Thus Mylius, the philosopher, that April morning. All the better for him, actually; if he believed what he was saying, the Event will not have been a surprise, or painful for him. Radical pessimism turns out to be much like optimism.
Let me add that our philosopher was nearly sixty years old and hobbled by arthritis, that a few years back his wife had abandoned him and run off with an assistant, also a philosopher. Even so, philosophy had this going for it, it was anti-rhetorical. It debunked a pseudo-fatal antithesis probably unknown in nature. To some extent, that’s a consolation.
•
Widmad, eight AM. I’m admiring the monument I built. It hasn’t moved, it has stood up to the elements (sleet and wind this morning), but now a question occurs to me. The Kodachrome landscape, sun beating down on the Bahamas, the white sand, the “Come to us, where life is better”: what if the great exodus was only a flight to the Bahamas? Or some other unexplored earthly paradise?
They used to say that the dying embark on “a better life.” The poster, in fact, urged us to go “where life is better.” The death-prize, like collective tourist emigration, makes sense in a century like our own hugely dedicated to the improving activity of travel.
Tourism is a surrogate for total military mobilization, said Hans Magnus Enzensberger.29
There is, however, a logistical problem. Pure spirits, too, appreciate decent meals and lodging. Neither the Bahamas nor all the Antilles put together could host such a vast congregation. Even paradise has to offer some comforts.
I come back to my first hypothesis. Volatilization—sublimation. Sublimation—assumption (to the heavens).
Now let’s see. I once read something, a text by Iamblichus30 that I looked up for some reason, I no longer recall why. It dealt with the demise of the species and it was titled Dissipatio Humani Generis. Dissipation not in the moral sense. The version I remember was in Latin, and it seems that in the third- and fourth-century Latin dissipatio meant evaporation, or nebulization, or some physical process like that, and Iamblichus referred to a fatal phenomenon of this kind. He was less catastrophic than other prophets: there was no great flood, no holocaust solvens saeclum in favilla,31 covering the world in ashes, like a nuclear catastrophe of today. Rather, he wrote of human beings changed by sudden miracle into a spray, or an imperceptible (harmless and probably odorless) gas without any intermediate combustion. Maybe not glorious, but at least dignified.
•
I’ve had some erudite pursuits in the past, and though I’ve abstained for years, I don’t regret them.
Before Ezekiel (ten centuries after Moses) there was no mention in Judaism of a celestial life set aside for humans after their stay on earth. The just were rewarded with prosperity (earthly) and longevity; it’s said of Abraham that he died “sated with years.” Later celestial compensation would become, as we know, one of the fundamental ingredients in the religious recipe for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and a favorite argument for theology and related literature. Among the innumerable commentators was one Salvian of Trier, alive in the third or the fourth century, a Christian writer, not well known, a hagiographer and apologist. In a letter to the bishop of his city titled De Fine Temporum (I think, but have no way to verify it), Salvian, seized with evangelical mercy for the woes of men, spoke of their hoped-for mass sublimatio.
And this is nice: he granted that final redemption even to pagans. All living bodies having been made ethereal in a single miraculous event, they would be taken to heaven in a mass assumption. Abrupt and unexpected. I quote from memory: Mundus permanebit. (He was right on that point). Viri, mulieres, pueri, humani viventes cuius-cumque aetatis, ordinis vel nationis, raptim sublimabuntur.32 (It wasn’t Salvian who inspired Freud; Freud’s sublimation is a pale metaphor.)
But Salvian joined clemency with discerning justice. Nihil huius gloriae decet peccatorem.33 Pagans as such can sublimate, sinners, no. It would be interesting to see which of the two categories I belong to, assuming they are not superimposed. But my knowledge, or self-knowledge, does not reach that far. I desist.
11
WHEN I went into the shepherds’ house the other day, I saw no nightclothes on the bed, as I recall. Now I look into one of the rooms that was occupied at the Mayr, and overcoming a certain revulsion, poke around the sheets using a clothes hanger.
