That was the word I was groping for underfoot last week, being an attempt at the translation of the German noun das Unumgängliche. More of this in a minute.
The circumstance of the road narrowing, and you are right about 'granite being an example of a brutal fact', and that I was brought to my knees that time I was walking on a path along a Dartmoor ledge that narrowed, on the one side the overhanging solidity of granite rock, on the other the fringes of heather and tufts of grass that obscured the emptiness of a sheer drop down into an old abandoned quarry below. Not – Walk, Not – Don’t Walk, but down on all fours and try to crawl backwards, with the wind tugging and the plummeting mind still chattering away, Can this be happening to me?
The overhanging granite, and my vertigo. “Overtakelessness”. The emptiness on the other side, and the impossibility of my knowing what lay beyond – Mutter, Mutter – and lost underfoot, but in the certainty that the moment will come back to haunt.
And my mistake! The word in German for that precise moment, das Unumgängliche, it wasn’t Tony Judt at all (as I was thinking here last week) who uses it in his series of ‘Memoir’ articles in the New York Review of Books, although it might have been. Here in fragmentary recollection is part of the piece, which my memory could not find then:
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History can be a storydog that roams around Asia Minor collecting muteness like burrs in its hide. Note that the word “mute” (from Latin mutus and Greek mnein)…
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… likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.
(Compare the Latin word mutmut…)
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To put this another way, there is something that facts lack. “ Overtakelessness” is a word told me by a philosopher once – das Unumgängliche – that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts – it remains beyond them.
Anne Carson, Nox. 2010, New Directions, New York. # 1.3
Mutter, Mutter – Anne Carson, as you will know from Nox of course! Her – Again! Although, yes, it could as easily have been Tony Judt, who elsewhere in the NYRB (nb the review’s blog is all OPEN ACCESS with no subscription required), and deep within a transcript of the lecture – ‘What is Living and What is Dead…’ – he gave at New York University in October 2009 before his illness had progressed, near the end (on page 4), gives us the striking phrase a 'democracy of fear’, adding as amplification via reference (8); By analogy with “The Liberalism of Fear”, Judith Shklar’s penetrating essay on political inequality and power.
Mutter, Mutter – mutmut.