Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  “I?”

  “Who else? you, of course …”

  “Never …” it was rather the voice of the slave than his own which had said that.

  “Never?”—Plotius flared up—“are you only trying to frighten us with this kind of talk? or do you actually want to call down on yourself the indignation of the gods?!”

  “The gods …”

  “Yes, the gods, they will not suffer you to keep on blaspheming …” And Plotius, with arms bent like an oarsman, shook his hairy fist.

  The gods did not wish him to finish the verses, did not wish him to correct the incongruity, for every human work has to arise from twilight and blindness and therefore must remain incongruous; thus have the gods decided. And yet now he knew it; not only the curse but grace as well was mirrored in this incongruity, not only man’s inadequacy but also his closeness to the divine, not only the soul’s incompleteness but its magnitude, not only the blindness of the blindly-born human labor—otherwise it would never have been done at all—, but also its divining strength, for in the kernel of all human labor lay the seed of something that reached beyond itself and beyond him who had created it, and in this wise the worker was transformed into a creator; for the universal incongruity of circumstance began only when men became active in the universe—for there was no incongruity in the circumstances of the animal or of the gods—and only in this incongruity was revealed the fearful glory of the human lot which reached beyond itself; standing between the muteness of the animal and that of the gods was the human word, waiting to be silenced in ecstasy, beneath the radiant glance of that eye whose blindness has come in ecstasy to seeing: ecstatic blindness, the confirmation.

  “Oh, Plotius, the gods … I have known their grace and their displeasure, I have encountered benefits and burdens … I am thankful for both.”

  “That is as it should be … it is always so …”

  “I am thankful for both … life has been rich … I am thankful also for the Aeneid and even for its incongruities … incongruous as it is, may it endure … but the will, Plotius, just for this reason it must be finished … for the sake of the gods …”

  “One cannot argue with a peasant … so you do not intend to postpone it?”

  “It must be done, Plotius … and you, Lucius, are you able to write it down as I have given it to you?”

  “That is not difficult, my Virgil … of course it would be more in accord with the rules if you were to dictate your wishes; I hesitate to write down anything about taking a recompense for myself for the publishing job in prospect.”

  “All right, Lucius; for my part you may settle that personally with Caesar …”

  “Then you wish to dictate?”

  “To dictate … I shall dictate …” —was this task still to be achieved?—, “I shall dictate; but first give me another swallow of water so that my cough will not interfere … and meanwhile, Lucius, … you may write the date on the document … as of today …”

  Plotius gave him the goblet: “Drink, Virgil … and save your voice, speak softly …”

  The water ran coolly through the throat. And when the goblet had been totally drained, there was renewed breathing, and voice complied to will: “Have you put down the date, Lucius?”

  “Certainly … at Brundisium, the ninth day before the calends of October in the seven hundredth and thirtieth year after the founding of the city of Rome … is that correct, Virgil?”

  “Without doubt, that is the date …”

  The drizzling continued, the drizzling of the wall-fountain, the drizzling in the leafy shadows, the drizzling of the stream, the uncheckable stream, which, it is true, had become so broad that the other shore could not be reached, aye, it could not even be seen. But it was not necessary to stretch the hand out over the stream for already here on the shore, yes, here upon the cover, within reach of the hand, was a golden shimmer: the laurel shoot! placed there by Augustus, by the gods, by fate, by Jupiter himself! and its golden leaves were shimmering.

  “I am ready, Virgil …”

  And voice complied to will:

  “I, Publius Vergilius Maro, today in the fifty-first year of my life, in full possession …, no, do not write full, rather put possessed of sufficient physical and mental health, see fit to add to my former testamentary provisions which have been deposited in the archives of Julius Caesar Octavian Augustus, as follows … have you written all this, Lucius?”

  “Certainly …”

  And voice complied to will:

  “As by the wish of Augustus, who has bestowed on me many a favor, I have been deplorably restrained … no, strike out the deplorably and if you have not written it so much the better, … now, as through the wish of Augustus who has bestowed on me many a favor, I have been restrained from burning my poems, I designate firstly, that the Aeneid be considered a dedication to Augustus, secondly, however, that the entire bulk of my manuscripts be passed over in joint ownership to my friends, Plotius Tucca and Lucius Varius Rufus, and that in the event of the death of either, these automatically become the exclusive property of the other. I entrust to these same friends the exacting supervision of my poetical legacy which is herewith given over into their possession; only the most meticulously examined texts shall have validity, and above all, nothing is to be struck out or added to them, and copies for the librarians are to be made from these authorized texts alone, should the librarians desire them. In any case a clean and correct copy is to be delivered immediately to Caesar Augustus. The full responsibility for all this rests on Plotius Tucca and Lucius Varius Rufus … have you written it, Lucius?”

