Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  Trees framed the moorage at the shore, its shadow-flecked and leafy pathways rising gently toward the interior of the land invited one to come nearer, and the water, notwithstanding the ever-enduring placidity of its mirror, washed on the shore with a swift, soft, white-bordered overflow, leaving behind a little foam that seemed like sound in the silent inaudibility, friendly in its murmuring onflow, friendly in its trickling ebb. The liquid element lay behind him, the solid one in front of him, both of them limitless while merging limitlessly into each other, a landing but still not the end of the journey, because there was neither a before nor an after, and though he felt the firm ground under his feet, this was neither a standing, nor a going, but rather a state of half-movement, a detention in drifting onwards, held fast in a limitation without limits, held fast within the limitless center of existence which drew everything unto itself and retained everything for the integration of that which was within and without. The silence of the middle—, was it the middle of being which had thus been reached? And towering aloft, here was a tree, rather like an elm or an ash, but bearing an unfamiliar golden fruit; and now as the star shimmered through the frail branches, it too basking in Plotia’s responsive upturned glance, her glance-echo, her welcome and her greeting, the tacit concurrence between above and below became a memory-freed recognition more poignant than any greeting, became a flowing unanimity between inertia and activity, indistinguishable from within as from without, indistinguishable whence the occurrence arose, whether it was the woods which were being carried hither or whether he was being drifted on to the woods, the borderline between abiding and pressing onward was being dissolved: he had been landed, but even the landing was no ending, and in this almost motionless gliding across terrain which seemed too imponderable for any foot to touch while being too ponderable for Plotia’s buoyancy, in this gliding into something gliding to meet them, he and Plotia were taken along, both of them by compulsion, both of them spontaneously, her step carefully halted to accord with his own; she was naked in a charming natural nakedness, clothed in naturalness, as naked as the seraphic boy from whom she had emanated, and the pure sweetness of her nudeless nudity received the song of the spheres in order to be received by that song, subsumed in its ethereal ringing, in its continuous vibration, mute and forever. Nakedness? He too was naked; he noticed this without remarking on it, so little was he abashed, and Plotia’s nakedness was likewise unremarkable, for without this detracting from her bodily charm, he was scarcely able to see her any more as a woman, he saw her as it were from within, and beheld from the core of her individual essence, she was scarcely any longer a body but rather a transparent intrinsic substance, no longer a woman, no longer a virgin, but rather a smile, the smile which gives meaning to everything human, the human countenance opening in a smile, freed of shame, and exalted through a forlorn preparation incapable of consummation, sublimated to a transported-transporting love; strangely touching, strangely wintry, was this smiling, loving gesture toward the star swimming there in cool, virginal light, and strangely cool, aye, almost childish in its virginal, sex-stripped lucidity was this yearning gesture sent up to the utter clarity of the remotest spheres. And yet this yearning, upward gesture was already fulfillment. For the transparent cloudy dome which is stretched between above and below, impenetrable for those on earth, prevents the song of earthly longing from entering the sphere of the infinite, so that it reverberates, an echo of the soul, an incomplete outer-echo of the mute inner face, and a still more incomplete one of the yearned-for song of the spheres, this separating echo-wall dissolves and disappears when the miracle of the unearthly comes to pass, when the outside and inside pass into each other, merging the self with the universe; and just as no earthly song is then needed, no song of yearning, no song of love, perhaps not even an upward gesture, because the yearning is fulfilled and the song of the spheres resounds inside and outside at once, so now Plotia’s innermost essence was transmuted to a quality of the universe, to that all-embracing, universal validity which annuls but transports the earthly chance from which it has sprung, assuming the shamefulness of chance and the chance embodiment, revealing the chance-delivered, the shame-freed, the sweet and terrible dignity of a transported and primal innocence. It was the innocence of final concurrence through which they were striding, or rather floating, the innocence of final immanence which connotes simultaneous permanence in every transformation of shape, which connotes the truth in every transformation of essence, in all transformations of error, they moved through an innocence which uses no measure and which had not yet learned to do so, sweet and terrible in its inordinacy, sweet and terrible in the passivity of its concurrence—and sweet and terrible was the morning’s serene quietude in its verity, in its immeasurable echo of the star-face, the human-face, the animal-face, the plant-face, all without measure: here in this prodigal and prodigious garden with its terrorizing sweetness and sweet terror they made their way, blessed with innocent nakedness, acquitted of naked guilt; the forest stretched out shadily and flowers grew there beyond the height of trees, the forest gave on to flowery meadows where, without overtopping them, dwarfish shrubs were standing among the flowers, for no matter whether it was oak or beech, whether poppy or cassia or narcissus, whether nightstock or lily or grass or bush, there was not a single plant that could not have taken on any size whatsoever, and in