No nightgowns or pajamas. In the closet I find an entire female wardrobe: evening dress, tennis clothes, ski gear, and a jewelry case with bracelets and rings. On the table are binoculars and a Polaroid camera. Below, parked in the piazza, the woman’s car. But the nightclothes have disappeared. The Dissipatio Humani Generis, the sublimatio, has made a subtle distinction: the vanities, even precious, adherent things (jewelry) remain below, destined to damage and loss, the clothing that in that moment covers people, shares the fate of the bodies. Nylon, rayon, polyamide, and other fibers invade the intermundia.
I am wrong to be astonished. Augustine of Hippo supplied the theological explanation. It is unseemly, the great Augustine said somewhere, that human beings should appear naked in the kingdom of heaven. A more than welcome observation (demonstrating that a major thinker can also pay attention to the details of his science, something I don’t see Husserl doing in our times). Clothing, suggested Augustine, is natural hominis tegumentum, quasi altera cutis.34 Perfect.
In the room I visited at the Mayr there was the usual supply of tranquilizers on the night table. I pocketed them. Not because I suffer from insomnia; I had another idea. I feel I have a duty to symbolically resow (yes, resow) the species, following Deucalion.34 He used stones that grew into human beings. With those meprobamate pills, I hope to propagate a calmer, less quarrelsome breed (compared to the extinct). I thought I might plant them on the Bellevue tennis courts where I watched the Davis Cup’s European zone matches. They ought to produce handsome people, like tennis champions, and like them, inclined toward fair play. I’ll spread them parsimoniously. It’s a breed that tends to multiply exponentially. You never know.
•
So Deucalion appears.
Nothing illegitimate about that. I am the Successor. Humanity was, now I am. Incarnation of the epilogue. Outcome of the generations. The purpose, the destination, the journey’s end. (Is there a humorous aspect to what I’m saying? Up to a point. The humor’s fitting, if not altogether sincere; it’s undercut by pride and melancholy).
I see a pyramid. If I look at it carefully, a temporally existing, upside-down pyramid. Actually, two pyramids. The one, upright, widens over the eons from the first man or hominid progenitor to the swarming billions of creatures of the same species present on the night of June 2. Underneath that, the upside-down triangle (and this one has no temporal existence, it is merely an ideal) that from the swarming billions suddenly shrinks to a single individual.
I am that point of termination. (The word vertigo derives from vertex, summit or apex: mal di vertex. My head spins; it must.)
If up until now there has been humanity, and now there is only me, then I must take on the activities that they have had to abandon. And what did they do, in fact? What did they do? Well, it’s pretty simple: they acted so as to achieve things. And they thought about things they saw around them, or believed they saw around them. And they represented them with words, signs, sounds.
Other than that, they did nothing. I may be a reductionist (a simplifier), but I don’t think I’ve omitted anything. To carry on, to substitute for them, is not something that reduces me to quivering with fear; it wouldn’t make anyone quiver. When all is said and done they didn’t have great expectations, or ambitions.
•
The one thing that’s certain is that I’m the survivor. By chance?
I don’t think so. I’ve always believed that Chance—supposing such a capital-C thing exists and isn’t just that holy foolishness we call asylum ignorantiae36—is utterly undistinguishable from a superior and inscrutable will. Lloyds and the gr
eat London insurance companies didn’t consider hurricanes and freak waves, great wildfires and earthquakes to be accidents, they called them Acts of God.
I survive. Therefore I was chosen, or excluded. It was not chance, but will. But it is up to me to interpret. I’ll conclude I’m the chosen if I decide that humanity deserved to come to an end on the night of June 2, and the dissipatio was punishment. And that I’m the excluded if I decide that it’s all a glorious mystery, an assumption to the empyrean, the angelification of the species, and so forth.
