6 February 2013
Chapter 1 (continued)
The gates of that great vessel of peculiarities had been a part of me from such an early age that I know not where a vaguely normal sense of existence, experienced as a babe ended and where Schwernheim began. That line, which was already misty by nature, has been blurred and smudged to some rosy, ethereal outline as restless and shifting as a mirage. The high stone walls and that ornate, rusty portal were as much a part of ma as my eyes or heart or toes and I felt some inexplicable sense of oneness with the lot. The great heaving pile which housed this other home I mine was a steadfast symbol of the past. Its courtyards and turrets, its entire domineering façade and echoing inner halls spoke of a time of order and hierarchy and power. An era where everyone knew their place or else may the good Lord help them for discipline fell hard in the backs of those who forgot. A mean time, a cruel place which perhaps did suit its newfound purpose. For the world had given the inhabitant of this hulking, magnificent chasm a cruel time of it. This memorial to regime and order in a place before the political tempest if the twenties and thirties in Europe stood still in time and, unswayed by its passage, offered a structured refuge for the most poorly understood breed of our kind. Here their shouting and babbling could fill the corridors shrouded in a ghostly haze, now dispersed by their cries. Here they could wander barefoot through the grass of its sprawling grounds and paddle in its lakes and ponds. While perhaps it's glorious splendour and opulence had been somewhat reduced its utility had grown fivefold and it was the sanctuary of the many a lost soul. In my years before school I spent all day everyday there, learning to walk and talk among some of those who had forgotten how. My strength grew in the midst of fragility, my ability to laugh and love fathered by many for whom such things were yesteryear's phantoms. And by the time my formal education had begun I simply spent what time I could under Schwernheim's comforting shadow. After my self-indulgent rambling I feel I had better justify my words albeit in an unfortunately clunking manner. Schwernheim has been closed these past thirty years and while I last witnessed its workings some many moons before then it has always held a place in my heart. I, Maximilian Klein, felt it best to record each magnificent memory of it in writing to right my wrongs, for a page and ink can never truly fade. To entomb each event herein is perhaps the only thing I can do for such a place so dear to me as my nursery, my classroom and my home and it is human nature to cling ceaselessly to a past which shone as bright as any proposed future. So here lies Schwernheim, enshrined within words and immortal now as anything could ever be.
©Delilah-SThompson 2013
Dialogue And The Doppler Effect • Opuss № I