tranquil simultaneity boundlessness was joined to boundlessness, the grass-blade rose up high as a tower, rigid and entwined with ivy, nearby to some spring-soaked moss opening out into shrubbery, each of these a living essence and yet resembling one another in the shadowed and serene tranquillity. For in all this restful green, surrounding the wanderers with a stone-cool drizzling breath, there hovered the darkness of its inmost rooty-soil, the darkness of the rooty-abyss that had pushed up this plant-life and saturated it to its last fiber, a hint of the last countenance in which star-face, human-face, animal-face, plant-face were again reflected hither from the earth, bound up with the unity of their earthly lives as the reflections of that most profound face, the face of the earth in its shadowed maternal calm. Thereupon the wandering, the striding, the floating turned into a resting, welcomed into a laurel-scented hopefulness by the universe opened for repose, and by its smile. Round about, the animals rested also in a vegetative earthly way, boundless their rest, boundless their aspect, immeasurable their stature, whether great or small, immersed in darkness and mostly asleep. And when they awoke their eyes followed the wanderers: the large eyes of the cattle which had ranged themselves fearlessly near the lion had a wondering look, the eyes of the lion, drowsily commanding, were watchful but not threatening, giant long-necked lizards peered with yellow dragon’s eyes from the leafy caverns of the beech trees, toadlike creatures in the form of wolves blinked between the water-roses and the acanthus, and an eagle-headed dwarfish bird glanced sharply in amazement as it swung upon a branch of the white flowering privet, while an insect with scaly body and tubular legs a yard in length stared back at them with unmoving lidless eyes. Yes, many of the animals made ready to accompany the wanderers. The serpent alone glided off, green-spotted its outstretched coils, gliding off into the gold-shimmering green of grass and leaf. Rosy grapes hung down from the wild thorn-bush, honey-dew oozed like resin from the bark of the hardest oaks, gray-green quinces, chestnuts, wax-yellow plums and golden apples hung in profusion throughout the woodland, but there was no need to touch the fruit in order to be sated, no need to bend over the water to sip of it, appeasement and refreshment came floating along invisibly on a smile sent hither from shame-freed innocence, sent hither from the expansive smiling of the garden, from its immeasurable, boundless depth, sent hither without need of name or speech, the faceless smile at rest in itself. The scent of flowers drenched with sunny rain arose and spread arching over the rivers, wafted from grove to grove, and wherever they wandered, along the river or through tawny-tossing meadows or over the unseen bridges, wherever they went there gleamed at their heads the tranquil star of the
morning, the herald of the beneficent eastern sun, the mild bearer of light that, without light of its own, lets there be intimations of unending light, the tender iridescent reflection of the seven colors, their last echo in the universal dome. As boundless as the spring and just as peaceful, the mountains reared up in smiling severity, and in the stripped smiling peacefulness of their crags, the grayish white sides of the ravines rose skyward, the hard bones of creation, scarcely touched with green; yet high above the stony barrenness the meads on the summit were greening in a light gold under an expanse of opalescent be-starred transparent blue, and there eagles, vultures and falcons were wheeling in calm flight without darting down toward the grazing lambs and the speckled kids nibbling quietly at the laurels which grew there at the forest’s edge below, there where the black-shadowed slope turns into a pasturing vale; and here where brooks were flowing, drizzling between the fragrant willows, drizzling between shores verdant with trembling reeds, their pools holding the reflected constellations of the sky, there rested, immobile in the soft welling, the round-eyed fish-folk; deep in the remotest basins of pellucidness the shadows of their bodies played about while the herons, streaking across the upper air, they also did not dart downwards. There was sun and there was shadow, but nowhere just sun or just shadow, for the opal-shadowed light-circle of the cupola above was more than heaven, and the star-strewn shadowed darkness of the garden country below was more than earth, cupola like garden was boundless though not unbounded, rather it was enclosed in the real, the second immensity, in the immensity of the veritable light, in the immensity of true inglowing discrimination, which no longer created shapes from light and shadow but from their essence, making them in this way perceptible, so that darkness and light melted into each other and, above as below, nothing was to be found which would not have been at the same time both star and shadow; even the human spirit having become a star no longer cast the shadow that is language. The spirit was resting. And star and shadow likewise were these two who wandered here; their souls walked hand in hand, their communion, liberated from language, came to be chastely at rest, and the animals which followed after them participated in this communion. Restfully they wandered and afterwards they rested from their rest, resting within rest as evening came on. Ranged round by the animals they rested and gazed up to the westward-turning orb, gazing up to the motionless star, divining in it the invisible presence of the second immensity behind the cupola, gazing up until the sun-ball had sunk down to the edge of dusk, and that on which they gazed had the appearance of beauty—yet it was beyond the realm of the beautiful, for with all its loveliness, its buoyancy, its profundity, its harmony, that which came to them so blithely was in no sense the obtuseness of beauty but was, on the contrary, an awareness