41.
Wife and harlot are two ghastly relics of the past, two waymarks on the same path pointing in the same direction, two congruent concepts. Both are products of a society that stands and falls with barbarian ideas of social order, condemned to have their loves turned into marketable commodities, of a society that has turned everything between Heaven and Earth into commercial wares, even the mercy of God and the boons of the virtuosos.
The harlot is the wife; the wife is the harlot. The one I buy for lifelong intercourse. All her life she receives beautiful clothing and food and drink at my table for being my whore. The other I buy for intercourse for one night, and on the next morning I give her one pound sterling so that she can get something to eat in an inexpensive teahouse and buy herself new shoes so that her feet won’t get wet; for her feet are sensitive. What is the difference? One is hired by contract; the other sails in the wind; both give me the same thing. I am tied to one, and independent of the other. One is pretentious, the other content with little. One is fat, conceited, and stupid, like a general or an archbishop, because she knows that she is in a secure position. The other is poor, penniless, and experienced in life, like an Icelandic poet. One is impudent, more hypocritical, and more vacillating; the other is meek, guileless, and unostentatious. One is highly esteemed in silly charitable clubs, and there does what she can in order to keep her little light burning in a society that turns half of mankind into slaves and paupers. The other is the image of self-denial, ever-sacrificing; she sacrifices her honor and happiness, body and soul, sacrifices her entire self to everyone, everywhere. One raises children that are later used as cannon fodder for the king, freedom, and the fatherland, or else that die of starvation and hardship. The other is a vagabond between the glass houses whence hypocrisy and hesitation cast stones, and where self-complacency grimaces in contempt.
It is nothing but invention when a woman, panting, throws her arms around the neck of her lover after he whispers a marriage proposal, and replies: “I am yours forever!” Such things never happen except in rotten poetry and fifty-aurar fairy tales written for maid-servants and the bourgeoisie.
When a man makes his marriage proposal the woman always gives the same answer: “What are you offering me? What will you pay me? Will I be given dining-room furniture, living-room furniture, and a piano? Will you feed me roasted chicken? Will you dress me up in ostrich feathers? Will you buy me a car?” Although I might only have the means to buy her an ordinary Ford, she would rather take the man who can give her a five-seater Fiat – and no woman can withstand a Rolls-Royce. If I don’t feel like attending to her needs, she runs back home to her father’s house. If I don’t bring her a brace of codlings tied by the tail for lunch and plucked fowl for dinner, she takes me to court. She loves me if I give her money, baubles, houses, musical instruments, expensive clothing, plenty to eat. And if I succeed in lying my way to the highest ranks in society, I become her best ornament. But if I offer her nothing but my love, nothing to eat, no perks, then it is hopeless to count on her fidelity. If I go abroad and stay away from home for five years, she stops loving me altogether. If I ask, “Why, though I love you, should I be obliged to support you?” then I am a scurvy rogue. But beyond everything else, she hates me and scorns me if my sexual organs are out of line. Although she might have promised me all her love with the most fervent words in the language, burning kisses, and glittering tears the day before the wedding, I can rely on the fact that she will let the first Don Juan that we meet on our honeymoon take her as his mistress. There are daredevils in the south who spend their lives in expensive hotels and have made it their sport and life’s work to seduce newly wedded women on honeymoons. It is said that few men are more successful in their work than they are.
42.
The older a man becomes, the more vain become the questions that he ponders, the more paltry the decisions that he makes. It is a rare exception to meet a man older than thirty who thinks. To grow older signifies a man’s surrender to facts. He no longer changes water into wine, no longer gives orders, is no longer a creative philosopher. His cleverness from this point on is confined to taking a position toward things as they are, settling himself down in such a way that the flaws he fought against most often in his youth cause him the least amount of trouble as possible. To grow older is to lose the nerve to try to untie the Gordian knot, to settle with whatever one wasn’t able to conquer. The soul of a middle-aged man is solidified lava.
The time will come when I no longer contemplate pressing questions. I will be sucked into pittances and day-to-day quarrels, seated with professors, members of parliament, and other wretches, honorable-looking men with well-trimmed hair, probably mustaches, discussing in solemn tones “the way out of the straits,” considering myself important, and paying heed to no counsel but simmering.
The enigmas of life are stilled in my mind like water in a peat pit; they evaporate like standing water in the heat of summer. Those that never left me alone from morning till night and prevented me from sleeping at night – what are they now? The adventurous chapters in the first part of my autobiography and scarcely that, forgotten reveries. Instead my mind is filled with answers to questions that I never asked. In my youth I asked, What is God? In my old age I will write scholarly books on the details of court life in France during the reign of Louis XVI. I am quite satisfied to have forgotten the things that I wanted to know, and to know all sorts of things about which I never asked. My nervous system has reached a calmer ambit, the secretions of various of my glands have changed their function, my impulses have been stilled, the wavelengths of my thoughts curtailed.
