He shifted upward a little on the pillows to ease his aching chest, very cautiously so that the outstretched landscape of himself which seemed to guarantee him clarity might not fall into disorder and confusion as was the case with those who stand erect; then he felt about him for the manuscript-chest and let his hand finger almost tenderly the surface of its rawhide cover; hot and exciting the feeling of work, the compelling feeling of the discoverer, the great wanderer-sense of creation awoke in him, and were it not that simultaneously there sprang up in him the great fear of the wanderer, the terrible fear of the lost wayfarer who mistakes his path in the impenetrability of night, the same profound fear which accompanies all creation, the hotly happy surge in his breast would have quelled the death-anticipation of the admonishing pains there, would have relieved the lack of breath, would have made him forgetful alike of fever's heat or chill, and nothing would have prevented him from immediately sitting down to work, prepared to begin anew, mindful of the task he had to fulfill to the drawing of his last breath, the task which could bring him fulfillment only with his last breath. No, nothing would have restrained him from work, nothing would have been allowed to restrain him, and yet everything did so, and did it so thoroughly that the finishing of the Aeneid had been at a standstill for months past and nothing remained but flight after flight. And neither the disease nor the pains, long since familiar, long since weathered or outwitted, were to be blamed for that, but rather the inescapable, inexplicable unrest, this alarming sense of being lost with no way out, this sharply-felt foreboding of an ever-threatening, ever-present engulfing calamity, its essence indiscernible, its source undiscoverable, especially as one was ignorant of whether the threat lurked within or without; lying quietly and breathing cautiously he listened into the darkness: the tapers on the candelabrum expired one after the other, only the small, patient light of the oil-lamp next to the couch survived, often swaying to and fro on the faintly ringing chain at the merest breath of a breeze, mirrored on the wall in a butterfly-soft, cobwebby, undulating shadow, and while outside the tumult of the street gradually subsided and the indeterminable noise dissolved into every sort of neighing, grunting, squawking, the drone of the festival receding into a clearer or deeper hum which was dispersed through the kaleidoscopic noise-picture, the even tread of the withdrawing troops became audible as a sort of ground bass, indicating that a section of the guard was retiring to quarters; then it became still, but soon the stillness was animated by a curious vibrancy, curious because the stillness itself was vibrant, as suddenly from afar, from every side—did it come from the fields just outside the city, or from those in Andes?—• the chirping of crickets became audible, the myriadfold sound of those myriad creatures, humming endlessly in the hush that was spread over the infinite. Quietly and gradually the ruddy reflection from the illumination of the street-festival paled also, the ceiling of the room grew black except for the bright spot directly above the lamp, which, as it shifted softly, seemed the light's painting of a pendulum, and the stars before the window stood in blackness. What was this unrest, the source of which he was seeking? why was there unrest now when the ebb of the low-despairing clamor should have betokened a general solace for him? No, the evil had remained, and now he perceived it, he was bound to perceive it: it was the evil of man's imprisoned soul, the soul for which every liberation turns into a new imprisonment, again and again.
