The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Once long ago—oh, so very long ago!—after arriving in Cologne with my busted box of books and, together with my Mom, passing the bordello test that all academic greenhorns from the provinces have to go through (the only test, by the way, that I ever passed), I threw myself into the arms of the professors with the thought, “Here I am! Now create me anew in your image!” I was no longer a little boy, but actually not yet old enough for this kind of re-creation. My true nature had already taken shape, but unfortunately the wrong way around. I looked up to my intellectual guides as if they were superhuman. I was astonished at the amount of their knowledge, which they not only set down in books but could also, at least in some cases, deliver impressively at the lectern. Even more impressive were the private libraries in their erudite households, collections that, following their decease, were submitted in toto to the local antiquarian bookshop of K. E. Koehler & Co. How great was my pleasure at poring over catalogues of old books! A scholar who never once in his career experienced an embarrassing moment must have felt the pinch after his death, when the contents of his book collection were revealed for all to see. But what amazed me most of all was the procession of Ph.D.s emerging one by one from the seminar rooms, wearing borrowed suits and with summa cum laude diplomas in hand. The sight of this academic conveyor belt in operation bore serious implications concerning the highest aims of life.

  I signed up for course after course, educating myself with a genuine furor teutonicus, and continually extended the goal-markers on my intellectual horizon—given that there was no upward limit to my seeking. It was when listening to the professors of divinity that I first realized that certain things were not quite right about the German system of higher education so prized by Goethe and his humanistic contemporaries. I was crushed to ascertain that the teachers of theology had no sense whatever of religion. Instead, they were the mathematical purveyors of dogmatic theorems into which they inserted statements about God. They derived the cubic root of God, and raised God to the desired power—which is to say, they held on a leash the entity they referred to as their Creator. Those who allowed this entity the most slack were the ones who attracted the most students, but it was easy to see that the leash had a finite length. Sooner or later the leash would go taut, and the game would end with a jolt. Johannes Hessen was one such theological gamesman, whose lectures were exciting to listen to. In the halls of academe it was an open secret that he constantly stood with one foot in the papal dungeon. He warned us against Rilke’s dangerous pantheism—Rilke, whom I considered more religious than the entire Bible.

  In other academic departments, it took me longer to figure out that German scholarship was a malleable science, one that always gave way to stronger pressure. Thus I was not at all surprised to witness the universities falling victim to political Gleichschaltung in 1933. In fact, most of the learned gentlemen were willing to forego their customary privilege of waiting the “academic quarter-hour”—no one wanted to be left behind. Having studied their way into “frigidity and impotence,” these erudite fellows kowtowed to patriotic fervor, and kept on teaching with half the normal professional achievement (nationalism always means doing things in halves) and in constant fealty to the ineffable omniscience of the Führer. The rest of the world greeted with astonishment this newest patent, Made in Germany. Rather than threaten imitators with lawsuits, the Reich actually encouraged them; whoever was unwilling to imitate was a loser. Great writers shrank to midget size and joined the ranks of the Reich Chamber of Literature. I had been among their admirers, but now they had gone stupid and fell for a country-fair barker, just as the tourists on Mallorca fell for a certain other Führer’s swindle. Both Führers had this in common: they detested the rabble and reacted to them by vomiting—each in his own fashion.

  The higher the degree, the weirder they be: Schopenhauer, Lichtenberg, Nietzsche—who wouldn’t have certain qualms when it comes to scholars who wind themselves up inside a cocoon or hide inside a shell, lacking the kind of spiky tooth that every fowl embryo comes equipped with, to peck its way out of its prenatal housing? Kierkegaard, too, meditated on this subject and wrote about it. Take, for example, Professor Wernicke, who made a name for himself as a scientist investigating the higher cognitive processes of human beings. A specific area of the brain has been named after him, and this will remain in mankind’s memory longer than any city park that bears his name. This man, so very familiar with the brains of his fellow countrymen, is reported to have said that twenty-two percent of German university professors were feebleminded. In issuing this report, Wernicke clearly echoed statements made by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. Whoever feels personally offended by this ought rightfully to put his head in his hands. If he is unlucky, he will find himself touching the Wernicke region of the brain. Damage to this area of the cerebrum has as a consequence the inability to understand simple language… I intend to pursue this matter further, because rumors of this kind do not arise merely by accident. Indeed, there are rumors that have more truth to them than the events that gave rise to them. One example: how human beings actually became human.

