The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  WOE to that man who has not shown himself equal to the grace again bestowed upon him, woe to the penitent who cannot bear his penance, woe to the creaturely remnant of existence who will not put off his existence, alas, who cannot do so, because the extinguished memory persists in its emptiness; woe to that man, who despite his contrition remains unalterably undelivered, condemned to creatureliness! about him the laughter breaks out anew, and it is the laughter of horror, a laughter neither male nor female, neither that of the gods nor the goddesses, it is the empty tittering of the void, it is the remnant of vitality in the void that does not disappear for the mortal, that titters and breaks into laughter, the remnant which unveils itself as existence in nothingness, nothingness in existence, as the union of sham-life and sham-death, as the hilarious knowledge of this sham-dead existence, as the terrible and fearful remnant of knowledge amidst the emptiness, maniacal and inducing madness, becoming more and more intense until the emptiness is turned into naked horror. For the more that remorse gains ascendancy over the human being and strips him of his human essence, the more directly it takes hold on the creaturely and the bestial in human nature, the quicker it comes to grips with animal fear, the horror-hounded fear of the human being who has been hurled back into his creaturely loneliness and like a stray-ejected part of the flock cannot find its way back to the herd; this was the horrible fear implanted in all the herd-born from the beginning of things, the fear of a discarnate death-emptiness, and—at the final peak of fright, in the final deliverance to fear, almost beyond death—it was the mute terror of the beast that, alone in its littleness, invisibly overcome, bereft of consciousness, creeps trembling under some dark shrubbery so that no eye may watch it dying. Woe to the penitent whose soul is incapable of bearing the little loneliness laid upon it, its smallness comes to be unconsciousness, and the grace of humility becomes an empty degradation for him. Had it gone so far? His thinking was lowly, insofar as it still existed, his actions were those of an. animal, insofar as there were any, and laughter, blindly hidden, waited within the inaudible; suddenly and without deliberation he had reached the bed and was crouching in it pitifully, his throat constricted, a dry coldness in his limbs, surrendered unconscious to the black-invisible omnipotence spread out doubly over the contrite and the creaturely, surrendered unconscious to a realm beyond fear, beyond terror, beyond horror, beyond death, yet he felt fear, terror, horror and death break out anew, feeling the horror in the intangible, perceptible, even in imperceptibility; he was let fall while yet being held, still held, held into the empty space of horror, oh, he was held into the horror and at the same time filled with horror: first and last memories touched each other, both lost and locked in loneliness within the thicket of life, the thicket of voices, the thicket of images, the thicket of memory, the beginning never dimmed, even though overshadowed by so many years, never dimmed the memory of the straying herd-animal, the memory of its primal horror, the only one which had remained, all others being but transformations of this solely terrible one that sat on every branch in the thicket of memory, tittering scornfully, laughing scornfully, laughing over the motionless encirclement of him who was hopelessly lost in the thicket, encircling him, itself the thicket, itself the impenetrable ; the journey of memory was without movement, a journey of ceaseless beginnings and ceaseless endings, a journey across the un-space of memory, across the un-space of stagnated straying, across the un-space of the unrecallable trance-life; it proceeded without movement, a whizzing journey through all the transformations of un-space, inevitably accompanied and encompassed by them, dimensionless in their trance-stagnation, dimensionless in their trance-movement, always however within the undimension of horror, because it was the inescapable, the ever-present, the never-forsaken prison of the leaden trance of death, in the shadow of whose horror the sham-life of mankind plays itself out—he was held into the undimension of a trance-death. And even though he lay still, without moving a finger's breadth in any direction, and even though the room about him did not change in the slightest, it seemed to him that he was being carried forward, yes, that he was being carried forward, drawn forward into the invisible by the invisible, by his fore-knowledge, by his fore-remembrance; now memory in all its diversity scurried past him as if to lure him on, as if by its means the journey could or should be accelerated, he was being carried forward to the goal of horror which had been there from the