Most pitiful is that this condition came over me bit by bit without my being aware of it. The spiritual hardening doesn’t announce itself soon enough to give me any opportunity to shoot a bullet through my head in time; my adult years inebriate me like Jesuitical wine. “Dear ladies and gentlemen!” say I, sweetly and idiotically. “I pray for understanding for the convulsions of my youth!”
The adult years that lock their necrotic claws onto a man’s heart muscle appear to my eyes as the most fateful disgrace. It would be more fortunate to die than to be forced to take a seat on a bench with men who stitch up the rotten holes in society and urge the paupers to simmer their potatoes slowly.
“Good gentlemen!” I write, after I have become an adult. “We must all be thrifty and economize! The remedy for mankind’s troubles is to simmer, simmer, simmer!”
And if I am diligent enough in preaching simmering, I may finally receive a medal of honor from the king for my “achievements in the service of the fatherland.” I will be granted the Order of the Falcon and the Dannebrog, the Order of Saint Olav, the Iron Cross and the Order of the Garter, until I clatter all over like a sea monster.
43.
London, New Year, 1925. Dear sir. I have not yet reached the conclusion of the letter that I started last summer. Allow me to add a few words.
You think that I am a communist, a stubborn pursuer of political dreams. No, dear sir, I have given up. I couldn’t damn well care less about mankind. I am at my wit’s end. I beg you to help me. I must be quartered – there is no other way.
Tell me, dear sir, what business does man have appearing in the light of day?
All winter long I have been struggling to nourish within me three inclinations that can overcome man: namely, homosexuality, drug addiction, and the desire to commit suicide. In these three passions I descry the highest ideals of mankind. Mankind cannot aspire to a higher ideal than to die out; life is the worst enemy of the living and “death is the victory over life,” as one of the sages of our time says.
It is a madman’s rage to wish to struggle for the future or for the welfare of mankind.
And I would like to know, what comfort is it to me whether people live well? People matter nothing to me. People are completely different from me. It is nothing other than Christian blather, founded on faith in God the Father, that we ought to love our brot
hers and do them good. But I do not believe in God, and therefore it is entirely all the same to me whether mankind feels better or worse. The only thing that makes me feel content is to live for myself, not because I love myself, but rather because I despise myself and long to destroy myself. I despise people as I despise myself. I amuse myself with the idea of sticking my bayonet through children and breaking the teeth out of ravished Negresses with the heel of my shoe, like the European soldiers in Kattinou. I have the right to do all that I will. For to whom in Hell am I obligated if God does not exist? For what do I exist besides myself? If God does not exist, then it is a sin to live for anyone besides oneself.
A living being emerges into the light of day only to die. Why should a man struggle to perpetuate his race when his only end is to die? A man is born into vanity and delusion; he suffers, endures, and fears for a few years, but each time the clock strikes, death has come nearer by one hour. My life is like a spark beneath a hoof. In one transient blink of the eye I appear on the surface of the Earth, and I am not even allowed to choose the color of the hair on my head. My heartbeats are measured, my breaths counted – just a few more times, and then it is all over. I am the husk where helplessness took up its abode, the quaking ghost in the faint glimmer between two endless darknesses, two sleeps. Why is man not commanded to cease from renewing his kin? Why this eternal work of Sisyphus, up and down the slope? A man sows but is never allowed to behold what he reaps, weaves and is clothed with derision!
He weaves and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap.
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.38
Animals are of a dissimilar, higher nature than man; they are spiritless creatures, without investigative self-consciousness. What exists on our Earth that is higher, more perfect, and more holy than a snow-white sheep on a midsummer day? It is man’s reward that he received as a cradle gift a tiny measure of passions that seek gratification. What should his goal be other than to gratify his passions and die? “Il piacere é la sola virtù,” “Self-gratification is the only virtue.”
When I was seventeen years old I took part in Spanish and French nighttime debauchery in which naked women, painted from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, performed fancy lesbian dances in between running to giant Negroes tied down to couches, while the audience lay in each other’s arms on the floor. The gratification of sexual demands is man’s highest pleasure, and justifiable only when it is gratified in such a way that no new individuals are born. Homosexuality is the highest level of sexual satisfaction. Of all the paths of gratification, that one is lowest and most brutish, most blind and imperfect, which leads to such a fatal consequence as the birth of new people. The goal of man is to destroy man. The goal of culture is to destroy man. The goal of wisdom is to destroy man. “Der Mensch ist Etwas das überwunden werden muß.” “Satan conduit le bal!”39 Homosexuality, drug addiction, and suicide are the joyful extirpation of the final and highest beings on Earth. The deepest desire of lovers is to be reminded of death in their embraces. Only death gratifies love.
Behold! These ideals point to end times.
44.
I do not think; have never thought. I know. It is my fate and misfortune to have always known without having thought or learned. He who needs to think and learn is endowed with the talent of never knowing anything. And that is a great grace. The noblest creature on Earth is the ass, because Christ rode one into Jerusalem.