which streamed out from the innermost and outermost borders of existence, not only as a symbol, not only as a symbol of the border, nay, but as the very essence of existence in which they participated so easily that nothing appeared as strange but everything as familiar, every spot saturated with distance, every distance brought into closest proximity, distance and nearness charged with the illumination of an immediacy that was theirs in common, establishing the inner communion of their souls. However, when the dusk became deeper, it too reposing on into the night, and when he was so completely at rest under the star, its opal shimmer having come into its own light, that soon he beheld nothing other than this gleaming star, neither the companion resting near him nor the animals resting around him, then his bondage to the star turned more than ever into an insight of wholeness, his own wholeness as much as that of the happenings near him, it became more than ever an alliance, as much an alliance with himself as with heaven, star, shadow, animal and plant, a twofold alliance with Plotia in the perception and self-perception of a doubled insight: and as soul, animal, and plant were being reflected into each other, reflected as substance in elemental substance, as the whole reflected in the whole, and he too was reflected in the elemental darkness of Plotia, he recognized mother and child in her, he saw himself as having taken refuge in the mother-smile, he perceived the father and the unborn son and Lysanias in Plotia, and Lysanias was himself; he perceived the slave in Lysanias, and the slave was himself; he perceived the great descendant and the great ancestor in the inclusiveness of the ring which had strayed from Plotia’s hand to the heaven, wandered there as the source of light, and he saw therein the universal fusion beyond fate, saw the beaming fusion of elemental substances, layer by layer, limb by limb, he perceived the living oneness of the elemental substance which was his own soul and, for all that, so very much that of Plotia’s that she was bound to have reached him in spite of having sprouted from other roots, of having been delivered from another tree, of having risen from another level of animality, and she had reached him, having passed through many mirror-surfaces, through mirrors and more mirrors, she had come as the reflection of his soul and in order to be reflected in it, the great disclosure of balance in the whole creation. Overcast by mirror after mirror, mirrored in himself, he fell asleep. However, continuing his perception even in sleep, he felt the unquenchable persistence of the fusion and reflexive insinuation of Plotia into himself, into the constituent parts which made up this self, insinuation into the sensible and insensible, wholeness gliding into wholeness, earth-dark and soft, stone-cool and hard, insinuation into wholeness of his life, into the rocky bones of his skeleton and into his earthbound roots and marrow, into what was vegetative and plantlike in him, into what was the animality of his flesh and skin, he felt Plotia becoming a part of himself, of his innermost seeing soul, and he felt her glance resting in him, seeing, as had his glance in her, from within. His sleep was the ancestral chain and likewise the chain of descendants; the line of substances through which he had passed and the seed of those he carried in himself had united in his sleep, contracted to his sleeping self, absorbed into him nameless along with Plotia to whom a name no longer clung—a spaceless reflection of all that had been built into the recesses of sleep so that it might unfold again as a reflection in space, there where sleep would turn into waking. It unfolded to a bright day into which he awoke, surrounded by images of all these substances, the sun playing about him, the stars above, although the universal equalization was simplified, for Plotia was missing. She had vanished without loss, left behind in the second space of memory, infinitely forgotten, infinitely unforgotten; nothing had changed since nothing had been lost, since nothing could be lost, and without changing him she had become a part of himself, without remaining she still stayed on. The mute song of the spheres continued to resound. Only the smile had left the garden through which he now had to wander alone, only the smile had vanished, for only serenity can smile, serenity and nothing else. And it was certainly unrest or, at least, a lack of serenity which kept him constantly roving. Or could this unrest appertain to the animals? Could he have taken it over from them? In increasing numbers they joined themselves to him in order to accompany him on his path, they came on from every side, soundless the tread of their paws, their hooves, their soles, their claws, an inaudible trampling, nevertheless an even tread, or rather a tread enthralled to a ghostly restless evenness, to a common buoyant alertness that joined with his own and forced even his own gait to turn into an inaudible even tread like that of the animal; the longer this continued the more like an animal’s his walk became, the more compelling the animal trends that rose up from below, from the ground up, from his moving feet, the animality invading his striding body, making him into an upright animal, since he felt himself a beast from top to toe, from toe to top, a gaping jaw, even though he did not snap, a claw-bearer even though he rent no game, a feathered thing with a hooked bill, even though he swooped on no prey; and bearing the beast in himself, seeing the beast from within, he heard the dumb language of the beast, heard with them, heard in their speech, heard in himself the mute melody of the spheric song continuing to sound, carried by an echo of profoundest earthly darkness, in unison with the unincarnated, uncreated elemen
