The essays in Judith Schalansky's latest book, "Marble. Mercury. Fog. What the World Is Made Of," are masterpieces of intellectual agility. The author connects minute details with grand themes. She approaches the natural sciences with poetry, the diffuse with clarity. She takes three materials in three different states of matter—marble, mercury, and fog—as the starting point for fascinatingly idiosyncratic reflections on the world, perception, and art. The author boldly transcends genre boundaries to share the associative stream of consciousness in her sparkling essays.
Her latest texts form the starting point for this evening, which itself intends to meander between conversation and reading. In conversation with Thoralf Czichon, the young literary YouTuber (»LiteraturNews«) and, since this season, dramaturg of literature at the Lausitz Festival, we encounter a wordsmith, visual artist, and speaker for whom books are fundamental repositories of human culture, time capsules bound in media, and also visual and tactile works of art with high emotional value.
Schalansky, a trained book designer and, among other things, editor of the book series »Naturkunden« published by Matthes & Seitz, grew up in East Germany. As a child, if she wanted to travel, she had to dream of the wide world through books. Even today, from the cockpit of the library—her sacred research center—she views our world holistically, as if through a multifaceted eye, mapping remote places she herself will never visit (»Atlas of Remote Islands«) or tracking down things that are definitively lost and missing (»Inventory of Some Losses«). Excerpt of possible conversation topics: An encyclopedia for the 21st century, the longing for undiscovered landscapes, daring artistic ideas, medieval shipping, Greek mythology, the eroticism of fresh printing ink.
