The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  Oh, who wants to sleep while Troy is burning! again and again! now are the waves of the sea set to foaming, churned by the oar-strokes, cut by the furrowing ships, as their triple-beaked prows cleave the waters . .

  —, the images persisted and were not to be banished; night after night terror had lifted him through the silence of the spectre-filled craters, through the unremembrance of the pre-creation, through the re-abandoned, aeon-far existence reversed to immediate proximity, across the gnarled, weary fields of complete desolation, deserted by all men and all things, creation abandoned anew. Night after night he had been led up to the cold unshakeable force of reality, to that unreal reality that comes before all the gods and outlasts all the gods and that puts the seal on their helplessness; he had caught sight of Moira, waiting gruesome and three-bodied, she in whose images all forms of sham-death are suggested, and he had tried to close his eyes to her paralyzed-paralyzing, powerless power, blind in his distraction, deaf to the coruscating giggling scorn of the nothingness which the helplessly sobered one is nevertheless unable to escape, deaf to the fateful, flat laughter of the pre-creation which makes him aware of the impossibility of mastering the nameless, the indiscriminate, the unformed, and prompts him to contrition; oh, thus had it been, bearing the inevitable threat, warding off the inevitable; the years were like the flowing on of a single night, flooded with images, bedevilled with images, capering with images, borne along by images in a standstill of horror, and the thing that unremittingly and irresistibly had announced itself night after night could no longer be averted; it was a horror-cramp of tranced prostration in which he would lie, constrained by his coffin, constrained by his grave, stretched out for the immobile journey, he alone, without support, without intercession, without succor, without mercy, without light, without eternity, surrounded by the imperturbable, stony slabs of the sepulchre which would open for no resurrection. Oh, the tomb! it was here also in the narrow chamber, also touched by the elm-branches, danced about by furies, stormed by the fury-scorn, ah, even the tomb seemed to scorn itself as well as the self-deception to which he had clung, scorning his childish hopes which had betrayed him into believing that the quiet immutability of the Bay of Naples, that the serene sunny majesty of the sea with its far-reaching memories of home, that the power inherent in such landscapes would gently attend the act of dying and change it to an unsung, unsingable music, a music which would awaken life, forever hearkening, forever hearkened to, awaken it to death; oh, scorn and more scorn, now that the edifice stood devoid of space, devoid of landscape, with nothing opening beyond it—no sea, no coast, no fields, no mountains, no stone, not even the amorphousness of the primodial clay—nothing but the intangible waste, incomprehensibly horrible in its very nothingness, a naked scorn-edifice, surrounded by that ever-undulating flood in which he floated and was carried along with the grotesque animals on every side, swirled into and borne floatingly onward by the stuffy, breathless, parched, undrinkable ether-glair, which was neither air nor water, borne onward by the transparent fumes of every flaming fear, by this no-breath of the whole pre-creation which vanished like a sort of dry sifting between the fingers; and even in this terribly animal-sated, animal-pregnant, animal-dripping, ethereal element—absorbing him who had fallen back into animality—half-birds were perching on the roof-top, terrible grave-birds with fishy eyes in a crowded row, owl-headed, goose-beaked, pig-bellied, gray-feathered with feet that were merely human hands webbed for swimming, brooding birds flown from no countryside, whose flight was unfit for any land. Thus they crouched in the nakedness of terror, glowering and perching close to one another, and thus also stood the tomb crowned by them, as much within the bay-window as outside there in the unreachable, sought-for distance. Layer on layer, one above the other, the bareness of a no-heaven was covered by the round bow of the bay-window, both arching over the sepulchre, both permeated by un-space even though shot through by the velvet blackness of the whole star-studded round of the sky, and the domes of the universe were intergrown by elms in an immeasurable expansion of all discrepancies and distances which, at the same time, was an immeasurable contraction of them; the landscape-lack pierced the landscape and was pierced by it, the un-space pierced space and was pierced by it, symbolic in its lack of symbol, just as the animal element penetrated the trance-death and was penetrated by it in turn; the symbols of life had died away, spent like the starry animal formations of the heavens, their meaning fulfilled and full of meaning; they had grown cold under the bareness that covered them, but the symbols of death remained, if only in the symbolic bareness of the