Even among his sisters and daughters, Prince Saurau went on to say, when he could no longer bear to stay in his room and went down into the lower rooms “hoping for the relief of conversation,” to find them sitting in “the dusk that always reigns in Hochgobernitz,” either chatting or silently “contemplating themselves in preparation for the night”—even among them he more and more heard the noises that he had often told my father about. For months these noises had not left him, he said.
Devoting more and mor of his intellectual capacities “to the higher exaltation and the higher speculation” (Father’s phrase), in his weaknesses, even in that condition which in the course of the past several months had become an excruciating torment, when he locked himself in his room to conduct, alone with himself, his “masochistic discussions” (Father’s phrase), which he continued even during his son’s stay in England and which, probably due to the fact that he was doomed to stay on in Hochgobernitz to the end of his days, he conducted with utter ruthlessness chiefly toward himself, pitching them at such a level, in spite of the extreme irritability from which he suffered, as to require the utmost tension of his mind, an ever-increasing ruthless tension of his mental powers. “Consistently delving into all scientific phenomena” (Saurau’s phrase), he had heard these “fatal noises” (Father’s phrase) even in the course of last night while he was studying Cardinal Retz’s memoirs, had “been forced to hear them,” though he was no longer able to remember at what point in time these noises had imposed themselves upon him. He now heard them continually, he said, and could no longer fall asleep; he feared these noises more and more. Day and night in the past week these noises had penetrated his consciousness, deranged him, constantly and in the cruelest manner “projected” him into his own death.
The terrible part of it was that to the very degree that he thought he had to withdraw from the world, he was falling prey to it, Prince Saurau said. “We think fantastically and are weary,” he said. In “the drive to exhaust all possibilities” he had cast a pall of gloom over Hochgobernitz, and Hochgobernitz over him. “The analogies are deadly” had by now become one of his recurrent, decisive phrases.
Saurau spoke of his family as “this continual, outrageous truncation of the mind.” They were ruling here in Hochgobernitz in his name. “With the hapless impotence for which they are made they inhale their daily life primarily into their bodies and secondarily into their heads in the form of hundreds and thousands of dismaying intellectual kleptomanias, from the greatest remove.” Meanwhile he, Prince Saurau, in the midst of them, in the midst of their “catastrophic company,” was being plagued by these noises (“rumblings in the earth?” [Father’s phrase]). Feeling his brain (“irruption of water into what has been parched from time immemorial?” [Saurau’s phrase]) painfully as a membrane abused in behalf of all mankind, knowing these noises to have existed always in humanity (“a transformation of what is into something else that will be” [Saurau’s phrase]), he no longer merely heard these noises, but also saw and felt them in his head. His brain must suffer these noises (“expanding fault lines, an ideal disintegrative process in nature!”). He found himself suddenly and uncontrollably injecting all sorts of phrases into his torment, and almost all of them ended with “for the sake of all mankind.”
He often felt, he said, the vast span of “emotional and geological history coalescing into wholly new substances,” which he regarded as a process in which “everything is destroyed in order ultimately to become.”
“Here, on this spot, I always would discuss everything concerning Hochgobernitz with my steward,” Prince Saurau said, and he called our attention to broad areas in the valley that had been devastated by the flood that recently affected a great part of the countryside below Hochgobernitz. “No more than three weeks ago,” Prince Saurau said, “I was walking up and down here, shocked beyond words by this tremendous flood damage. And while I was watching the slow recession of the water, silent, horrified, in a state of derangement that lasted for two hours, Doctor,” he began to think about the dubious life of his son, who was studying in England. “On this spot,” Prince Saurau said, “I always think about my son. The fact is that my son’s life is completely estranged from mine.” From this spot three weeks ago he had watched the receding high waters and then “without saying a single word against nature,” returned to the castle. Now he said: “My son is in England and I am going under here.”
