Post #7 - Reading Danube on the Mekong
Somewhere between Pak Beng and Houay Xay, I sat on the boat deck reading Claudio Magris’s Danube. It might feel strange, reading one river while traveling another. But both of these shared waters have carried stories, love, empires, faiths, migrations, life across their expansive reach. And both now bear the weight of infrastructure that promises progress while slowly undoing their souls and ecologies.
The Danube once possessed vast floodplains that are breeding grounds for sturgeon and pelican. These vital habitats have been largely lost to dams, levees, and navigation canals. Things are improving, especially since the establishment of International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR), where EU and non-EU states cooperate under binding conventions. The Mekong River Commission (MRC), by contrast, relies on voluntary coordination among competing national interests. Transparency, accountability, and downstream equity remain ever more fragile here.
Magris writes of the Danube, “It is in classifications that life flashes through so tantalizingly, in the registers that attempt to catalogue it and in so doing expose its irreducible residuum of mystery.” The Mekong, too, resists being catalogued. Its flow defies neat management plans and spreadsheets of megawatts.
His prose drifts between myth, observation, and reflection. He writes that places can hold “a Platonic anamnesis of the soul.” Maybe rivers do too. They remember our longings and our errors. They show us what has been lost, and what might still be repaired, if we learn to listen across waters.
—-
A selection of Magris’ writing from my reading:
“For Goethe, Gigi goes on to say, the unnatural probably did not exist. Goethe’s Nature embraces and enfolds all things, and it is she who with elusive irony causes and creates all forms, even those which apparently contradict her and which to men appear “unnatural”. Even the most deprived, sterile individual, who thinks of himself.as banished from her bosom, belongs to her without knowing it, and plays the part which she has assigned to him in the everlasting pageant: the tap and the gutter are vassals of the river-god.”
“At these café tables in Vienna, in the early years of the century, Peter Altenberg — the homeless poet in love with anonymous hotel rooms and picture postcards — wrote his lightning, impalpable parables, his tiny sketches of minute particulars (a shadow on a face, the lightness of a footstep, the brutality or the desperation of a gesture), in which life reveals its graces, or else its nothingness, while History betrays its still imperceptible cracks, omens of a forthcoming sunset.”
“A map of Mount Sneznik, bearing the names of its clearings and its paths, is also a portrait of men, the image of what I have experienced and what I am. Sometimes places can also be atavistic, and emerge from some Platonic anamnesis of the soul, which recognizes itself in them. Vienna is one of these places, in which I rediscover the familiar and well known, the enchantment of things which, like friendship and love, become ever fresher with time. This feeling of ease in Vienna may derive from the city’s being a crossroads, a place of departures and returns, of people, both celebrated and obscure, whom history gathers together and then disperses, in the vagabond”
“The boat glides over the water, the canebrakes slip by on the banks. Perched on a tree, a cormorant that has opened its wings to dry off is etched against the sky like a crucifix, the gnats swarm like an uncaring handful of the loose coinage of life; and the German scholar who specializes in Danubian literature does not envy Kafka or Musil, with their genius for depicting dark cathedrals or inconclusive committees, but rather Fabre or Maeterlinck, the bards of the bees and the termites; and he understands how Michelet, having written the history of the French Revolution, would have liked to write the history of the birds and the sea. Linnaeus is a poet, when he urges us to count the bones of a fish and the scales of a snake, and to observe and distinguish between the flying-feathers and the steering-feathers of a bird.”
—-
Magris, C. (1989). Danube: A sentimental journey from the source to the Black Sea (P. Creagh, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.