He stared toward the window, the night circled in its immense space, the orb turned by Atlas resting on the giant's shoulders, strewn with sparkling constellations, the enormous cavern of night from which there was no release; he listened to the rustlings of night, and to him in his utter wakefulness, to him whom fever had brought so low that he burned and froze beneath his covers, there came in sharpened coexistence the pictures, the odors, the sounds, of the present together with those of every lived or livable moment in the twofold remembering toward past and future, so swollen by inevitable, inexplicable weirdness, so uncapturably fugitive, so hidden in mystery despite all their nakedness that he, whipped on and halting at once, was thrust back into the chaotic maze of separate voices—, the shapelessness he had thought to outrun took hold on him again, not as the indiscriminateness of the herd-beginning, but directly, indeed almost palpably, as the chaos of severance, and as a dissolution which by no hearkening or grasping could ever be conformed to unity; the demonic chaos of all separated voices, all separated perceptions, all isolated things, regardless of whether they belonged to the present, the past, or the future, this chaos now assailed him, he was given over to it, yes, this is what it had been since the roaring, indiscriminate noise of the streets had begun to change to a maze of separate voices. This was what it was. Oh, everyone was surrounded by a maze of voices, everyone wandered round in the maze his whole life long, wandering and wandering, yet bound to the spot in the dense forest of voices, entangled in the night-growth, tangled in among the forest roots, which took hold beyond all time and space, oh, everyone was threatened by the anarchic voices and their grasping arms, by voice-twigs and voice-branches which, twining about each other, entwined him, which in branching out from each other shot up erect and crooked into one another again, demonic in their independence, demonic in their separateness, voices of the second, voices of the year, voices of the aeon, which had spread out into a lattice-work of the world, crisscrossed, incomprehensible and impenetrable in their roaring muteness, humid with the groans of pain and harsh with the joyous savagery of a whole world. Oh, no one escaped the primordial roar, no one was spared it, for each one, whether he knew it or not, was nothing other than one of the voices, belonging to them with their insoluble, indivisible, impenetrable threat—, how could anyone sustain hope! the lost one was past saving, imprisoned in the maze, in which no breach or clearing could be discerned, and had he wished to stretch his hope beyond this, to send it over and beyond—there into the inextensible eternity where the unity, the order, the omniscience of the voice-totality was to be divined, to the promise of their great harmony, voice-locked, voice-releasing, to the last reverberating harmonic echo from the furthest spaces of universal unity, universal order, universal perception, to the last echo-solution of the universal task—such hope of a mortal, insolent and abhorrent to the gods, would have burst against the walls of deafness, dying away in the voice-maze, in the maze of perception, in the mazes of time, dying away to an expiring breath; for the voice-source of time's inception was unreachable, it lay beneath the depths of all roots, lying beneath all voices, beneath all muteness, impassable the root-springs of the forests, the root-springs in which the starry map of unity of order and of speech was stored, unbeholdable that symbol of all symbols, for infinite and more than infinite was the variety of their outspreading courses in the unsurpassable immensity of space, infinite was the number of identities, infinite the number of paths and their intersectings and also the multi-compartments of speech and memory as well as the profusion of their trends, and the infinitude of their private abysses were only very weak, very sparse reflections woven into the earthly meagerness of that which was not to be comprehended by thinking, of that which stored in its breath all starry spaces and would itself be preserved in even the tiniest point of the spheres, breathing itself in and out, streaming in and out, the reflection of a symbolization sheerly unutterable, sheerly unrememberable, sheerly unpredictable, the salvation of knowledge that by its effulgence outreached every lapse of time and transformed each split-second to timelessness: crossroad of all paths, compassed by no one, the immovable, transported journey's end! even the first, the very first step that would be taken in any direction of the road-mazes, were it ever so fleet, would require a lifetime and more than a lifetime for its consummation, it would require an endless life to retain a single scanty moment of recollection, an endless life to gaze but for a second into the profundities that language holds in its depths! by giving ear unto these depths he had hoped to be permitted to listen to death, he had hoped to lay hold on a knowledge, even if it were
