by Susan Sontag
* * *
For those who hadn’t known her well, he evoked her thus.
My wife, he said, was small, slender, of an elegant appearance and with distinguished manners. She had light blond hair, which age had not whitened, vivacious eyes, fine teeth, a witty smile. She was reserved in bearing, modest in gesture, and adept at contributing a few words to move a conversation forward without any thought of dominating it. Her constitution was delicate, and in the course of her life her poor health greatly influenced her frame of mind. Well-bred, cultivated, and a superb musician, she was much sought after in society, which she often avoided, however, for reasons of health and self-preservation. She was a blessing and a comfort to those who knew her, and will be sorely missed by all.
He reminisced about her virtues, her talents, her preferences. In fact, he mainly talked about himself.
Grief turns one into a queer being, the Cavaliere told Charles in a letter. I am much more bereft, much sadder than I expected to be.
Something terrible had happened to him, for the first time. The world is a treacherous place. You are going about, doing your life, and then it is over, or everything is worse. Just the other day at Portici, one of the royal pages opened the door of a disused chapel, walked into a mofetta, as pockets of cold poisonous gas secreted by the volcano are called, and died instantly. Since then the terrified King had talked of little else, and had added a few more amulets and charms to the large assortment normally pinned to his undergarments. And look what happened to old Drummond, while riding out to visit … no, the Cavaliere suddenly remembered, the one to whom something terrible has happened is himself. He had no magic charms; he had his intelligence, his character.
Something terrible. Something to meet with fortitude. I have had a happy life, he thought.
A wise man is prepared for all, knows how to yield, to resign himself, is grateful for the pleasures life has offered, and does not rage or whimper when felicity (as it must) ends.
And was he not a great collector? Therefore continually absorbed, distracted, diverted. He had not known how deep his feeling for Catherine was, or his need for her. He had not known he needed anyone that much.
Collectors and curators of collections often admit without too much prodding to misanthropic feelings. They confirm that, yes, they have cared more for inanimate things than for people. Let the others be shocked—they know better. You can trust the things. They never change their nature. Their attractions do not pall. Things, rare things, have intrinsic value, people the value your own need obliges you to assign to them. Collecting gives egotism the accents of passion, which is always attractive, while arming you against the passions that make you feel most vulnerable. It makes those who feel deprived, and hate feeling deprived, feel safer. He had not known how much Catherine’s love also made him feel safe.
He expected more of his capacity for detachment, which he confused with his temperament. Detachment would not be enough to get him through this sorrow. Stoicism was needed, which implies that one really is in pain. He did not expect to be so slowed down by the press of grief, so darkened. Catherine’s love seemed radiant now, now that it had been extinguished. No tears had bathed his eyes as he sat at Catherine’s bedside and pulled his picture from her stiffening grasp, nor when he returned it to her, laying it in the casket before it was closed. Though he did not weep, his hair (suddenly greyer), his skin (drier, more lined) spoke for him, mourned for him. But there was no way he knew how to upbraid himself. He had loved as much as he could and had been more faithful than was the custom. The Cavaliere had always been good at self-forgiveness.
He sat beneath a trellis that looked out on the myrtle grove, exactly where Catherine was sitting when she fainted and was brought into the house. Where she had often sat with William. A thick complex web stretched across an ocular opening at the top of the trellis. He gazed absently at it for a while, before thinking to look for the spider, which he finally located hanging motionless from the outermost filament. Then he called for his climbing staff, reached up, and scythed through the web.
His letters speak of a settled, ungovernable melancholy. Heaviness, ennui, indolence—how tedious it was to write the words—is becoming my lot. The Cavaliere did not like to feel too much, but he was alarmed by the evident waning of feeling. He wanted to go on feeling not too much, not too little either (as he wanted to be neither young nor old). He wanted not to change. But he had changed. You would not recognize me now, he wrote to Charles. By nature lively, energetic, receptive, interested in everything, recently I have become indifferent to much of what once gave me pleasure. This is not indifference to you, dear Charles, or to another, but a general enveloping indifference. He lifted his pen, and considered what he had written.
I trust that apathy is not my inescapable condition, he went on, trying to strike the optimistic chord.
He had planned to bring out another edition, with more plates, of his book on volcanoes. The plan has been abandoned, he told Charles; he cannot surmount the feeling of weariness. Of a recent trip to Rome to look at pictures, he reported: Melancholy pursued me here also. My new acquisitions give me little pleasure. He described to Charles one of his acquisitions, a painting by a minor seventeenth-century Tuscan master evoking the transience of human life. Its message was voluptuously pertinent, its execution admirable. He gazed woodenly at the ingenious angle of the flowers and the mirror, at the soft flesh of the young woman gazing at herself. For the first time in his life, adding to one of his collections did not give him pleasure.
His lithe, reliable body allowed him to ride, to swim, to fish, to hunt, to climb the mountain as effortlessly as ever. But it was as if a veil lay between him and whatever he observed, draining everything of sense. Out for a spell of night fishing, attended only by Gaetano and Pietro, he watched the two servants jabbering in their incomprehensible dialect, butting the air as if words and phrases needed to be pushed forward with their jaws. The echoing voices from other boats crossing and recrossing the black bay, the black night, sounded like the cries of animals.
