Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  — oh Plotia! unforgotten and unforgettable! you who were swathed in beauty! oh, if love existed, if the discrimination of love could exist in the human thicket, it would portend that together we might descend to the obliterating fountain of nothingness, to the sobering depths of the underworld, that we might descend, we sober and without illusions, going down to the primal base, not through the beautiful ivory portal of dreams which never opens for the return, but through the sober entrance of horn which would permit us to come back, retrieving in our common ascent a new fate from the last fate’s embers, retrieving from the last lovelack a new love, a newly created fate, fate in the making! oh Plotia, childlike yet no longer a child! only the unfolding fate may we take upon ourselves, not fate that is fixed; only as it unfolds does this fate become love’s reality which we seek for in kernel and bud of all that breathes of spring, in every grassblade, in every flower, in all young and growing creatures, but most fervently in the child, assuming the unfolded fate and its readiness to be formed, for the sake of which we bow to all that is still untouched, subsuming what is coming to pass in that which has already come to pass, taking the boy into the formative strength of the man, oh, Plotia, it is this unfolding fate, it is this which would be bestowed upon us if love existed, if its discriminative force, freed of all chance lust, could assure us the real certainty of loving, then fate itself would be love, love in its unfolding and its being, love as the descent into the depths of unremembrance and the ascent once more in complete recollection, as the extinction to nothingness and as the homecoming into an unchanged sameness, were it in the form of grassblade and blossom and child, as unchanged as these always are, and yet changed to love, enhanced by the gleaming shadow of love’s golden bough, the undiscoverable—

  — oh, the dead are without communion among themselves, under no bright shadow of a golden bough, they have forgotten one another; and Plotia’s figure, Plotia’s unforgotten-forgotten existence, which had once been his shimmering light behind every shadow, had lost itself in the shades and had become indistinguishable in the shadowy realm, sunken into the hordes of the dead, a particle yet scarcely a part of the collective dead, the mass of whose faces, skulls and figures were nameless and indistinguishable for him, all together having disappeared and evaporated because, from the beginning, they had been as dead for him, nameless because he had never once wanted to be of actual help to the living, aye more—condemned by the gods and fate to such unwillingness, innocent and yet guilty—because he had needed a whole lifetime even for the first attempt at help, for the first untaken step, for the first untaken start of such a step, reluctant to join any living community in service, to say nothing of taking the fate of a single living creature upon himself for this purpose, oh, he had misused his life in the non-community of the dead, he had always lived with the dead only, among whom he reckoned the living, he had considered human beings as lifeless building blocks with which to erect and create a death-fixed beauty, and therefore human beings as a whole had disappeared for him into the realm of the unaccomplished, into the oblivion of the eternally uncreated. For only in the task that the human being assumed because of his humanity was the saving perception also to be found, and in shirking the task he robbed himself even of salvation. Unfit, that is what he was, unfit for real helpfulness, unfit for the loving deed; he had looked on human sorrow and been unmoved by it, he had looked on the horror of events merely as something to be remembered unchastely and without chastity recorded in beauty, and this was the very reason why he had never succeeded in depicting real human beings, people who ate and drank, who loved and could be loved, and this was why he was so little able to depict those who went limping and cursing through the streets, unable to picture them in their bestiality and their great need of help, least able to show forth the miracle of humanity with which such bestiality is graced; people meant nothing to him, he considered them as fabulous beings, mimes of beauty in the garments of beauty, and as such he had depicted them, as kings and heroes of fable, as fable-shepherds, as creatures of dream in whose unreal god-likeness, played out and dreamed out in beauty, he also — resembling the mob even in this — would gladly have participated, in which perhaps he might have participated had they been visions of the real dream instead of mere word-creatures, barely alive in his poetry but dead as soon as they turned the next corner, emerging from the dark thicket of language and disappearing into limbo, into unlovedness, into numbness, into death, into silence, into unreality, just as those three who had vanished, never to be seen again. And out of their vanishing there boomed the evil, world-shattering muteness of derision with which these three had been shaken, boomed maliciously as a second silence through the silence of the plaza and the streets below, boomed through the stillness of the night, a chance laughter full of strangeness, booming, bursting and annulling space though not annulling time, the laughter of consummate perjury, the mute booming of the shattered creation at the mercy of chance.

