The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  Could it be anything else? Man stands erect, he alone, yet he lays him down, stretched out quietly for sleep, for love, for death—, and it is also this threefold nature of his lying down that distinguishes him from all other creatures. Destined to grow upright as long as man stands erect, the human soul reaches out from the dark abyss where her roots are entwined in the humus of existence and strives upward even unto the sun-drenched dome of the stars, bearing upward her cloudy sources from the regions of Poseidon and Vulcan, bringing downward the clarity of her Apollonian goal, and the nearer she comes in this upward growth to being light-drenched form, the more shapely she becomes in her shadowing, branching out and unfolding like a tree, the more is she enabled to unify the darkness and the light in the shadowy leaves of her branches; but when she has stretched out, abandoned to sleep, to love, to death, when she herself has become an outstretched landscape, then her task is no longer the merging of opposites, for in sleeping, loving, dying, the soul is no longer either good or evil, she has become only an unbroken endless hearkening: spread out to infinity, infinitely held in the orbit of time, infinite in her repose, she is absolved from growth, and without growth, along with the landscape which is herself, she persists as the unchanged and unchangeable Saturnian realm throughout the whole of time, persisting from the golden age to the age of brass, aye, even beyond it to the return of the golden age, and by virtue of her nestling into the landscape, by virtue of her imprisonment in the realm of earth and earth's meadows, on the surface of which the spheres of heavenly light and earthly darkness part one from the other, she is like them in being the border, separating and binding the regions above and below, belonging like Janus to both, to those of the wavering stars as well as to those of the weighty stones, to the etheric regions as well as to the fires of the underworld, januslike the double aspects of infinity, januslike the double aspects of the soul, as in her twilight she lies quietly outstretched to infinity so that her hearkening prescience may partake of the significance of both zones without uniting them; however, the circumstance as such has no meaning for her, is not worthy of pre-hearkening or prescience for she feels it neither as growth nor as fading nor as deterioration, neither as a blessing nor a burden, but more as a constant return of the all-encompassing Saturnian era in which the landscape of the soul and the earth are stretched out infinitely, inseparable in their respirations, inseparable in their seasons of sowing and blossoming, in their harvest or growth, in their dying and resurrection, in their boundless seasons, interwoven with the eternal return, surrounded by the circle of eternal sameness and consequently stretched out quietly for sleep, for love, for death—, a hearkening of the landscape and the soul, the Saturnian hearkening to deathless dying, golden and brazen together.

  He was listening to dying; it could not be anything else. The knowledge of this had come over him without any shock, at most with the peculiar clarity which usually accompanies a mounting fever. And now, lying and listening in the darkness, he understood his life, and he understood how much of it had been a constant hearkening to the unfolding of death, life unfolded, consciousness unfolded, unfolded the seed of death which was implanted in every life from the beginning and determined it, giving it a twofold, threefold significance, each one developed from the other and unfolding through it, each the image of the other and its reality—was not this the dream-force of all images, particularly of those which gave direction to every life? was not something of the same sort hidden in the cave-images of the universal night which, miraculous and fear-inspiring with timelessness, heavy with stars and presaging eternity, domed death over all existence? What once in boyhood had been a childish and childlike conception of death, the conception of a grave into which the body would be lowered, had unfolded to the great image of the cave, and the erection of the mausoleum beside the Bay of Naples, there near the Posilipian grotto, was more than a mere repetition and visualization of the old childish concept; nay, the whole dome of death was symbolically expressed by this building, perhaps still a little childish when reduced to such earthly dimensions, nevertheless the symbol of the mighty all-embracing domain of death in which he, ever aware of the goal and yet seeking it, he a path-seeker in the dome of death, had day-dreamed a whole life away. For the sake of the all-embracing might of this goal he had long, yes too long, searched for his own vocation; for the sake of this always known yet never known goal, dissatisfied with every profession, he had prematurely broken away from each one, unable to find peace in any, either in the calling of a medical man, a mathematician, astrologer, philosophical scholar or teacher: the demanding but unrealized vision of knowledge, the grave recognizable image of death had stood perpetually before his eyes, and no vocation measured up to that, as none exists that is not exclusively sub-serviated to the knowledge of life, none with the