The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  The matter must have been treated in full seriousness, because the Estates General established an award of 25,000 florins for whoever would successfully realize this intention bordering on madness. Two experienced men of the sea, Captain Jacob van Heemskerk1 and the pilot Willem Barents2, set out with a crew and two ships on a great reconnaissance. It was May 1597. The green strip of land quickly disappeared from view, and after barely three weeks the sailors were surrounded by an inconceivable polar world. On June 5 one of the deck hands shouted that he saw a flock of huge white swans on the horizon. These were actually mountains of ice. The sailor’s mistake indicates not so much poetic imagination as a poor knowledge of polar hell.

  After many dramatic episodes, adversities of weather and fate, struggles with an ever more incomprehensible environment (these wonders increased gradually, allowing partial adaptation), less than four months after leaving Holland further navigation became impossible. The ships were imprisoned by autumn ice on the shore of Novaya Zemlya. A decision was made to winter there. For this they needed a house.

  By happy coincidence they found wood on the island, brought by ocean currents from Siberian forests. It was hard as rock, but they managed with this resistant material. The ship’s carpenter died at the beginning of construction; the frozen earth did not want to accept his mortal remains, and his body was buried in a crevasse of ice. Time was running out—the days were shorter and shorter, the temperature fell in an appalling way. Those who worked on the construction complained that when they put nails in their mouth according to the carpenter’s custom, they froze to their lips and had to be torn off with the skin.

  On the third of November the last board was finally nailed to the roof. The happy sailors decorated their home with a branch formed out of snow.

  So here was the house: a miniature of their homeland, a shelter from frost and the polar bears that hunted the Dutchmen. There was hardly a day they did not meet them eye-to-eye. Rifles, flintlocks, muskets, halberds, and fire were used but did not help much; the stubbornness and persistance of all these animals were almost human as they suddenly appeared like white, bloodthirsty phantoms, climbing the roof and trying to enter through the chimney. They sniffed and panted threateningly at the house’s door.

  The chronicler of the expedition rarely permits himself to express emotions except for pious sighs to the Creator. At one point in his report he adopts the emotional term “beast” for the bear, and uses it until the end. In the middle of a polar night the bears’ siege came to an end and polar foxes appeared; the chronicler has a tender and warm term for them, “creatures.” They obediently entered the traps that were set, provided meat (it tasted like rabbit) and fur. Once again it was shown that the mythical brotherhood of men with those on all fours contains a certain dose of hypocrisy.

  On earth that was not destined for man in God’s plans, on the cruel, dazzlingly white and blindingly black chessboard of fate, stood a house. A fire set in the fireplace gave more smoke than warmth. Icy wind played in cracks caulked with moss. Sick with scurvy and consumed with fever, the men lay on bunks that hung from the walls, snow burying the small house with its chimney. The polar night confused all measures of time and reality. At the end of January, the sailors succumbed to a collective hallucination just like that of wanderers in the desert who have visions of an oasis—they saw an unreal sun above the horizon. But the funereal darkness of polar night was still to last for a long time.

  It would be a mistake to think the hibernation of the Dutch was a kind of passive resistance. On the contrary, the energy that sparked from them is cause for admiration. They were busy, bustling like good Frisian peasants on their barren holdings. They carried wood for the fire, nursed sick companions, repaired the house; some of them wrote about the peculiarities of the surrounding world. They hunted, intricately practiced culinary arts, read the Bible aloud, entered four to a barrel while the ship’s barber poured hot water over them. He also cut their hair, which grew amazingly fast, as if the body wanted to cover itself with fur. They sewed clothes and shoes from the hides of the animals they caught, sang pious and indecent songs. They repaired a clock that constantly froze, a clock that was consolation that time is not an abyss or black mask of nothingness but can be divided into a human yesterday and a human tomorrow—into a day without light and a night without glimmer, seconds, hours, and weeks, into doubt that goes away and hope that is born.

  He who struggles with the elements in a deadly contest, with an adversary a hundred times stronger, realizes he has a chance only if he concentrates all his attention, will, and cunning to counter the blows. It requires a special reduction of the entire personality, a degradation to animal impulses dictated by instinct. It is necessary to forget who one used to be. What counts is only the very moment of thunder, fire, storm, blizzard, and earthquake. Any human surplus, any superfluous thought, feeling, or gesture can bring catastrophe.

  The handful of Dutch sailors exposed to the utmost ordeal transgressed these iron rules at least two times. They added a human accent to the laws of struggle with impersonal nature. But perhaps it was not just a risky extravagance or sentimental song about attachment sung in the icy wilderness, but an important element of self-defense. Both events are related to their new home. Because—after all—it was a home.

  On January 6, 1598, the day of Epiphany, without paying any attention to what was happening outside, the shipwrecked men decided to celebrate the holiday as in their homeland. Even sober Captain van Heemskerk gave in to the madness, ordering a sizable portion of wine and two pounds of flour to be measured out to the crew from diminishing supplies; with this they baked a plum cake and biscuits. The mulled wine with spices put the crew in such high spirits that they started to dance; many times they went through their favorite “bungler,” a hat dance, and a reel. They arranged a contest to decide who would become the Emperor of Novaya Zemlya, and selected an Almond King3. He was a very young sick sailor, Jacob Schiedam, who died soon afterward, but on that memorable evening he smiled for the last time, to his companions rather than the world. The chronicler says everything took place as it did with their dear ones in Holland, which he summons only once with the solemn incantation “patria.”