  Nothing remained but the scorn-blinded shame of an extinguished memory, which had turned to the unchastity of a dead sham-memory. Aroused by no earthly flames the fires of heaven had died down into namelessness; the middle was silent, covered by the paving-stones of cities, it had merged with the most distant boundaries, grown cold under the breath of nothingness, and now the simultaneous stream of the creation in which the eternal reposes, it too was benumbed: woe to the sham-reversions of the false path, for they but imitated the vast orbits which have the power to bind past and future into the eternal now of timelessness; woe to this seeming timelessness which was the essence of all intoxication and which, to maintain such diversion, must needs continue to substitute the thing created for that which creates, beauty-thirsty, blood-thirsty, death-thirsty, betraying and perverting the sacrifice for the voluptuous intoxication of pleasure; woe to this unchaste vanity of memory for which the reality had never existed, and which remembered simply for the sake of remembering; woe to this reversion of being, for the pledge could not be renewed, the flame could not be rekindled, for dalliance failed and must fail, no matter how much beauty, blood and death was contributed to it, it remained ineffectual at the turning point of time on which all earthly immortality was shattered; verily, so long as the sacrifice failed to be a real sacrifice, disaster was inevitable, there was no awakening from the sleep of twilight, and the presumptuous one, caught in a vicious circle, remained imprisoned once and for all, the presumptuous one, who regarded himself as justified in neglecting his pledge because he interpreted the enchanting concurrence inside and outside, the ebb and flow of the world’s tides, the tempting view at the beauty-hemmed boundaries of the world, because he interpreted seduction itself as permission for that unreal reversion, which held just as much intoxication as forgetting or remembering, both spelling the loss of reality—woe to the intoxicated one, who presumptuous and obstinate lingered in his perjury and, whether overcome by remembrance or not, forgot that he was human; he had lost the fiery core of being and no longer knew whether he toppled upward or downward, whether he peered forward or backward, his cyclic path was without direction, but his head was screwed stiffly and absurdly onto his neck. The dead are inert, she who was dead could not be aroused, the space of oblivion had closed above her in a gray flood, and it seemed as if the women in Misery Street had known that one who had not realized his life was being carried there into his final disillusion, into his last oblivion. Had their scorn now really justified itself? Was there nothing left for him save the shameful plunge into nothingness and into the regions of the empty surface which stretch out subterraneously beneath the borders of oblivion? Oh, they had judged rightly and he was meant to accept the scornful curses with horrified shame, for the, unchastity of which he had innocently made himself guilty was more debased than the most shameless, passing lust of the mob, since his guilt was the unchastity of a voluntary downfall, since, even though at fate’s bidding, he had been a willing part of a perjured and lost race, a race which reeled over the flagstones of the
void, the Titanic deed forgotten, a race as fireless as the animal, as cold as the plant, as inert as the stone, lost in the underbrush, itself mere underbrush, sunk into the indiscrimination of final petrification: he had fallen prey to the threat which encircled the degraded, he degraded along with them, lost with the lost ones, and the threat—fate-empowered by a higher threat, not to be held back by the roaring of any laughter, silent with an absolute silence, tone-benumbing, light-benumbing, in the crystalline darkness of the stonily inevitable, diffused and benumbed along with the night—the threat mounted higher and higher. Everything was threatened, everything had become unsure, even the menace itself, since the danger had changed, transposed from the zone of incidence to that of permanence. The night endured unshaken, coldly glowed the darkly transparent gold of its pinions spread over the human dwellings, which on all sides rested stonily upon the rigid earth, painted over by the arid light of the moon; and the rigidity, drinking in the light from the stars, was transformed into transparent stone unto its deepest, fiery depth, was turned into a transparent stone-shadow in the opened crystal shafts of the world, turned to a crystal echo of the inaudible, until it was like petrification’s last breathless struggle for breath, a stony gasp praying for the breath of