ts slumbering uneasily at the dark source of all animalhood and vibrating through all its dumb speech; whereas before it had been a perception of qualities, a recognition of wolfish, foxish, cattish, parrottish, horseish, sharkish attributes, he was now becoming fully aware of the beastly lack of qualities in quality as yet unborn, inexistent, still-unformed; and seen from within the animal, the yawning gulf beneath and behind the animal proclaimed itself to the perceiver, recognized as the roothold of every creaturely qualification. Whatever was round about, striving with tongue too light or too heavy toward speech, grinning with frustration, struggling to be created, all this was the animal in its manifold forms, nevertheless the animal as such, scattered like rain-drops, yet gathered like them to a plenum, just as raindrops are gathered in a rain-cloud, falling moisture rising again in fullness from the unity of the interwoven roots, and this animal totality in its invisible transparency was the goal of his conscious knowledge, he knew himself to be one of them in the animality of his transparently striding body. The light was transparent, but more transparent still the recognizing beam at the rear of the heavenly cupola, that of the steady star, symbolizing the light on high and sending it below as a transparent, floating alertness so that even the animals seemed to be seized by it. The aimless and restless roving in the boundless fields lasted the whole day, and with the sinking sun the restlessness mounted even higher; in its entire expanse over mountain and valley the garden began to be filled by a disquieting restlessness, and as the sun-ball retired to the low horizon the onset of night came to be a prodigious occurrence: all of a sudden the wandering of the animals came to have a common goal, became unified, yes, all-embracing this wandering, they came on from every slope, from every forest, from all directions, and they wandered along the rivers toward the great water, even the fishes heading down-stream in a wandering without fear or haste, yet one under a forceful command, for the banks closed together immediately behind the animal train, the earth was pushed forward by the irresistible growth of the plant roots, all plant-life shooting up to a most immeasurable height, every shoot branching out to a most impenetrable jungle, the earth steaming in the mass of primal growth, so that only salamanders and reptiles could live in it, the thicket being too dense even for the birds and they just able to nest in the uppermost tree-tops; not a beast was lost from the many herds during the wandering, none died, they only disappeared into the nocturnal oceans, into the nocturnal ether, taking their places among the scaly ones and the feathered ones inhabiting the day-and-night ocean, the night-and-day air. And he who wandered with them, he the animal set upright, he having become lidless, sleepless, fish-eyed, fishy-hearted, he stood on the swampy shore tall-ly erect, covered with sea-weed, scaly, reptilian, tangled in the plants, like a plant, save that the singing of the spheres did not cease for him, he kept on hearing it, it continued to sing because he had remained human; unlost, the great human sense of wandering beat on in him, nothing had been lost for him and the star of the east was still sparkling at his head. Thus he waited for the morning, he an upright monster and yet a man, awaiting the morning. It came again and sun lay over the damp mists; these ascended in reeking fumes from the boundless plain of green which, like a single heaving plant-being grown mountain high, was spreading over the erstwhile garden, while overhead the cloudlessness became iridescent in the pearly gray light, a quivering mirror of the green plain below, heaving as it did, more and more overcast by the ever denser mist which shifted only to settle down as clouds, and the opal gleam of the star glimmered into gray. He saw this and anticipated rain. But it did not rain although birds were flying low, clouds of bird-beasts and other bird-like creatures which, soundlessly screaming, swarmed about his unmoved head and often alighted on his shoulders. His feet among the teeming fishes he waded through the brackish water, he waded along the shore, seeking something, he knew not what, certainly not Plotia, more likely the place on the shore where she had met him, but nothing was to be found, nothing could be recognized again, no tree overtopped another in the uniform covering of green, and in the midst of his wandering, the duration of which could not be measured in time, he stopped again not far from the shore, it may be because the place where he found himself held him enchained in a most inexplicable way, it may be because an inexplicable almost plant-like weariness had overcome him, and, even though his arms were like wings with which he could have flown over the green summits, he did not stir. It was like a presentiment of an immobility yet to come. Unspeakable things flew overhead, unspeakable things swam below, immense dragonish things flew with the birds, swam with the fishes, innumerably multiplied, inconceivable in their monstrous shapes, and above melted with below, since fresh swarms of fishes were constantly diving into the water, one like the other transformed into dragon-shapes, caught in a constant interchange, exchanging fins for wings. The difference between the flying and swimming animal was fading out more and more, the living stuff of both having slid from the egg, and it seemed as if they were pressing backwards into the amorphousness of their herdhood so that voluntarily they might come to an indiscriminate uniformity like that of the plants, its gigantic spread of green conceding nothing more to the single growth; although they were still flying, although they were still swimming or clinging like plants to the bed of the sea, although each of them was in its own particular form, whether covered in feathers, scales, shell, or skin, whether with feet or claws, whether finned or beaked, there lurked reptilian-fashion in their eyes or non-eyes the glance of the serpent, and this serpentine look, to which