  It is not known who first had the idea—it might have been a product of collective imagination—but when the house was finally built (to tell the truth, it was a doghouse) they decided to give it some style. A triangular portal was painted in black over the low door, and two windows were placed symmetrically on the front wall (the house was without windows). An eave made from shipboards was arranged in tiers and nailed to a flat roof. Soon it was swept away by a snowstorm, clearly hostile to these aesthetic subtleties.

  When on June 13, 1598, they started back on two wretched boats, no one had the courage to look back at the deserted home—that monument to fidelity with a triangular portal and two false windows where pitchy darkness lurked.

  SPINOZA’S BED

  IT IS AN amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with a foreboding that his role of teacher of the Swedish queen would be his last, old Kant smelling a grated horse-radish before his daily walk (the cane preceding him, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand), Spinoza consumed by tuberculosis and patiently polishing lenses, so weak he is unable to finish his Treatise on the Rainbow…A gallery of noble moribunds, pale masks, plaster casts.

  In the eyes of his biographer, Spinoza was unmistakably an ideal wise man: exclusively concentrated on the precise architecture of his works, perfectly indifferent to material affairs, and liberated from all passions. But an episode in his life is passed over in silence by some biographers, while others consider it only an incomprehensible, youthful whim.

  Spinoza’s father died in 1656. In his family Baruch had the reputatio
n of an eccentric young man who had no practical sense and wasted precious time studying incomprehensible books. Due to clever intrigues (his stepsister, Rebecca, and her husband, Casseres, played the main role) he was deprived of his inheritance. She hoped the absentminded young man would not even notice. But it happened otherwise.

  Baruch initiated a lawsuit in court with an energy no one suspected him to have. He hired lawyers, called witnesses, was both matter-of-fact and passionate, extremely well-oriented in the most subtle details of procedure and convincing as a son injured and stripped of his rights.

  They settled the division of the estate relatively quickly; clear legal rules existed in this matter. But then a second act of the trial unexpectedly followed, causing a general sense of unpleasantness and embarrassment.

  As if the devil of possessiveness had entered him, Baruch began to litigate over almost each object from his father’s house. It started with the bed in which his mother, Deborah, had died (he did not forget about its dark-green curtains). Then he requested objects without any value, explaining that he had an emotional attachment to them. The judges were monumentally bored, and could not understand where this irresistible desire in the ascetic young man came from. Why did he wish to inherit a poker, a pewter pot with a broken handle, an ordinary kitchen stool, a china figure representing a shepherd without a head, a broken clock that stood in the vestibule and was a home for mice, or a painting over the fireplace so completely blackened it looked like a self-portrait of tar?

  Baruch won the trial. He could now sit with pride on his pyramid of spoils, casting spiteful glances at those who tried to disinherit him. But he did not do this. He only chose his mother’s bed (with the dark-green curtains), giving the rest away to his adversaries defeated at the trial.

  No one understood why he acted this way. It seemed an obvious extravagance, but in fact had a deeper meaning. It was as if Baruch wanted to say that virtue is not at all an asylum for the weak. The art of renunciation is an act of courage—it requires the sacrifice of things universally desired (not without hesitation and regret) for matters that are great and incomprehensible.

  LETTER

  IT WAS ACCIDENTALLY discovered in the 1920s—to be exact, in 1924-in an antique-book shop in Leyden. Three sheets of cream-colored paper of the dimensions 11.5 by 17 centimeters, with traces of humidity, but the handwriting well preserved, the small, clear letters completely readable. An unknown person had pasted the letter onto the inside of the cover of an old, once very popular romance called The Knight with a Swan, published in 1651 by the Amsterdam firm of Cool.

  The majority of scholars have written skeptically about this discovery—for example, Isarlo, Gillet, Clark, De Vries, Borrero, and Goldschneider; only a young poet and historian from Utrecht, van der Velde (later stabbed with a dagger in mysterious circumstances not far from Scheveningen), fiercely defended the authenticity of the letter to the end of his life. According to the young scholar, its author was none other than Johannes Vermeer, and its recipient Anton van Leeuwenhoek1, a naturalist whose merits in the field of improving the microscope are well known. The scholar and the artist were both born in the same year, the same day, and spent their entire lives in the same city.

  The letter shows no traces of corrections or subsequent interpolations, but it contains two spelling mistakes and changes; obviously it must have been written in a hurry. A few lines have been crossed out so decidedly and energetically that we will never learn what foolish or shameful thoughts were covered forever by the blackness of the ink.

  The handwriting with its pointed letters, “v” written like an open eight, a somewhat wavy movement of the pen as if someone was speeding up and then suddenly stopping, reveals a striking similarity if not identity with the only preserved signature of Vermeer in the register of Saint Luke’s Guild in 1662. Chemical analysis of the paper and ink allows us to date the document at the second half of the seventeenth century. Everything indicates, then, that the letter could have been written by Vermeer’s hand, yet we lack irrefutable proofs. We know that technically perfect falsifications have been made.

