There are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, on old maps places that are not white because there is snow there, but because no one has been there – or no one who would have reported. The white is then not nature, but renunciation of knowledge; it is not cold, but not-knowing. These places were called, with a mixture of pride and shame, terra incognita; and small signs were placed in them – sea monsters, dragons, baroque warnings – in order to give the empty paper at least the gesture of the known.
Our time, which no longer paints dragons, has another reflex: it cannot bear the white. It fills it, if not with experience, then at least with data. Where previously the unknown stood, today there is a bar “0 %”; where previously the legend was missing, today it says “No connection”; and where previously a traveler could only say: I do not know, today a device says: No data. That is, strictly speaking, the same confession – only with less dignity.
For the confession of not-knowing, of the unrecorded, of the unsaid was, as long as it was still considered a human limit, something that one – like a gap in the teeth – did not like to show, but at least accepted as a fact. Now, however, since life is laid out in rings, curves, scores and nicely rounded digits like a menu, the gap also becomes moral. A white spot is considered an omission. And an omission is, in a world of programs, already a kind of sin.
Thus it was no coincidence that Hans Castorp, the man of the in-between spaces, the deserter, who had removed himself from the register, at some point could no longer shake off the question of whether his new form of life – this bestforming, this liturgy of powder, protocol and duty – was not precisely the opposite of what had once saved him: namely invisibility.