They are absolute alternatives, but I’ve been given the faculty to choose. I am the elect—or the damned. With the curious distinction that it’s up to me to elect or damn myself. And I do have to decide. “To drown in the abyss—heaven or hell, who cares?”37 That’s all very well for Baudelaire the magician. For me, no. That’s mumbo jumbo. It matters. It matters.
The magician here supersedes all oratory, all prayer. Or better, in the present circumstances, it is St. Thomas Aquinas with his sober, fierce Latin. Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, quia beatitudo per hoc magis complacebit.38 The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned so that their bliss might be more pleasing to them. Supposing I am damned, my good friend Mylius (who won’t forgive me two things, Henriette’s visits and my thirty-nine years, for he was fifty-nine) when he looks out from his heaven will be pleased to see me in hell. I don’t doubt he will feel repaid. And how will Professor Mylius fare in the kingdom of heaven, with his bliss? Will it be like those sabbaticals at Princeton that he so envied his more illustrious colleagues?
Meanwhile I, too, have compensations, although I am excluded. Silence is not one of my punishments; from dusk to dawn, noisy dormice gnaw busily on the roof beams. They gnaw all night, and in the morning I find sawdust on the ground below. This is no mere mania to destroy; it has been said they sharpen their teeth this way, to better unshell wild nuts and berries in the woods. The marmots, when they dig their burrows, lining them with leaves and stocking them with small dead animals for the winter, make a cry like the whimper of their little ones. When the courting season is over, the long-eared owl grows reticent and is heard only at great intervals, while the little owl keeps sounding his musical calls, and the closer he is to his nest, the more he sings. The afternoons are loud with cuckoos; the evenings ring with the woodpecker and his strange call, like the hinges creaking on an old iron-bound castle door. I call him the Gothic bird.
There’s my thundering creek, and because of the abundant rain, countless runnels flashing down the mountain, silver threads harmonious and strong despite the wind that ruffles them. When the wind rises, it carries their voices right into the house.
Nature seems unaware of the night of June 2. Maybe she is gladdened to have all of life to herself again, now that the brief intermezzo known to us as history is closed. She has no regrets or misgivings, I am sure.
12
TODAY I share nature’s indifference, or should I say abhorrence. So much so that I ask myself if this intermezzo is really over, or won’t simply start up again in a moment, a naughty prankster. Given that they were neither necessary, nor helpful.
I consult my personal mass spectrometer. I find no results on black (hatred), but on gray (fear), yes, often; and on the ashy yellow of annoyance, the data is strong. The sample ranges from the ascetic vampirism of “early detectors” to the injurious pettiness of acquaintances, the inevitable frictions of daily life. The colleague who came to visit and asked “why in heaven’s name” had I chosen to live in this “goatherd’s hut”? The book contract with swindler clauses, like the one stipulating that “The Publisher assumes no obligation as to when the Work may appear in print . . .”
I’m no longer the pious Antigone contemplating funeral monuments. I’ve moved into the phase of psychic disconnection, of coming unglued. Incoherence. Fluctuating states of mind in a rarefied atmosphere. Today I’m assailed by small animosities, marginal episodes that date back to “my old age” and are generally quite overlookable. This one, among the many, comes to mind, I don’t know why.
The editor used to allot each of us new staff members one column in the paper in turn. The piece I managed to push through once was somewhat pompously titled “Against formalism and conformism: examining some stereotypes” and was meant to be the first of a series. It was dedicated to two terms, alienation and prostitution, circumscribing the first and amplifying the second. I proposed that “alienation” be limited to what the later Marx intended. A worker who is in a position to manage his own employment, if he so desires, and thus be an inventive electrician or a creative blacksmith, yet who prefers the assembly line for the guaranteed paycheck, has no right to consider himself a victim of alienation. As for professional prostitution, it would rightly include those women who legally prostitute themselves with a husband they don’t love, or don’t love anymore, but who continue to accept the ease and creature comforts with which he pays them. The bourgeois ladies were virtuous, the unions philistine, I was told contemptuously. The editor threatened to fire me, I had attacked “the circulation.”
