Free Across by Peter Handke

to the other side safely, and my fear helps me. In sliding off, I ask myself: Where am I? And precisely because of my fright, I know where I am. In this case, the threshold is something like the take-off board in the broad jump. In the other sort of dream, it’s just the threshold of a room, a mere strip of metal such as you often find in new buildings. But I’m incapable of crossing it. In the whole dream, nothing happens, just that I’m standing by the open door, looking at my face, which is reflected in the metal under me. Once, when I managed to turn around, I saw behind me a glass cage full of simultaneous interpreters, all waiting for me to start making my speech.”
    The painter: “Two ancient peoples were such bitter enemies that when one had defeated the other, it smashed the statues in the other’s temples and used the stone for paving its thresholds at home. In some cultures, we find labyrinth designs outside the thresholds; their purpose, we are told, is not so much to protect the threshold as to make intruders stop and consider a detour. To me personally, thresholds are no problem. I’m not mature
enough for that. Nevertheless, I’ve sometimes thought: If there are paintings over doorframes, why not build thresholds and make them more recognizable by means of colored forms? We’ll see.”
    By then, the priest had collected his thoughts. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said, “the tradition has little to say of the threshold as a material object. One of the prophets predicts that the temple will tremble so violently that even its stone threshold will be lifted. As an image, however, it occurs time and again, though as a rule a different word is used. In the indexes of works on the subject, threshold. usually refers us to door. The threshold and the door (or gate) are seen as parts standing for the whole. In the Old Testament, the whole is the city: in one passage, the mere earthly city—‘Howl, O gate; cry, O city!’; in another, the heavenly city—‘The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.’ In the New Testament, the gate stands in one passage for perdition—‘the gates of hell’; in another, for salvation—‘I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.’ Thus, the threshold is ordinarily associated with passage from one zone to another. What may be less evident is that the threshold is itself a zone, or rather, a place in its own right, a place of testing or of safety. Isn’t the ash heap where Job sits in his misery a threshold, a place of testing? Didn’t a fugitive put himself under someone’s protection by sitting down on his threshold? Doesn’t the archaic usage of ‘gate’ evoke the threshold as a dwelling place, as a room in its own right? According to modern doctrine, of course, there are no longer any thresholds in
this sense. The only threshold still remaining to us, says one of our modern teachers, is that between waking and dreaming, and nowadays little attention is paid to that. Only in the insane does it protrude, visible to all, into daytime experience, like the fragments of the destroyed temples just mentioned. For a threshold, he says, is not a boundary—boundaries are on the increase both in inner and in outer life—but a precinct. The word ‘threshold’ embraces transformation, floor, river crossing, mountain pass, enclosure (place of refuge). According to an almost forgotten proverb: ‘The threshold is a fountainhead.’ And this teacher says literally: ‘It was from thresholds that lovers and friends absorbed strength. But,’ he goes on, ‘where nowadays are we to find the destroyed thresholds, if not in ourselves? By our own wounds shall we be healed. If snow stops falling from the clouds, let it continue to fall inside me.’ Every step, every glance, every gesture, says the teacher,