they all tended and to which they came home, was like a last creaturely essence which they had shared in common, plant-like, beast-like, primordial, yes, even stemming from pre-creation, the last origin of quality from which beings were created into life, the only one that guaranteed their remaining in life and in creation. More and more the flying and swimming animals were amassing to an impenetrably dense heap, increasingly commingled by monsters, the mass becoming increasingly monstrous, more and more threatened by uncreated and precreated elements, more and more both sky and sea were filled with them unto their most transparent depths, for it became apparent that just here everything was streaming together in great masses, that just the spot at which he had stopped was acting as a mighty crux of a creaturely occurrence by attracting it from every side. And now the well-spring of the waters also became visible, their deepest root-abyss, the fountain within the fountain, and there in the uttermost depths of the fountain lay the serpent itself, rainbow-colored yet transparent as ice, closed to a time-cycle, coiled around the nothingness of the middle. It was that which transmutes by reason of its own immutability. The fountain was enlarging like a crater as if the serpent-ring were to become all-embracing, and whatever came near to it stiffened to immobility, all flow and flight stilled, made rigid by the green staring sent out from the nothingness, the serpent’s glance sending nothing out. Were these things here still beasts at all? Were they not about to lose their final substantiality in this last transformation, having become inescapably appropriated by the serpent’s glance? The sky was also rigid, and rigid the cloud-blanket of uniform gray which could let down no rain and behind which the sun, a shapeless, stolid and dead lightspot, was tracing its rigid course. And he, the man, having remained human notwithstanding his concourse with the uncreated, involved in the community of beasts slid from the egg, of plants sprouted from seed, in a class with both, feather, fin and leaf transparent, a weed to himself and in himself, he was included in this benumbing occurrence, he, too, immobile in his unexpectant waiting, he, too, a stolid evanescent creature, yet his human eye had forfeited none of its discrimination and he had knowledge of the starry countenance behind the cloud. Now the sunspot, dimmed by night to a grayish red, reached the lower edge of day, and the glimmering stars, glowing up to nocturnal intensity, were able to break through the fog-blanket with their uncertain gleam, haltingly at first and then with increasing clarity, slowly they came to be full in number and splendor, not only above but below as well
, turning here to a second starry heaven, to that of a mirrored image which shone up equally from the black watery depths and from the blackly-moist spread of plant-life and transformed them into a single black mirror-shield, to a single cupola set with stars; now nothing separated the flood of plant-life from the flood of the waters, the seas had overflowed all their shores, streaming into the plant-life which streamed into the life of the seas in turn, and, between the stars above and those below, the beasts of the air and the beasts of the water floated rigidly. The lower cupola was but an echo of the stars—but was not the upper one already an echo of the plants? unity above as below, one like the other upheld by the doubled heaven, upheld by the doubled seas, united to a single entity grown over by plants and stars, so very inclusive and self-contained that in its space no sort of isolation was any longer possible, none was permissible because everything was being resolved; whether eagle or heron or dragon-bird, whether shark or whale or a water-lizard, they were now but a totality, a single blanket of beastiness, a single space-filling essence which became more and more transparent, an animal-fog losing itself in ultimate invisibility, absolved into starriness, absorbed into plantliness; the animal totality was swallowed by the night, the animal breathing of the world was spent, no heart was beating any more, and the icy serpent had burst asunder, the icy serpent of time. Abruptly, unhampered by time, the night went over into full day, abruptly and time-exempted, the sun stood at the peak of day surrounded by an opalescent starry throng from which no star was missing and neither the whitish moon, and likewise, increasing in splendor, there glittered the abiding eastern star. So it came to pass above, while no less suddenly in the lower mirror there began a last enormous growing of the plants, partly as a struggle against their root-and-stem enchainment to earth, partly as an attempt to attain to something beyond themselves, to burst through the plantliness in order to win to an outright animal differentiation and motility, for, warmed by the sudden light, and beyond doubt driven on by all the animality it had absorbed into itself, the verdure on its side was growing with unbridled and irresistible subanimality out from its former immeasurable rooty-network, growing aloft, growing far beyond itself, the very humus of existence growing instinctually in this incessant change, in this constant self-renewing, sprouting and pushing, propped by tail-stems, constrained by snake-stems but long past being a tree, a blade, a flower, having shot up beyond reach, gnarled or pliant, spiralling or rampant, in a terrible unpredictable wildness—and he, who even while in its midst might watch it, could watch it, must watch it, moved on by the animally-invaded plant-life, became like a plant himself, inside and outside, throbbing with the flow of earth-sap, rooty, basty, tubular, woody, barky, leafy, though still remaining human, with the unalterable human eye: for even though quality after quality be lost, though substance after substance be overtaken and abandoned by the creation, the eye remains human as long as it looks forward, and that