About man and nature, remembering and forgetting. It's written in beautiful prose and the style completely fits the consciousness of the main character.

2nd read: I forgot how intricate and wonderful this little novella is, and how it has so many layers and possible interpretations. Wonderful.

Today I went for a walk down the street and through the gate to the cement road, steeply inclined and overgrown in patches with thistles and weeds sprouting from the droppings of many cows, who roam the now yellowing hills that despite the overcast sky are impressively laid out for many miles, a winding valley through which a running creek cuts and crosses over grey and under green.

The cement road branches at its base, and if you follow the right path you will come to a gate and yet another branch, and if you continue to veer to the right you will walk down a wide and well-maintained construction, bounded by the base of a slope on the left and riotous growth on the right. If you walk down far enough, you will see a small area that slopes and suggests the beginning of one of those cow trails that cut into the hills in a zigzag shape, treacherous and sometimes humiliating to take when thinking on how creatures much larger and more unwieldy than yourself not only forged the road but unwaveringly maintain it.

Except that is a trap. It would not have been a trap fifteen years ago, when the stream was a mere two feet wide and barely six inches deep and even my six-year old self was able to jump across it with relative ease, six-year old eyes recording the sight of sunny gold burbling along as six-year-old feet readied themselves at the bottom of a gentle slope to jump across with six-year-old legs and land on the sandy shore across. Now, that slope cuts off a foot from its origin, and what greets you is a drop that would break both legs and maybe a neck, across a creek that has carved itself into a sizable expanse that rapidly spills and churns volumes into a deep basin that could easily swallow you down, should you lose your footing. A while back I heard from a surveyor that it had been measured at sixteen feet, surrounded by loose walls of mud and flimsy roots that could no more support a grasping hand than a daisy could resist the pull of eager six-year-old fingers.

I have no six-year-old memories of that landscape gullet.

The creek that chewed out that deepening hollow as well as the surrounding valley and hills is called Sabercat Creek, and if you went back and back and farther back to the first fork in the road and took the left path, you would walk along a road similar to its mirror, albeit more overgrown and more steep in its slopes, a high yellow slope pocked with trees and shrubbery on your left and a deep green gorge massed with fallen branches and poison ivy on your right. At the end of this path there is a gate, and beyond the gate is the place that the creek was named for, where 50 years before I was born they excavated the bones of monumental felines that returned to earth entirely 1.6 million years before humans gained their modern physiology. You can hike up the cliff that was left, look down at the long yellow grasses and tall thin whips of pink and green that healed the gouges left by the archaeological endeavor long ago, and wonder if there are any bones still resting in shapely divots, cool and dry under the earth that hasn't seen anything but a light rain for many weeks.

They were there long before us, and should the creek continue its destructive path and course itself into landslides that cause the houses to slip and slide and batter themselves into oblivion, possibly with their inhabitants within their walls, they will be there still.

One of those houses is mine, and in that house I have a laptop, and in that laptop there is a word document with which I have been keeping a collection of names, words, phrases, poetry, quotes both categorized by book and miscellaneous by necessity, and more recently reviews that differ from their lettered brethren in being of my own design. The document is 360 pages long, and is a boon for someone who could never keep a diary yet still wishes to have some record on hand, that both absorbs the new and cradles the old for rediscoveries by a brain that may still be young but is not infinite. It has survived three computers, four years, and countless accidentally closed windows and abruptly errant shutdowns. By it, I see myself, and slowly but surely, the changes of said self.

There may come a time in old age or even younger, when in the throes of Alzheimer's or some other decay of the brain I will open this document and forget words as soon as I read them, or forget it for long periods until a sudden retrieval reassures me that all is not lost, or delete it unknowingly and forget that such a thing ever existed.

If you keep in mind: the ceaseless biting and gnawing of water in a fierce erosion that can wear away the physical and make one question the mental; the monumental backdrop of time that one plays a blip of a part upon in this period that in the spirit of the Triassic and the Jurassic and the Cretaceous is termed the Holocene; the quickening sink and slippage of layers of the mind that jerks and shudders towards a broken record of a living that forsakes the straight road of the present for the drop into the deep waters of memory, no matter how many words are written on the wall.

You'll get a sense of what this book is like.

Max Frisch is a talented author who I need to read more of. This is especially great, since it's only 107 pages, and you can get through it in a couple of hours. The story follows the thought process of an old man, Geiser, as his mind begins to fail him. He fills his life (and the pages of the novel) with fragments of encyclopedias and the bible, and continually loses track of time and touch with reality.

Phenomenal.

At first i wasn’t into it. but then i kept reading and i got attached to geiser which i didn’t expect. that was spectacular, because it’s so dense with things i usually don’t care about. it made me think about dinosaurs and i got freaked out that i never think about dinosaurs and i got freaked out that they actually lived at one time. that’s insane. this book is tragic but very good.

We use the commands 'select', 'copy', 'cut', 'paste', 'look up' so often on our screens that it's easy to forget that the words themselves are not new, though their virtual use is an innovation of this computer age we live in.

I thought of those words while I was spending time with the main character of this story, set before the computer age. Geiser, for that is his name, likes to look things up in encyclopedias and history books, and copy down information he wants to remember. He's very interested in the geology of the area he lives in, a remote valley in the mountains of Ticino in the southernmost part of Switzerland.

Geiser didn't always live in Ticino and therefore doesn't know all the things the locals know about the region. And so, as a displaced person in a sense (he's completely cut off from his former urban life in northern Switzerland), he feels the need to inform himself about Ticino in order to feel he's on firm ground. The geology of the area is on his mind particularly because of a period of persistent rain that has caused a landslide, damaging a section of the only road out of the valley in which he lives.

Since the rains show no sign of ending, Geiser begins to fear a more catastrophic landslide that would wipe out the entire village, and he searches his books for information about such catastrophes in the past.

Geiser fears other things besides erosion of the landscape. There is the erosion of his physical abilities—his back aches constantly and his knees are weakening. But the thing he fears the most is the erosion of his mental faculties—which is why he copies down what he reads, and pastes the resultant notes on to the walls of his living space as a memory aid. When his fingers get cramped from writing, he resorts to cutting out selected paragraphs from his books which he then pastes on the walls. The sections that interest him most are about glaciation and erosion, sections that tell how, during the Pleistocene period, glaciers cut through the rocks and created valleys such as the one he lives in, and then carried the debris they'd carved out further down and deposited it as moraines.

I was struck by the parallel of Geiser's habit of cutting and pasting sections of information that were precisely about how nature cut sections of mountains long ago, and pasted them further down the plains. I wondered if the author had intended that parallel.

Nature is everything for Geiser—though he does open up his bible when the rains start, and pastes some lines from Genesis on his memory wall. But in spite of the Bible, Geiser knows he's a man of the Holocene period. And he's also aware that nature has no need for names such as God or Holocene or Pleistocene—or even for Man himself. He knows that Nature recognizes no catastrophes.

This slim little book has pasted itself on the wall of my memory. I hope it will remain there for a very long time.
…………………
In the other Max Frisch books I've read, names have sometimes carried extra meanings. I looked up Geiser in German and it turns out that it means geyser or hot spring—and there is a section where Geiser talks about hot springs in Iceland.
Incidentally, Geiser is not young and he is a bit of a curmudgeon, so sometimes I thought of him as an old geezer. But I liked him a lot.