only the divining gleam of an intuition of that perception-boundary which already was beyond earthly understanding, but even this hope had proved presumptuous in the face of the incomprehensibility that pulsed up from the echo-walls of the abyss, a glint that was scarcely more than a glimmer, now scarcely more than the memory of a glimmer, scarcely more than the echo of a memory, a fleeting breath so invisible that not even music would have been able to grasp it, to say nothing of being able to express this invisibility as a foretaste of impalpable infinity; no, nothing terrestrial was able to sunder the impenetrable thicket, no, no earthly means was sufficient to solve the eternal task, to disclose and announce the law, striking out toward that knowledge beyond knowledge, no, this was reserved for supernatural powers and transcendental means, a potency of expression that left all earthly expression far behind it, a language which would have to stand outside the maze of voices, beyond all earthly linguistics, a speech which would be more than music, a speech which would help the eyes to perceive, heartbreakingly and quick as a heart-beat, the unity of all existence, verily it must be a language still unfound and glowing in the supernal that could undertake this task, and the effort to approach such a language with paltry verses was rash, a fruitless effort and a blasphemous presumption,! ah, it had been granted to him to perceive the eternal task, the task of the soul's salvation, it had been granted him to set-to with a spade, and he had not noticed that he had lavished his whole life on it, wasted his life, frittered away the years, squandered time, not just because he had failed and had shown himself inadequate, inadequate to lay bare even a single rootlet, but because the mere decision to attempt the spade-work would exhaust an endless life, all the more since death overtook every soul and was overtaken by nothing, not even by the aid of an overheard language or a pre-heard memory; all-conquering was death, all-conquering the maze that was not to be cleared by anything, and mercilessly confined the lost one, helpless the lost one, himself but a helpless voice in the thicket of separateness. How then could anyone still sustain hope? did not the human event, however and wherever it happened, unhesitatingly disclose itself as a consequence of creaturely fear, from the twilight prison of which one could neither break out nor escape, as it was the anguish of the creature lost in a maze? He became more deeply aware of this anguish, he understood better than ever the unsilenced wish of the lost soul for the death-sublimating annulment of time, he understood better than ever the unquenchable hope of the creaturely masses, he understood what they were aiming at, they down below there, voices and more voices they also, with their wildly despairing clamor, he understood them, when, inviolable and unteachable, clinging to their individual and collective ardor, they screamed out of themselves and to themselves that somewhere in the thicket there must exist an excellent one, a mighty one, an extraordinary voice, the voice of a leader to whom they need only attach themselves so that in his reflected glory, in the reflection of the jubilation, the intoxication, the power of the imperial divinity they might with a gasping, wild, bullish, thundering assault still be able to clear an earthly path for themselves out of the entanglement of their existence, and, aware of this, he saw, he understood, he knew better than ever before, that his own aspirations were different only in form and presumptuousness from those of the frenzied herd's honest though brutal will-to-violation, not however in their objective, meaning, or content; that he had only disguised the simple, creaturely fear that clutched him with the selfsame force, falsified it in a yearning for the omniscient unity of law, falsified it in a vain and therefore doubly sanctimonious listening and fore-listening, that he had simply pushed off to the end of his earthly life the hope for a path-finding, extraordinary, guiding voice, that this most earthly mob-hope was his also, that he had made himself believe it would resound one day from the beyond and would then be supernatural, phantom of his presumption, which was given over to the terrestrial and forfeited to the vanity of all things earthly; oh, now he realized better than before the futility of their herdlike impulse to escape, the futility of their dogging fear, of their attempt at flight, which broke into an uproar with hope and lapsed into silence with disappointment and compelled them to run off again and again into the stark, unshadowed nothingness, lost in time, fixed in time, time unabolished; and he realized that the same lot was assigned to him, quite as inevitably, quite as inescapably,—the fall into the nothingness which does not abolish death, but which in itself is that very death. Oh, erratic and squandered his life, for from the outset the path he had taken had led nowhere, impeded by awareness of its wrong direction, impeded by knowing itself astray, erring and groping in the maze from the outset, a life of false renunciation and false farewell, impeded by the fear of the inevitable disappointment which, even as hope, had been pushed to the limit of life and earthly experience. Had this limit now been reached, so that nothing was left but disappointment? so that nothing was left but icy horror, this crippling and breathtaking horror of death which was perhaps unacknowledged but positive, and possibly even stronger than the dread of disappointment? nothing was left but the numbness which