You may have heard of our town. Thuringen has been getting a small amount of notice. Of course it will be the 'Thuringen Ladder' that you've heard of.
But we're not yet famous and as the ladder has begun to lose its fascination amongst us, the locals, I'll describe it to you who haven't yet come to our town, and perhaps you will visit before it disappears.
The Ladder, you see, is a sport. An endurance sport I suppose. It seems also to share the simplicity of the sprint or lifting the weight. The 'Thuringen Ladder' has always been embedded in the town square and soars skywards further than anyone can follow with the naked eye. I am no engineer so I can tell you nothing of its construction. Yet in the early years it held us in awe, in the same way that a simple monolith can.
On a sports day, usually every Saturday in the season, a large crowd gathered very early in the morning to see the athlete who had won his way through the heats, before he took the first steps up the Ladder. These first steps were always strong and determined. The athlete could expect the cheering and singing that was his due until he had climbed well out of sight. For a while longer those with binoculars called out the stepping athlete's progress while most people turned to enjoy the jollities and the fair that always arrived the night before.
Every rung on the 'Thuringen Ladder' has a sensor, so the judges, assiduously following a series of small lights on the board in the judges' hut, can inform the crowd of the athlete's progress once he's out of sight. Even the athlete knows how far off the record he is, for every rung on the famous Ladder has a number engraved on it.
Late in the day even larger crowds gathered for the descent of the poor athlete, often only half conscious by now, and his appearance out of the bottom of a cloud or out of the haze was always first announced by the 'peerers', trained assistants wearing powerful glasses who are also skilled in spotting a falling athlete and can quickly clear the exact place in the town square where the failed and unfortunate athlete will dash out his brains. Many try to spot the descending athlete before these 'peerers' but it's quite impossible.
The main skill the athletes on the 'Thuringen Ladder' demonstrate is that of being able to ascend through thinning air. At some point every athlete begins to hallucinate and lose a certain amount of consciousness, and it is this that drives them back. A 'faller' by the way is considered both a disgrace and a failure, and is soon forgotten; his height is not recorded in the ledger even were it to be a new record, something which seems likely to have been the case in the past.
But now we are losing interest in the Ladder. Now, the Ladder is largely a tourist attraction, and most of the crowd on the town square every Saturday are visitors, and their number has always been limited due to our poor marketing instincts, a weakness we freely admit to.
And note this. Our contempt for the 'tourist ladder' has swiftly extended to a loss of interest in all sporting events. All sports! An unexpected loss indeed! And this is the point we're at now. The current talk in our town is often put in the form of a question. We ask: 'what was it that used to interest us in sport anyway?' Music, our other enthusiasm, we're holding on to that. Music either puts words to something we feel, or alters our mood. It refers out of itself. But sport? So someone can move more quickly than the rest of us; another can lift a weight that is beyond the rest of us. Someone can do something better than the rest of us - but if that 'something' is self-referring or to put it more bluntly, is otherwise pointless, why should we be interested? Music has a point: sport does not.
And what was it we used to feel anyway? Respect for the athletes? Awe? These are weak emotions. Compare them with anger or fear. Or contempt. I ask you. Or was it the deaths that held our interest? Was it really that simple?
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