At his last visit, my father recalls, Prince Saurau, commenting on the flood, kept exclaiming “landslide” and spoke of “despair assailing his mind.” Again and again he exclaimed “landslide” and kept reckoning “flood damage, flood costs, flood sums.” The whole region was afflicted by a mild but “insidious” smell of decaying cadavers—on both banks of the Ache a great many drowned cattle had been wedged against houses and trees, torn open, bloated, some “dismembered by the power of the water” (my father), and many head of livestock from the Saurau barns in the valley had not yet been cleared away. And because of this smell the prince had kept exclaiming words like decay, dissolution, and the word diluvianism. Then he had suddenly declared that the noises in his brain were wreaking far greater devastation inside his head than what could be seen on the banks of the Ache down below. “Here in my head,” Saurau had said, “there is actually inconceivable devastation.”
This first day after the flood seems to my father to have been a critical one for the prince’s illness, which then evolved “at a furious rate” (Father). “On that day both of us, horrified by the extent of the catastrophe, went down to the Ache,” Father said. Actually, the extent of the flood, as they both observed after the water had receded to its normal level, had indeed been catastrophic. Prince Saurau seemed to find it incomprehensible that the flood should have happened immediately after the steward’s death. “Right now, when I’m completely without help!” he had exclaimed again and again. At first the two of them had been so shocked by the sight that they had not been able to say a word to one another, although they had no doubt greeted the workmen who were busy dragging wood and corpses out of the water. They had tried to walk as far as possible; the prince had begged my father not to cut his visit as short as he customarily did, because he could not stand being alone. Again and again Prince Saurau had spoken of “damage in the millions,” my father said. And after remaining silent for hours during their inspection tour, the prince talked without a stop once they were back at the castle.
Prince Saurau now said to me: “The more intensively I talked about the flood, the more your father was distracted from the flood. Moreover,” the prince said, “he was distracted by the play that was put on in the pavilion the day before the terrible flood. This play, a different one every year,” Prince Saurau said, “is a tradition at Hochgobernitz. The curious thing is,” Saurau said, “and I am speaking now of an absurdity that is absolutely phenomenal: The moment I began talking about the flood, your father began talking about the play. The more I was preoccupied with the flood, the more preoccupied your father became with the play. I talked about the flood and he talked about the play.”
My father said: “I kept thinking all along that you couldn’t help talking about the flood, but I talked about the play.”
Prince Saurau said: “But I talked about the flood and not about the play, for what else could I possibly have talked about that day, if not the flood! Naturally I could not think of anything but the flood. And your father thought of nothing but the play. As I became more and more preoccupied with the flood, your father became more and more preoccupied with the play, and insofar as I, speaking of the flood, was irritated by your father’s speaking of the play, your father, speaking of the play, was irritated by me because I spoke of nothing but the flood. There was tremendous irritation!” the prince said. “Again and again I heard your father commenting on the play in the midst of my endless talk about the flood. The incredible, amazing thing was,” the prince said, “that as the time went on I spoke more and more about the flood and
nothing else and your father spoke about the play and nothing else. And your father spoke more and more loudly about the play, and I more and more loudly about the flood. Loudly, equally loudly, at the same time, both of us, your father and I went on, he speaking about a tremendous play, I about a tremendous flood. And then,” the prince said, “there came a period in which both of us spoke exclusively about the flood, followed by a period in which we talked of nothing but the play. But while we were both talking about the play, I was thinking only about the flood, and while we were talking about the flood, your father was thinking only of the play; while your father thought of the play, my thoughts were with the flood. If we talked about the flood, I thought that your father wanted to talk about the play; if we talked about the play, I wanted to talk about nothing but the flood.”
“I wanted to compare the play,” my father said, “with a play I once saw in Oxford, and to discuss the qualities of English actors versus the qualities of our actors, as well as the difference between the English language and ours.”
The prince said: “Naturally I was completely obsessed with the flood, but your father was just as naturally not obsessed with the play.”
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