The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  For nothing had changed: form-fast and mute, unchanged in the visible world, sunk deeply under the surface of heaven were the multitude of stars; to the north was the serpent overcome by the arm of Hercules, to the south stood the threatening Archer; unchanged in the invisible realm stood the forest rigid in darkness, criss-crossed by serpentine, moon-shot pathways through which the dream-sated deer were running in search of the sparkling water-holes; unchanged in the distant and yet almost homelike realm of the invisible were the mountain-peaks, gleaming with silence and greeting the mountainous splendors of the moon, and far beyond anything that could be seen was a silver rustling—the sea; thus the night was disclosed to him, unchanged in its visible and invisible realms, one of a myriad nights continuing immutable since the very beginning, the world opened in its most invisible realms, sphere after sphere separated from each other, the fore-court of reality unchanged; oh, nothing had changed and yet everything was moved into a new distance which cancelled all nearness, penetrating the near and transforming it into an inscrutability which made one's own hand strange to one, which drew one's own glance out into the invisible, into an omnipresent remoteness that sucked up light, even the wall-shadowed, crackling firelight below into its nowhere, a remoteness that drew every tone of life, even the lonely, infrequent step of the sentry down there, out of the realm of the senses and took it all home into the inaudible, distance brought into proximity, the unreal element still in the reality of both, and in both, transported by distance, —beauty. For

  on the most transported horizons beauty shone forth

  streaming out into mankind,

  removed from perception, removed from the question,

  effortless

  only to be glimpsed

  the unity of the world established by beauty,

  founded on the beautiful balance of ultra-distance,

  which saturated all points of space, sating them with distance,

  and—sheerly demonic—not only resolved the most incongruous things

  into equal rank and meaning,

  but also—still more demonic—filled the remoteness

  of every point in space with the remoteness of time,

  bringing the quivering scales of time everywhere to a standstill,

  repeating its Saturnian suspension,

  not the annulment of time, far more its enduring now,

  the immediacy of beauty, as if by gazing upon it

  man, although set erect and growing upright, were permitted to sink back

  into his drowsy, recumbent listening,

  stretched out anew between the depths above and the depths below,

  newly at one with his listening-looking, which he sent forth as if the depths allowed a new participation,

  one free from knowledge and questioning,

  one which might be foregone as it was in the dawn of time or in its night,

  as if one might forego the choice between good and evil,

  fleeing the human duty of perception,

  fleeing into a new and hence false innocence, letting

  the abandoned and the duty-bound, evil and redemption,

  the cruel and the kind, life and death,

  the comprehensible and the incomprehensible

  be brought into a single indiscriminate unity,

  bound in the cestus of beauty,

  streaming out blithely into the beauty-embracing glance.

  Wherefore beauty was a bewitchment, enchanting and enchanted beauty

  demonically absorbing everything, gathering all into its Saturnian poise;

  wherefore beauty was a reversion to the pre-divine

  lingering in man as a memory of something that existed before his prescience,

  a memory of the tentative time of the creation, prior to the gods,

  a memory of the amorphous, dusk-enshrouded semi-creation, lacking the pledge, lacking development, lacking renewal;

  nevertheless recollection and as such pious, albeit

  with a piety impervious to the pledge, to development, to renewal,

  the demonic piety of the transported being who looked on beauty, on the threshold of ecstasy

  but without the will to go beyond it,

  turned back to the pre-creation,

  to the fore-show of the divine which resembles divinity,

  to beauty;

