By then I was watching with alarm those lit-up stations gliding by as I realized, stunned, that a point existed from where it was forever forbidden to enter this city, this country, this whole continent—and I gaped outward, at Bismarckstrasse, Theodor-Heuss-Platz, and finally Ruhleben.
Esteemed convocation: yes, evil exists.
IV
Look at me, I am tired.
How are we doing with that door?
Forty-two minutes I have been talking and that door is still locked.
I should look again, you’re saying, because it is open now? Very well, but what about this security detail? Again? To escort me? Where?
I just want to go home.
Hospitality? What kind of hospitality?
The lecture is over.
This time I spoke about revolt.
THE THIRD LECTURE
I
I am here for the last time.
For the final time I am standing in front of you to give a lecture.
And I will ask no questions. I understand that I am supposed to give a lecture. I won’t ask what its purpose is. I don’t want to know.
The only reason I won’t remain completely silent is that given my situation I am forced to speak, which you may take to mean that I shall speak like one who remains silent. This talk, consequently, will not metamorphose into inquisitiveness—that is, I will not start making inquiries to find out about your ultimate identity nor about the somewhat ominous ambiguity of your intentions regarding what is to be done with me. I will keep my word, so that those worried-looking gentlemen in charge of security who conducted me up here from the sub-basement and to whom I gave my word that I wouldn’t ask—nor would I expect to receive an answer to—any questions, yes, you gentlemen may rest at ease and exhale a sigh of relief right here at the start: I will not inquire—not even up here in this splendid auditorium, under the possibly sheltering auspice of your most unusual public presence—I will not ask what your intentions have been over the past weeks regarding me, you see this . . .how shall I put it . . . lecturer is totally ridiculous as a public speaker because he’s totally absorbed in exploring the dance steps of saying goodbye to the world, and he is incapable of anything else; no, I will not badger you about why you happened to select and invite me here, only to frog-march me, after my second lecture, into a sub-basement suite and deprive me of my freedom; just as, finally, you may be absolutely certain: I will not try to pry into what the point is of a so-called farewell speech, when one is taking leave as I am, that is: when the departing one doesn’t need an audience, nor does this audience need the departing one, for by now they have nothing further to share.
For in my case, no doubt, my leavetaking is actual and definitive; and this lecture of mine will be a true valedictory. The first statement is explained by an inner impulse (enough said about that for now); and the latter is explained by your third invitation, or shall I say your nonappealable summons, as will be immediately seen from the following brief—although for some of you perhaps not superfluous—outline of events.
You see, today at daybreak—which by the way was the seventh of my detention here—I was woken by the house telephone ringing at my bedside. A voice of sparse, measured elegance informed me that this evening I was to appear once again in front of you. Thanks to our memorable encounters, said the voice, we were able to get to know your views on melancholy and revolt. This time we would like to hear what you have to say about possessions, and here the voice grew softer, and added that I—this “I” referred not to him but to me—had earlier hinted more than once that my inner state could be likened best to that of someone taking leave, and therefore he, the voice, would now like to reassure me not to worry: the people sitting in the audience this evening are also nothing but leave-takers, and since this evening it would be leave-takers on both sides, I would be fully justified to consider my lecture as a valediction. Then something was said about a great expectation, but the sentence broke off halfway, the voice left off, the line was disconnected.
Esteemed gentlemen!
Until this morning the house telephone had been inclined to function exclusively in one direction only, when I asked for food or drink from the “service” staff that showed up only on these occasions. Never the other way, that is, during seven days no one had anything to communicate to me regarding my situation or yours. So thanks to this one-way traffic only now am I able to inform you: I have no interest in what you want from me, I’m not interested in your intentions, nor what you are saying farewell to, for in all likelihood not only does an unbridgeable gap exist between our respective interpretations of a valediction, but the content of our valedictions is far from identical. I would emphatically like to make you understand that after the monotonous senselessness of my subterranean sojourn, I am giving this lecture, apart from my own amusement, not because of some baseless, putative shared trait, but solely because by complying with your request, I wish to be granted, in addition to my two daily walks (morning and afternoon), a third and a fourth walk, an early morning, and a so-called evening one.
You see I desperately need air, my body, ever since a sudden illness a few years ago, cannot do without fresh air, so that airing, especially frequent airing in my case is, as they say, most desirable. Therefore I will offer you a lecture in exchange for fresh air, and since I take your nods to indicate there are no serious obstacles to the implementation of these two additional walks, the only thing left for me now is to clarify what kind of lecture we are talking about here.
By now you ought to be used to my never promising anything, in fact each time I have done my best to cool down the ardor of your expectations. This time, too, I must do the same, nay, this time I promise even less than before.