inexpressible, unthinkable, unimaginable pre-creation; they remained in the creaturely, expressionless, animal grimace, in these images of horror creeping out of trance as if stemming directly from emptiness, reflecting nothing and reflected in nothing, image and counter-image united in the nullity of expression inherent in every deep, primal loneliness which, never-comprehended, always known, always feared, coils in the aeonic depths of time and creaturely animality; the cycle of the symbolic closes itself in latency, closes itself there in the pre-creation's mingling of the spheres, closes itself there where nothing has a connection with anything else and where the empty, aeonic distance revolves to become visible in the vacant grin of the animal, as if the conscious image of primal loneliness had been carried through endless cycles of images, from semblance to semblance, in order to reveal itself in ultimate nakedness at the very imageless end; and in this revelation, in this mutely thundering outbreak of the uncreated and its loneliness, breaking out with all the malice which corresponds to the baffled, displaced aggressive greed in the blank animal grimace, the evil becomes manifest, the evil behind all creation and uncreation, behind the pre-creation and all lonely distance, threat-boding and disclosed in. the oppressiveness of the trance-death, implying ominously that all paths of reversion, that all ways of in-sensitivity, of dalliance, of intoxication lead unhesitatingly to animality, that all ways of beauty end squarely in the grotesque. And on the roof of the sepulchre which was to have transformed death into beauty sat the chain of evil birds. On every side the cities of the globe were burning in a landscape devoid of scenery, their walls crumbled, their flag-stones cracked and burst asunder, the fumes of decay on their fields reeking of blood; and the godless-godseeking lust of sacrifice raged everywhere, sham-oblation after sham-oblation was heaped up in a frenzy of sacrifice, men mad with sacrifice raged all about, slaying the next in turn in order to shift their trance onto him, razing their neighbor's house and setting it in flames in order to lure the god into their own; they stormed about in evil vehemence and evil rejoicing,—oblation, slaughter, brand and demolition giving honor to the god in the way he willed it, in order to deafen his own horror and his own knowledge of fate, he who, to this end, being greedy for laughter and destruction, had unchained human belligerence, the belligerence of intoxication and of sacrifice and, having become impotent, participated in and enjoyed it, gods and men driven and more than driven by the same furiously destructive fear, the fear of being petrified in stony isolation, the fear of trance, the fear of insensibility, driven into a deadlock by the murderous, merry-making pandemonium of the gods, by the murderous game of men, by the volcano of nothingness in the soul, from which the fire flooded out in a flowing un-element and stood still; the cities burned without ashes, the flames licked like stiffly-erected tongues, like upstanding scourges lashing up from no depths, indeed, below the torn, frayed surface which had opened out of itself, there was no second surface, there was no depth at all, the flames being composed of the hard, serrated surface itself, and about them roared the stark-yelling thicket of paralyzed voices, their cries nothing more than terrible, fanglike shadows, roared the mute storm of the re-abandoned and shattered creation: rigid new structures rose out of the ruins on every side, they grew upward into the drab, gray light, into the lightlessness of the light-stripped waste, growing out of the emptiness and yet having always been there, hopelessly standing there since time out of mind
for the glorification of lasting murder, for the perpetuation of evil, structures of spurious life, of spurious death, their cornerstones drenched in blood, leaning heavily on life, and no amount of blood was able to fuse the constructions, the encirclements, the petrifications of evil with the law and into the stream of creation, no exorcism was able to uncoil the icy serpent by the renewal of the pledge; pre-creation was stronger than creation: the trance was the state of the unborn, it was the obstacle in the orbit of creation, evading and opposing the creation, itself a state of uncreation, desiring to perpetuate itself to the exclusion of all else, setting itself up as a monument and making itself into a tomb; it remained robbed of speech, conscious of guilt and with subsided breath; it remained despite its stony monumentalness unperpetuated and without permanence and, having shaken, off the creation, it had come to be a grave from which there was no rebirth. Thereupon the dome of the un-space, the dome of the no-heaven itself became a single cavernous tomb, imbedded in the serpentine windings of the celestial viscera, imbedded in the god-rejected viscera which bear the humus of existence, where fate is astir and makes itself known regardless of time; and he was being carried into this cave as to a homecoming; the journey was leading there and, although