Professor Friedrich Icklebohm (Part III)

The Consolation of Thought

Evening had settled. The lamps burned low, their amber glow mellowing the sharp corners of the room. Outside, the wind moved softly through the birches, whispering against the windowpanes like the murmur of an old language. Between them, on the low table, stood a bottle of whiskey and two heavy tumblers — each half-filled, each slightly clouded by the room’s warmth.

For a time the men said little. It was a silence that did not require apology. They had long ago discovered that thought, like wine, matures best when left undisturbed.

At length, it was Mersch who spoke. “I sometimes think,” he said, turning the glass slowly in his hand, “that meaning itself is an invention of youth. The young must imagine purpose, else they’d never endure the confusion of beginning. But old men… old men have no need for meaning. They require only reconciliation.”

The Professor regarded him quietly. “You speak as if the two were enemies.”

“Not enemies,” Mersch replied, “but strangers who never learned each other’s tongue. Meaning insists upon progress — upon movement toward something. Reconciliation, by contrast, rests in acceptance. It doesn’t reach forward; it simply abides.”

Icklebohm smiled faintly. “Then perhaps reconciliation is the truer philosophy. The only question one not defeated by time.”

Mersch laughed — a dry, brief laugh that caught in his throat. “You always were the stoic. Even at the university you sought balance in everything. You once told me — I remember it still — that despair was merely enthusiasm turned inward.”

The Professor leaned back in his chair. “Did I say that? Then I must have been unbearably confident. Yet there is something in it, I think. Despair is energy that has lost its object. The wise thing is to give it another.”

“And what object have you chosen?”

The Professor considered. “Endurance,” he said simply. “I have found no philosophy more practical than to continue.”

Mersch stared into his glass. “And yet endurance,” he murmured, “is the dullest of virtues. It’s like waiting for the postman — knowing he’ll come, knowing he brings nothing of importance, and still watching the road.”

The Professor chuckled softly. “Perhaps. But I’ve come to believe that endurance is not passive. It’s a kind of discipline — the art of continuing one’s own story when no one else is listening.”

Mersch looked up, and there was a glint of recognition in his eyes. “That’s good,” he said. “Yes, that’s very good. The art of continuing. Perhaps that’s all that remains for us — to keep narrating, if only to ourselves.”

They refilled their glasses. The whiskey glowed in the lamplight like a small captured sun.

After a pause, the Professor said, “You know, Rolf, I’ve often wondered why we philosophers spent so much time defining truth and so little time preparing for death. One would think that would have been the first chapter, not the last.”

Mersch nodded slowly. “Because the truth about death is unspeakable. Words are for the living. The dead have no need of meaning — and that frightens us.”

The Professor’s gaze drifted toward the window. Outside, the night was absolute. “When my father died,” he said, “I found him seated at this very table, his head resting on his arm, as though he had simply fallen asleep. I remember standing there, looking at him, and thinking — not of grief — but of symmetry. The completion of a form. He had begun here, and he had ended here. And there was, oddly enough, a kind of beauty in that.”

Mersch listened in silence. Then, quietly: “So the philosopher found comfort in geometry after all.”

“Perhaps I did,” said the Professor. “Perhaps in the end we all do. Life is asymmetrical; death is its correction.”

Mersch sighed. “You’ve grown gentler with your abstractions.”

“Age is a solvent,” said the Professor. “It dissolves the sharpness of ideas, leaves only the residue of feeling. That’s all I have now — feeling and the small habits that make it bearable.”

Mersch raised his glass. “Then let us drink to residue — and to the art of continuing.”

The Professor lifted his own. “To that, my friend. Always to that.”

The glasses met with a quiet chime. Outside, the wind faded, and the room seemed to settle into perfect stillness — two old men, the light, the whiskey, and the long, unspoken recognition that conversation, like life itself, is not meant to conclude, only to pause.

To be continued…

 

Professor Friedrich Icklebohm (Part IV)

The Village Morning

The next morning broke clear and bright, the kind of autumn day that begins with a cool breath and promises warmth by noon. The Professor was already awake when the first light found the windowpanes. He sat at the small writing desk in his bedroom, jotting a few fragmentary thoughts about endurance and reconciliation—phrases that had lingered from the night before, still murmuring at the edge of consciousness like a melody remembered upon waking.

