The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  constrained to return constantly into its own beginning which was its end,

  and hence pitiless,

  pitiless toward human sorrow which meant no more to art

  than passing existence, no more than a word, a stone, a sound, or a color

  to be used for exploring and revealing beauty

  in unending repetition;

  and thus beauty revealed itself to man as cruelty,

  as the growing cruelty of the unbridled game

  which promised the pleasure of infinity through the symbol,

  the voluptuous, knowledge-disdaining pleasure

  of an earthly sham-infinity,

  hence thoughtlessly able to inflict sorrow and death,

  as happened in the realm of beauty at the remote periphery,

  accessible only to the glance, only to time,

  but no longer available for humanity and the human task;

  thus beauty revealed itself to man as the law that lacked perception,

  beauty in its abandonment proclaiming itself as a law unto itself,

  self-contained, inextensible, incapable of development or renewal,

  pleasure the rule of the game,

  self-gratifying, voluptuous, unchaste, unchangeable,

  the beauty-saturated, beauty-saturating game in which

  beauty was at play with itself,

  passing the time but not annulling it,

  playing out fate but not controlling it,

  the game that could be repeated endlessly, continued endlessly,

  yet one that had been destined from the beginning to be broken off,

  because only humanity is divine;

  and thus the intoxication of beauty revealed itself to man

  as the game forlorn from the outset, forlorn

  in spite of the eternal balance in which it was established,

  in spite of the necessity which compelled it to be resumed again and again,

  forlorn, because the unavoidable repetition brought with it

  the unavoidable loss,

  forlorn, because the intoxication of repetition and that of the game

  were inevitably reciprocal in their affects,

  both caught in the twilight,

  both subject to lapse,

  both without growth though assuredly waxing in cruelty—

  whereas the true growth,

  the increasing knowledge of perceptive mankind,

  undeterred by lapse and freed from repetition, unfolded itself in time,

  unfolded time to timelessness, so that

  time, as it consumed all lapse by force of growing reality,

  might break through and pass beyond boundary after boundary,

  the innermost like the outermost, leaving behind symbol after symbol,

  and even though it left the final symbolic nature of beauty undisturbed,

  untouched the necessity of its consummate harmony,

  yet the earthly quality of this game had nonetheless to be uncovered,

  the inadequacy of the earthly symbol be revealed,

  the sadness and despair of beauty laid bare,

  beauty stripped of intoxication and sobered,

  its perception forfeited and itself lost in impercipience,

  and with it, the sobered self,

  its poverty—,

  and he, to whom the symbolic nature of the self, of beauty, of the game, of time's passing, had come as an illumination, streaming to him by unavoidable necessity from the innermost and outermost limits of the world, from the innermost and outermost spaces bound by the night, so that he bore the whole occurrence within himself, buried in himself even though he was confined in it, held within the bounds of necessity, held into the limited space of his own ego, within the spatial boundaries of the world and within the symbol of its boundlessness, held within the scope of the game, within the compass of an overdistant nearness, the compass of beauty, the compass of the symbol, which was questionable at every point and yet which warded off and transfixed every question, held in the constriction of every kind of rigidity, he himself rigid, stifled by the rigidity, he sensed, he grasped, that none of these spaces reached beyond the transparent cover which was spanned between the realms above and those below, that all of them lay in the interrealm of the still-unachieved infinity, that their borders were those of the infinite while yet belonging to the realm of earth: the still-earthly, the realm of beauty, the terrestrial, still terrestrial, infinity! it was within this sphere that he was held, confined within it; he was confined in the space of the earthly breath, but expelled from the space of the spheres, from that of the true breath. And sensible of the confinement, aware that in it lay the cause of all rigidity, the cause for all holding of the breath, he felt on all sides a force at work to shatter this constriction, feeling the necessity, the inevitability, of such a shattering in the depths of his being, in the depths of his soul, in the depths where he breathed or did not breathe; he felt this bursting and he knew what it was, sensing and realizing how it had been made ready in him and in the world, how it dwelt in him even though it surrounded him; he was aware of it as something physical, lying in wait to gag and choke him, robbing him of breath as it robbed the visible-invisible world, but nonetheless aware that it was a demonic temptation weaving within and about him, surging high within him and breaking over him, bodily-disembodied, the temptation to destroy until all was destroyed, to shatter until all was shattered, the temptation to self-surrender and self-derision, to self-destruction, choking him, shaking him through and through, but still promising deliverance; thus it was that he felt something in him, lurking, ready to spring and burst him asunder, the proximity of an inscrutable feeling so ancient that it was beyond recollection, thus he realized it and thus he wished it to come about, in a sheerly atavistic opposition to the numbness, to its further development, to the restriction of the limited space, to existence and its still-existing incongruities, but furthermore to the residual sorrow behind all play and all beauty, oh, it was the temptation of an immense, primitive lust, it was an immense, itching lust, the itch to burst everything, to shatter the world, to explode his own ego, shaken as he was by the lust of a still greater, still earlier knowledge, oh it was such an intensification of feeling, of experiencing and of knowing that it became enlightenment, an enlightenment that came to be perception, yes even self-perception, flooding up to him from the deepest repository of the prescience in which he was held, a last comprehension streaming to him, and in a flash he perceived that the bursting of the beautiful was caused by nothing but naked laughter and that laughter was the predestined explosion of worldly beauty, of which it had been an attribute from the first, inherent in beauty forever, shimmering out as a smile at the unreal borders of utter-distance, but bawling out noisily on that curving horizon which marked the turning point of beauty's duration, breaking out as the booming, thundering demolishment of time by laughter, as the laughing, demonic force of complete destruction, laughter being the necessary counterpart of world-beauty, the desperate substitute for the lost confidence in wisdom, the end of the intercepted flight into beauty, the end of beauty's interrupted game; oh sorrow for sorrow, making game with the game, pleasure in the very expulsion of pleasure, a doubling of sorrow, a doubling of the game, a doubling of pleasure, this was laughter, a constant flight from the haven of refuge, beyond the game, beyond the world, beyond perception, the bursting of world-sorrow, the eternal tickle in the masculine gorge, the cleaving of beauty-fixed space to a gape in the unspeakable muteness of which even the nothing became lost, enraged by the muteness, enraged by the laughter, divine even this:

  for

  the prerogative of gods and men was laughter,

  springing first from that god who recognized himself,

  springing dumbly-aware from his intuition,

  from the intuition of his own destructibility,

  from his intuition of the destructibility of the creation

  in which, as a created an
d creative part, he prevailed

  a god, growing by virtue of worldly wisdom toward self-perception and beyond it, back

  to intuition,

  whence arose laughter;

  oh divine birth and human birth, oh death of the gods and of men,

  oh their common beginning and ending, eternally implicated with each other,

  oh, laughter stemmed from the knowledge that the gods are not divine,

  from the knowledge common to gods and men

  originating in that unquiet and disquietingly transparent

  zone of communion

  which was spanned demonically between this world and the one beyond,

  in order that in its beclouded zone of demons

  gods and men could and might encounter each other,

  and though it were Zeus who struck up laughter in the circle of the male gods,

  it was the human being who aroused the laughter of the gods,

  just as

  the laughter of men was aroused by the behavior of animals

  in the endless cycle of drolly serious recognition,

  just as

  the god found himself again in man and man found himself again in the animal,

  in order that the animal might be raised through man to the god,

  the god, however, returning to men through the animal,

  god and man united in sorrow though overcome by laughter, because

  this was the farcical game of that first sudden confusing of all spheres,

  the game in the fatal rules of which

  they had been caught,

  the farce of the first sudden disclosure of native nearness,

  the great farce of intermingling the spheres,

  a vagaiy of the gods, a beauty-destroying, order-annulling game,

  the divine in creation and the creature frightfully commingled,

  and both cheerfully surrendered to chance,

  the abomination and scorn of the knowing mother-goddess,

  the sport and hazard of the gods who, delivered from perception and disdaining it,

  were flooded by laughter,

  because this joke of abruptly uniting the spheres,

  perpetrated without the faintest trace of perception or questioning or any kind of effort,

  executed itself as self-abandonment, as a jovial, frivolous

  surrender

  to chance and to time,

  to the unpredictable surmise, to the surmised unpredictable,

  to the delightful immediacy of a guess,

  unconcerned that it be so,

  even as to death;

  a joke of the inscrutable, a joke so huge that

  with the sportive destruction of the last remnants of lawfulness,

  with the ludicrous collapse of order, of the boundaries and bridges,

  with the breakdown of the fixed spaces and their beauty,

  with the collapsing sphere of the beautiful,

  there followed the final and ever-valid reversion,

  the reversion

  into a boundless realm without knowledge, without name, without speech, without connection, without dimension,

  the partitions tumbling down,

  the intuitions of the gods thrown in with that of men,

  breaking down their common creation but also

  laying bare the nature of the ageless pre-creation,

  reversed by this disruption to immediate proximity,

  the vision of the pre-creation laid bare in an impression

  so remote that it was no longer memory,

  an impression inaccessible even to the divination of the god,

  laying bare an amorphousness in which

  the real and the unreal,

  the living and the lifeless,

  the significant and the atrocious

  were coupled into a sameness beyond conception,

  laying bare that unconjectured nowhere, in which

  the stars float at the bottom of the waters

  and where no thing could lie so far from another

  as not to disclose itself as interlocked with it,

  waggishly turned inside-out and outside-in,

  thrown together by chance and branching out from each other

  by chance,

  waggish

  these indiscriminate chance-creations of time's passing,

  herds of gods, of men, of animals, of plants, herds of stars

  containing each other,

  the nowhere of laughter exposed,

  the very world-inversion exposed in a laugh,

  as if that pledge of creation had never existed,

  the pledge by which gods and men had mutually bound themselves,

  duty-bound to perception and to an order which creates reality,

  bound to helpfulness—the duty to duty:

  oh, this was the laughter of betrayal,

  the laughter of unburdened, carefree faithlessness,

  this was the unkindness and irresponsibility of the pre-creation,

  aye, that it was,

  the unkind inheritance, the bursting seed of withheld laughter,

  inherent in the creation of all worlds from the outset, ineradicable,

  already shining out from the smiling, serene reticence

  by which, in premature loveliness, it offered to charm,

  shining out in the premature-pitiless knowledge by which

  even horror, dissipated by beauty, was transfixed

  at a pity-lost, pity-frozen distance,

  and beyond that, beyond all distance whatsoever, where the innermost and outermost unite,

  shining out in the dimensionless un-space of the ironic and terrible surface,

  the surface of beauty, to which it would topple

  when the borders of time were reached, showing forth its innermost and underlying nature,

  the inborn nature of beauty, born out of beauty again and again,

  its unformed lack of creativeness, impervious to form,

  born out of, tumbling out of, hurled out of beauty,

  laughter:

  the language of the pre-creation—,

  for nothing had changed, oh nothing: form-fixed and mute, sunk deeply into the dome of heaven, perjury still lowered, redolent of laughter; there in the inviolable song of the stars, impregnating the earth with quietude, impregnated with the earthly quiet, there in the shining continuance of the world, in the realms of the visible and invisible and in the beauty that turns to song, there, trembling from restraint and ready to break out, forcibly tickling and strangling, lurked the sultry laughter akin to beauty, the lowering, tempting desire for destruction was there within and about him, it embraced him yet lurked within him, expressing horror and bringing it to pass, the language of the pre-creation, the language of the void, to bridge which nothing has ever existed, nameless the space in which it functioned, nameless the stars which stood above it, nameless, unrelated, expressionless, the solitude of the space kept for language amidst the spheric confusion, the unavoidable place of dissolution for all beauty; and gazing at beauty while already held into a new space—the space feverish with horror and he also feverish with horror—he perceived that no further entrance to reality presented itself, that there was no return and no renewal, nothing but the laughter that destroyed reality, indeed that the wordly existence laid bare by laughter could hardly claim to be considered as real, question and answer annulled, the duty of perception cancelled, and cancelled the great hope that the pledge of knowledge would not be in vain, not merely because truth was futile but rather because it was superfluous within the range of petrifying beauty, within the range of its collapse, within the range of laughter—, worse and more malign than the herd-sleep was laughter, no one laughs in dreams unless under pain, unless under death from the growing cruelty juggled so jestingly before him by beauty; oh, nothing was so near to evil as the god tumbling down into a false-humanity or the man catapulted toward a false-divinity, both lured toward evil, to
ward calamity, toward the uncreated state of the animal, both playing with destruction, with a demonic self-destruction from which they were perchance separated only by a hand's breadth, since anything might be expected in the ceaseless flow of time, both laughing over the uncertainty and the brevity of this time-span surrendered to fate, both prey to a laughter that took pleasure in the lightly abandoned duty and the lightly broken pledge, both tickled and excited by the risk, laughing over the cancellation of the divine as well as the human element in the irrelevancy of all knowledge, laughing over the propagation of evil which is born from the beautiful evil, laughing over the reality of the unreal, jubilant because the pledge of creation has been broken, become maniacal with exultation over the success of their deed, a treacherous undoing and not a deed, the fruit of the broken pledge. Then he understood: the three staggering below had been witnesses to the perjury.

  And they had become witnesses against him. That was why it had been necessary for them to come. That was why he had had to await their coming. They had appeared as witnesses and complainants, to accuse him of sharing in their guilt, alleging that he was one of them, an accomplice, a perjurer, and guilty even as they, because, like them, he knew nothing of the pledge which had been broken and continued to be broken, because from the outset he had been oblivious of the pledge and of duty, aye, and it was this that increased his guilt, notwithstanding the necessity by which his life, just as theirs, was fate-ordered to reach this point, the point of relinquishing the creation again: the creation was once more relinquished, gods and men again abandoned to the unborn state of the pre-creation in which life and death are equally doomed to be meaningless, for duty derived only from the pledge, for meaning derived only from the pledge, and nothing retained meaning when, duty being forgotten, the pledge was broken, the pledge given at the obscure beginning, the pledge which must be kept by gods and men although no one knows what it is, no one except the unknown god, for all language stemmed from him, the most hidden of heavenly creatures, only to return to him, the guardian of the pledge of prayer, of duty. It was to await him, the unknown god, that his own glance had been compelled earthward, peering to see the advent of him whose redeeming word, born from and giving birth to duty, should restore language to a communication among men who supported the pledge, hoping thereby to retrieve language from the regions above and below speech, the regions into which man—this too his prerogative— had plunged it, seeking to rescue it from the cloudy state of beauty and the tatterdom of laughter, that it might be led out of the thicket of opacity, in which it had been squandered, and reinstated as the instrument of the pledge. This hope had been a vain one, and the world, sunk back into amorphousness, into meaninglessness, sunk back into an unborn state, encircled by the shadowy mountains of its pre-natal death over which it could not be lifted by the wings of any earthly death, lay spread out before him, the world threaded with beauty and sundered by laughter, its language lost and without human brotherhood, because of the broken pledge of which it too was guilty; instead of the unknown god, instead of him bearing the pledge that led to duty, these three had come hither: the bearers of dereliction.