A man’s aptitude is a product of time and patience, says Balzac. But my power is revealed in impatient coruscations. The deepest perceptions charge through my soul like crashes of thunder. The history of the Earth, the history of the solar system, the experience of mankind – all of it streams through my being in galvanic revelations. I am the mirror image of the development of mankind, of its grandeur and its pettiness, its distress, its wisdom, and its error. I am creation itself in the terrifying night gleam of sleepless self-consciousness. I cannot sleep; I cannot dream; I cannot forget. I stay awake, see, see through everything; I am clairvoyant; nothing can be concealed from me; I am everything, the universe my prison; the ends of the world slumber in my breast; I am alone; nothing exists but me, a feeble ephemera; I am suffering itself, dread, panic itself; death, it is I.
People suffer; all around me are people suffering. They suffer from freedom and oppression, from penury and opulence, from ignorance and knowledge, from love and hate, from God and Satan, from what they are and also what they are not. I met a little girl on the street this morning with a milk jug in one hand and bread in the other; she was walking slowly and carefully, so as not to slip on the ice, and the bread was almost as big as she was – she too was on the road to Golgotha. I felt so much pity for her, this poor little thing who walked so carefully for fear of breaking her jug, that I started sobbing when I came home.
What power do great men have? All that they accomplish is to rob the people of their ability to bear their fate. They drive the people out into the most desolate wilderness in the hope of the Promised Land, and in the wilderness the people collapse and die. At its best the Promised Land, the dreamland, proved to be seven times more accursed than the old one. It requires a great deal of childishness to fight for an ideal or solve a puzzle, because in the morning the ideal becomes soiled underwear that has gone from harlot to harlot, and the puzzle a Masonic symbol. Mankind has struggled and fought under the banners of its great men for a million years only to confirm the fact that nowhere is there a land of bliss, only various forms of suffering. There is a lichen called manna growing on rocks, and a rainbow in the sky, faith, the covenant with the Lord, but no one has ever reached its end, because it is only a mirage in man’s eye – and those who eat manna get sick to their stomachs. Primitive man makes holes in the ground, and the holes gape like wounds over his suffering while he lives, and fall together over his remains when he dies, like a scab over a wound. We cannot go any further. No one has ever reached a fairer dreamland than a three-ell-long grave. After a few years the worms promenade over my rotted head.
I find myself compelled to consider the three greatest giants of the last generation: Tolstoy, Strindberg, and Nietzsche.
Tolstoy wanted to help the world with wisdom and philanthropy, and died a martyr of despair. I know of few pilgrimages more dismal than the flight of the old man from Yasnaya Polyana a few days before he died. He almost runs, as if trying to convince himself that he is young and immortal, and then disappears and dies. No one became wiser or better; in Paris a few fanatics founded a club, that is all.
Nietzsche wanted to overcome man with the superman, and when he saw that all things came to naught he wrote to Rome and requested an audience with the pope. What a lamentable recourse to descry finally his last refuge under the protective wing of the Christian delusion! And he went insane in Torino two days after he wrote the letter, then lived for eleven years like a beast, imagining that he was Christ on the cross!
Strindberg wanted to save mankind from its misery using all of the medicines that have been tried on it since the start of the history of mankind. And yet this titanic, universal homeopath lived his whole life as a wretched target for the persecutions of Jesus Christ, until he himself surrendered to this cross-madness on his deathbed, and now one may read the inscription on the wooden cross over his grave in Stockholm, worded according to his own instructions: “O crux, ave, spes unica!”40
Even the most perfect man is nothing but a plaything of derision. Man is nothing but vanity.
45.
Chi siete voi che uscite dall’ eterno silenzio?
FAUSTO MARTINI41
What will is it that conjures up spirits from the mysterious depths of unconsciousness and makes them dance a whole lifetime by its hypnotic power, curse their provenance, and fear the way to dust? “Gieb, ja ergieb, grausamster Feind, mir – dich!”42 shouts Nietzsche.
Once I was up north in Kaldidalur, in the Icelandic wi
lderness, where the path leads over dapple gray boulders destitute and dead, and in the distance tower the glaciers like unsculpted images of saints, those holy and soulless gods of the wastelands. But in the middle of Kaldidalur there grows a little plant. I don’t know its name, but I saw it after I’d been traveling for half a day. It was growing alone there in the endless boulder-strewn tracts of land. And it bowed down when it saw me, because that was the first time since it was born that it had seen a living thing. I tore it out of the ground because it was exactly long enough and soft enough for me to use to clean my pipe.
I ask, why does the wave of life try to break forth from the mysterious depths? What is the goal of this blind struggle against triumphant death? Life is on the wrong path! It has no home in the material world; it dies! Poor being, you arise from eternal silence in order to die.
Everything that lives perishes, families as well as individuals; the sun burns out and the solar system dies of cold and starvation like little children. Ancient prophecies proclaim that the God of Judgment will come in fire. But this is false prophecy: the God of Judgment will come in ice. The sun has changed noticeably in the last ten months, says Soupault:
And soon the sun shall darken
The earthly clay disperse.
And all things turn to nothing
And no more universe.43
I stand at my window, look out at the fog, and ask, where will I be when the sun burns out – I, this perceiving speck of the universe, this questioning lump of earth, this trembling grain of dust, this husk of helplessness – where will I be then?
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