One week ago the same gentlemen who brought me here tonight escorted me from here down to the sub-basement through an emergency exit (you may recall there was a spot of trouble with the doors), and these gentlemen, who back then, a week ago, told me not to ask any questions and not to worry, if at first glance this looked like confinement—actually I would enjoy the most auspicious hospitality during my stay here—these same gentlemen, while escorting me now from the sub-basement, kept saying the same as before, that I should still refrain from asking any questions, not to worry, just calmly concentrate my attention on the subject of mutual concern to us, after all we—and here the gentlemen pointed at themselves—are here so you can accomplish this without any hindrance. These aberrant interpretations of hospitality and captivity clearly illuminate how profoundly mistaken these gentlemen were on the way from the sub-basement to the lecture hall, and how radically we differ in our assessments of the situation, and how utterly different our interests are under the apparently dying flickers of the constellation of our “subject of mutual concern.” If I conclude correctly from the extreme little I can surmise regarding this castle and your circle, you are most concerned about the predictability of the world, in other words, your own security. All of that, however, is merely of tangential interest to me; on the contrary, what concerns me (as mentioned before) is the sequence of steps enabling one to back out of the world. Please don’t misunderstand me, I do not dispute—since I too must endure the same—that the world in question indeed lacks certainty, but while you gentlemen, I suppose, lament the absence of security in the universe, I lament the absence of beauteous meaning in the human world, or—inasmuch as we measure our differences by our disillusionment—your disillusionment comprises the so-called universe, whereas mine is limited to so-called humankind, by which I mean that you gentlemen have in fact been disappointed by failing to discover the keys to the universe, while retaining this universe itself; whereas I have been disillusioned by human intelligence after realizing the key to it is commonplace prostitution, and since I have found nothing else, I am left with nothing.
It probably sounds peculiar that without even trying to disguise it by some artful stratagem, I op
enly admit that in my case I am discussing something so trivial. Peculiar it is, possibly a bit ridiculous as well, and I would certainly understand if you yelled at me: Hey Mr. Artist, you should have dusted off this trivial insight before tossing it at us, because this story is at least a hundred fifty years old, in other words, it’s musty; so what, you’re disillusioned by human intelligence, why not by all of humankind? Please, please spare us that sort of thing. Meanwhile, what am I to do? A hundred fifty years, well, it’s been a hundred fifty years; the same thing happened to me as to someone a hundred fifty years ago, probably it went down this way because I have traveled backward, for me everything has gone backward compared to the way—I imagine—it has gone for you in this world a hundred fifty years later. Because here and now, the customary course of the intellect’s choice of a theme is that in the wake of earlier experiences and ensuing disastrous traumas, that human intellect, rising above resignation vis-à-vis the human universe, becomes fed up with this world mired in the monotony of hopelessness, and transcends it, at last leaving it behind and identifying this particular theme in some enigmatic grandeur—some indecipherable, mysterious majesty, that is to say, in the universe, or in the deity of the universe.
From here on—sad to say, but I must add, predictably—it, the intellect, cannot thrive, because its attention can never reach beyond itself, and, as attention-paying subject, it forever remains a prisoner in its own security. It is not interested in the universe as much as in its own special status in the universe, interested not so much in the universe’s divinity, as in the likelihood of its own chosenness, in a word this theme becomes a sacred but regrettably unattainable goal, and yet the dignity of this theme, the high level of attention paid to it—in contrast to the rank, the worthiness, of the subject paying it attention—continues to exist, and will always exist.
For me, all this went down very differently.
It began with what it usually begins with: my very first act of consciousness, practically on the way out of my mother’s belly, was wanting to know everything right away about this universal plenum I was a part of; and about its existence I learned not from the experiences of others but from allusions made by others, beginning with the first cursory, skimming glance finding the human world around one devoid of interest—imbecilic, insignificant, and therefore negligible—and since this judgment was at least as recklessly appealing as it seemed convincing, after this first cursory glance I quite simply ignored the human world and, as if ashamed of it, skipped it and immediately darted toward another world where, or so I believed, I would face the dramatic presence of majesty and eternity. The process itself was most like daydreaming, for the universe that I had believed to have found (to call it by its name here) ultimately by its very nature had no need of any confirmation and depended exclusively on the imagination. This imagination embellished a limitless and impartial nature with a totally unjustifiable force of attraction, and then it experienced this embellished nature as the universe; yet when ultimately a more thorough, searching investigation, aiming as a matter of course to establish a so-called ultimate meaning, ran aground and deprived this so-called universe of its attractive power, all that remained was nature itself with its maddening neutrality, its untamable, prodigal omnipotence—and of course came disillusionment, a most extreme collapse, the bitter recognition that, instead of a thirst for knowledge, all along this had been about the primal desire for possession, and taking possession had failed to happen. I don’t wish to temporize here, so in summation all I have to say about this collapse is that its gravest consequence turned out to be the collapse of the imagination, of free imagination, after which the only possibility was to retreat, and here we are speaking of a global retreat where one cannot expect a favorable turn of events—and this being a well-established case, allow me to be redundant: there cannot be a favorable turn of events . . . But regardless of how this happened, no matter how instructive the sad tale of my downfall may be, the tale of gradually awakening to the realization that what I had been gazing at with such wonder and yearning did not exist, for it was glued together solely by this wonderment; let’s skip the details now; suffice it to say that I had fallen back exactly to the place where presumably you, the shrewd ones, had started out from, the most prosaic setting, a world bogged down in the boredom of hopelessness.
