Emily Kathleen Cooke

In Tübingen the houses sit along the River Neckar like nineteenth-century ladies on lounge chairs with flowing skirts and big hats: they look comfortable and bourgeois and unassailable. Like most of Germany. From the bridge over the river you can see a tower, painted yellow now, where the poet Hölderlin went crazy for 36 years: a long, slow burn that might, in other circumstances, be called life. This is where he wrote these words, which I found quoted by Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude: The lines of life are as various as roads or asThe limits of the mountains are, and what we areDown here, in harmonies, in recompense,In peace for ever, a god will finish there. On the opposite side of the river is a park where I walked with my father under plane trees two hundred years old. Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com