  Count Harry Kessler, the Kaiser’s adjutant during the Wilhelminian World War, shared with us similar horror stories about the cerebral zones of members of the General Staff. When the papers reported the death of Joseph Pilsudski, he told us how in 1918 the Kaiser had given him orders to free the Polish conspirator from the Magdeburg citadel, a mission he accomplished by disguising himself as a prison guard. Continuing on the subject of stupidity as a way of life, I asked him whether this phenomenon, stupefaction as the result of over-education, was visible among the leading officers of the German Army. Kessler flashed a glance at me with his hollow-set eyes, but he was too polite and too set in his traditional ways to reply, “Hold on there, my friend, don’t ask such stupid questions!” Instead, he simply explained that the officers in question manifested a form of stupidity that stemmed from sheer military obstinacy. As a mitigating factor, he cited the fact that even these gentlemen sometimes regarded events at the battlefront as stupid, but then they would take up their rifles and go off duck-hunting. The enemy would suddenly break through the defense lines, and the Kaiser would quickly cashier these generals, the ones who meanwhile had chosen to take potshots at a different kind of enemy. “And which one was the stupidest of them all?” we wanted to know. Kessler explained that there had been a good deal of rivalry for this distinction, but that we should now just be patient. If the Nazis kept their hands off of our island he, Kessler, would let me type out the names to my heart’s content. But he added that he planned to take up this topic only in the fourth and final volume of his memoirs.

  Count Kessler never got past the first chapters of Volume Three. Thus I have had to compile my own list.

  It wasn’t until I started living in foreign countries that I became aware of how disreputable these German scholars were who, gorged by the extent of their own knowledge, maintained contact with the world around them exclusively through the prism of their narrow specialties. What they thought and said had precious little to do with genuine human affairs. That is why Hitler had an easy time stringing them one by one, these bogus pearls of German scholarship, onto his Nazi necklace. I was once witness to the first personal encounter of two famous German professors who over the previous twenty years had exchanged professional ideas in letters and scholarly journals. I mentioned to the professor from Munich that his colleague from Berlin would be attending the conference. “Oh, fine,” he said, “it’s good that he’ll be on hand. That means we can ask him directly. It’s not possible to clear these things up by writing letters.” When they finally met, there was no evidence of real pleasure. They shook hands with each other—an anemic gesture resembling nothing so much as two slabs of veal getting placed one on top of the other. Not one personal word. I stood by watching in horror. This, I thought, is how a victorious general and his conquered counterpart might behave at an armistice negotiation. There’s no denying that scholars
of this type play a role as catalysts in the advancement of “pure science.” They serve as activating parasites, like the millions of larvae that aid the digestive process in the stomachs of elephants. As long as scholarship continues to go on, this brand of specialized scholar will always be on hand, though it will never occur to them that their true role is that of a purgative. Hitler despised these learned puppets within his movement just as deeply as the Christian churches he continually toyed with.

  Beatrice had long since stopped sketching with her imaginary pencil. She put aside the broker’s letter and said laconically, “Pedro! And you’re falling for it, too?”

  “Pedro? What’s Pedro got to do with Don Fulgencio? Can’t there be anything at all unusual any more without Pedro being involved in it? Just because he’s a Sureda?”

