The truth: I kite on the gold treasure

To this day I have not understood how all the famous correspondence in literary history could have been preserved for us. When I send a letter, it is usually gone. At best, I'm left with a shoebox full of foreign letters, hopefully with friendly content. Consequently, all letters from Goethe to Schiller must have ended up with Schiller and all letters from Schiller to Goethe must have ended up with Goethe. Or should Goethe always have made copies of his wise words – and thus have posterity “CC” every letter to Schiller?

By the way, the transmission of wise words, as they are passed on orally from generation to generation within ordinary families, is completely uncontrolled. Most of the time they are not wise at all. And because no one wrote them down, only those sentences that stuck there for some reason remain in memory. I would like to have something clever or instructive that my clever and instructive grandfather might have once told me.

I mean, the man was really important in my life. Nevertheless, I only remember the following remark from him: “When you have something in your mouth, you always use your tongue!” Admittedly, that's not wrong. But it's not exactly the end all be all. And it's kind of depressing that I always have to think of my grandpa when I have something in my mouth, like a broken tooth or a painful canker sore. He doesn't deserve that.

I am a walking encyclopedia of my grandmother's sayings, which I quote almost every day, depending on the occasion, with "My grandmother always said...". Is menopause looming? “My grandma always said: I get the flying heat!” A cloudburst approaching? “No one has stayed wet yet!” Anyone hungry? “Lick salt and you’ll get thirsty too!” I also have a special memory of her thunderous threat: “I'll stick my head between your ears!”, the inconsequence of which only dawned on me decades later.

Recently I caught my daughter writing one of my sentences in a little notebook, something about the “mealy presence” of chestnuts on the palate. When asked, it turns out that the child has been secretly taking casual comments from me out of context and grinning for years, with a preference for megalomaniacal statements such as “I am an inexhaustible source of eternal wisdom” or “I sit like a dragon on the gold treasure of my knowledge”.

When I asked her to do what Kafka had already asked of Brod, namely to burn the notebook “completely and unread,” she wrote that down too. Posterity will be happy. I'm delivered.