exception of that one to which he had finally been driven and which is called poetry, the strangest of all human occupations, the only one dedicated to the knowledge of death. Only he who dwelt in the interrealm of farewell—oh, it lay behind him and there was no returning,—only he who tarried in the dusk on the banks of the stream, far from its source, far from its estuary, was in durance to death, serving death like the priest by virtue of his office which stood above any personal vocation, mediating between the above and the below, pledged to the service of death and through this likewise banished to the interrealm of farewell; yes, he had always deemed as priestly the task of the singer, perhaps because of the strange consecration to death inherent in the enraptured fervor of every work of art; until now he had seldom dared to admit it to himself, he had repudiated it, just as in his first poems he had not dared to approach death, but rather had been vigilant to ward off that which threatened and was always at hand by the lovely-loving power of an ardent love for life, more and more futile in his resistance since the poetic power of death had proven itself the stronger, acquiring step by step the privileges of domicile which, in the Aeneid, assumed full sovereign rights, following the will of the gods: the clattering, bloody, admonishing, unchanging sovereignty of fate, the all-conquering sovereignty of death, which by this token also conquers itself and annuls itself. For all simultaneousness was sunk in death, all simultaneity in life and in poetry was forever obliterated in death's complete annulment, and death was filled by day and night, they penetrating each other and becoming the bi-colored cloud of dusk; oh, death was filled by all the diversities that had proceeded from unity so that finally through death these might achieve to unity, death was filled by the initial herd-wisdom of the beginning and by the isolating knowledge of the end—it was comprehension in a single moment of existence, in the very moment which was already that of non-existence; for death was involved in an unending reciprocity with the stream of life and the stream of life flowed incessantly into death, welcomed by death, turned back to the source, the lapse of time changed to the unity of remembrance, to the memory of worlds upon worlds, to the memory of the god: only he who accepted death was able to complete the orbit of mortality, only the eye of him who sought the eye of death would not fail when it gazed into nothingness, only he who hearkened to death had no need of flight, he might remain, because memory had become the well of simultaneousness, and he alone who plunged into memory could hear the harp-tone of that moment in which the terrestrial should open into the immense unknown, opened to rebirth, and to the resurrection of everlasting memory—, landscape of childhood, landscape of life, landscape of death, they "were one in their indivisible simultaneousness, previsioning the landscape of the gods, the country of the very beginning and the very end, eternally joined by the span of the seven-colored, dewy-breathed bow, oh, the pastures of the fathers. Much took place for the sake of memory, divulging itself at last as a listening to death; and much that was taken for death was only memory, anxious yearning memory that had need to be guarded with care that it might never become lost. It had been so and not otherwise in the case of the tomb near the grotto of Posilipo, caressed by sea breezes, played upon by springlike shado
ws, entwined in green leaves, this almost playfully built homestead of death full of childhood memories, which he had incorporated into a gardenlike serenity without having been conscious of doing so, in consequence of which everything that had been taken in by the child's eyes at the paternal house in Andes was to be found here on a smaller scale and only slightly altered; for example, the entrance drive to the gate of the courtyard was now the main path through the garden, equipped with the same double curve, bordered on the left by the same laurel bushes, leading on the right to the mound of his childhood games, even though this one was crowned by only a single cypress instead of the ancient olive-groves, while to the rear of the edifice, in great tranquility here as there, the elm trees, shrouded in a twittering of birds, arose today even as in times past, a shelter of solitude and peace; and just as in boyhood it had been possible to pass his hand over the wattled hedge, now it was possible with equal definiteness to dream back, just as definite and valid for all times as it had been to dream forward, to dream toward death and dying, the goal of all dreamy hearkening since the days of childhood, the goal and source of his memory, clear, unloseable, knowledge-seeking, although the image of the tomb was only a small, an extremely small fragment of memory set in the stream of the past, a quite palpable island, emerging almost by chance in its slight palpability, vanishing, and therefore deserving oblivion compared to the roaring width of the flood which poured itself into his constant hearkening; constantly the flood came toward him, memory-wide, wave-wide, constantly and softly and grandly it advanced, wave after wave of the once-beheld, gleaming in the harp-tone of enduring ineffability—oh, lovely imprisonment of