The Mirror of the Magistrate

The secret to this tale from this collection is that we should have been paying attention from the very beginning, which may be the lesson folded into every Father Brown story. It has been debated, by people who like these types of debates and perhaps, when his great mind drifted among the mildest of cloud-banks, even Chesterton himself, whether his intellectual sketches featuring a small Catholic priest (and sometimes not even featuring; sometimes the insignificant-looking churchman just flutters in the shadows like a bat) were superior to these legendary mysteries. Well, they most certainly are and they most certainly aren't. In terms of style, profundity, and moral insight they trump well-nigh any other fictional works of similar length in the English language. But they aren't in one, very important regard: the adventures of Father Brown are hardly adventures at all. They are philosophical exercises, psychological games that assume, however unjustifiably, that the reader will accord every last detail the same amount of intense scrutiny and from these details derive the identity of the party or parties responsible. Responsible for what, you may ask? A crime, or two, or something that surely appears to be a crime but turns out to be an eccentricity or a hoax. In that respect, the tales of Father Brown are almost impossible to set to the screen (a fact that has not dissuaded a passel of attempts), owing in no small part to Brown's adamance on being meek, inconspicuous, and quietly observant; Holmes and Watson, on the other hand, were truly born to become celebrities. With that in mind we may proceed to the sad fate of Sir Humphrey Gwynne.

It is night in a "silent and seemingly lifeless labyrinth of [a] large suburb," and the night is patrolled by two men, one a professional in nocturnal investigation, the other an amateur. The professional, a Mr. James Bagshaw, has been haranguing the amateur, a Mr. Wilfred Underhill, on the shortcomings of detective fiction: to wit, "the only trade" consistently depicted in book after book "in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong" (Bagshaw, of course, is wrong about being wrong, but not for the right reasons). Before they hear gunshots – yes, there will be gunshots, but actually only the professional will hear them – Bagshaw presents his friend a scenario on which, from its polished logic, he has clearly been ruminating for a while. The subject, to no one's surprise, is the aforementioned celebrity sleuth:

Let's take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade, the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left. I'm quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I'm quite sure Lestrade wouldn't guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is the fact that the policeman, who couldn't guess, might very well know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all natives, too. As a policeman I'm glad the police know so much; for every man wants to do his job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder whether they don't know too much.

We can safely assume that Bagshaw has never been to the United States, where ethnic diversity has made the detection of a foreigner a near-impossible task. That said, from mannerisms and dress, and sometimes even from facial expressions, I believe an observant native can distinguish someone raised in his home country from someone who grew up under alien mores. Two shots ring out and our semi-professional duo races off in the direction of "that paradise of peace and legality," the back garden of Sir Humphrey, known popularly as Mr. Justice Gwynne, "the old judge who made such a row about spying during the war." There they find a series of odds and ends in human form: Michael Flood, an Irish journalist who decided to enter the estate by clambering up its garden wall; Green, the man-servant of Mr. Gwynne who, although quite at home in this "paradise of peace," was said to have most recently come to work by the same method as the Irish journalist; and finally, a poet by the name of Osric Orm. Orm was introduced to us much earlier, as it were, right after Bagshaw's little exemplum about what separates the professional and the amateur policeman. Orm is a "literary man of Anglo-Roumanian extraction .... one of the new poets, and pretty steep to read," which makes it clear that not only does Bagshaw have no idea who the "new poets" may be, he has also never read Orm or, for that matter, any other poet. So when Mr. Justice Gwynne is found face down in his otherwise serene garden pond and an "Anglo-Roumanian" neighbor is also found wandering about in that way so commonly incident to poets who compose while they stroll for hours, there is nothing for Mr. Bagshaw to do but take the foreigner into custody.