  for so all-embracing was the night spread out before him, so very remote, so filled with the silver dust of echo ringing back from the last reaches of the world, that the night and all that was buried within it became inseparable, whether a song, a yelping laugh, a hint of the animal voice, a rustling of the wind, one could not tell which. And this ingenuousness, this antagonism to knowledge with which beauty—as if to protect its frailty and tenderness—veiled itself, yes must veil itself, because the world-unity founded by it was much more evanescent, less resistant, more vulnerable than that of perception, one which furthermore and in contrast to the latter could be injured at any point by knowledge, this impercipience was radiated to him from the whole cycle of the visible world along with beauty, gentle and at the same time demonic in its allure, in its arrogant seduction to equivalence, demonically whispered to him from the outermost borders and penetrating to the innermost, a shimmering oceanic whisper streaming into him with the drenching light of the moon, balanced like the floating tides of the universe which interchange the visible and invisible in their whispering might, binding the multiplicity of things into the entity of the self, binding the multiplicity of thoughts into the unity of the world, both, however, denatured in becoming beauty: knowledge of beauty was lack of knowledge, perception of beauty was lack of perception, the one without vantage of thinking, the other without the full measure of reality, and in the rigidity of beauty's equilibrium—rigid the floating balance between thinking and reality, rigid the reciprocity of question and answer, of askable and answerable from which the world was born—the flood-scales of inner and outer worlds were brought to a standstill, becoming in this rigid balance the symbol of the symbol. Thus the night arched about him, the dark-gleaming space balanced in harmonious beauty and spread out Saturnically over all time, therefore surely remaining in time and not extending beyond the realm of earth, stretched from boundary to boundary while constituting at every point of itself the innermost and outermost of limits; thus arched the night about and within him, and beauty, the symbol of the symbol, was floated to him from the night, balanced over the world, bringing with it all the strangeness of inner and outer remoteness and withal curiously familiar, veiled in impercipience and yet curiously unveiled, because now it revealed itself to him suddenly as under a second magical illumination, the symbol of his own image, as clearly as though he himself had created it, the symbolization of the self in the universe, the symbolization of the universe in the self, the interlocked dual symbol of all earthly existence: illuminating the night, illuminating the world, beauty spread to the borders of unbounded space and, immersed with space in time, carried on with time through the ages, it became the ever-enduring now, giving boundaries to boundless time, the perfect symbol of earthly life limited by time and space, revealing the woe of limitation and the beauty of life on earth;

  thus in mournful sorrow,

  thus beauty was revealed to man,

  revealed in its self-containment which was

  that of the symbol and of equilibrium,

  the self gazing at beauty and the beauty-filled world

  enchantedly facing each other,

  each a-float in the place allotted to it,

  both limited, both self-contained, both in equilibrium

  and therefore balanced in their apposition in the space common to both:

  thus was revealed to man

  the self-containment of earthly beauty,

  the floating expanse and the magical beauty

  of self-contained space, borne on and benumbed by time,

  incapable of renewal by the question,

  incapable of
expansion by knowledge,

  the constant completeness of space held in balance

  by the influence of beauty within it, yet without renewal or expansion;

  thus space in its completeness and self-containment

  revealed itself in every one of its parts, at every point,

  as if each of these were its innermost core,

  revealing itself in every single figure, in every thing, in every human work

  as the symbol of its own spatial finitude

  at the innermost limit of which every created thing annuls itself,

  the symbol annulling and subliming space, beauty annulling and subliming space

  by the unity maintained between its inner and outer boundaries,

  by the infinitude of the self-containing boundaries,

  infinity—but bounded, the sorrow of man;

  thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary,

  and this boundary, the inner like the outer,

  the boundary of the remotest horizon or that of a single point,

  was spanned between the finite and the infinite,

  utterly remote while still of earth and within earthly time,

  yea, bounding time itself and causing it to linger,

  space lingering at its own border with time, but not annulling time,

  this being but a symbol, an earthly symbol of time's annulment,

  a mere symbol of death's abolishment, not the abolishment itself,

  the boundary of human life that never reached beyond itself,

  wherefore it was also the boundary of inhumanity—

  thus it was revealed to man as an event of beauty,

  revealing beauty for what it was, as the infinite in the realm of the finite,

  as an earthly sham-infinity,

  and hence a game,

  the game of earthly men amidst their earthliness, playing at eternity,

  the symbolic game on the periphery of earthly life,

  beauty the essence of the play,

  the game that man played with his own symbol in order that

  symbolically—since otherwise it was impossible—he might escape his fear of loneliness,

  repeating the beautiful self-deception again and again,

  the flight into beauty, the game of flight;

  thus there was revealed to man the rigidity of the beautified world,

  its incapacity for all growth, the limitation of its perfection,

  this world which survived only by repetition and

  which, even for this sham-perfection, had always to be striven for anew,

  it was revealed as the play of art in its service of beauty,

  as art's despair, its despairing attempt

  to build up the imperishable from things that perish,

  from words, from sounds, from stones, from colors,

  so that space, being formed,

  might outlast time

  as a memorial bearing beauty to the coming generations, art

  building space into every production,

  building the immortal in space but not in men —

  wherefore it lacked growth,

  wherefore it was bound to the perfection of mere repetition without growth,

  bound to an unattainable perfection and becoming more desperate as it came nearer to perfection,