life; shadow-petrified, shadow-petrifying, it roamed up and down, even the sentry’s steps beyond the wall, after marking off time as permanent, became part of it; they had turned into stone, a resounding, solemn shadow-tread of nothingness, growing out from the ringing pavement and back into it; and as the stiff-pointed, sharp-shadowed apex of the iron cupola surmounting the wall-turrets now became visible under the continual intensification of light, the shaft between the wall and house opened up no less candidly, its shadows sharpened and cleared by the light unto its final depth, silver-green from the flow of spheric brightness, light-petrified, light-dry, light-ringing, from very muteness down to the sandy grit of its floor, down to the absolutely immobile vagueness of the shaft-bottom where, in the dry shadow of some brush, all sorts of oddments, scarcely describable, became visible, half-hidden by the silver-green branchings of the thicket, with planking and tools, these also casting shadows, but in a fashion so terribly solemn that it was like a lonely and strangely unworthy echo of the stony, universal muteness, mirroring danger, revenge and threat, because here the nothing was reflected in nothingness, the transparent in dust, one like the other grazed by the motionless pinion, both paralyzed by melancholy and in both, hunted and torn, the unheard hissing of death—

  — but the Ciconean women, whom he had offended out of love for her who was dead, had torn the man into pieces during their bacchantic orgies at the feast of the gods, and scattered far and wide in the fields the limbs wasted away; the head too was torn from its marble neck, but still it retained its voice and, already seized by the paternal Hebrus in its swirling eddy, the head called back with its failing breath, “Eurydice, thou poor one,” and from the bank of the stream came back the echo, “Eurydice”—

  —yet he was echoless, a dead reverberation in the desert mountains of Tartarus which had shot up to remain there forever, he was a mute echo in both worlds which were fading out without moving, a mute echo of a breath-wringing gasp in the dry chasms and in the crystal shafts of petrification; he was a sightless skull, rolled out into the stone rubble on the shadowy shores of oblivion, rolled under the dry, dense shrubbery on the shores of the shadowy stream, rolled toward a void so totally without egress that it extinguished oblivion itself; he was nothing but a blind eye, without trunk, without voice, without breath, emptied of breath, and thus he was thrown out to the vacuous blindness of the underworld: his task had been the casting off of shadows, instead of which he had created shadows, the great pledge of allegiance to earth had been laid upon him and he had been perfidious to it from the first, oh, he had been charged with the task of moving the stones from the sepulchre once again, so that humanity might rise to rebirth, so that the living creation as law, manifested in an ever-recurring contemporaneousness despite all changes of time, might not be interrupted, so that the god might again be awakened to this eternal presentness by the everlasting now of the sacrificial flames and forced back to the pledge of self-creation,— the god shaken by the pledge, torpidity checked by the pledge, the flames kindled by the pledge, oh, this had been his task and he had not accomplished it, he had not been allowed to accomplish it; even before he had been able to move the gravestones in order to fulfill the unknown pledge, aye, even before he could touch them, even before he had been able to lift his arms, these had become heavy, paralyzed and transparent, grown into the stony petrification, grown into the motionless, heterogeneous, dry and transparent stone flood, and this immobile flood, petrifying and petrified, penetrating from all the spheres toward the middle and shivering back again as far as the borders of the spheres, absorbing the living and unliving in its shadowy crystal, became a single stone, the sacrificial altar of the universe, ungarlanded, unwarmed, unshaken, immovable, became the grave-stone of the world, denuded of sacrifice, covering the inscrutable and itself inscrutable. OH, THE LOT OF THE POET! LOVE’S POWER OF REMEMBRANCE HAD FORCED ORPHEUS TO ENTER THE DEPTHS OF HADES, ALTHOUGH AT THE SAME TIME IT PREVENTED HIM FROM GOING FURTHER, SO THAT, LOST IN THE UNDERWORLD OF MEMORY, HE WAS PREMATURELY IMPELLED TO RETURN, UNCHASTE EVEN IN HIS CHASTITY AND RENT IN HIS CALAMITY. HE, UNLIKE ORPHEUS, HE, LOVELESS FROM THE BEGINNING, UNABLE TO SEND FORTH THE LOVING RECOLLECTION AND GUIDED BY NO MEMORY, HE HAD NOT EVEN REACHED THE FIRST LEVEL UNDER THE IRON RULE OF VULCAN, EVEN LESS THE DEEPER REALM OF THE LAW-FOUNDING FATHERS, AND STILL LESS THE MUCH DEEPER ONE OF THE