  “Certainly, my Virgil, and it will be carried out exactly, should it ever come so far.”

  And still voice was compliant to will:

  “In accord with Augustus’ permission, I am allowed to set my slaves free; this is to be done directly after my death, and each slave is to receive a legacy of one hundred sesterces for every year spent in my service. Furthermore, I set aside twenty thousand …, no, make it thirty thousand sesterces to be distributed as soon as possible toward feeding the people of Brundisium. All further money settlements are to be found in my first will, to which I have already referred; this remains in full force except for the reduction of the bulk of the estate necessitated by the aforementioned new legacies which my principal heirs, namely Caesar Augustus, as well as my brother Proculus, together with Plotius Tucca and Lucius Varius and Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, will indubitably not consider to be unfriendly …, that is about all … that will suffice, will it not?”

  “Be assured, Virgil, it is sufficient …”

  “It … is it? … yes, it is sufficient …”

  And voice no longer complied to will. Even the last words had to be fetched out of an enormous emptiness, and now nothing remained but this emptiness, a wretched, exhausted, and boundless void, endlessly extended, unsurveyable in the large as well as in its intimate recesses, a frightful emptiness, empty of fright, a void of forgetfulness, filled with a curiously grievous, forgotten wakefulness, a void with a whistling fever straying within its shell. But besides the fever there was something else rustling about, something unsaid, something that had to be said without fail, something connected with all that had gone before, and yet not quite connected, so that it too must be found, otherwise what had previously happened would not suffice. It was of no less importance than the verses themselves, which at first were to be destroyed, and must now be preserved.

  “Where … where is the chest?!”

  Plotius looked up sadly. “Virgil … with Augustus, well cared for … make your mind easy …”

  But now Lucius drew near with the document, which still seemed inadequate, in order to get his signature. Or was it merely the signature which had been lacking? Was it this which had to be found?

  “Give me …”

  The signature was placed, but the text was not legible; evidently because it did not yet suffice, the letters were dancing over one another. “You stil
l have to add something, Lucius … add something … the cantos are not to be torn apart …”

  “Yes, my Virgil.”

  And Lucius sat down again waiting for dictation.

  “The cantos … are not to be torn apart and … I forbid a single word to be added or deleted …”

  “We had all this before …”

  “Write it … do write it down …” There was no help at hand, and his strength was at an end; the void would yield nothing, no sound, no memory, not even the gray trickling of the water. Only the fingers led a life of their own, they wandered over the blanket constantly interlacing and loosening only to interlace again. The cantos were not to be torn apart, nothing was to be torn apart; that had been very important, but that was not the real thing, was not yet that which concealed itself in the darkness. Oh, even the void might not be torn apart before it surrendered what it was concealing, and his fingers were aware of it, for they wandered about searching the void, pressing it together, forcing it to disgorge the hidden thing, and as they pressed against each other more and more frantically, it happened: between the fingers, deep in the void, scarcely perceptible, as if all the cloudiness of the firmament had been drawn away from it, glimmering there weakly, vanishing like the sign of a fading star, and already on his lips in a sigh of deliverance, there was that which had been sought and was now so wondrously found: “The ring belongs to Lysanias.”

  “Your seal-ring?”

  One had yielded enough to things earthly; there was radiance now and a soundless buoyancy: “Yes, to Lysanias.”

  “And he doesn’t exist,” something murmured, and perhaps it was Plotius.

  “To the child …”