  All those who spoke against the authenticity of the document put forward numerous arguments, but to tell the truth, they are not too convincing. Scholarly prudence and even far-reaching skepticism are undoubtedly praiseworthy virtues. But one could sense something between the lines of the critical remarks that no one clearly stated: the main reservations were caused by the letter’s content. Let us suppose that if Vermeer wrote to his mother-in-law, Maria Tins, asking her to lend him a hundred florins for the baptism of his son, Ignatius, or let us also imagine if he offered one of his paintings to his baker van Buyten as a guarantee against a debt, I believe no one would protest. But when after two and a half centuries the Great Mute speaks with his own voice, and what he says is an intimate confession—a manifesto and a prophecy—we don’t want to accept it because we have a great fear before a revelation, and withhold of consent to a miracle.

  Here is the letter:

  Undoubtedly You will be surprised I am writing rather than simply dropping by your laboratory before dusk, as so often happens. But I think I do not have enough courage, I do not know how to tell you to your face what you will read in a moment.

  I would prefer not to write this letter. I hesitated for a long time, because I really did not want to expose our long friendship to danger. Finally I made up my mind to do it. There are, after all, things more important than what unites us, more important than Leeuwenhoek, more important than Vermeer.

  A few days ago you showed me a drop of water under your new microscope. I always thought it was pure like glass, while in reality strange creatures swirl in it like in Bosch’s transparent hell. During this demonstration you watched my consternation intently, and I think with satisfaction. Between us there was silence. Then you said very slowly and deliberately: “Such is water, my dear, such and not otherwise.”

  I understood what you wanted to say: that we artists record appearances, the life of shadows and the deceptive surface of the world; we do not have the courage or ability to reach the essence of things. We are craftsmen, so to speak, who work in the matter of illusion, while you and those like you are the masters of truth.

  As you know my father owned the tavern Mechelen at the marketplace. An old sailor often came there who had wandered all over the world, from Indochina to Brazil and from Madagascar to the Arctic Ocean. I remember him well. He was always quite tipsy but told splendid stories, and everyone gladly listened to him. He was the attraction of the place, like a big colorful picture or exotic animal. One of his favorite stories was about the Chinese emperor Shi Huang-ti.

  This emperor ordered his country to be surrounded by a thick wall, in order to shut out everything that was different. He burned all books so he would not have to listen to the admonishing voice of the past; he forbade cultivation of any of the arts under penalty of death. (Their complete uselessness was blatantly clear when they were compared to such important tasks of state as building a fortress, or cutting off rebels’ heads.) Thus poets, painters, and musicians hid in the mountains and remote monasteries; they led the life of exiles tracked by a pack of informers. On the squares piles of paintings were burned, fans, statues, ornate fabrics, objects of luxury, and all things that could be considered pretty. Men, women, and children all wore the same ash-colored clothes. The emperor declared war even on flowers; he ordered their fields to be buried under stones. A special decree announced that at sunset everyone was to be at home, the windows tightly covered with black curtains because (you know yourself) what incredible pictures can be painted by the wind, clouds, and the light of sunset.

  The emperor valued only science. He showered scientists with honors and gold. Every day astronomers would bring news of the discovery of a new or imaginary star. In servile fashion it was given the name of the emperor, and soon the entire firmament teemed with the luminous points of Shi Huang-ti I, Shi Huang-ti II, Shi Huang-ti III, and so on. Mathemati
cians labored to invent new numerical systems, complicated equations, and unimaginable geometrical figures, knowing only too well their labors were sterile, of no use to anyone. Naturalists promised they would develop a tree whose crown was embedded in the ground and whose roots reached the sky, also a wheat grain as large as a fist.

  At last the emperor wished for immortality. Physicians performed cruel experiments on men and animals to discover the secret of the eternal heart, the eternal liver, eternal lungs.

  As it often happens with men of action, the emperor desired to change the face of the earth and sky so his name would be inscribed forever in the memory of future generations. He did not understand that the life of an ordinary peasant, shoemaker, or grocer was far more worthy of respect and admiration, while he himself was becoming a bloodless letter, a symbol among countless symbols of madness and violence monotonously repeating themselves.

  After all the crimes, all the devastation he caused in human minds and souls, his own death was cruelly banal: he choked on a single grape. To remove him from the surface of the earth, nature did not exert herself to produce a hurricane or deluge.

  Probably you will ask: Why do I tell you all this, and what is the connection between the story of the foreign ruler and your drop of water? I will most likely answer you not very clearly or coherently, hoping you will understand the words of a man who is full of forebodings and anxiety.

  I am afraid that you and others like you are setting out on a dangerous journey that might bring humanity not only advantages but also great, irreparable harm. Haven’t you noticed that the more the means and tools of observation are perfected, the more distant and elusive become the goals? With each new discovery a new abyss opens. We are more and more lonely in the mysterious void of the universe.