NOTHING, WHICH GIVES BIRTH TO THE WORLD, TO MEMORY, TO SALVATION, HE HAD REMAINED IN THE TORPID EMPTINESS OF THE SURFACE. The unmastering, once having taken place, leaves nothing behind to be mastered, and the great life-bearing tides of enkindling and extinguishing, absorbed by the vast silence of the perception-drained, law-drained ignominy, these too were silenced; likewise the tides of beginning and ending, the tides of blazing perturbation and mildly-trickling reassurance, their mutual regeneration, that turns one into the other, were silenced; the universal entity, having forever lost its breath, its substance, its movement, its cohesion, was now stripped down to a silent glance amidst the universal silence, stripped to an encompassing view of pure nakedness in its visible invisibility, stripped to its glanceless-glancing, unalterable, final non-existence: stony the staring eye above, stony the staring eye below, oh, now it had come, the long-awaited, the always-feared, it had come at last, now he beheld it, now he must look into the namelessly inconceivable, into the inconceivable namelessness, for the sake of which he had fled through a lifetime, for the sake of which he had done everything to prepare for a premature ending of this life, and it was not into the eye of night that he looked, for the night had vanished into the petrification, and it was not fear, not horror, for it was greater than any fear or any horror, it was the eye of stony emptiness, the torn-open eye of a fate, which no longer participated in any occurrence, neither in the passing nor in the annulling of time, neither in space nor in spacelessness, neither in life nor in death, neither in creation nor in discreation, an unparticipating eye in whose glance there was no beginning, no ending and no concurrence, released from subsistence and survival, bound to subsist and survive only through the threat and the looming suspense, only by the element of time in the waiting interval that still continued, reflected in the continuing existence of the threatened one and in his threat-fearing glance, the threat and the threatened cast out to one another in the dregs of time. And flight was no longer possible, only its breathless gasping, and there was no going on—whither could it have led now?—and the gasping was like that of a runner who, having passed his goal, knows he has not met it and will never meet it, because in the no-man’s-land of perjury, this perjured un-space, through which he had been driven, only to be driven on and on, the goal could not be pledged and remained unvouched-for, aimless the creation, aimless the god, aimless the human being, the creation without echo, god and
man without echo in the lawless reabandonment that gives birth to un-space. That which surrounded him no longer symbolized anything, it was a non-symbol, the very essence of the unreflectable and beyond reflection; it had the dolor of symbol-impoverishment, the dolor of vacuity, that was spacelessly submerged into every thing created in space and even dreamily submerged into the dormant humus of existence, divested of all symbol and yet containing the seed of every symbol, voided of space, yet like a final trace of time-borne beauty conditioned by space, the dream-sadness that dwelt in the depths of every eye, in the eye of the animal as in the eye of the man and the god, indeed, shimmered even in the universal eye of emptiness like a last sigh of the creation, mourning and mourned in the throes of a scarcely remembered chaos, as if vacuity originated in sorrow and sorrow likewise continued to stem from vacuity, as if in their oneness were implanted the primal doom of all incarnation, the evil that threatened everything human and divine, their common fear of fate, their common punishment by fate; on the one hand the fear of the perjurer condemned from the outset to perjury, on the other hand the punishment with which fate overruled even the gods, the punishment for the deed undone, the uncommitted wrong, the punishment determined by the unknown law, which was the loss of perception, and languishing in the prison of a blindly-compelled drowsiness, the HOPELESSNESS OF IMPERCEPTION IN ITS IMPERCEIVABLE NECESSITY: near and nearer it moved, driven by the mutely-gasping, breathless, unredeemed sorrow, yet so slow as to be immobile, lost in sorrow and evil, lost in an emptiness which absorbed even the sorrow and the evil; stony and leaden it arose from all the shafts of the inner and outer worlds, as if the threat were about to be consummated, the peering emptiness mounting like a thunderstorm; more and more threatening became the not-yet-encountered, stonier the compulsion of the glance, pushed near like a wall of silence, pushed nearer in a stupefying muteness which was his as well