beginning, and the room floated with him, unaltered and yet disarranged as in travel, time-fixed and yet constantly in flux. Rigidly the amorini released themselves from the frieze and despite this they remained a part of it, the acanthus leaves, freed from paint and plaster, became human-faced and the stem, grown out to the crooked claw of an eagle, floated near the bed, opening and closing its talons as though wishing to test the strength of its grip; beards grew out of the leaf-faces and were sucked back again, they floated on in immobility, often turning over, often rotating in a motionless whirlwind; there came to be more and more of them, far more than the wall-painting contained even though it renewed itself constantly, they fluttered out of the frieze, they fluttered out of the bare wall, they fluttered from a nowhere, vomited forth from the bubbling cold volcanoes of nothingness, which were erupting everywhere in the visible and invisible, within and without, they were the lava of these volcanoes, the breathy detritus of a former existence and disintegration, becoming more diverse as they increased, shapes forming and being formed out of emptiness and, for all that, changing into one another as they fluttered along, transformed and untransformable stuff, fluttering like leaves and butterflies, some like arrows, some fork-tailed, some with tails like long whips, some so transparent that they only floated about, invisibly-mute like silent shouts of terror, many, on the other hand, as harmless as an idiotic-transparent smile, as numerous as sun-motes, as numberless as ants, they swarmed vacantly about the candelabra in the center of the room, nipping at the spent candles, making way immediately, to be sure, for things that came storming, buzzing and dancing in their wake, more than pushed out by a press of hollow shapes in which, next to faces and non-faces, next to the twin-bodied Scyllas, strange seals, and bristling Hydras, next to the bloodily-hissing,-bloodily-bound heads of tousled, snake-like hair, all sorts of deformities were scampering, and all kinds of hoofed creatures, half-starved or unfinished Centaurs or fragments of Centaurs, winged and unwinged, whizzed past, the orcus-pregnant space bursting with grotesque animal-life; toadish, lizardish, dog-footed creatures emerged, reptiles with innumerable legs, with no legs, with one, two, three, a hundred legs, at times wobbling in the bottomless pit, at others sailing past woodenly, stiffly a-sprawl, often pressed close together as if, with all their sex-lessness, they meant to mate in flight, often entering each other with arrow-like swiftness, as if they were hollow creatures of air, ether-born and ether-carried, surely that is what they were, for their winged horde, staggering, creeping, tumbling over one another, although they covered and concealed one another, could be seized and held easily by the glance even unto the last single speck and into the furthermost limits of the room packed full of them; oh, they were ether-scaled, ether-winged, ether-bred, abruptly spewed up from the volcanoes of the Aeons, torrential, voluminous, constantly evaporating, constantly vanishing, so that the room became empty again and again, as empty as the spheres, as empty as the whole world, with an emptiness through which trotted only a single horse, stamping alone high in the air with bristling mane, through which floated only a single male torso whose flatly transparent head, turned toward the bed, was distorted by hollow, scornful, mirror-laughter before it was once again swallowed in a newly-risen vermin-flood of horror—and not one of these creatures breathed, for there is no breath in latency; the room had become a chamber of furies and it offered space enough for the whole terrible occurrence, even though this waxed without let or hindrance: the ceiling had no need to lift, although the candelabrum had spread out to a gigantic tree, the candle-holders stretching immeasurably to become the towering, moist-leaved branche
s of an ancient, shade-giving elm, and in its foliage, leaf by leaf, thickly gathered as dew-drops, sat the hypocritical dreams; the walls had no need to widen although all the cities of the world lay between them, and all of them burning, the cities of the remotest past and remotest future, man-blatant, man-tortured cities, cities with foreign names which nevertheless he recognized, the cities of Egypt and Assyria and Palestine and India, the cities of the dethroned gods, come to helplessness, the pillars of their temples crashed, their walls shattered, their turrets broken, the paving-stones of their streets cracked open; and the smallness of the chamber sufficed for the vastness of the whole world, although city and field and sky and forest had not lessened in size, and everything, great and small together, revealed itself in an almost overpowering sameness of significance, this sameness suggesting that under the