which has been created remains unforgotten to it through all transmutations, unforgotten even in the forgetting, left back in the second immensity, the on-impelling and ever-impelling, the unlosable star. He was a seeing plant although he was not struggling back to anything, neither into beastiness. Hours elapsed without being hours, the day had no end, endless, just endless, neither fast nor slow was the circling of stars in their courses, endless the progress of the sun, and without end the growth surrounding him, the all-grappling, aeonic plant-growth in which he participated in a plant-like way, aeonic and endless in such a way that inertia and movement, interchanged and time-exempted, united to an indistinguishable flowing rest, so changed by the aeons from one into the other that—just as abruptly as the daybreak—suddenly the night broke out from the course of the stars, from their endless, moving stability, broke out as the primal darkness which had held itself hidden behind the furthermost starry orb and now, independent of the arching path of lights, indeed, without putting out a single one of them, it filled the dome of existence with impenetrable darkness: the essential world-darkness burst forth, that uncreated darkness which is infinitely more than mere loss of light, mere lack of light, or the absence of light, for it can never be lightened at all by any force of the sun, even at full noon, to say nothing of being completely dissipated by light; so, with its mid-day radiance undimmed, the sun also was standing unchanged and, it seemed, unchangeable, still in the zenith, cast about by the stars in their full abundance but framed, along with them, in the profoundest stuff of night, a nocturnal figure sunk into the night-shield and, together with the starry abundance, the sun was reflected from the blackness above to the blackness below, becoming there a twin image of itself, a lower sun, a lower zenith, caught by the well-shaft of the middle, in the flowing depths of which its brightness swam, to be lifted up once more on the waters of creation, an echo flooded in darkness, dying out as it was flooded up. Starry countenance above, starry countenance below, and, in the doubled darkness of the duplicated night-dome, the green of the plant-billows faded to a pale reptilian shimmer, to the innate light of plants, so that these attained to an almost transparent perceptibility even unto the furthest ramifications of their stormily-wild growth of filaments and interlacings. Not less gleaming, not less perceptible became the roots under the earth and under the waters, and soon these, together with the stems and branches and all their stormy sprouting, wove themselves into a palely-wild single network, stretching out to every corner of the night-dome, creeping in all directions, shooting up in all directions, anchoring in all directions, being in the diversity of its directions almost as chartless as infinite space itself, an ether thicket hanging in itself, but despite this always striving upward, its direction indicated by the light above, by the invisible linear-play of the stars in which the gleaming countenance of the heavens was invisibly engraved as the archetype, and to which every single echo was carried; now the fountain of the middle was growing and extending itself upward and downward, welling with liquid elements, having become transparent in conjunction with its own incipient light, stretching upward and downward, coming into planthood, scarcely a shaft now, far rather a transparent tree branching out with the sun-echo in its rooty depths, caught into a gleaming inscrutability of plant-and-star growth, and at this point it was sheerly unperceivable whether there was still a borderline between plant and star, whether star and plant were not already touching in the archetype, star-echo and plant-echo enmeshed and intergrown in each other, merged together into that mirrored depth where the firmament above and that below touched and dissolved the boundaries of the other and flowed together to form the orb of the world. Visible yet invisible was this occurrence of the skies, visible yet not recognizable—, he, however, he the beholder, caught into this universal growth, he the plant-involved, the beast-involved, he also stretched himself from firmament to firmament, stretched himself through the starry tides of the universe, and standing in the earthly realm with his animal-roots, his animal-stems, his animal-leaves, he stood at the same time in the furthermost sphere of the stars, so that at his feet lay the sign of the serpent which, root-entangled and seven-starred, had sunk deep into the west while, transferred to his heart, sparkling in a twofold triad, shone the sign of the lyre, and high, oh, high over all, his crown reared aloft, reaching to the uppermost height of the cupola, reaching toward the eastern star though not quite attaining it, reaching for the star of promise whose infinite beaming had companioned him on his way, the star coming into more immediate proximity, coming nearer and nearer. No longer as an earthly face but just as a beholding tree-top, he gazed upward to the stars, into the face of heaven which had gathered into itself the lineaments of all creatures and had transfigured them, the human and animal face having become one, and bore them now enfolded in itself; he gazed toward the sun-bearing transparent gleaming sunward-turned shaft of the middle that held captive in its branches the rounded universe with its oceanic flooding and heaving as though for a future uniting, and caught likewise in this oceanic trembling, swept into this oceanic surge, his heart