  This was the attack I was fearing, but it was coming from an unexpected direction: from above. I had to devise a cautious defense of my friend, and try to fend off the worst. If this new model of his started smelling, that would irritate Beatrice, and she would toss out the both of them together with sheepskin and easel. But then what about Pedro’s art? Pedro liked Beatrice, but Beatrice liked Pedro less and less, the closer she looked and sniffed at his artistic trappings, and the odder the people were that he brought to our house. These characters were in fact quite impossible if you insisted on judging them by non-Spanish standards—as Beatrice did. That’s why she wasn’t getting any fun out of the jokes Pedro was playing with his victims.

  Here is an example which, while again diverting our attention momentarily from Don Fulgencio, will eventually make his case all the more comprehensible. Pedro knew a pharmacist whose mind worked in ways that were not altogether compatible with the production of pills. This man boasted of being able to tell at a distance of twenty yards whether a woman was, as they say, immaculate. The fellow later became the victim of his own talent, but that is yet another story with a fatal ending. Pedro told this seer about this German friend of his who wrote poems, and who showed other signs of not being quite mentally sound. For example, whenever this friend was introduced to someone, he broke out into gales of laughter. He would get veritable laughing fits. But then, polite fellow that he basically was, he would try to suppress his mirth, and this made the situation all the more embarrassing. Would the pharmacist care to make this gentleman’s acquaintance, Pedro asked? Indeed he would, was the pill-pusher’s reply, whereupon Pedro told me the selfsame thing about the apothecary’s strange habits and asked me the same question: would I be interested in meeting him? The meeting took place in our apartment, unfortunately at the very moment when Beatrice, in despair over the linguistic ineducability of the Mallorquin populace, entered the house. She joined us just as we were standing in the doorway laughing uproariously at each other. Pedro, working his sketch-pad with abandon, winked at both of us in turn: “What did I tell you!” Each of us reacted to the event in the precisely appropriate fashion—most appropriately Beatrice, who turned livid.

  It was episodes like this one that, in the course of time, made us constantly wary of Pedro as a house guest. That explains why Pedro had to be suspected of setting us up for this prank with the broker’s letter—I myself, good German that I was, had fallen for this nonsense just as all the Germans had fallen for Adolf Hitler. This was a direct hit! Then began our domestic political feud. Beatrice called my gullibility very German and very Catholic. Just one more step and I would land in the bosom of both Führer and Pope, the two medicine-men of organized mass deception. Well now, I said, how very Swiss-Reformed of you to think that way. Just one more step and… But then I was silent, because, for one thing, I couldn’t really imagine where one next step might take a woman like her, and for another, because I thought we shouldn’t be arguing at all about the Nazis—those people would soon enough find a way to drive a wedge between us. Each of us should go off into a corner and be ashamed of ourselves. But now, what about the kind offer being made to us by the aging broker, the worker of miracles?

  Pedro, Beatrice continued calmly, had known for a long time about my interest in this fabulous child-dealer, or child-strangler, a fascination that Mulet’s tertulia had kept at high pitch, probably with the intention of pulling one over on me. It was easy to think that Verdaguer might do something like that. Later he would write a mysterious short story about Don Vigoleis, the guy who believed in everything except God. But the tertulia crowd was made up only of literary types; Pedro wouldn’t hesitate to go farther. Not only did he invent people, he actually brought them to our house. I should be on my guard. It surely was Pedro who wrote that letter. Tonight he would show up at our place all a-twitter. As always he would start sketching, and he would listen carefully to our chatter to find out if we had taken the bait. “Just let him come,” said Beatrice. “I’ll go off to bed.”

  “My dear Inca maiden, Pedro will arrive tonight just as surely as he did yesterday and will again tomorrow. He’s a persistent guy. He aims to wear you down, but he’s using the wrong technique. Don’t worry. I have no intention of revealing the secret ways of winning over a transalpine squaw. And besides, with all due respect for his thoroughly un-Spanish inventiveness, he would never be able to concoct such a letter.”