Yes, he still had the same physical robustness. It was an aging of the senses and of his capacity for enthusiasm that he noted. He felt his gaze becoming dull, his hearing and taste less sharp. He decided that it was because he was growing old. The reasons are innumerable for this general cooling, he explained—here the death of Catherine is being acknowledged—but perhaps it is mainly the passage of years. He struggled to resign himself to this reduced capacity.
He has never felt young, as he had told the sibyl. But when Catherine died he felt, suddenly, old. He is fifty-two. How many years had Efrosina told him he had to live? He had dealt himself his hand and played it. He wondered how the devil he would occupy the eternity of twenty-one years to come.
* * *
To be unaccompanied. To be alone. To lower yourself into your own feelings.
There to find mists and vapors. Then little protuberances of old angers and longings. Then a large emptiness. You think of what you have done, done with brio—great slabs of actions, enterprises. All that energy has drained away. Everything becomes an effort.
Surfeited, his appetite for surfeit. Now it’s enough.
* * *
A few months after Catherine’s death, touring the devastation left by an earthquake in Calabria, gazing at the stiffened, dusty bodies dug out of the ruins, at their convulsed features and clawed hands—depressed people are often voyeuristic—then at a child brought up still alive, who for eight days had been lying under a collapsed house with her fist pressed against the right side of her face and had pushed a hole through her cheek.
Yes, show me more horrors. I will not flinch.
* * *
For a moment, just a moment, he saw himself as a madman, disguised as a rational being. How many times has he already climbed this mountain? Forty? Fifty? A hundred?
Panting, broad hat shielding his meager face against the sun, he paused and looked up at the cone. From the volca
no’s summit—far above the city, the gulf, its islands.
He was high up, looking down. A human dot. Far from all obligation of sympathy, of identification: the game of distance.
Before, everything affirmed him. I know, therefore I am. I collect, therefore I am. I am interested in everything, therefore I am. Look at all that I know, all that I care about, all that I preserve and transmit. I construct my own inheritance.
The things had turned on him. They say, You do not exist.
The mountain says, You do not exist.
The priests say, The volcano is the mouth of hell.
No! These monstrosities, volcanoes or “ignivomous mountains,” far from being emblems or presages of hell, are safety valves for the fires and vapors that would otherwise wreak havoc even more often than they do.
He knelt in the moat-like surround of the cone, placed his palms upon the dusty rubble, then stretched out, belly down, out of the wind, and lay his cheek to the ground. It was silent. The silence spoke of death. So did the thick, stagnant, yellowish light, as did the smell of the sulphur drifting up from the fissures, the rocks piled up, the tephra and dry grass, the slabs of clouds lying in the indigo-grey sky, the flattened sea. Everything speaks of death.
Let’s take a positive view. The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (sterminator Vesevo, as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.
Under the ground were stretches of slag and clumps of bright minerals and fossil-studded rock and murky obsidian on its way to becoming transparent, beneath which lay more inert strata that enclosed the core of molten rock, as the mountain each time it exploded further deformed and layered and thickened the ground. And down the slope, under the tilted saliences of rock and the swatches of yellow broom, underneath, all the way to the villages below and riding out to the sea are ever more layers of human things, artifacts, treasures. Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried and now—a miracle of the age—have been exhumed. But offshore lies the Tyrrhenian Sea, which closed over the kingdom of Atlantis. There is always something more to be uncovered.
The ground holds treasures for collectors.
The ground is where the dead live, stacked in layers.
Cheek to the ground, the Cavaliere has descended to the mineral level of existence. Gone the court and the thuggish, jovial King, gone the beautiful treasures he has brought into his keeping. Is it possible he is not attached to them any more? Yes, at this moment he no longer cares.
* * *
The Cavaliere would have liked to have had a vision of redeeming plenitude and grace, such as one often has on mountain tops. But all he can think of is going higher still. He imagined taking to the air in that newfangled French marvel, the balloon, with a train of attendants; no, just young Pumo; and being able to look down on Vesuvius, from above watch the mountain becoming smaller and smaller. The cold bliss of effortless ascent, moving up, up, into the haven of pure sky.
Or, he would have liked to conjure up a lofty vision of the past, such as William had regaled Catherine with. But all that comes to mind is catastrophe. Say, a panoramic view of the great eruption of A.D. 79. The fearsome noise, the cloud in the shape of an umbrella pine, the death of the sun, the mountain burst open, disgorging fire and poisonous vapors. The rat-grey ash, the brown mud descending. And the terror of the denizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Like a more recent double urbanicide, one murdered city is much more famous worldwide than the other. (As one wag put it, Nagasaki had a bad press agent.) So let him choose to be in Pompeii, watching death rain down, perhaps unwilling to flee while there is still time because he is, even then, some kind of doughty collector. And how can he leave without his things? So perhaps as his street, then his knees, vanish beneath the ashes, it would have been he who had recalled the line from the Aeneid the excavators found that someone had written on a wall of his house: Conticuere omn … (“All fell silent”). Gasping for breath, he had not lived to finish it.
