Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  but he knew also that the beauty of the symbol, were it ever so precise in its reality, was never its own excuse for being, that whenever such was the case, whenever beauty existed for its own sake, there art was attacked at its very roots, because the created deed then came to be its own opposite, because the thing created was then suddenly substituted for that which creates, the empty form for the true content of reality, the merely beautiful for the perceptive truth, in a constant confusion, in a constant cycle of change and reversion, an inbound cycle in which renewal was no longer possible, in which nothing more could be enlarged, in which there was nothing more to be discovered, neither the divine in the abandoned, nor the abandoned in human divinity, but in which there was only intoxication with empty forms and empty words, whereby art through this lack of discrimination and even of fidelity, was reduced to un-art, and poetry to mere literarity; verily, this he knew, knew it painfully,

  and by the same token he knew of the innermost danger of all artists, he knew the utter loneliness of the man destined to be an artist, he knew the inherent loneliness which drove such a one into the still deeper loneliness of art and into the beauty that cannot be articulated, and he knew that for the most part such men were shattered by this immolation, that it made them blind, blind to the world, blind to the divine quality in the world and in the fellow-man, that—intoxicated by their loneliness—they were able to see only their own god-likeness, which they imagined to be unique, and consequently this self-idolatry and its greed for recognition came more and more to be the sole content of their work—, a betrayal of the divine as well as of art, because in this fashion the work of art became a work of un-art, an unchaste covering for artistic vanity, so spurious that even the artist’s self-complacent nakedness which it exposed became a mask; and even though such unchaste self-gratification, such dalliance with beauty, such concern with effects, even though such an un-art might, despite its brief unrenewable grant, its inextensible boundaries, find an easier way to the populace than real art ever found, it was only a specious way, a way out of the loneliness, but not, however, an affiliation with the human community, which was the aim of real art in its aspiration toward humanity, no, it was the affiliation with the mob, it was a participation in its treacherous non-community, which was incapable of the pledge, which neither created nor mastered any reality, and which was unwilling to do so, preferring only to drowse on, forgetting reality, having forfeited it as had un-art and literarity, this was the most profound danger for every artist; oh how painfully, how very painfully he knew this,

  and by this token he knew also that the danger of un-art and literarity had always encompassed him, and still encompassed him, and that therefore—although he had never dared face this truth—his poetry could no longer be called art, since, devoid of all renewal and development, it had been nothing but an unchaste production of beauty without real creativity, and from beginning to end, from the Aetna Song to the Aeneid, it had been a mere indulgence of beauty, self-sufficiently limited to the embellishment of things long since conceived, formed, and known, without any real progress in itself, aside from an increasing extravagance and sumptuousness, an un-art which was never able of itself to master existence and exalt it to a veritable symbol. Oh, in his own life, in his own work, he had experienced the seduction of un-art, the seduction of all substitution which puts the thing created in the place of that which creates, the game in the place of communion, the fixed thing in the place of the living, ever-vital principle, beauty in the place of truth: he knew all about this substitution and reversion, knew it all the more as it had been that of his own life’s path, this erring path which had led him from his native fields to the metropolis, from the work of his hands to self-deceptive rhetoric, from a humane and responsible sense of duty to a pretense of compassion, which observed things from above and aroused itself to no real help, borne along in a litter the whole way, the way leading down from a community regulated by law to a chance seclusion; the way, no, the fall into vulgarity and there where vulgarity is at its worst, into literarity! Although he had seldom been aware of it, he had succumbed again and again to intoxication, whether it had been offered to him as beauty, as vanity, as artistic dalliance, or as a game of forgetting; these things had ordered his life and constricted it as though in the wreathing, gliding coils of the serpent, vertiginous, this intoxication of constant revolving and reversion, the seductive intoxication of un-art; and although now, on looking back at this life he might feel ashamed, although now, the limit of time having been reached and the game about to be broken off, he had to admit to himself in cold sobriety that he had pursued a worthless, wretched, literary life, not a whit better than that of a Bavius or a Mavius or others of their sort whom he had despised as mere phrase-makers, and although such an admission might reveal again that all contempt contains some self-contempt, now as this rose up in him so disturbingly, with such shameful stabs of pain that it seemed there could be but one possible or desirable solution, namely self-extinction and death, nevertheless that which had overcome him was something other than shame and more than shame: he who looks back on his life, sobered, and because of this sobriety perceives that every step of his erring path has been necessary and inevitable, yea, even natural, knows that this path of reversion was prescribed for him by the might of destiny and the might of the gods, that therefore he had been bound motionless to the spot, motionless despite all his aspirations to go forward, lost in the thicket of images, of language, of words, of sounds, commanded by fate to be entangled in the ramifications within and