On self-images and the boundaries we draw
I stood at the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen, impressed by what I saw. An acquaintance who had visited three years earlier was not. Only when he showed me a photograph did I understand why: there had been much more water cascading over the falls back then. I had no earlier water level to compare with.
So which one is the Rhine? The one in the photograph, or the one I stood before? Both are the Rhine, and neither stays the same. A river is not an object that simply sits somewhere. It exists for as long as water flows.
And yet, children learn at school how long rivers are. It sounds like knowledge about things. What they learn, in fact, are definitions. People decide where a river ends and flows into the sea. Its beginning is no less clear-cut. Where does the Danube rise? There are three answers. The spring in the grounds of Donaueschingen Castle, known as the Danube Spring. The confluence of the Brigach and the Breg, where the river takes the name Danube. And the source of the Breg, northwest of Furtwangen, which lies farthest from the river’s mouth. In the early 1980s, the Breg source was no longer marked as the source of the Danube on official road maps.
The course of the river is less straightforward than the map suggests, too. On many days of the year, the Danube disappears completely underground between Immendingen and Möhringen. On the map, it continues to flow. Most of its water re-emerges at the Aachtopf spring and eventually reaches the Rhine via Lake Constance, rather than flowing into the Black Sea. Some of the water that plunges over the Rhine Falls was once called the Danube.
We draw boundaries not only around things. We draw them around ourselves, too, in the way we describe who we are. People often do this in conversations with me. “I’m an anxious person” sounds like a description. But the sentence draws a boundary. It turns anxiety into a personal trait and extends it across time. What it is based on are moments, some more anxious than others.
“I was anxious this morning” draws the boundary differently. “There is anxiety” does so in yet another way. All three statements can refer to the very same hours. Each establishes something different. The first locates anxiety in the person, the second in a particular morning. And even the third, which attributes it to no one, turns an experience into a “thing” that is there.
Words do not simply reflect what is there. They help determine where something begins and where it ends.
The same applies to time. When I ask people to name something that does not change, the answer is often a diamond. De Beers’ advertising slogan, “A Diamond Is Forever”, dates back to 1947. It moves the end point into infinity. A diamond formed under pressures far greater than anything found at the Earth’s surface. Here, graphite is the more stable form of carbon. The reason a diamond remains a diamond is that, at room temperature, the transformation into graphite happens so slowly that it is practically imperceptible. Some diamonds are more than three billion years old.
A diamond does not last forever. It simply lasts much longer than we do.