was beating and surging in unison with it, his heart that long since had ceased from being a heart, only a lyre, ah yes, now a lyre, as if at last the promise were to ring out among its starry strings, not the song itself but the annunciation of it, the hour of song, the hour of birth and rebirth, the hour of twofold leading awaited without expectation, the singing hour at the closing point of the circle, crying out the unity of the world on the last breath of the universe: it was preparation, a mighty preparation, mighty in its tension, but the lyre did not ring out, could not ring out, might not ring out, for the unity achieved here by the flow of the universe in its oceanic heaving from one firmament to the other was that of plant-life in its power of growth, was the unity of the inviolable muteness of plants, the universal silence pulsing under the unbroken reticence of the stars, inviolably mute even the enormous power with which this unification was accomplished, as, in a final spurt of growth, the sprouting roused itself to the limits of its range, palely glistening its earthy might, palely shuddering from the exertion by which it had thrust its transparent tips into the furthest and topmost border of the dome of darkness, so irresistible, so all-compelling, star-compelling, heaven-compelling, that the heaven, as if to ward off this onslaught of plant-growth, had become enhanced in a final burst of flame, in a final flaming transport of its sun-bidden, sun-related midnight face from whose creatureliness beamed out the human aspect, purer than of yore, purer, greater, milder, devouter, more transfigured, more transparent than ever before, but still destined to extinction, still able to be vanquished, vanquished forevermore, vanquished by the onslaught of plant-growth, sucked in by the sucking strength of the darkly-pale submerged roots; and the heavenly countenance vanished, overgrown by the ether-thicket, star after star vanished, one after the other vanished into its own mirrored image coming up to it, vanished to the complete disappearance of both in their common marriage; yet inextinguishable in its extinguishing, no star’s light was lost, each remained in safe-keeping, unlosably passing into the conquering innate radiance of the plants, light after light dropping into its counter-light and impregnating it with an ever increasing strength, becoming more dense within it, growing and growing until at last the sun itself crashed into its own reflection, received into the transparently flaming tree branches of the world-shaft, the sun also fading into its own reflection, the reflection fading too and vanishing as the sun vanished, vanishing with it into the sparkling, upturned elm branches of the middle which, for this moment, for this one short moment of the crash, had unfolded to the full splendor of its whole arch hung with sun-golden fruit, only to evaporate in a mute, heaving sigh that was like a breath, only to vanish with star and reflected star, with sun and sun-echo, fading in the pale universal glimmer of the star-sated, sky-soaked universe of plants. The boundary of plant-life had been reached, the amplitude of growth covered space after space, covered sky after sky, enveloping the starry abundance; the welling, glowing, life-giving fountain of the middle was dried up and dissolved into cool light; the climax was past. And this universe of plants, as if exhausted from the enormous effort of its attack, breathless after its final flare-up, breathed itself out in a sighing silence; it hung in the darkness like a pale gleaming underbrush, visible within it if not lighting it, but it had given up its growing, and not only its growing but its light as well, its brightness given over bit by bit to the darkness, endlessly vanishing into its second immensity just as the world-shaft and the world-branching had done, and, weary of a fading perceptibility, it had filtered into the darkness, fading into its depths. Primal darkness now ruled over whatever still existed, existence, being no longer divided by any star-light or plant-light, was abandoned to darkness, given over to it alone, dominated by primal darkness, dominated by its dumbness, even the plant-breathing stilled, outside as inside the breath was being held, it passed into an immobility in the breathless blackness of which the scales of time balanced quietly, breathless in their equilibrium. Shadowed in immensity, though not yet into the final consummation, the primal night glided on—, nevertheless it was not yet consummate: for this darkness, like everything graspable by the senses, was all too perceptible not to be harboring its own counterpart, and, even though the tides of heaven, the tides of the heart may have ebbed forever, a translucent beam seeped once more from the darkness, almost as though it had preserved within itself the pale light of stars and plants while making them essentially one—star and plant having their common essence in the primordial stone, pregnant with darkness—, then darkness gave way, surrendering space to an indistinct brightness reminiscent of day without being day and yet being more than day, a brightness spreading over all existence and lacking the breathing of star or plant or animal, a breath-stripped universal day. Night-black under the shadowless universal light extended the motionless floods in which no sunlight was reflected, night-pale under the shadowless light the mountainous root-forests, which had not won back their green, spread immeasurably over the boundless fields of earth, and they faded away. He, however, divested of his animal-likeness, his plant-likeness, was now a being of clay and earth and stone, mountain high, an unwieldy shapeless tower, a spar of clay, destitute of all limbs, a shapelessly-powerful, shapelessly-towering stone giant, certainly of no size in comparison to this immeasurable earth-shield curving itself before him under the sky-shield, shield and counter-shield bonelike and horny in color, certainly of no size in comparison to this measureless plain over which he stalked, no, over which he was being moved, no, over which he was being carried, he the stony-faceless one, divining the light behind the shield of the curving sky, the light which he saw because the morning star, grazed by his head, had sunk into his rocky forehead as a third eye above the other