without, but denied by fate and the gods the one hope of those who lack a leader, the hope of seeing the golden, shimmering bough amidst the wilderness of these prison walls; he who has perceived these things, he who perceives them is no longer ashamed, he is horrified, for he perceives that everything happened simultaneously for the Olympians and that consequently the will of Jupiter and that of fate had come to be unified in a terrible concurrence, revealed to earthly man as an indivisible union of guilt and punishment. Oh, virtuous alone is he whom fate has destined to discharge the dutiful service by which the human community is established, he alone is chosen by Jupiter to be led out of the thicket by fate, but when the common will of fate and the god does not permit this discharge of duty, then inability or unwillingness to help are held to be one and the same, and both are punished by helplessness: unfit for help, unwilling to help, helpless within the human community, shy of communion and locked in the prison of art, this was the poet, without a leader and, in his defection, unfit for leadership; and should he wish to rebel, should he wish to become a helper, an arouser from the twilight, in order to win back to the pledge and to brotherhood, these aspirations of his were condemned to fail from the start—and the three had been sent to him so that he might realize this with horror and shame: his help would be a sham-help, his truth but a seeming truth, and even were they to be acceptable to mankind they would be misleading and calamitous, far from leading to salvation, far from salvation itself, aye, this would be the outcome: the one lacking perception would bring perception to those unwilling for it, the word-maker would be calling out speech from the mute, the derelict would impose duty on those ignorant of duty, the lame would guide the halt.

  He was again abandoned, abandoned to an abandoned world, oh, no hand held him now, there was nothing there to shelter or sustain him; he had been let fall, and he hung brokenly over the window-ledge, clinging lifelessly to the dusty, hot, inanimate bricks, feeling the sharp dust of their overheated, primordial clay under his fingernails, clinging to the primordial earthliness of which they were composed; he heard the stifled laughter in the stone-heated, form-fixed silence of the surrounding night, he heard the taciturnity of consummate perjury, the obdurate hush of a guilty conscience, robbed of speech, of knowledge, of memory, the silence of the pre-creation and its increasingly cruel death, the conditions of which allowed no rebirth or renewal for the created world, for such a death bore no traces of divinity: oh, no othe
r creature was so unconditionally and undivinely mortal as man, for none was so capable of perjury, and the more abject he was the more mortal he became, but most perjuring and most mortal was he whose foot had estranged itself from the earth and touched nothing but pavements, the man who no longer tilled and no longer sowed, for whom nothing took place in accord with the circling of the stars, for whom the forest no longer sang, nor the greening meadows; verily nobody and nothing was so mortal as the mob in the great cities, grovelling, sneaking, swarming through the streets, having staggered so long that it had forgotten how to walk, upheld by no law and upholding none, the re-scattered herd, its former wisdom forfeited, unwilling to have knowledge, submitting like the animal, like something less than the animal, to every chance, and at last to a chance extinction without memory, without hope, without immortality; the same thing had happened to him, to him in conjunction with the re-scattered mob-herd of which he was a part, so had it been laid on him as a necessity of fate, inevitable. He had left the region of fear behind him, but only to see with horror how he had fallen to the level of the mob, fallen to a surface which offers no ingress to any kind of depth—, would this fall go still further, must it go further? from surface to surface, down to the final one, the surface of sheer nothingness? to the surface of final oblivion? The Plutonian doors were always open, the fall was inevitable, the fall from which there was no return, and in the intoxication of falling, man was prone to believe himself propelled upward, believing it until he was there where the timeless event of the heavens revealed itself simultaneously as an encounter in the realm of earth, until on the boundary of time he met the un-deified god, who had caught up with and outrun him and who, wrapped in the fluttering mantle of cosmic laughter, hurtled downward even as he, both of them cast into the same state of sober self-abandonment, surrendered to a horror which, even though it was expressed by a doggedly stubborn laughter, was dimly aware of a still greater horror to come and hoped to laugh it off; this fate-driven journey, this fall proceeded toward a horror, a shame, a denudation still more naked, going on in a fresh access of destructiveness and self-destructiveness, worse than before, in a new isolation which was meant to surpass all former loneliness, all the loneliness of night and the world, deserted by not only all that was human but moreover by all that was substantial; here the empty surface of unmastered existence was suddenly laid bare, and the night in the inaccessible inner and outer spheres, although unchanged and radiant in the full circle of its darkness, had dissolved into a nowhere which was so delivered over to chance that all perception and knowledge had become superfluous, and being useless was allowed to vanish; memory like hope had vanished, vanishing before the might of unmastered chance, for it was that which was revealed in the foregoing experience; inescapable this chance which held sway over the uncreated, enveloped by intoxication and the unremembered abandonment of the pre-creation, threatened by its cold flames, by its amorphousness and pre-natal death, making itself known as naked chance which spelled utter and nameless loneliness, and claimed the right to be supreme—, this was the journey’s end, the now visible end of the fall, the very essence of anonymity.

