Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest. Storey by storey, it grew for thousands of years in rivalry with itself, up to heights of fifty metres and more, and who knows, perhaps perhaps larger and larger species would have evolved, trees reaching the sky, it the first settlers had not appeared and if, with the typical fear felt by their own kind for its place of origin, they had not steadily forced the forest back again.
The degradation of the most highly developed plant species is a process known to have begum near what we call the cradle of civilization. Most of the high forests that once grew all the way to the Dalmatian, Iberian and North African coasts had already been cut down by the beginning of the present era. Only in the interior of Corsica did a few forests of trees towering far taller than those of today remain, and they were still being described with awe by nineteenth-century travellers, although now they have almost entirely disappeared. Of the silver firs that were among the dominant tree species of Corsica in the Middle Ages, standing everywhere in the mists clinging to the mountains, on overshadowed slopes and in the ravines, only a few relicts are now left in the Marmano valley and the Foret de Puntiello, and on a walk there a remembered image came into my mind of a forest in the Innerfern through which I had once gone as a child with my grandfather.
A history of the forest of France by Etienne de la Tour, published during the Second Empire, speaks of individual fir trees growing to a height of almost sixty metres during their lives of over a thousand years, and they, so de la Tour writes, are the last trees to convey some idea of the former grandeur of the European forests. He laments the destruction of the Corsican forests 'par des exploitations mal conduites' ('by mismanaged exploitation'), which was already becoming a clear menace in his time. the stands of trees spared longest were those in the most inaccessible regions, fro instance the great forest of Bavella, which covered the Corsican Dolomites between Sartene and Solenzara and was largely untouched until towards the end of the nineteenth century.
The innermost mystery of secular metaphysics is this strange sensation of physical absence, something evoked by what might be called an over-developed gaze. Significantly, the customers coming out of the twilight of the peepshow and going back into the street always have to give themselves a little shake before they are fully in control of the bodies they had to shed as they were absorbed in looking at the panorama.
Kafka's comments on photography suggest that he felt there was something fundamentally uncanny about this way of copying life. Friedrich Thielberger. for instance, remembers once meeting Kafka in the street when he himself has an unwieldy box for making photographic enlargements under his arm. Thielberger writes that Kafka asked, in surprise, 'Taking photographs?' adding 'That's really rather sinister.' Then, after a short pause, he continued, 'And you enlarge them as well!' Kafka's books too contain many indications of the vague horror he felt at the impending mutations of mankind as the age of technical reproduction opened, mutations in which he probably saw the imminent end of the autonomous individuality formed by bourgeois culture. The freedom of movement of the heroes of his novels and stories, which is not great to begin with, steadily undergoes further restrictions in the course of the action, while figures already called to life by an inscrutable series of laws take over, characters such as the court functionaries, the two idiotic assistants and the three lodgers in The Metamorphosis, executives and officials whose purely functional, amoral nature is obviously better suited to this new state of affairs. In the Romantic period the doppelganger which first aroused a fear of mechanical appliances was still a haunting and exceptional phenomenon; now it is everywhere. The whole technique of photographic copying ultimately depends on the principle of making a perfect duplicate of the original, of potentially infinite copying. You only had to pick a stereoscopic card and you could see everything twice. And because the copy lasted long after what it had copied was gone, there was an uneasy suspicion that the original, whether it was human or a natural scene, was less authentic than the copy, that the copy was eroding the original, in the same way as a man meeting his doppelganger is said to feel his real self destroyed.
'Kafka Goes to the Movies' by W.G. Sebald, collected in Campo Santo, trs Anthea Bell
How things have changed in less than a century. Now the camera and the computer do not just capture and copy reality and identity but create and manipulate it, and, as the techniques have become available to us all individually, not just to the "sinister" ones, we no longer feel our own identities threatened or diminished. Our sense of our own reality is no longer challenged: we have instead a sense of our own ability constantly to renew and recreate ourselves. The doppelganger is now a mere amusement. We have cheated not only death and dissolution, but life itself. Feeling ourselves in control, we no longer feel the need to confront external forces. Yet our auautonomy is of course exercised within a system provided for us - "we play happily and child-like in the gardens created for us by the evil giants of Google and Apple". We have become licencees of our own reality, forever checking the box that declares "I accept the terms of this agreement" without ever actually reading it or bothering that we have no choice.
