Understories. Tim Horvath

a smile visible. “The teacher who climbs trees.”

      “Yes,” Schöner laughs. “It’s a necessary part of my job.”

      “Hmmm, yes,” Heidegger says. “Well, it’s as Hölderlin says, ‘Others climb higher/To ethereal Light who’ve been faithful/ To the love inside themselves, and to the spirit/Of the gods.’”

      “Well,” says Schöner. “I just do it to get the best view of the canopy.”

      Heidegger looks mildly embarrassed, or perhaps disappointed. He clears his throat. “In any case, it seems that we have a student in common.”

      “Ah, yes, Max.”

      “Indeed. He is a talented thinker.”

      “He’s a talented young man, then, because he shows signs of doing well in my class, too.”

      “So he’ll be leaving my lectures a few minutes early.”

      “If that’s all right. You see, I asked the students at the beginning of the term if they could leave a bit earlier for some of our walks, if they had any conflict. But if it imposes on you, I would certainly discourage him from—”

      “Nonsense.” Heidegger waves him off. “It’s all right. To be frank, he’ll learn more in the open air than sitting in a hard chair daydreaming about pine trees.”

      “Well, I’m sure that’s hardly the case,” says Schöner, somehow embarrassed himself now.

      There is a protracted silence. Then Heidegger says, “That piece of bark . . .”

      Schöner looks back at his specimen. “Yes?”

      The philosopher looks puzzled. “What can you learn from it? I mean, by examining it thusly?”

      “Well, I’m trying to figure out what got to it first, animal, fungus, or pathogen.”

      Heidegger nods, and Schöner can’t tell whether this is genuine interest or mere politeness. He hears Heidegger’s intense breath, then hears him ask, “How well do you know these woods?”

      “Fairly well,” Schöner replies. Probably an understatement—he knows them, by now, better than any professor at Freiburg, surely as well as some of the woodsmen who earn a living there.

      “Perhaps you can show me, sometime, some of your favored routes.”

      “It would be an honor, Herr Professor Heidegger,” says Schöner.

      “Please. Martin,” he says, scratching above his mustache right into his nostrils.

      Schöner and Heidegger go on lengthy walks through the Schwarzwald. “How is your work?” is always the first thing Heidegger asks him the moment they’ve gone beyond the garden and through the gate at the edge of the foothills. Schöner points out the various kinds of trees, explains the dynamics of the cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, while Heidegger holds forth on poetry, art, music. Schöner knows some scattered lines of poetry from secondary school, his Goethe and some Trakl.

      On one of their earliest walks, Heidegger recoils in horror as he rattles off names with which Schöner has only the faintest familiarity. “Schlegel? Heine? Hölderlin?”

      It is only when Schöner realizes he’s being, at least in part, had that he retaliates with equally exaggerated dismay: “Not know a black spruce from a red spruce? Norway from white?” This prompts a lengthy excursus from Heidegger on Goethe’s theory of colors. Schöner, accusing him of trying to change the subject, insists on bringing him back to the trees, offering up the same mnemonics he does to his students. After several misidentifications, Heidegger throws his arms up in despair, and Schöner drops it.

      After they’ve gone for several of these jaunts, Heidegger gets him a copy of Schlegel’s Shakespeare. He explains that Schlegel was influenced by Herder in his translation, recognizing the playwright not merely as a great dramatist, tragedian, and shaper of characters but as a splendid wordsmith, whose puns and poetry and musicality are inextricable from the works’ greatness.

      “In Schlegel’s rendering,” Heidegger says, “Shakespeare is almost German.”

      Looking through it in the evening, Schöner sees that he has inscribed the volume: “To my tree climber, who lends me his forest spectacles.”

      Schöner, in turn, gets him a tree-identification guide, which he inscribes: “May this be soon as dog-eared as Viburnum plicatum.” Though it is a plant he’s pointed out to the philosopher, Schöner worries that his inscription is too impersonal. Nevertheless, he cannot risk a joke such as “Great being-in-the-woods with you,” since Heidegger is highly sensitive about the accusations that he coins terms and phrases with flagrant disregard for clarity and logic.

      As for Schöner, he feels certain that there is clarity in Heidegger’s thought. As they are walking, sometimes, he loses himself in Heidegger’s voice, as soothing as though they’ve been following the banks of a stream. There is always a sense of connectedness, of going somewhere, even if Schöner is lost mostly in the sounds of the words. He can distinguish the grammatical distinctions between Sosein (“Being-as-it-is”), Sein-bei (“Being-alongside”), and his namesake, Schon-sein-in (“Being-already-alongside”) but he cannot follow the conceptual distinctions that the philosopher is attempting. At times, Heidegger makes him feel a little like he doesn’t speak German at all. It is something that the scientists will often poke fun at the philosophers for, this lofty propensity for abstraction, which sometimes seems to be a peculiarly German affliction. But in Heidegger’s voice the words are infused with something that makes them as palpable as the furrows in bark.

      Though the pair return continually to the joke of their respective intellectual blind spots, they also find themselves returning again and again to science. Heidegger vehemently maintains that philosophy is a science, and Schöner remains skeptical. Further, Heidegger says, science has become too fragmented—he rattles off the various divisions and disciplines in the university as if he is a judge pronouncing a lengthy sentence. “But,” he says, “it is not too late. All science needs to do, really, is to recover its essence.” He praises the Greeks, how in the true spirit of discovery they had no separate designations for chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, physics, and so were better able to apprehend nature as a whole. At first, Schöner is thrilled to learn of Heidegger’s enthusiasm for such work, for he has secretly lamented such divisions, the petty snobberies and snubbings that they invite. The mathematicians look down on the physicists, who can’t quite do the pure math. In turn, the chemists couldn’t cut it in physics, and the biologists, like himself, are at the bottom of the pecking order, dealing with spotted haunches and big leafy greens, even while the physicists are plying away at the atomic limit of matter. Schöner feels that he is viewed by many, in spite of Freiburg’s prestige, as a taxonomist, or, worse, a glorified gardener.

      He is also delighted by Heidegger’s reverence for classical civilizations. At last he’s found an ally who will sympathize with his own insistence on instilling Latin terms in his students’ minds. Heidegger, though, never simply agrees or disagrees, and in this case he frowns.

      “The Romans translated everything, but the essences were destroyed in the act. Unlike the Greeks, remember, the Romans were a brutal, materialistic people right down to the morpheme.”

      Schöner is no match for him as a philologist, so he tries to swing the conversation back to the need for interdisciplinarity, where they will surely agree. “Anything else is sheer stupidity,” says Schöner. The trees grow in the soil. For that, we need to understand nitrogen compounds. To understand these, we must understand nitrogen atoms, right down to physics. Labels impede scientific work. Worse, they impede progress.” He practically sings the last word.

      Heidegger seems more amenable as he speaks, but in the end he continues to hem and haw. “Progress. A word to be infinitely suspicious of,” he says. “Science needs to get back to its