The story's title is an allusion to this old collection of didactic works which, I suppose, hardly anyone reads nowadays, although I should be careful not to presume too much about others' reading habits. What we can presume is that Chesterton does not think much of men of title and rank. If he did, he wouldn't make so many of them the victims and culprits in his stories (that he almost never includes significant female characters, however, does not mean that he does not think much of them; in fact, it might mean that he thinks the world of them). We do not know anything about Judge Gwynne in life since he very inconsiderately spends the entire tale deceased; what we do know is that if there were one thing the old judge could not suffer, it was treason, be it in the form of a communist (Orm gets shoved brutally into this gaping pit) or, far worse, from someone who has all the power and responsibility an Englishman could reasonably attain and yet still chooses to do ill. And ill cannot be done by doing nothing.

La Beatrice di Dante

The concluding part to an essay ("Dante's Beatrice") by this Italian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

In The New Life, therefore, we have a Beatrice oscillating between woman and angel; in The Banquet, a Beatrice consumptive from symbol and allegory, a creature without blood or flesh like Anacreon's cicada; in The Divine Comedy, in which everything is completed and merged, here we find ourselves face to face with a whole Beatrice, simultaneously woman and angel, sentiment and reason, symbol and reality. Sketched from the sentiment in The New Life, affected by The Banquet's syllogisms, she is represented as completely derived from the genius of The Divine Comedy, in which Faith, Science, and Art beautifully embrace one another like The Three Graces of Canova.

For sure, we do not find herein all the characteristics of a mortal creature, transported alive and palpitating from the immortal realm of art; nor are we speaking directly and powerfully to the heart like Francesca, Desdemona, or Margarete. Yet I say given such a Beatrice, this youngest of angelets, quickly vanished from the world in this way. And given all the circumstances of time and place in which she was born and in which the genius, the love, the character, and the poetry of Dante occurred, she is as she ought to have been. She is not an idea or the symbol of art embodied in a living creature, but a living creature whom Faith, Science, and Art lift upon their wings and then confuse with the light of the supernatural and the infinite.

If you were to snatch her from such an environment, she would lose both substance and life; and she would be destroyed by your hands like the delicate wings of a butterfly. Behold her from afar and leave her in that world in which she was born and where she grew up. Then you will see her drawn only against a diffuse light, like the image of the Madonna seen in dreams and depicted by Fra Angelico. This Beatrice, however, as it were, does not miraculously leap out from the brain of Dante. She is the result of a slow and extremely long elaboration, not only from the mind of our Poet, but also from tradition and the popular poetic consciousness.

Works of art in accordance with the laws are the processes of the creations of nature: isolated phenomena that do not simply appear, but rather are derived from the miraculous disruption of laws. Everything is the product of an ordered and more or less visible labor, and only in a state of superstitious ignorance could one call portentous the existence of a fact whose concatenations and projections are not known. Since art was able to reach all representations of Beatrice, the hetaera of Athens and the matron of Rome would have had to transform themselves gradually into the woman of the Gospels; that Semele and Psyche, victims of the supernatural, became the Virgin Mother, spouse of the Holy Spirit, indicate origins of divinity incarnate.

The religion of Christ provided art with two types of women: the virgin mother – the enigma – and the regenerate adulteress – the scandal. The first is thrust into flight on the art of the supernatural, that is, of mystery, and was the legitimate mother of all the madonnas sung by the medieval poets, in particular by our poets who have babbled on in this matter almost until now. The second, placing art on that spectrum between forgivable and forgiven sensuality, flies upon faith, on the florid path, to slide back ultimately into the brothel. Manon Lescaut, Marion Delorme, and La Dame aux camélias are natural outgrowths of the famous phrase: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

From all these evanescent madonnas of the Platonic Italian cycle, the firmest, most decisive and most luxuriant figure is certainly that of Beatrice, who is not a complete woman, but rather a complete creature of art. Mandetta, Selvaggia, Laura, to name only some of the most beautiful, remain inferior to the creation of Dante: they have less of the symbolic and more of the real. They are neither women nor ideas; their beloved names are repeated in all tones and with all the sweetness of their lovers. The being who is complete, human, and living, the true divination of the woman of medieval art, is Francesca. She is neither an angel nor a prostitute, but very humanly and almost fatally culpable; not wholly damned by an ascetic and Pharisee art, and not wholly regenerated by an art that is both stingily liberal and unabashedly vulgar. Thus she is a complete woman in the human and artistic sense of the word, whose fatal weakness is a piteous halo, the infinite martyrdom, and love.