An extreme left group had joined the Zero Population Growth movement for birth control (unusual, the left being optimistic, agnostic about sex, and anti-Malthusian); they asked me to speak on the radio and I was happy to do so. Mine was a brief sermon, eight minutes. The following day the program management distanced themselves from my views but I continued to get anonymous phone calls at home for quite a while, invariably along the lines of “You filthy, depraved unmarried bastard.” My reply: “I can still change that. I haven’t even turned twenty-four.” Or else I would put a record on and play into the receiver a silly French song that was popular at the time, “Les célibataires sont si malheureux”39: “Bachelors are unhappy men / We’d better say a prayer for them / Because they’re always on their own, / And lay themselves to bed alone.”
I never had much luck in my few radio appearances. Recently, after I’d given up political journalism, I sat at a so-called round table where I was able to pose the following question: If the press aspires to represent public opinion, as it claims to, why is it still monopolized by the journalist tribe, not more than 150 people in this whole country, editors in chief and managing editors? Open up to the public! Professional journalists could be responsible for reporting the news and offering comments, and those two tasks would be plenty to justify their existence. The rest, the bulk of the paper, would collaborate with the users, the readers, a joint participation that would certainly be unregulated, discordant, and partial, but still the only way to give voice to an authentic public opinion. One of my colleagues said, very politely, that I didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of what it meant to put out a newspaper. Others stood up to the microphone to declare I was out of my mind.
Remains of petty resentments. Small stuff. I had conveniently forgotten about them. Why they bob up again now I have no idea.
•
The directors, the editors, the writers, colleagues, ex-colleagues, and “friends” are now on the other side. Walking the bare hills of Mount Armageddon. Waiting for the final judgment, wary, they dig into the ash with their fingernails, covering the telex and the typewriters to which they’re (rightly) chained. Angels on guard watch that they don’t escape. They are three black angels, the same before whom idolaters prostrated themselves when they were alive. Each bears a shield: on one shield is written “sociologism,” on another “historicism,” on the third “psychologism.” At the foot of the hill, two snakes creep by, hissing and spitting fire. One has scales that spell out “advertising,” and the other, “marketing.”
I admit, it’s not very original as an apocalyptic vision.
It’s pretty implausible; I need more details. The waiting throngs giggle and exchange notes. Dies illa? Non creditur. Le jugement dernier? Incroyable. Das jüngste Gericht? Unmöglich. Doomsday? You’re kidding!
Ideas
contain the solvent that activates them when they come alive and blocks them when they don’t. Without that productive solvent, they are flimsy, nebulous, but thanks to that nebulosity, whatever catastrophe comes, they can resist.
Resist and reemerge. Ideas are like a phoenix (a noisy, featherless phoenix, a caged bird). For the phoenix, there is no end of the world, or the end of the world is just an opportunity to rise up and take charge. There is nothing to hope for or to fear.
•
Robinson Crusoe kept track of time by carving notches on a post, something that would never have entered the head of that other well-known sailor and castaway, Ulysses. Crusoe, the modern man, was suspended between two disbeliefs; he no longer trusted the natural knowledge that correctly registers the passing of the days and nights, and he also had little faith (rightly so) in ich-Zeit, his “own” time. Those forms of disbelief have grown sharper and more complicated for us. Our bête noire is naïve realism, and it’s as naïve to think that time and space are objective realities as it is to think that a child loves his mother when he actually lusts for her. We no longer register nature’s time, while the time we “possess” gets confused with that pap of sensations and impressions, that subjectivity we’ve made of the external world, distorting its qualities and its measure.
I should have marked the days on a calendar, after June 2. But I had no calendar, nor watch that reports the date. Before, I relied on the newspapers to keep track of the days. I shunned those artificial counters that provide yet another sort of time: one that standardizes and abolishes the pauses, even as the devices that surround us multiply to infinity. Our haste is pathological, an anxiety to consume life.
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