As in a dream (just as one is about to die), he vaults out of the doomed city and tries to be someone watching. Why not be the most famous observer, and victim, of the eruption? For if, yielding to the obvious, he could imagine himself not like but really Pliny the Elder, if he could feel the slap of the wind on the prow of the admiral’s boat rounding the cape of Misenum, if he could stay with Pliny right up to the end when, his lungs enfeebled by his asthma (O Catherine!), he succumbed to the lethal fumes … But unlike his young cousin, who is always imagining himself as someone else (and at the age of forty will congratulate himself for being forever young), the Cavaliere is hard put to imagine that he is anyone but himself.
That night, he slept on the flank of the volcano.
If he dreams, he dreams of the future—jumping over the future that remains to him (he knows it holds neither great interest nor happiness) to the future that amounts to his own death. Thinking about the future, the Cavaliere is peering into his own nonexistence. Even the mountain can die. And the bay, too—though the Cavaliere cannot imagine that. He cannot imagine the bay polluted, the marine life dead. He saw nature endangering, cannot imagine nature as endangered. He cannot imagine how much death lies in wait for this nature: what will happen to the caressing air, to the blue-green water in which swimmers frolic and boys hired by the Cavaliere dive for marine specimens. If children jumped into the bay now, the skin would slide from their bones.
People in the Cavaliere’s time had higher standards of ruin. They thought it worth pointing out that the world is not as smooth as an egg. Fretted coastlines gave onto inchoate seas, and the dry land had broken, lumpy surfaces; and there were rude heaps: mountains. Blotched, stained, rutted—yes, compared to Eden or to the primordial sphere, this world is a mighty ruin. People then did not know what ruin could be!
* * *
He waited for a clarifying wind. And torpor hardened over everything, like the lava stream.
He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump. The Cavaliere recalled taking Catherine after the death of her father to Etna, then in full eruption, and stopping on the lower slope at the cabin of a hermit (there is always a hermit), who insisted on retelling the legend of the ancient philosopher who jumped into the boiling crater to test whether he was immortal. Presumably, he was not.
* * *
He was waiting for catastrophe. This is the corruption of deep melancholy, that its sense of helplessness reaches out to include others, that it so easily imagines (and therefore wills) a more general calamity.
Ominous rumblings, which tourists as well as the Cavaliere welcomed. Every visitor wanted the volcano to explode, to “do something.” They wanted their ration of apocalypse. A stay in Naples between outpourings of cataclysm, when the volcano seemed inert, was bound to be a little disappointing.
* * *
It was the time when all ethical obligations were first put up for scrutiny, the beginning of the time we call modern. If by merely pressing a button, one could, without any consequences to oneself, cause the death of a mandarin on the other side of the world (clever to have picked someone that far away), could one resist the temptation?
People can perform the weightiest actions if these are made to feel weightless.
How thin the line between the will to live and the will to die. How slight the membrane between energy and torpor. So many more could give way to the temptation to commit suicide if it were made easy. How about … a hole, a really deep hole, which you put in a public place, for general use. In Manhattan, say, at the corner of Seventieth and Fifth. Where the Frick Collection is. (Or a prole-ier address?) A sign beside the hole reads: 4 PM–8 PM / MON WED & FRI / SUICIDE PERMITTED. Just that. A sign. Why, surely people would jump who had hardly thought of it before. Any pit is an abyss, if properly labeled. Coming home from work, out
buying a pack of wicked cigarettes, detouring to pick up the laundry, scanning the pavement for the red silk scarf the wind must have sucked off your shoulders, you remember the sign, you look down, you inhale quickly, exhale slowly, and you say—like Empedocles at Etna—why not.
1
Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives. But before being allowed to arrive, it must lay siege to the weary heart. Let me in, it mews, it bellows. The heart must be forced.
That came four years later. First Catherine’s death had to be absorbed by the Cavaliere’s finely tuned metabolism. He requested another leave, to bring the body back for interment in Wales. There was no one here whose consolation consoled. Catherine’s death brought him perilously close to a condition he did not enjoy, that of thinking about himself. He applied his usual remedy, which was thinking about the world. With what time he had to spare after the usual duties and distractions, he busied himself with a visit to some new excavations in stony Calabria (Catherine is no more). There he was taken to a festival in a nearby village honoring Saints Cosmas and Damian which culminated in a church service to bless a foot-long object, much revered by barren women, known as the Great Toe. No more! Dusty, exhilarated, the Cavaliere returned to Naples. To a learned society devoted to the study of antiquity (Catherine is dead), the Cavaliere sent a paper reporting on this savory discovery of traces of an ancient priapic cult still existing under the cover of Christianity, which furnished fresh proof of the similitude of the popish and pagan religions; recalling the prevalence of effigies of the female and male organs of generation uncovered in the digs; and speculating that the secret of all religions was worship of vital forces—the four elements, sexual energy—and that the cross itself was probably a stylized phallus. Dead! With Catherine gone, he had no reason to rein in the sceptic and blasphemer.