After her we would be at pains to find in all of Italian poetry a perfect figure of woman. In Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Sophronia is a statue, Erminia an idyll, Armida an animate symbol recalling both Medea and Ariadne. Ariosto's women are either extravagantly true or extravagantly beautiful: either they are stern and indifferent warriors who later evaporate in a pastoral honeymoon, or legendary figures of magic, or adventurers of seductive nakedness. The best of all of them, Olympia, is simply the restoration of two ancient pictures: one painted by Catullus on two old designs from Euripides and Apollonius of Rhodes; the other a watercolor on similar plans by Ovid.   

For the poets of the sixteenth century, woman was either a sheet of white paper on which their Platonic courtesan songs were inscribed in a beautiful hand, or a filthy sheet of paper on which, gentlemen as they were, they dared to write nothing, leaving to Marino the glory of capsizing on the splendid cornucopia of his obscenities. Among the women of modern poetry, noteworthy are only those of Leopardi; yet Eloisa, Aspasia, and Nerina do not actually live from a life of their own, as they are merely reflections of the poet's soul. 

Of the others it is better not to say a word. It is not worth mentioning that they remain figurines of decalcomania carved with the base shears of Romantic sentimentalism and badly glued to the bottom of a cooking tray, from which the only thing that might surface is the covetous scent of a prepared dish and a simpering crowd of convalescents. Very few of these accused parties, yawning, show any sign of life, because even those born with scrofula would go to take a cure at an ospizio marino.

Our poets need to persuade themselves one blessed time that they may write about their pastoral visions and their stoves, that they may descend from their clouds in which they have lived hitherto, that they may live on earth with mankind and breathe with full lungs the wholesome oxygen of reality. Woman here will not be as singularly feminine as in novels; she will not dominate them like she dominates gentlemen; she will not be an idea or a symbol as in Platonic writings. She will no longer be in the heavens or on the altar, but on earth, amid society, and first and foremost in the family, which is the true domain and perhaps the only one of her virtues.  

La Biblioteca de Babel

A story ("The Library of Babel") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

The universe (what others call the Library) consists of an indefinite, perhaps even infinite number, of hexagonal galleries with vast ventilation shafts at the center surrounded by the lowest of handrails. From any of these hexagons the lower and upper floors can be seen – interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves to a side, cover all the sides save two; their height, which is that of the floors, barely exceeds that of a normal library shelf. One of its free sides gives onto a narrow corridor which disembogues into another gallery identical to the first and to them all. On the left and the right of the corridor there are two miniscule offices. One allows for sleep standing up; the other satisfies your calls of nature. Here passes the spiral staircase which sinks and rises towards the remote distance. In the corridor there is a mirror that faithfully duplicates appearances. Men tend to infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (and if it were really so, what would be the point of this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the burnished surfaces shape and promise the infinite ...  Light emanates from one of those spherical fruits which bear the name of light bulb. There are two in every hexagon – transverse. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant. 

Like all the men of the Library, I traveled during my youth. I pilgrimaged in search of a book, perhaps a catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can almost no longer decipher what I write, I am preparing myself to die but a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Dead, there will be no lack of pious hands that will carry me along the guardrail; my tomb shall be the unfathomable air; my body will plummet a long distance and disintegrate and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, a fall that is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that mystic ecstasy reveals to them a circular room with a large book with a continual spine that is turned towards all the walls.  But their testimony is suspicious, their words obscure: this circular book is God.) It is enough for me, for now, to repeat the classical report: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is some hexagon, whose circumference is inaccessible.