  AIR — THE HOMECOMING

  WAS THERE STILL SOMETHING MURMURING? WAS IT still the kind murmuring of Plotius, protecting and kind and strong? oh, Plotius, oh, that it might endure, oh, that it might endure murmuringly, quiet and quieting, welling up from the unfathomable depths within and without, now that the labor was over, now that the labor sufficed, now that nothing need follow, oh, that it might go on forever! and verily it went on, murmuring and murmuring, rolling in softly in endlessness, murmur-wave after murmur-wave, each of them tiny yet all of them radiating in a boundless cycle; it was simply there, no sort of hearkening, no effort whatsoever was needed to hold on to it, indeed this murmurousness was not to be held onto, for it strove onward, mingled with the trickling of the fountain, with the trickling of the waters, merged with them in the vast and colorless might of a rest-bearing stream, itself the thing carried, itself rest, itself a moving stream, softly lapping the keel and sides of the boat with slithering foam. The destination was unknown, unknown the harbor of departure; one was shoved off from no pier, coming out of infinity, pressing on to infinity, the journey went on of itself, nevertheless strict and true to its course, guided by a sure hand, and had it been permitted to turn around, one must have glimpsed the steersman at the helm, the helper in the unchartered, the pilot who was acquainted with the exit to the harbor. But Plotius likewise had remained no less a helper and a friend; degraded and exalted, he had taken upon himself the servile office of an oarsman, his murmuring mouth was dumb, dumb and delivered up to the universe, the gasping of his breath almost inaudible in the ease of these happenings, free of suffering and strain; thus keeping silence he rowed on with bent arms over the colorless, murmuring, silent surface of the water, not half as vigorously as might have been expected of him, but instead with oars barely lifting and sinking to cut into the moisture: forward at the prow sat Lysanias, or perhaps he was standing there, a youth who should have lent singing to the voyage, but that Plotius, faced with the injunction against turning around which applies to every earthly being, paid no attention to him, he did not turn toward him; it well may be that he wished to avoid catching sight of the journey’s end which was forbidden him, and, facing backward, he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, looking past the traveling companions toward the steersman at the helm whose directions he had to follow, beyond the steersman toward the immensity of past happenings from which they had come. The shores were left behind and it was like an easy leave-taking from the human life and human living that still persisted there, a farewell in a changed scene essentially unchangeable, a leave-taking from the diversity of familiar things, from the familiar images and faces yonder, not the least of these being the tomb fading into the gray fog, and the constant Lucius, still at his writing, who had however been pushed with his table so close to the edge of reality that a crash from its steep, rocky ledge was greatly to be feared; and it was a leave-taking from the many others wandering about there, among them Horace and Propertius who waved to them with gestures of friendship; familiar images fading back gradually and without pain though still ready to accompany them, and the waters across which the boat was gliding were populated by all sorts of craft, though by very few going in the opposite direction to come home again to the forgotten haven of departure, instead many were being sent out from there, one fleet after the other, so many that to provide them all with the space needed for traveling the immense ocean had to widen out to a second immensity, an immensity so boundless that there was no line of demarcation between the liquid and the sheerly airy, giving the impression that the ships were swimming in pure light, extending so far that the ship-covered sea and the procession of ships advancing toward the unexplorable, common goal were goals in themselves: herdlike this procession, enveloped in a mild zooming like an invisible cloud; every sort of vessel was to be seen, merchantmen and warships, among them, gold-gleaming and purple-sailed, there was also the parade ship of Augustus, numerous fishing smacks and coastal boats, but especially a host of tiny barks emerging first here, then there, as though being born from the water; these participated in the endless voyage, all of them curiously keeping the same speed, no matter whether like the little barks they were drawn by a single pair of oarsmen or whether like the Augustan galley they were propelled by a gigantic rowing-mass several stories high, they flew along as if all together they were without weight, as if they were not obliged to dip into the water at all, as if they could float above it, and their sails were taut as though pressed by imperceptible storms coming out of the airless void, for it was windstill, complete calm reigned, and the mild zooming hummed in a nowhere. The sea heaved in flat, soft, almost slab-shaped waves, soft and dusky-gray, as though of a breath-soft lead, the murmur became blurred in this smoothness, in this dusky vigor which carried the ships with breath-lightness on its mirrored surface; pearly though colorless, the shell of heaven opened above it, Plotius was rowing, and left behind were the sounds of life from the distant and disappearing shores, left behind the uncapturable song of the mountains, left behind in a realm eternally receding was its flute-tone, lost with its echo which had resounded in his own breast; the audible had sunk back into the unmanifested, and along with it the murmur of the murmuring universe, and the boy’s song stayed unsung, remaining as a soft, golden shimmer in the shimmering heaven. As though the silence were too loud, a new stillness set in, a second and more intense stillness on a loftier