as that of all the spheres, burdensome and more than burdensome, more and more oppressive, the glance-widening gaze of terror which approached the lifeless middle; and the ego, caught and encircled by the middle, caught between the glance-walls, forced into the indiscrimination of inner and outer worlds, stifling in this double sadness, in the boundless, universal sorrow of the still-surviving existence, which lifts all multiplicity and all duplication into the vastness of its own immensity, thereby annulling it, the ego, too, was annulled, absorbed and crushed by immensity with its doleful emptiness, with its terrible foreboding that carried the twofold fright and the twofold horror while dissolving them; the ego, too, was dissolved, dissolved yet frozen into the glance of the surrounding threat, the glance-threatened ego having long since become no more than a blank stare; the threat-subjected ego was compressed to the last trace of its existence, was annihilated to the un-space where it was inchoate and unthinking, was thrown back to the minimal point of life at its ebb, unresistingly delivered to the clasp of emptiness; oh, it was thrown back, hurled back, propelled into the abasement of itself, flung into contrition, into utter contrition, humbled to a necessity from which there was no escape, to ITS OWN NECESSITY FOR CONTRITION, humiliated in the abjectness of the void which is the sheer ceasing of existence; the ego had lost its selfhood, had been stripped of its human qualities, nothing more remained to it save the naked soul’s most naked guilt, so that even the soul, having no more selfhood though yet immortal as the human soul, existed only in its contrite and empty nakedness, forced down and absorbed by the unmirrored emptiness of the threat-silent eye, unwitnessed the contrition, unwitnessed the ego, unwitnessed the soul, blankly abandoned to the power of the extinguishing glance, itself extinguished—; silence, emptiness, vacuity, muteness, yet behind the black-crystalline walls of the universal muteness, in the distanceless utter-distance of unbordered immensity, fading, inaudible, like a most desolate sound-image of existence, already beyond existence, thin, bright and female, frightening in its unspeakable smallness, a single point took sound, vibrating from the most inaccessible point of the spheres, its core of terror taking sound in a tiny titter, the vacant titter of emptiness, the tittering of the empty nothing. Oh, where was there help?! where were the gods?! was this which had happened the last emanation of their power, their revenge and retaliation for their abandonment again by abandoned mankind?! were the women-kind of the gods exulting over lost humanity and the inescapable perjury of the world?! Deafened now to any answer, he listened into the chaos, but the answer did not come, for the perjurer was not able to pose questions, as little able to question as the animal, and the stone was dead, dead without an echo to the unasked question, dead the stony labyrinth of the universe, dead the shaft on the very bottom of which the naked ego, abased to extinction, divested of both question and answer, barely existed. Oh, back! back into darkness, into dream, into sleep, into death! Oh, back, just to be back once more, fleeing and fleeing backward once again into the sphere of recognition! Oh, flight! but flight again? if there was still flight, if flight were actually possible, if he was actually meant to escape? he did not know, perhaps he had once known but now he knew nothing, he was beyond all possibility of knowing, seeing that he was in a void without knowledge, in the universal emptiness, beyond the agitation of flight, alas, the penitent is already beyond escape—, but dejected by his perjury, as if the perjurer himself must be broken, as if he should nevermore be allowed to stand erect, he felt himself flung to his knees, and bowing deeply under the immense burden of the blind-unmoving, invisibly-transparent universal emptiness, flight-benumbed, flight-paralyzed, the laden shoulders bent down, he sought with dry and lifeless hands blind-fingered for the wall of the room, touching with blind fingers the blind-fingered shadow on its moon-lit, moon-dry surface, he groped his way along it, accompanied by his deeply-bowed shadow, gliding near him, groped his way with violent trembling back into the darkness, unmindful of what he was doing or not doing, he felt his way to the wall-fountain, allured like an animal by the water, hankering for what was still earthly, still living, still moving; with hanging head he crept like an animal through the benumbed aridity toward the most animal of all goals, toward water, so that bent over in the sheerest animal necessity he might lap at the silver-trickling moisture.