Five shelves correspond to each one of the walls of each hexagon; each shelf incorporates thirty-two books of the same format; each book has four hundred ten pages; each page has forty lines; each line has some eighty letters of black color. There are also letters on the back of every book; these letters neither indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know this disconnect sometimes seemed mysterious. Before I summarize the solution (whose discovery, despite its tragic projections, is perhaps the main chapter of the story) I would like to recur to certain axioms. 

The first: the Library has existed ab aeterno – from the beginning of time. Of this truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no reasonable mind could have any doubts. Man, that imperfect librarian, could be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe with its elegant allocation of shelves, of enigmatic tomes, of indefatigable staircases for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance that persists between the divine and the human, it is sufficient to compare these rude tremulous symbols which my fallible hand scribbled on the cover of a book, with the organic letters of its inside: punctual, delicate, utterly black, inimitably symmetrical.

The second: the number of orthographic symbols is twenty-five.* This verification permitted, three hundred years ago, the formulation of a general theory of the Library and the satisfactory resolution of a problem which no conjecture had ever deciphered: the formless and chaotic naturalness of almost all the books. One, which my father saw in a hexagon of circuit fifteen ninety-four, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very often consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters; but the ultimate page says Oh time, your pyramids. It is already known: for every reasonable line or honest piece of news there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal farragoes and incoherencies. (I know of a wild, unbroken region whose librarians repudiate the superstitious and vain custom of searching for meaning in books and outfitted their library so that one might look in dreams or the chaotic lines of the hand ...  They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is by chance and the books have no meaning in and of themselves. This report, we will soon see, is not completely false ...)

For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that more ancient men, those first librarians, employed a language quite different from that which we speak today; it is likewise true that a few miles to the right the language is dialectic and ninety floors up it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true; but four hundred and ten pages of unchanging M-C-Vs cannot correspond to any language, however dialectic or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuate that every letter was able to influence the subsequent letter, and that the value of M C V in the third line of page seventy-one was not a language which could sustain the same series on another position of the page, but this thesis did not prosper. Others thought of cryptography; this conjecture was universally accepted, although not in the sense in which it was formulated by its inventors.

Five hundred years ago the head of an upper hexagon** came upon a book as confused as the others, but which had almost two pages of homogenous lines. He showed his find to a roaming decipherer who told him that these lines were in Portuguese; others told him they were in Yiddish. Before a century had passed, the language had been established: a Samoyedic-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní with inflections from classical Arabic. The contents were likewise deciphered: notions of combinatory analysis illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples permitted a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, however diverse they may be, consisted of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He then alleged a fact that all the travelers had confirmed: there did not exist, in the vast Library, two identical books. From these incontrovertible presumptions he deduced that the Library was whole and that its shelves recorded all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols (a number that, although enormous, was not infinite) or perhaps everything which it was convenient to express – in every language. Everything: the meticulous and detailed history of the future; the autobiographies of the archangels; the faithful catalogue of the Library; thousands and thousands of false catalogues; the demonstration of the falsity of these catalogues; the demonstration of the falsity of the true catalogue; the Gnostic gospel of Basilides; the commentary on this gospel; the true account of your death; the version of every book in all the books; the treatise that Bede could have written (and did not write) on the mythology of the Saxons; the lost books of Tacitus.

When it was declared that the Library spanned all books, the first impression was of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or global problem whose eloquent solution did not exist – in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe brusquely usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time there was much talk about the Vindications: books of prophecy and apology, which forever vindicated the acts of every man in the universe and guarded the prodigious mysteries of his future. Thousands of covetous persons abandoned the sweet hexagon of their birth and sped up staircases, urged on by the vain proposition of encountering their Vindication. These pilgrims argued in the narrow hallways, cast obscure curses, strangled one another on the divine staircases, hurled deceptive books to the bottom of tunnels, and died from having been thrown off cliffs by men in remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons from the future, persons who are perhaps not imaginary); but the seekers did not remember that the possibility of a man encountering his own Vindication, or some perfidious variation of his own, is computable at zero.