he was cast out of heaven, himself intergrown with serpents, nevertheless he lay imbedded in the celestial viscera. What a shuffling of inside and outside! What a terrible reversion! On every side the tomb-streets and tomb-cities of the death-inhabited world were ablaze, on every side the stony aimlessness of human fury glared forth, as did the jubilation, the sacrificial madness of men; on every side the cold flames of human passion stood stiffly erect, and humanity was being discreated, the creative gods were being dethroned amidst the stony snarling of the dying creation, denuded by death—, the decree of the distracted gods confused by their belligerent fear, the decree which had to be enacted for purposes of their own. For creation demanded continual resurrection; creation consummated itself only in continuous rebirth, enduring only as long as there was resurrection and not a moment longer; oh, only he might become a creation, only he might be called a creature, who descended again and again to the fires of rebirth, taking unflagging care lest the unvanquished should rise again, lest the maternal uncreated should break out to stony muteness; oh, only he was created who gave issue to creation, who, in ascending, brought himself as offering, without reservation and absolved from reversion, without reverting to intoxication, aye more, without any turning back for verification or identification, putting off from himself all carnal fear, putting off also the last carnal desire; oh, only then are we creatures of creation, when we have stripped off all carnality, when we have learned to separate ourselves from even the knowledge of carnality and what lies behind it, when we have roused ourselves to accept our final penance with humility, when we are able to obliterate our own graves! And when, uneasily and dream-far, this realization came to him, who lay there as if in a dream, and when a voice from a second dream whispered into the first one, as if breaking once more through the fear, revengefulness, and impotence of the gods, as if yet again and perhaps for the first time they were exercising a bounteous mercy, as if that mysterious, wordless whisper issued directly from the horrible, once again shattered fear of the gods themselves, murmuring that he was to have courage— courage for extinction, courage for belittlement, courage for submission, courage for the redemption of contrition—he could hear in this whispering wordlessness, that was like a language beyond language, a much narrower condensation of meaning, a wordless word from a dream still more remote than the second one, a softer, more urgent murmuring, incomprehensible although summoning to action, scurrying off and dying away, yet being the strictest order, the imperative command that everything which had served a false life, and confirmed it, must disappear so completely as never to have been, evaporating into the inconsequential, disintegrated into the nothingness, divorced from all memory, divorced from knowledge, forced back from everything that had existed in men as well as in things, oh, it was the command to abolish everything that had been done, to burn everything that he had ever written or composed, oh, all his writing would have to be burned, all, and the Aeneid besides; that is what he heard within, the inaudible, but before he had extricated himself from the stupefaction with which he had stared toward the motionless chain of half-birds crouching on the eaves of the building, a gradual wave seemed to flow over the blanched plumage, flowing and drifting airily, one wave and then another, and suddenly in a spume of noiselessness the swarm had flown aloft, as though lifted up without flight and dissolved to invisibility, so that the familiar housetop could be seen for a second, just for this single second however, for in the next one the building crashed down, not less noiselessly than the wing-beats of the birds which had flown away, not less airily transformed into invisibility; sucked into the nothingness. And when he had realized this the lack of sound began to change, and it changed to stillness; the torpidity turned to calmness, the motionless journey which had carried him on came to an earthly halt, the spectres—in the shapes of plants and animals, and finally in that of a single, flaming-haired fury with pale transparent body and streaming locks—no longer accompanied him, instead they glided past him; they glided thither where the sepulchre had sunk down and they sank after it, one after the other absorbed in the empty duskiness of the shadowy crater; and even though this emptiness stared back at him horribly like a threatening counter-eye, and yet his own, a final threat of horrible emptiness, when the last of the harpies had vanished within it, it too was seized by dissolution; the sucking force came to be an all-inclusive peace, came to be profundity, came to be the eye of earthly night, the eye of dream, large and heavy with ethereal tears, resting on him its dark-gray velvety gaze, lightly embracing him who was delivered from dream while yet in a dream; opened in returning, the night was again to be seen, and