was laid on him like a mysterious penalty determined by his stars, punishing a predestined and unrequitable sin, a sin he had not committed and which was presumptuousness even without being committed, an eternally uncommitted sin standing eternally at his back, forever opposing the eternal task of understanding, the penalty for which was constantly imposed on him so that he might not perceive his task and its fulfillment, an invisible chastisement in a still more invisible numbness, the sin of not awakening and its punishment, time-benumbing, speech-benumbing, memory-benumbing, the drowsy listening benumbed into the void on the dreary field of death; and his body, pining away and aged with weariness, lay quite forlorn in this numbness, extending saturnically and drowsily over the zones of himself which became more and more transparent, more and more evanescent, forsaken even by the demons, continuing to be still more desolate, still more immobile, as if they were blank windows opening upon no view: nothing remained but this, nothing else was even to be remembered, for everything which had once signified life's advantages had failed; the once-pledged, once-timeless memory had become feeble, aging even quicker than he had, lost to him and submerged into what had been barely created, barely lived; and the translucent and glittering pictures of his life's landscape, once so dazzling, had grown dim, had withered and died away; his verses, which he had twined about them had dried up and fallen away, all this had blown away like faded leaves, no longer remembered but merely known about, season-wafted, season-weary, a forgotten rustling; oh, how much there had been; the far past, the near past had existed in thousandfold diversity, in millionfold identities, yet it had never caught up to him, it had never been allowed to become a whole, the circle of memory was not closed, the past would never catch up with him, it was, even in the living, doomed to be unlived and to remain undone, just as the performance of his endless task had been consigned to the unfinished, halted at the very first step, even as this first step, notwithstanding it had already lasted a whole lifetime, remained still untaken as at the very outset, held in a ghastly unshakable paralysis for which there was neither advance nor retreat, consequently no second step could follow the first untaken one, because the distance between each single living second had grown to an immense, empty space which was not to be bridged; and from this point on nothing whatsoever followed, either quickly or slowly, because nothing was able to continue, the done and the undone, the imagined and the unimagined, the uttered and the unuttered, the written and the unwritten, all unable to continue and—, oh ye gods, the Aeneid!—must this also remain unfinished, unable to be continued, unable to be completed like his whole life! Had this actually been determined by the stars? was this actually to be the fate of the poem?! the fate of the Aeneid, his own fate in its unfulfillment! Was this conceivable, oh was this conceivable?! The heavy portal of fear had sprung open and behind it the cavern of horror reared up, mighty and all-encompassing. Something unknown, fearful, ghastly, assailing him simult
aneously from within and without, ripped him up; a sudden, malignant outbreak, superlatively painful, tore him aloft with all the devastating, convulsive, stiflingly desperate force inherent in the first lightning-and-thunderclap of a rising storm; thus chokingly it drove into him, death-dealing, death-threatening, yet the seconds following hard upon each other enriched in flashes the empty space between them with that inconceivable thing called life, and it almost seemed to him as if hope blinked up once again in those flashes while, with the fleetness of a breath or a glance, he was being torn aloft in the clutch of the iron, hand; it seemed to him that all this was happening so that the neglected, the lost, the unfinished might still be retrieved if only in this instant of renewed second-wind; overcome as he was by pain, by fear, by torpor, he knew not whether it was hope or no-hope, but he did know that every second of new-lived life was needful and momentous, he knew he had been hounded for the sake of this up-flickering of life, whether it lasted a short or a long time, chased up and away from the couch of torpor; he knew he had to escape the breath-lack of the narrow-walled and shut-in room, that once more he must send his glance outward, turned away from himself, turned away from the zones of his self, turned away from the dreary field of death, that just once more, for a single time, perhaps for the last time, he must come to comprehend the vastness of life, he must, oh he must again behold the stars; and starkly lifted up from the bed, held in the clutching fist that gripped into his whole body and yet grasped him from without, he moved himself with stiff-jointed legs, like a marionette convoyed on wires, uncertainly as though on stilts, back to the window against the frame of which he leaned exhausted, a little bent over because of his weakness but despite this held upright so that, as with elbows drawn back he satisfied his hunger for air with deep regular breaths, his being might disclose itself anew, participating in the breath-stream of the yearned-back spheres.
The Death of Virgil Page 9