another one of my favourite passages from in the dutch mountains


she had set her heart on being a trapeze artiste, but her body lacked the inner contradiction that allows the audience to endure the thought that the trapeze artiste may, at any moment, crash to her death. this possibility is always implied and is the first prerequisite of the spectator's enjoyment, which includes both the fear and the hope that the catastrophe will actually occur. with regard to lucia, in some spectators the fear was too great and in others the hope was too slight. this hope derives from the fact that the spectator knows that the person leaping through the air high above is not really able to fly. the punishment is the fall, and the fact that no fall occurs is the miracle.

with lucia it was different. [...] the fearful among them truly did not want that body, of which they immediately acknowledged the uniqueness and therefore the utter impossiblity of having such a body themselves, to end up as a mangled mess of excrement and blood, especially not in front of their eyes. the hopeful ones had a different problem. they believe that someone with such a body must indeed be able to fly, and the fact that it never flew farther than the next trapeze was a bitter disappointement.