Thus an explanation of the basic mysteries of the universe was also hoped for: the origin of the Library and of time. It is plausible that these solemn mysteries can be explained in words: if the language of the philosophers does not suffice, the multiform Library might have produced the unprecedented language required as well as the grammars and vocabularies of this language. The hexagons have fatigued men for four centuries ... There are official seekers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the fulfillment of their function: they always arrive exhausted; they speak of a staircase without steps that almost killed them; they speak of galleries and staircases with the librarian; occasionally they take up the nearest book and leaf through it in seach of infamous words. Visibly, no one expects to find anything.

Unbridled hope was followed, as is natural, by excessive depression. The certitude that one shelf in one hexagon contained precious books, and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost unbearable. One blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should end and everyone should shuffle letters and symbols until they construct, through an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities saw themselves obligated to promulgate strict orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I saw old men hiding for long periods of time in the latrines, with metal discs in a prohibited beaker, feebly mimicking the divine disorder.

Others, inversely, believed it was paramount to eliminate the useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials that were not always false, leafed with annoyance through a volume and condemned whole shelves: to their hygienic and ascetic furor we owe the senseless loss of millions of books. Their name has been execrated, but some deplore the "treasures" which their frenzy destroyed, neglecting the notorious facts. One: the Library is so enormous that all reduction of human origin turns out to be infinitesimal. Another: every exemplar is unique, irreplaceable, but (as the Library is whole) there are always many hundreds of thousands of imperfect facsimiles: works that do not differ apart from a letter or comma. Contrary to public opinion, I dare to suppose that the consequences of the depredations committed by the Purifiers have been exaggerated by the horror that these fanatics provoked. They were spurred on by the delirium of conquering the books of the Crimson Hexagon: books of a lesser format than the natural books; omnipotent, illustrated and magical.

We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf of some hexagon (men reasoned) there ought to exist a book that may be the perfect cipher and compendium to all the rest: a certain librarian went through it and he has become analogous to a god. In the language of this zone there still persist vestiges of the cult of this remote functionary. Many have pilgrimaged in search of Him. For a century the most diverse routes were pursued in vain. How could one locate the venerated secret hexagon which accommodated the book? Someone proposed a regressive method: in order to locate book A, one would first need to consult book B which would indicate the site; in order to locate book B, one would first need to consult book C, and so forth for infinity ... It is to adventures like these that I have consecrated my years, with them now consumed. It does not seem implausible to me that on some shelf of the universe there might be a total book***; I beg those unknown gods to have one man – a single man, even if he lived thousands of years ago! – read the book. If this honor and this wisdom and this happiness are not to be mine, may they be others'. May the heavens exist even if my place be in hell. May I be outraged and annihilated, but may in an instant, in a being, Your enormous library be justified.

The impious affirm that such nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (which is also pure and humble coincidence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the 'febrile Library, whose hazardous volumes run the unending risk of changing into others, and affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything like a divinity who is raving.' These words do not simply denounce the disorder, they also exemplify it and notoriously prove their appalling taste and desperate ignorance. In effect, the Library includes all the variations which the twenty-five orthographic symbols permit, but not a single absolutely foolish act. It serves no purpose to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons which I administer is called Combed thunder; another The cramp of plaster; yet another Axaxaxas mlö.  These propositions, at first blush incoherent, are doubtless capable of a cryptographic or allegorical justification; this justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, is already part of the Library. I cannot combine certain characters

dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library might not have foreseen and which do not, in any of its secret languages, entail a terrible meaning. No one can pronounce a syllable that is not filled with tendernesses and fears, that is not the powerful name of a god in one of those languages. To speak is to incur tautologies. This useless and verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the uncountable hexagons – as does its refutation. (A number n of possible languages uses the same vocabulary; in some, the symbol library admits the proper definition: ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries. But library is bread or pyramid or some other things, and the seven words which define it have another value. You, my reader, are you sure you understand my language?)

Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. The certitude that everything has been written annuls or haunts us. I know districts in which young people prostrate themselves before books and barbarically kiss their pages, yet they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, all of these have decimated the population.  I believe I have already mentioned the suicides, more frequent every year. Perhaps I am deceived by fear and old age, but I suspect that the human species – the only one – is about to make itself extinct and that the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

I have just written infinite. I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical custom;  I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who deem it limited postulate that in remote places the corridors, staircases and hexagons will for us inconceivably cease to be – which is absurd. Those that imagine the world without limits forget that it contains the possible number of books. I dare to insinuate this solution of the ancient problem: the library is unlimited and periodic. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in a given direction, he would prove, at the end of the centuries, that the same volumes repeat in the same disorder (which, I repeat, may be an order: the Order). My solitude is lightened by this elegant hope.****

-------------------------------------------

* The original manuscript does not contain figures or uppercase letters. Punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. Those two signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five symbols sufficient to enumerate the unknown. (Editor's note.)

** Previously, for every three hexagons there used to be one person. Suicide and pulmonary diseases destroyed this proportion. A memory of unspeakable melancholy: at times I have traveled for many nights through polished corridors and staircases without finding a single librarian.

*** I repeat: it is sufficient that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book is also a staircase, although there are doubtless books which challenge and deny and demonstrate this possibility, and others whose structure corresponds to that of a staircase.

**** Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is useless; in all honesty, a single volume, in the typical format and printed in nine or ten sections consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages, would suffice. (At the beginning of the seventeenth century Cavalieri said that every solid body was the superimposition of an infinite number of planes). Making use of this sleek vademecum would not be easy: each apparent page would double into other analogues, and the inconceivable central page would not have a reverse side. 

Pushkin, "Воспоминание"

A work ("Remembrance") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

When for the dead a noise-filled day subsides,
Upon the lonesome city squares; 
The night's translucent shadow glares,        
And sleep, reward of daily work, abides;   
For me these hours drag out, a silent drill,   
(Oppressive wakefulness, each one);
In idle night shall burn the sun            
Of my heart's viper gnawing at my will.

Dreams seethe; whereas my mind with yearning knolls,
As thick, unneeded thoughts escape;    
Remembrance wordlessly so waits     
Before me, to unfurl its lengthy scroll.                
And with repulsion shall I read my life,   
Shake, swear, and bitterly complain;
And spill most bitter tears in vain; 
But these, these saddest lines I shall not strike. 

Ghosts (Gespenster)

You need not be a parent to understand the concern – the hourly concern – with a child's well-being. These feelings are naturally more acute when the children are younger, more vulnerable, more helpless against the tides of man and machine that conspire to end our days. But they do not abate. If it is true that we always view our children in their eternal innocence, as perfect little mammals and miracles, then we do not rest as they age and take life into their own soft hands. Life is short enough without our worries about someone whose existence we determined and began; life is long enough to hope that they will be healthy, happy, and capable of fulfilling every molecule of their potential. And what if the unthinkable occurs due to our own negligence? What if cutting a corner results not in time regained but hell released? Such is the baleful lot of a character in this film.