  The nameless loneliness of chance, yes it was that which he saw before him as, ready for the fall and already falling, he stood there at the window. Unconquered and unconquerable in its abandonment, the estranged night lay open to his fevered glances, unchanged, immobile yet strange, brushed by the gently-unyielding breath of the moon, unchanged, immobile, and flooded by the gentle flow of the Milky Way, submerged in the silent song of the stars, submerged in the beauty and the magical unity conjured by beauty, submerged in the dissolving unity of a world become beautiful, submerged in its vast remoteness, benumbed and benumbing, and, like space,—beautiful, rigid, and vast, and demonically enchanted to strangeness—it was carried along through time with space, night, and yet immortal in time, aeonic yet not eternal, estranged from humanity, strange to the human soul, because the quiet unification which took place here, saturated by distance and saturating distance, no longer allowed of participation; the forecourt of reality had changed to the forecourt of unreality. Extinguished was the order of the spheres in the universe; their mute-ringing silver spaces, enclosed and estranged by utter incomprehensibility, became silent, including in their strangeness the utter incomprehensibility of all things human; sun and stars and Milky Way had no longer a name, they were alien to him in their remoteness, in their seclusion, which was without bridge or communication and yet which weighed upon him, subduing and threatening, transparent and hot, the overheated chill of universal space; whatever was about him enclosed him no longer, he stood outside the cave of night even though within it, cut off from his own as well as from all alien destinies, cut off from the fate of the visible-invisible world, cut off from divinity, from humanity, from perception, from beauty, for even the beauty of the visible-invisible world had vanished into namelessness, and even the knowledge of it, the meaning of it, had faded—

  — oh Plotia, do I still remember your name? in your tresses dwelt the night, spangled over with stars, presager of longing, promiser of light; and I bowed over their duskiness, drunken with night’s lambent breath, I did not sink into them! Oh lost life, most intimate strangeness, strangest intimacy, you the furthermost nearness, the nearest of all things far, first and ultimate smile of the soul in its earnestness, you, oh you who were and still are everything, close and strange and a near-far smiling, you, fate-bearing blossom, I could not let your life enter into mine because of its overwhelming remoteness, because of its overwhelming strangeness, because of its overwhelming nearness and intimateness, because of the burden of its nocturnal smile, because of fate, your fate which you bear within you and must bear forever, not to be consummated by you, not to be consummated by me, the fate which I dared not take upon myself because the utter impossibility of its consummation would have riven my heart, and I have been witness only to your beauty, not to your life! oh, you, reluctant departer whom I did not call back, you, graced by longing, whose recall was not permitted me, you, who will not return, your step, alas so light in the inscrutable and inaudible, you, the lost shining behind the shadow, where is your homecoming? where are you? you did exist; and you let me have the ring from your finger, placing it on my hand, and there was a time that encircled us darkly, time that rushed on, enshrouding the darkness, enshrouded by it, oh Plotia, I no longer know what it was—

  — scarcely a memory now was that which had vanished, that which had been real and more than real, scarcely more than a name was the woman he had loved, scarcely a glimmer, scarcely a shadow, she had sunk away from him into the inscrutability of chance, and nothing remained but an astonished remembrance of something having existed, of beauty’s dying music, the remembrance of a whilom wonder and a once inexplicably powerful oblivion that he had pursued with all the amazing perseverance of a narcotic, oh, still bemused even in remembering that it had ever been, in remembering that beauty had resounded, had been able to resound, that, imbedded in the human countenance like a soft breath issuing from eternity and breathing of eternity, it had shone out from the human countenance again and again, distantly intimate, strangely near, nocturnally smiling, glowing and fading, fragile as the white privet—a delicate tissue-veil of death spread over all things human, the veil of humanity, made dense in beauty while having at the same time become more transparent therein, as if oblivion had crept into the soul, as if the soul had lost itself to its earthly immortality in beauty, in the simple oblivion of beauty, as if a last remnant of hope still flickered in human beauty, that long-lost hope which is turned toward the inaudible, unattainable knowledge of death: nothing was left of it save invincible death standing behind the death-sweet shape which would not return; invincible and grandly erect, death reared up in immensity, raised up to the stars, filling the spheres and binding them, and along with death, evoked by its muteness, moved by it, fulfilling it, seeming to be its very essence, there was a sudden upsurge of all that death comprised,