in the uttermost depths of its glance the small yellow-tipped flame of the oil lamp flickered up again—oh, a star, and near at hand—, beaming in the moonless, nocturnal peace of the chamber, its peace regained and in readiness for sleep, the frieze scarcely recognizable, the walls darkened which encased only the familiar earthly furniture as if it had never been otherwise; this was coming back though not homecoming, this was recognition without remembrance, it was a mild revival, and yet, it was an extinguishment even milder, it was deliverance and imprisonment indescribably merged into dissolution, becoming miraculous by being accepted. The wall-fountain drizzled softly, the darkness became mildly moist, and though nothing stirred in any shape or manner, the muteness was un-muted, the numbness un-numbed, time became more yielding, more living, released from the silvery-cold stare of the moon and free to move once more, so that he, likewise freed of his fixation, was able to raise himself slowly, albeit with utmost effort; resting on palms whose outstretched fingers probed into the mattress, with his fever-hot head sunk a little between his hunched shoulders, thrust slightly forward and trembling a bit from his effort, he listened into the softness, and his listening pertained just as much to the clemency of the returning life-stream, which was not to be checked by any fever, as to the scarcely-emerged, scarcely-captured, now scarcely-capturable command from the dream, the command which had bidden him destroy his writing and which he now wished to hear in reality, which he must hear, so that he might be more certain of salvation: much as he wished to hear and fulfill it, the hidden command was unfeasible, it remained unfeasible until a wording for the whispering wordlessness could be found, and in the mysterious, great uncertainty that encompassed him the command to get back to words was forcibly at work; the walls of silence still surrounded him but they had ceased to be threatening; the fright still continued but it was a fright without fear, it was fearlessness within fright; the innermost and outermost borders still turned in toward and into each other, but he sensed how his listening dissolved or united them, not, to be sure, to an earlier order of understanding, certainly not to a human order, an animal order, a material order, not to a world-order in which formerly h
e had moved and which, extinguished along with his extinguished memory, no longer existed and never would exist for him again; and neither was it the unity of the beautiful nor that of the world's shimmering loveliness which disclosed itself, no, it was none of these, but rather that of a ringing tide within the incomprehensible, streaming in and out with the night, the unremembered-remembering of a sojourn in which the uncompleted had completed itself, connected with a longing for creation in a last arch-loneliness unspeakably beyond attainment, in an unimaginably fresh recollection of utter cleanliness and chastity; and that which his listening perceived was contained in the flood of longing, coming from the outermost darkness and vibrating simultaneously in his innermost ear, in his innermost heart, in his innermost soul, wordless within him, wordless around him, the hailing and humbling, quietly great power of the twofold, runic first-cause, holding him and fulfilling him as his listening became more profound; but soon it was no longer a crooning or a whispering but rather a mighty booming, a booming, however, which was carried to him through so many layers of present-experience, past-experience, future-experience, through so many layers of remembering and not-remembering, through so many layers of obscurity, that it did not even reach the strength of a whisper; no, it was not a whispering, no, it was the unison of countless voices, and beyond that it was the unison of all voice-herds, ringing up from all the reaches and recessions of time, singing and clanging and booming of safety and seclusion, perturbing by mildness, comforting by sadness, unattainable in its longing, inexorable, irrefutable, unalterable in spite of its great remoteness, becoming more and more commanding, singing more and more alluringly the more meanly his ego abased itself, the more his resistance gave way and he opened himself to the sound, the more he despaired of actually comprehending the greatness of the voices, the more his knowledge of his own unworthiness grew; and overcome by the bronze omnipotence, overcome by its gentleness, overcome by anxiety for his work that was to be snatched from him, overcome to desiring the judgment that would demand just that, overcome by fear as well as hope, overcome to the point of extinction and self-extinction for life's sake, imprisoned and liberated within the compass of his own insignificance, unconsciously-conscious under the power of the unformable, yearned for, universal chorus, that which he had long known, long suffered, long understood was wrung from him, escaping him in a tiny, inadequate expression of the inexpressible, looming large as the aeons, escaped him in a moan, in a cry: "Burn the Aeneid!"