From below, the faint clink of china told him that Ilsa was already at work. He washed, dressed, and descended the narrow staircase. In the kitchen, the smell of dark coffee and toasted rye bread seemed to complete the ritual of morning. Mersch appeared a few minutes later, slower on the steps, but smiling faintly—his gait awkward, his spirits sound.

“Did you sleep?” asked the Professor.

“Eventually,” said Mersch. “Your whiskey is persuasive.”

They breakfasted quietly, exchanging only practical remarks about the day. The Professor had planned their small outing: a leisurely tricycle ride to the village square, where the baker, the grocer, and the bookseller each kept their doors open to the morning air. The plan was modest, but the day itself invited ceremony; it was enough merely to move through it.

Before leaving, Mersch paused by the cottage window and looked out across the yard. “It’s strange,” he said, “how a place seems to carry its own peace. You’ve lived here so long, Friedrich—it’s as if the air knows your rhythm.”

The Professor smiled. “The air and I have come to an agreement. It tolerates me as long as I keep my expectations low.”

They stepped outside. The tricycle, freshly wiped by Ilsa’s dutiful hands, gleamed faintly in the sunlight. Mersch insisted on walking beside it rather than riding, claiming he needed to “earn the day.” The road from the cottage sloped gently down toward the village, lined with trees half-turned to gold. The leaves made a dry whispering sound underfoot, as though they too were holding conversation.

Along the way, they passed the old monument near the square—a stone obelisk topped with a bronze soldier. Icklebohm slowed his pace, as he always did, out of reflex or respect. The names inscribed there were long familiar, but his eyes found them anew every time, like notes in a score whose melody had changed with age.

Mersch stopped beside him. “Do you ever think,” he asked, “that remembrance is more for the living than the dead?”

The Professor considered this. “Yes,” he said at length. “But not as consolation. As instruction. Memory is the pattern by which we try to give shape to loss. It’s our geometry again.”

Mersch smiled faintly. “You’re consistent, if nothing else.”

They moved on, and the square came into view—a handful of tidy shops, a scattering of benches, and a stone fountain at the center, its water glinting in the light. The scene was at once ordinary and ceremonial. Two men in late life entering a morning full of small commerce and quiet civility—it was the kind of theatre that required no audience.

The grocer spotted them first. “Professor! Good morning! You’ve brought company, I see.”

Mersch nodded, extending a hand. “Rolf Mersch—an old student of life, though not of your university.”

The grocer laughed politely and insisted they come inside. Within the familiar scent of wood and produce, Icklebohm found himself watching his friend with quiet admiration. Mersch, once so given to abstraction, now moved with unhurried grace through the simplest interactions—touching an apple, reading a label, asking the price of cheese as if each word restored a piece of the world’s ordinary logic.

After their purchases, they sat at the café beside the fountain, their tricycle parked neatly by the curb. A young waitress brought coffee and scones, and for a time they said little. The square carried on around them—children chasing each other near the monument, a farmer unloading crates of pumpkins, the faint clang of a church bell marking the half-hour.

At last, Mersch said, “I think this is what you meant last night—endurance as continuation. One needn’t do anything heroic. Merely to sit here, to see, to breathe—that’s the act itself.”

The Professor nodded. “And philosophy, for all its ambition, can’t improve upon that. Life becomes truer when it stops trying to explain itself.”

Mersch looked across the square, his eyes half-closed against the sunlight. “Strange, isn’t it? After all our talk, all those years of teaching, the answer turns out to be a cup of coffee on a warm morning.”

The Professor smiled. “And even that answer changes daily.”

They sat until the light began to tilt toward afternoon. When at last they rose to leave, Mersch placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You know, Friedrich, I don’t think I’ve felt so present in years.”

“That,” said the Professor, “is all the meaning there ever was.”

And with that, they began the slow, companionable journey back up the lane, the tricycle wheels turning softly on the gravel, the rhythm of friendship and philosophy still murmuring between them — not concluded, only continued.