elm branches, as if their leafy shadows were high-flying thunder-clouds, the most terrible of cities, the largest and most accursed, were rising up in immeasurable vastness in the midst of ever-returning havoc— Rome, but humiliated, through whose streets, sniffing for prey, the wolves strolled to take their city again into their possession; the room encircled the globe, the cities encircled each other, not one of them was either inside or outside, all of them floating, while overhead, high above the volcanoes, high above the petrification, high above the foliage, cut off from everything, in the lofty gray dome of the sky, with a furious clatter of motionless, iron pinions, glinting and whirring like contraptions of steel, noiseless the birds of hate soared in wide, deep circles over the lands of abomination, ready with grim cowardice, with joyful fury, to swoop down with opened talons and sink their claws into the bloody fields, the bleeding hearts of the peasants, tearing at their entrails and devouring them, prepared to take their place in the train of wolves and butterflies passing the bed, fleeing with them to the outposts of defencelessness and com-fortlessness, to the edge of the fiery craters and dragon-plants, never recognized, never named but always known, the snaky borders of animality. What further volcanoes of the pre-creation had now to be opened? what new monsters would they still disgorge? was not everything stripped to its final nakedness without that? was not the high peak of every conceivable horror already inherent in the encircling beastliness? Or was the transparency of fear leading on to a fresh knowledge of fear, to new fear on inconceivably new levels of primitivity? Everything was exposed, nothing could be grasped, nothing was allowed to be kept, all that remained was the trance-movement of the things in flight, all that persisted was the dusky gray light of a cold aimlessness in which nothing near or far, above or below, could be seen, while he, fleeing with the train of monsters, flying with them through the cold light, through the aimlessness, he was seized and held, held by a bodiless, flying plant-hand with wild, untamable fingers, and he recognized the trance-death, the gray rigidity through the un-space of which he was being carried: icy horror, devoid of symbols, such were the images which floated about him, these tailed things that were not animals, these gaping jaws that did not clutch, this lifted crest that did not strike, this spraying poison that did not land, attacking and encircling from the rear, transparency assailing transparency, empty in their threatening and, despite that, more terrible than any shout or seizure; horror itself had become transparent, the organic nature of naked horror had revealed itself, and in its depths of depths, in its furthest well-spring lay the serpent of time, closed to a circle, icily coiling about the trickling of nothingness. Yes, this was the rigid horror of trance-death, and the animal face was scarcely a face now, all that remained of it was the transparency of plant life, sprouting in stems, entangled in stems, twisting in tail-stems, controlled by snakestems, shooting up from some immeasurable, undiscoverable lattice-work of roots, its subanimality incorporated in it, the animal-face denuded to the horror of blankness, fed by the nothingness of the middle. No horror of death could compare with this fullness of horror, for this was the horror of trance-death, surrounded by subanimality, by the pre-animal; no fear of, being wounded, of pain or of suffocation could equal this stifling horror, in the very intangibility of which nothing remained to grasp, because in the not yet created creation, in its no-breath, in its breath-need, there was nothing which one could grasp: this was the breath-need of the unfinished, the unborn creation, its absolute transparency in which animal, plant, and human, all of them transparent, resembling each other to sameness, were forced to suffocate one another because of their breath-robbing terror, because of their undelivered and undeliverable bondage to the nothing, because of their unlived, transparent lack of identification, because of their extreme sameness and hostility—all of them filled with the horrible fear of the animal, which recognizes the utterly amorphous animalhood of its own non-being, oh, the stifling horror of the universe! Oh, had this fear always existed? had he ever been free of it? Had it not always been a vain defense against the storm of horror? Oh, it had gone on night after night, year after year, as far off as youth, as near as yesterday; night after night in idle self-deception he had thought to listen to dying, but it had been only a defense from the horror of trance-death, a defense from the images of trance-death which had appeared night after night and of which he wished to know nothing, which he had refused to see and which had remained for all that—