death surging up mutely with all that it contained, the death-stricken, the death-bound, the chance-born, the chance-bound, the hordes of human shapes waiting for death, multitudinous the lame ones, manifold the fat-bellies, the jabberers and carpers, multiplied to such a dense horde that the empty stone receptacle of the plaza overflowed with them, pushing them on into all the spheric spaces without, altering the emptiness of the plaza or that of the spaces, a horde so dense that it was like the outburst and outpouring of time itself, a death-herd of concurrent identities, the earthly-human multiplicity, the earthly man in the cyclic multiplicity of his transformations together with his skeleton and skull—his round skull, flat skull, pointed skull, covered in wool, straw or flax, bald or braided,— skull after skull; the skull-bearing human with its multiplicity of faces—the animal face, the plant-face, the stone-face—curiously covered with skin, either smooth or pimpled or wrinkled, full-fleshed or slack, with jaws for chewing and speaking, the face’s cavern stonily beset with teeth; the face-bearing man with his various odors of skin and cavities, with his smile—silly, shrewd, defiant, defenseless—with his smile which even at its meanest is divinely touching and opens his countenance before it is closed again in laughter, lest his eye behold the inhumanity of the shattered creation; the human being blessed with the gift of sight—enlarged, transfixed, clarified, clouded, made vital, through the eye—revealing his destiny in his eye, hidden to himself in his eye; the fate-bearing human being, fate-destined by the very power of his eye to know shame, and yet the only creature who speaks, his human voice shamelessly and moistly articulated by the jaws, the tongue, the lips, the breath-bearing voice, the communion-bearing voice, the voice which issues from him—harsh, unctuous, flattering, threatening, flexible, stiff, gasping, flaccid, squeaking, bellowing—the voice which can be all of these but is always able to transfigure itself into song; the human being, this wonderful, terrible and yet miraculous entity of atomic being, of language, of expression, of perception and imperception, of dull drowsing, of calculations in sesterces, of desires, of enigmas, this creature indivisible yet divided into an infinite number of individual parts, individual abilities, individual spheres, divided into organs and living-zones, into substances, into atoms, multiplied over and over again; all this multiplicity of being, this maze of human particles, not even well composed, this creaturely thicket, as earthly in its reality as earth’s stony ribs, earthly as death’s skeleton, this underbrush of bodies, limbs, eyes, and voices, this thicket of the half-created and the unfinished which issues from chance lust and is forever sprouting out, one from the other, indiscriminately coupled in constantly renewed lust, carelessly commingled, copulated, interwoven, ramified, continuing to branch out and renew itself while constantly withering, so that what was withered, dried-up and faded might fall back to the earth; this human thicket, alive with the elements of the plant and the animal, this thicket of the living consecrated to death, this it was that flooded up with the shape of death, surging up with its booming and its silence, it was death itself filling the spheres, the human chaos of chance, so accidental and so mortal that we scarcely know whether he who happens to appear before us as living has not long since died, or perhaps has never been born, still in the state of the pre-natally dead or unborn—, Plotia, oh Plotia, never yet found, undiscoverable! oh, she remained undiscoverable in the underbrush of death, she had sunk away from him into the reabandonment of the underworld and he had less communion with her than with one who is dead; for he himself was dead, died off into the fore-death of uncreativeness, died off into perjury, into lameness, into crookedness, died off into the reabandonment of a vulgar, urban literarity which includes even death in the illusory path of its false reversion, adulterating death with beauty and beauty with death, trying to attain the unattainable by means of this lewd, corruption-seeking equalization, to substitute it self-deceptively for the inaudible knowledge of death, but also certainly to extend the pleasure of this sort of intermingling to love, indeed by love to push this playfully-lewd game to its actual climax; for he who is unable to love, who is unfit for love’s communion, he must rescue himself from his bridgeless isolation by means of beauty; titillated by cruelty he becomes a seeker of beauty, a devotee of beauty, but never a lover, far rather an observer of beauty in the midst of love, one who desires to create love through beauty, because he confuses what is created with that which creates, but also because he sniffs and follows hard on the intoxication to be found in love, the intoxication of death, the intoxication of beauty, the intoxication of oblivion, because in the drowsy absorption of his dalliance with beauty and his love of death he creates for himself the pleasure of oblivion, eager and willing to forget that love, even though blessedly able to create beauty, never has beauty as its goal, but heads solely toward its own immemorial vocation, that most human of all vocations which always and without exception implies assuming the other’s burden of fate; oh, the dead hold no communion among themselves, they have forgotten one another—