And here I truly mean the most banal realities of life, the world of table salt petrified in its container, shoelaces thinning in spots knotted day after day, street assaults and lovers’ vows trickling away into the sewer, a world where even a bouquet of violets carries the definite odor of money. This was the place I had fallen back into with a crash, where it would have been of vital importance to somehow discover the joy of so-called little things, and find, in the principle controlling the workings of the human world, the unmistakable traces of grandeur, of the eternal, in other words, a more spacious existence.
Keeping in mind what you may have gathered about me from the foregoing, surely no one will be surprised if without further ado I confess that in this most banal reality of the world I found, instead of the joy of little things, a loathing of little things, rather than discover the unmistakable traces of the grandeur of things eternal, I found instead irrefutable evidence of pettiness and the drive for instant gratification. So that by now nothing prevents me from deriving special enjoyment in using hackneyed expressions, and saying for instance that I have been engaged in a desperate struggle, searching for a most subtle form, given my situation in this disenchanted human world, which is confined to tangible realities graspable by the hand. I was dreaming of a form capable of conveying the hopeless situation of an age in which people . . . how can I put it in the most clichéd manner possible . . . are forced to live amidst a dreadful absence of ideals. But quite soon I came to realize that not a single mode of expression, no form whatsoever, not even the most infinitesimally subtle, can derive from sheer will, insofar as thinking itself is unfamilar with a freedom that has no object. Therefore I imagined that my form and mode of expression must refer back to a sensibility rooted in the aforementioned principle that controls the workings of the human world.
Well, that was precisely what I failed to find, that certain sensibility in this controlling principle, and the fact that I couldn’t find it—namely because there was no such thing—filled me with such bitterness that to this day I have been unable to get rid of it, no matter how much I imbibe—sweet or sour, pungent or salty—no matter what I try, nothing works.
I am telling you all this—the story of the differences between our respective disillusionments and intellectual choices—so that you will understand what I must announce now: it is with a bitter taste in my mouth that I stand here before you, who expect to hear some kind of informative talk from me, a bitter taste that is independent of the oppressive feeling caused by the captivity that is imposed for the sake of my own safety. I speak about the matter in such detail in order to make it impossible to simply glide over this bitter taste, and to emphasize just exactly how bitter it is, so that you will truly understand what I mean when with this bitter taste in my mouth I repeat: it is barely a smidgeon better than zero that I can promise to deliver as your lecturer this evening. In my experience, it makes no difference if the topic be melancholy, revolt, or possessions, a lecture such as mine will somehow fail to engage the attention of today’s audience, probably not because, in spite of all of its commonplaces, it is still too “difficult,” as listeners claim, but because everything coming from this quarter (which, you will recall, I have admitted could be as old as a hundred fifty years), everything arriving from this quarter bores this audience, because it can’t understand why anyone, such as this lecturer, especially after a hundred fifty years, couldn’t get over the fact that the human world is either vulgar or mendacious, or both.
Of course now I could reply that this is just it, and how should this hundred fifty years be reckoned? What if we can’t be sure if this century and a half
is still ahead of us, gentlemen! Maybe it isn’t for me—that is to say, starting from my kind of disillusionment—that we should trace back a hundred fifty years!
Yes, I could say that, and ask questions like that, but it wouldn’t change the fact that even so, I wouldn’t get over what makes the world of human intelligence so vulgar and so forth, not even if one hundred fifty years were still ahead of me (or behind you). I am incapable of overlooking the vulgarity and mendaciousness, I keep looking, and I just can’t see past them, so that both the universe and any god of the universe disappear from my field of vision; and as for my range of sight, if I may put it that way, it extends only as far as this frightening quality of the human world, I might even say point-blank that I have lost my range of sight in the relentless fog of the vulgar and mendacious.
There was a time when all of this first became obvious to me, and the rather alarming condition compelled me, in my heart of hearts, to give all of this some serious thought. Following these cogitations, or rather in their course, one day I awoke to the fact that I was nauseated, and this was a nausea radically different from all other nauseas.
It lacked an object.
I well remember the day; there I sat hunched over on the edge of the bed, contemplating a spot on the floor before me where the sun happened to be shining, and I waited for the nausea to pass. But it refused to go away, and when it occurred to me that perhaps it never would go away, it became joined by a sort of lightheadedness that I had trouble identifying at first. This lightheadedness was unlike liberation or relief, didn’t resemble them at all, it was rather a nightmarish weightlessness, like when you want to pin things down, but no go, because nothing has any weight and nothing can be pinned down. It was the kind of nightmare where you realize that the missing weight of things is sitting right there on your chest, like some kind of succubus, but before you can shove it off, it gets sucked away through a mysterious process into the unknowable realm of your cells, and from there on you are defenseless, your cells already weigh a ton, while your whole body is so light it almost floats, and that’s how it goes until you can only wonder how the cells could be so unbearably heavy when the body is so nauseatingly light, and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing—that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been.
The World Goes On Page 6