Diary of a Madman

I'm not overly superstitious or one of those people who believe in signs from the heavens or voices from the great beyond. But, still. Once in a while coincidences seem a little too pointed to ignore. One day outside the Guggenheim I was walking along Central Park and happened to notice a Fiat parallel parked next to a Mercedes, which happened to be the last two companies my dad worked for. "If the next car in the row is a Chrysler (the other company he worked for) it's a sign, I told myself. And so it was. Spooky. Or a meaningless coincidence. I took it as a nice way to remember my Dad unexpectedly. A few days ago I happened to pick a book out of my shelf to populate a new bookcase and noticed that the date on the cover (November 23) was today. The fact that it's a book based on a superstitious quest to keep someone alive made it all the better. So I've been reading Herzog's crazy daily journal to correspond with my calendar retracing his steps as he walks from his small town in Germany in the cold and the wet to Paris in a bid to keep the actress Lottie Eisner alive a little longer because he can't accept that she can die and he's taken it into his mad head to that by making this pilgrimage he can fool fate. Herzog is very much a man who has made a career preoccupied with  pushing against the forces of Nature...water currents, gravity, wild bears, Klaus Kinski's rage. It's impossible not to read his writing in his voice as he observes the details of his surroundings and his emotional and physical torment with the exquisite detail of an obsessive cataloguer. He battles against the cold and the wet of rural Germany and France taking in every little detail of the bleak landscape. Loneliness envelops him like an inescapable fog. 

He knows the idea that traveling on foot will help prolong a woman's life makes no sense, but it's performed as a rebuke to the bigger truths that make no sense. About mortality. And fate. And the specific arrangement of the cosmos that determines where we're born, who we meet, and the precise boundaries of our lives sketched out by unseen forces we may or may not one day be reunited with. In that context taking the slowest most deliberate action in the face of an emergency makes as much sense as anything.