon’s disposal that causes it to become both lighter than air but also capable of shaking where it lands. We are familiar with the idea of how the swan’s self as island of floating serenity is the product of its savage will, the will which it directs beneath the surface, then let us now imagine a ball of turbulent and rolling energy surrounding the pigeon in flight which it has captured to itself by the movement of its wings. As it flies, the pigeon rides this rolling ball of energy with great audacity across the air. The student is quiet for one moment, and then leaving the classroom recites a line, but quietly and in the original German, fine, that is the pfennig but where is the mark?