two which sat stone-blind in stone, a third eye above them as a seeing eye, divine and discriminating, and for all that a human eye. Sparser and sparser became the pale gigantic forests, looser and looser the mat of their reptilian branches, limp and limper their withering trunks, drooping back into the earth from which they had germinated so impetuously, now already dead in their withering; and when in this wise the transparent plant-life had drifted back into the earth to its last shred, so that nothing remained but naked stone extending the width of the world, the very roots stone-absorbed to their last transparent filaments, then darkness came again into the universe, turning again into night, into a breathless breath-stripped, breath-robbed universal night that was no longer nocturnal and yet more than nocturnal, awful even though not awe-inspiring, immeasurable in the might of its growing dark amplitude. All this happened apart from continuity or time, fixed but not final, as something seen and sensed, and in the course of this un-nightly boundless nocturnality he felt everything which had been firm and able to be retained dissolving, felt the ground slipping beneath his feet, dropping into forgetfulness and its infinity, into the memory-less remembering of its immense flood, which coupled the true image and the arch-image to oneness, and flowingly transformed the earth-darkness back into fluidity—the mirror of sky and the mirror of sea merging to a single essence, earth changing to light. That which had sunk down was changed to liquid light, brought after an imponderable span of eternity back from immensity into the dome of the sky which was again becoming light; however this retrieving was not recollection, stone and earth remained forgotten, and forgotten was that over which he had trod and from which he had been formed, and the shapelessness of his gigantic form was just as intangible in its transparency as the light, just as intangible as the fluid dome of the world surrounding him, an ultra-transparent shadow; he came to consist merely of his eye, the eye on his brow. Thus he floated between fluid mirrors, floating in the space between the liquid light-fog above and the liquid swells below, and the eternal light hidden behind the fog played in the waters, establishing wholeness, sustaining it. Mild was the gentleness of the fog, mild the gentleness of the flowing waters, both of them merged in the softness of the light; and it seemed to him as if a very large hand like a cloud were carrying him through this mild occurre
nce, through the mildness of this twofold dusk, motherly in its gentleness, fatherly in its calm, embracing him and carrying him on, further and further and forevermore. And then, as if to fuse together the gentle unity above and that below, as if to wash away the last separating wall between the liquefaction above and below, the rain began to fall. At first it was a lazy trickling, gradually becoming denser and denser, finally turning into a single stream of water falling through space, almost languid in its enveloping softness, an enveloping, streaming, infinitely-great gentle darkness, so all-permeating that it prevented one from knowing whether the stream was pouring upward or downward; consummate now the darkness, consummate the unity in which there was neither direction nor beginning nor end. Unity!—never-ending unity, a unity which did not end even when the final darkness was achieved and began to emit light again, as it now did: at the center of the darkness, as though with a soft stroke, with a gentle sigh, the cover of the sky-cupola was drawn back: wondrously gleaming it opened up suddenly, becoming like a single star, large in the skyey round, becoming a single eye in which his own was reflected, being at the same time above and below. Heaven, simultaneously within and without, heaven itself the inner and outer border, including the crystal of unity in the transparency of which all moisture had gathered. And held within its radiation, so that the heavenly whole as well as the earthly, infinitely unlosable in unending refractions and reflections, should be taken up by the crystal’s light forevermore, there was the starry face with its crystal rapture, the first light of being’s wholeness to shine forth and give light to the beginning, to the ending, and to each fresh attempt of creation. Where, however, was his own face in this universe?—Had the crystal receptacle of the spheres already received him, or was he in a void, excluded from all inner and outer realms of being?—was he, who was no longer even floating, no longer held by any hand, actually here at all?—Oh, he must be, because he was looking, he must be, because he was waiting, but his enraptured looking, caught into the sparkling rays, was, at the same time, the crystal itself, and his waiting, this prolonged yearning for the holding hand to grasp among the strings of the boundless transparency and make the heart of the universe, the heart of the waiting and of the waiting one resound, this unexpectant waiting was at the same time that of the crystal itself, was its consciousness of growth, a consciousness intent on developing to a still more embracing unity, to a purer equilibrium, to a more complete breath-stillness, so much the crystalline will, so much a fore-echo of the still unsung song of the spheres, so much a fore-echo of the ether that, in a last, flaring up of the universe, in a last flaring up of the creation, the light again crashed into the darkness as the darkness opened to receive the light, both of them—in plunge and counter-plunge—committed to a unity which was no longer a crystal one, but just the darkest radiation, having no quality, not even that of the crystal, but which was the essence of no quality, the borderless, universal abyss, the birthplace of all essential qualities; the middle of the star had opened, the middle of the ring: the birth-giving nothingness, opened to the glance of the glanceless one—the seeing blindness.