  Beatrice reached for a book, which promised better entertainment than a discussion of the case of the child-merchant. Summoning up my courage I continued, “Let’s talk about reality. This letter is extremely clever and subtle. The deceptively blue coloration is bluer than the German Romantic poets’ blue flower, the one whose fragrance we perceive at the source of all forms of deeper knowledge. It is pregnant with cadaver murders as at our Clock Tower. It is a double-edged entity conceived in the dreams and waking hours of the poets. Everything else in the world pales in significance whenever reality begins to bring forth stories—not history, but stories— plotless stories, random stories, just-so stories, stories that don’t care who gets to read them. L’art pour l’art, but with cosmic import. Reality can accomplish anything. It selects topics that our poets do not dare to contemplate. It writes about me, for example, la mia bella. Or about the Don Fungencio Lladó of this letter here. It has the greatest store of experience, of the kind that Novalis or Rilke expected any true writer to have. And it never tells lies, even though its texts may cause us to have certain doubts, just as you yourself are having right now. But then again, you are a theologian’s daughter. You could never resist taking peeks behind the scenes of your Daddy’s study as he composed his Sunday sermons or his university lectures, earning bread for his family in the employ of Heaven itself, just like any other Daddy earning his family’s keep. Such a family background is enough to give a precocious child a life-long complex.

  “Now you are no longer a believer in divine revelation. And that’s understandable, given a father who pronounces the Word of God on Sundays, and in mid-week lays down household cash on the table for Mother—what an impossible situation! The Catholic Church has arranged these things much more intelligently and meaningfully—with more eternal significance, I am tempted to say. Or do you perhaps think that the Church invented its rule of celibacy and defended it down through the centuries against all kinds of attacks, simply because the Church’s own virginity required a virgin priesthood, or perhaps because it feared financial burdens on the hierarchy, a debt that would of course grow to gigantic proportions if the clergy, from the village curate to the Pontifex Maximus himself, had to contend with wife and children? Ignatius of Loyola might have devised a militant solution to this problem. No institution in the world outdoes the Catholic Church in combining opulence with beggary. You are well aware that I am still searching for any Servant of the Lord who might actually still believe in this Lord. I am a huge fan of miracles. Romanticism is in my blood.”

  Such types as believing priests must actually exist, I went on, but it was difficult to fish them out of the mass of clergy because of their talent for camouflage. They were recognizable only by the radical colors that some of them wore, the ones
who like Savonarola got swiftly burned at the stake. I added that she herself, Beatrice, the daughter of a pastor and patristic scholar, constituted a welcome confirmation of my theory that the children of Men of God can easily fall victim to the devil, atheism, and hypocrisy. How could it be otherwise? It was simply unthinkable for a man to produce children, go through the daily drudgery of heading a busy household and family, go for walks with a pregnant wife, and then climb into the pulpit every Sunday and break the sacred bread. To me this seemed like a form of blasphemy. Nevertheless, I explained, it was not my intention to cast aspersions on her esteemed father—at least no more aspersions than I was casting in her own direction.

  I had read most of his books, and I had never forgotten what she once told me about this poignant incident in her father’s den, where the devout scholar was in the habit of writing at a stand-up desk. Sometimes when her mother wanted to be rid of her for a few minutes, she would let her enter her father’s study. On one such occasion, while Daddy was busy composing his History of Revival Movements, she began systematically removing the page slips from all the books she could reach on the shelves. Clueless in matters parental, yet always kind to children, her erudite father could think of only one way to handle this little intruder short of kicking her out of the room: he lifted the girl up to his stand-up desk, set her down on his manuscript, and went to another table to continue his work ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Fearful of falling down from her perch, the little tyke sat there as quiet as a mouse. We can ascribe to simple human nature what then ensued: Beatrice went about anointing the covenant that her father had entered into with his Creator. Later, Professor Adolf von Harnack, who often checked over his favorite student’s manuscripts before they were sent to the printer, noticed the strange aroma emitted by this particular sheaf of pages. Harnack, more acclimated to the refined fragrances of the German Kaiser’s household, probably interpreted the odor as the ordinary mustiness of a Swiss pastor’s dwelling.