The Law of Averages

Edwin Frank: Your question makes me think how unconversant I am with world literature these days.

Olivier Zahm: Which may sound romantic. It is, in fact, the least romantic thing in the world.

Frank: This is not criticism—what could it be called?

Zahm: Independence.

Frank: Yes, the law of averages.

•••

Zahm: Every image, every piece of information is instantly replaced by the next one in a fraction of a second.

Frank: But decades later the pieces read like a tissue of lost allusions.

Zahm: Sometimes, yes. One time, I was shocked.

Frank: They’ve taken note of it.

Zahm: They are two antagonistic realms serving opposing visions.

•••

Frank: In this way you can get through almost anything that you don’t find utterly indigestible or idiotic or—well, there are some things that are just uninteresting or impossible.

Zahm: By freedom, I mean the ability to push, develop, and discover what is relevant today—what is new and what offers new possibilities for creative minds, idealists, dreamers who seek freedom.

Frank: We now admire Hölderlin’s translations from classical Greek that do their best to warp German into classical Greek, but we admire them as Hölderlin, not Sophocles.

Zahm: I remain faithful to the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, my mentors.

Frank: Read them till patterns begin to form in the blur.