plane, shallow-waved, gentle, slab-shaped and smooth, like a reflection of the water’s mirror above which it was laid while yet merged with it; the inaudible was transformed again to a new interstate of audibleness, just as the waters had been changed to something new, to a stilled liquidity in which the speeding boats no longer drew a furrow, and which consisted so little of drops that none clung to the drawn-back oars, none dropped down from them; remaining in the invisibility, the inaudibility, the impalpability of a long-left and undiscoverable immensity, the visible, the audible, and the palpable remained intact, though fallen back into namelessness and non-existence they were nevertheless not without name and being; all of this was left behind while yet remaining, left behind because overtaken, staying by virtue of such overtaking, changed by it to a transformed permanence; and because it was the universe that had been in this wise overtaken, the universe in the full multiplicity of its material and hum
an content, nothing was excluded from it: ship after ship was overtaken easily, not because of the rowing skill of Plotius who had surely done his share, but who now with quieter breathing and idle gear was resting himself bent forward on his bench; no, it was no contest, no race between the boats, no, all of them, having come out in greeting and for escort, held back of their own accord, their commission ended, they no longer needed earthly rowing-gear and, whether they lifted these out of the water or let them drift therein, the oars soon vanished altogether, the dissolution starting as one vessel after another was taken out of existence, sinking back into forgetfulness and into the receding immensity. Augustus, standing under the purple canopy of his parade ship, with the short scourge of the ship’s overseer in his hand, let this drop when he had to realize the futility of speeding on or even of continuing the voyage, his power was slipping from him, slipping away with his name, with all the names which he had previously borne, all of which he must discard, even the name Octavian, but he was still himself, and in the last hurried glance he was allowed to send hither, in this last leave-taking with no prospect of return, in the farewell of this handsome face aged by weariness there was, at the same time, an eternal permanence, a transferred permanence, unlost even in the losing, so that as he sank quickly—alas, so quickly—into the irrevocable, with his face, his earthly form, and his name, abruptly stilled by being forgotten, yet he won a new identity, a new aspect, in a new stillness on a loftier plane. For the transformation which had taken place was the transformation of outside to inside, the merging of the outer with the inner face, always striven for, never attained, but now fully achieved by this final exchange: suddenly, as suddenly as his dropping into infinity, this man, who had hitherto been called Augustus, was seen from within, seen in that completely inner way usually reserved for the dreamer, the dream-lost, when he forgets his earthiness and—gaining perception through the dream—recognizes himself in the image of himself, seeing the ultimate, inseparable, crystalline, essential source of his qualities revealed as mere form, as a glassy play of lines, aye, as an empty cypher in its final dream-existence; this insight had now grown beyond itself, and had comprehended the one vanishing there, the friend—oh, unlosable is he who is seen from within in his nakedest wholeness. Oh transformation of the end into the beginning, transformation of the symbol back into the arch-image, oh friendship! And although few faces had been so familiar as his whom in friendship he had been permitted to call Octavian, the same thing happened to all the other faces sharing the voyage on the ethereal boats, one after the other they were overtaken just as his had been, they vanished into eternity without disappearing; and whosoever continued to share the voyage, seen for one moment and disappearing in the next, whatever they had been called or were still called—, who were they? was that one there actually Tibullus, the melancholy Tibullus in his blighted youth? was that one Lucretius, great in the relentlessness of his powerful mania? was that one yonder not the manly Sallust, always at his ripe fifty from his first appearance to his last? was this one not he, the name-giver, stripped of his own name? and was not that shape yonder the venerableness of Marcus Terentius Varro, bent with age and shrunken in figure, but still strong in the mildly mocking wizard’s smile of the vanishing old man’s face?—, oh, whoever they might be who had gathered for the easy farewell of friendship, face after face, bearded or beardless, young or old, male or female, however quickly or slowly they discarded their features, they had taken on the consummate transformation as, with the last remnant of their names, they sank into the irrevocable, for as they were falling into oblivion, their faces had become an unspeakable and unspeakably clear expression of their essential qualities, they were freed of all ties, deeply genuine in the boundless, nameless self, no longer in need of an earthly mediator and an earthly name-caller, because all of them, seen from within, visible from within, recognized from within, were absorbed into the glance of friendship, absorbed with that glance into an experience of a knowledge, self to self, which arose from the deepest recesses of the self, from the depths of a self that stemmed from a sphere beyond the senses, which no longer saw the material person and the material metaphor, but only the crystalline archetype, the crystalline entity formed by the essential qualities, resting so purely in the core of their essence, so free of memory and therefore so completely remembered, that all these friendly forms passed into a new interstate of memory, into a new interstate of comprehensibility, full of light-casting shadows within muted sounds. They passed into the second immensity.