youth, enfolded and ready for freedom—, and it was as if all brooks and ponds of yore poured themselves into this stream of memory, drizzling between the fragrant willows, drizzling between banks verdant with trembling reeds, lovely images without end, themselves a cluster picked by the hands of a child, a cluster of lilies, gilly-flowers, poppies, narcissus and buttercups, the image of childhood in a landscape revealed by wandering and wandering, by song after song, the image of the paternal pastures, the image he had been forced to seek wherever he had been driven, the image of the one and unforgettable landscape of his life, ineffable-inexpressible image, despite that it was so very luminous, so sharp of contour, sun-drenched, transparent, despite this unfailing clarity with which it had accompanied him, so inexpressible that however often he had depicted it it only resounded in the unutterable, always only there where language is insufficient, where it strikes beyond its own earthly-mortal boundaries and penetrates into the unutterable, abandoning an expression through words and—only singing itself into the structure of the verses—opening up between the very words a swooning, breathless, momentary abyss so that life could be comprehended and death be apprehended in these silent depths, which have become silent to disclose the completeness of the whole, the simultaneous stream of creation in which the eternal rests: oh, goal of poetry, oh, these moments in which speech sublimated itself beyond all description and all communication, oh, these moments in which it plunged into simultaneousness so that it could not be determined whether memory was gushing from speech or speech from memory, these were the moments in which the landscape of childhood had begun to blossom, leaving itself behind, growing beyond itself and every memory, beyond every beginning and every end, transmuted to a simple, rustic, shepherd's order in some golden age, transmuted to the scene of the Latin emergence, transmuted to the reality of the on-marching, commanding and serving gods, not the primordial beginning, surely not the original order, surely not the initial reality but still a symbol of it, not, to be sure, to the voice which was expected to call out from the furthest unknown, out of the inexpressible and extraordinary, out of the unchangeably and utterly divine, but still a token of it, but surely the echo-like symbol of its being and almost an affirmation of it—, the symbol that was reality, reality that would become the symbol in the face of death. These were the moments of resounding deathlessness, the moments of essential life emerged from its twilight, and it was in these moments that the true form of death revealed itself most clearly: rare moments of grace, rare moments of perfect freedom, unknown to most, striven for by many, achieved by few—, but among those who were permitted to retain such moments, to grasp the fugitive evanescence of death's shape, he who succeeded in giving shape to death by incessant listening and searching would find together with its genuine form his own, real shape as well, he was shaping his own death and with it his own shape, and he was immune from the reversion into the humus of shapelessness. Seven-colored and divinely mild the rainbow of childhood arched for him over all his existence, daily seen anew, the shared creation of man and the gods, the creation proceeding from the strength of the word with the knowledge of death: had not this been, the hope for which he had been obliged to bear the agony of a hunted life devoid of every peaceful joy? He looked back on this life of abnegation, of an actually still continuing renunciation, on this life that had been without resistance to death though full of resistance to participation and love, he looked back on this life of farewell that lay back of him in the dusk of rivers, in the dusk of poetry, and today he knew more clearly than ever before that he had taken on all this for the sake of that very hope; perhaps he was not to be mocked and execrated because life's great travail had as yet not led to the fulfillment of hope, because the task he had wanted to discharge had been over-great for his weak forces, because the medium of the poet's art was perhaps not intended for this after all, however he also realized that this was not the case, that the justification of a task or the lack of its justification was not to be reckoned by its earthly accomplishment, that it was negligible whether his own strength sufficed or not, whether any other man with greater strength were to be born or whether a better solution than the one put forth by poetry were to be found, all this was irrelevant, for the choice had not been his: certainly day after day and countless times during every day he had decided and acted in accord with his free choice, or at least he had thought that the choice was free, but the great line of his life was not of his own choosing nor in accord with his free will, it had been a compulsion, a compulsion on a level with the redemption and the evil of existence, a fate-enjoined yet fate-surpassing compulsion, commanding him to search for his own shape in that of death and thus to win the freedom of his soul; for freedom is a compulsion of the soul whose redemption or damnation is always at stake, and he had heeded the injunction, obedient to the task of his fate.