We begin in Germany with a handsome, middle-aged fellow in an expensive German car listening to this work. That Bach's cantata treats of affliction, of the endless suffering of those who believe and are not believed in, of those who have lost and can never recover, is not insignificant. But before we can wonder about this man's aims, we are taken to a mildly littered public park and the juvenile delinquents tasked with maintaining Germany's immaculateness. Here we find Nina (Julia Hummer), who does not meet many, if any modern film heroine criteria. She is not attractive, intelligent, self-aware, confident, or interesting; if we were to dub her average, we might insult the greater part of our own populaces. No, Nina's fate is wretched, even if she inhabits arguably the most comfortable of earth's regions. As we first see her, her attention is attracted to something almost out of view: a woman being manhandled by two stronger beings. Our initial impression – which will, in no small irony, turn out to be rather fitting – is of a prisoner herded away by the law's long and persuasive arms. Nina's intuition, however, informs her otherwise, and we follow our joint quarry just out of the camera's view, just around a corner or tree, just enough steps in front of us to prevent identification of what is taking place. Our camera will enjoy this frustrating distance as a vibrant metaphor for our plot, which I cannot wholly conceal, as that renders a review nearly impossible. What we can say is that Nina pursues this trio, finds in the rough a very fake diamond – in this case, an earring – interrupts what might have been a hideous crime, and alters, if for a day or two, her miserable existence. And for a day or two she will have the companionship of Toni (Sabine Timoteo).     

Toni may be the exact opposite of Nina, or she simply may be cloaking her insecurities in masculine bile. Her later actions suggest she has long since accustomed herself to humiliation, subordinance, and dependence; in other words, she is a perfect exemplification of a drug addict. This point is only made implicitly: her homelessness, shoplifting, pathological lies, and flailing power line of sexuality all bespeak terrible thirsts. But it is when we remember the first scene, when two ruffians who might have easily taken her honor take instead a few shots to her ribs, that we recognize the indebted pickpocket or substance abuser. Why doesn't Nina see all this? It is one of the film's finest conceits that Nina – who is neither a genius nor a credulist – does see it. She quickly identifies Toni as trouble yet wants to help her in the way that no one has ever bothered to help a teenage orphan who picks up trash in Berlin parks. Interposed with this Sapphic tale is the errand of Pierre, our opening scene's driver (Aurélien Recoing), which turns out to be the fetching of his wife Françoise (Marianne Basler) from a Berlin sanatorium. Françoise has been very sick for, well, about fifteen years now, when she committed the inexpiable sin of leaving her toddler daughter in a shopping cart for a minute unattended. Common sense screams that no one who really loves her child would ever do this; nevertheless, the warning persists for the unthinkable exception that for every parent is so very thinkable. Since the pain of such a mistake is insuperable, Françoise comes to Berlin more than once every year armed with forensic sketches of what her daughter would look like. Near our film's end, we are shown these sketches as well as the security camera footage from that Berlin supermarket and it curdles our blood. We tremble at the predator's alacrity, as well as at the likelihood that this is what Françoise sees every night when she tries so pathetically to fall asleep. 

How this childless French couple's story intertwines with that of a German orphan will not surprise even the most callow of viewers, but Petzold sees most plots as a contrivance. What matters to him, and should matter to the discerning admirer of his cinema, is how he works almost exclusively from a woman's point of view while avoiding the topoi typically reserved for females (if those subjects do not immediately spring to mind, you are reading the right pages). Perhaps for that very reason were critics not fond of Ghosts, which offers merely what its title promises: lonely strands of spectral existences, figures bound to the belief, as Petzold himself once observed, that "love can bring them back to life." Numerous vignettes show us what exactly these characters will do for love. There is an ex gratia breakfast that ends in tragedy; a remarkable soliloquy at a moment we could not possibly have expected; and a long and beautiful march out of the asylum, with a nurse opening a series of doors, one heavier than the next, then looking back at Françoise with mounting resentment. There also obtains, throughout our film, an equable camera as curious and desperate as the characters it stalks. But strangely enough, the most desperate is not Françoise but Toni. Timoteo's eyes and gait alone say everything she could ever express, and as a dingy, gamblesome, unabashed seducer, if one who must think ahead for her next pillow and meal, she is hypnotic. So when Françoise wrongly identifies the Bachian cantata's conductor as Gardiner, not Richter (as Pierre gently corrects her), should we see any symbolism in the German name's triumph over the Latinate? Or in the fact that Richter is German for judge, both the terrestrial and the heavenly? For some, indeed, there is no end to their affliction.