ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 282: Hearts and Holes

I’m reading Erich Remarque’s The Black Obelisk again because, now that I know the story, I can better concentrate on the characters, especially Ludwig Bodmer.

Ludwig hears a thrush singing and goes to his piano, trying to be something like the thrush and to pour out what I feel. A passerby hears Ludwig’s playing and calls up to him: “Hey, you, why don’t you learn to play?” Ludwig’s first impulse is to hit the guy, but then he thinks: He is right. I cannot really play. Either at the piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up . . . . Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it?

Ernie writes, in his memoir, of the girl he loved the summer he was twelve, and after she sends him a final letter, her farewell to him, he talks of a hole in the heart, deeper and darker than any other.

Erich Remarque and Ernie never found the way to fill their holes because it can only be filled in one way. With ourselves. Nothing else will do.