The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  "When, oh when?

  When was there Creation delivered from form,

  Creation, oh, when without fate? Oh it existed,

  And without dream it was, neither a waking nor a sleep,

  Only a moment, a song, once only

  The voice unique, a smiling call, unevocable,

  Once there was a boy;

  Once there was the Creation, once again it will come to be,

  The miracle, chance-delivered!"

  Would the bowl of heaven shimmer up there again within the dream-dome, bearing the beaming cross of the middle carried by the starry shield? Would it shine out in the real splendor of a newly performed act of creation? It had announced itself as an expectation, it was really here in the form of expectation, yet it had not actually appeared. For a still deeper silence had settled over the silenced light-voices of the dream, and this silence turned into waiting, was the essence of waiting, silent and almost miraculous, that imposed itself like a second and richer form upon the immobile, continuing luminescence which was the form of fate's nakedness, lying upon it like a second irradiation of light, as if the waiting were already an increase of riches, even though one expected and was entitled to expect a still further enrichment, a still stronger irradiation, perhaps even a second and more pervading immensity, in order that from this one the divine might stream out freshly again, abolishing evil forever. It was an undirected waiting, as undirected as the radiation, but for all that directed to the waiter, the dreamer; it was a sort of invitation to him to make a final attempt, a last creative effort to get outside of the dream, outside of fate, outside of chance, outside of form, outside of himself. Whence came this expectant challenge? from what beyond, from what undefinable region had this dimensionless omnipresence sunk itself into the entity of the dream-dome? Although it was strong with the strength of dream, it was really no summons, it was just nothing, coming from anywhere and somehow reaching him; it had suddenly filled and fulfilled him, just as it had the dream, splendor sunk in splendor, transparency in transparency; it did not order the dream back to reality, nor the multiplicity of directions into a single plan of direction; it was certainly not reversion, not a loss of creativeness, not re-constriction, no, it remained within the dream while vanquishing the dream and challenging to conquest, it charged the remaining within the dream as a challenge to achieve new knowledge by the knowledge gained from dreams; it was there in mute streaming recollection, never seen but nevertheless recognized, nevertheless understood in its dream-decree. And he, his own transparency involved with that of the dream, contained in the dream and containing the dream, he lifted himself in the enormous, god-like effort required of him and with a final piercing through of the dream's border, with a final shattering of every sort of image and every sort of revelation, with a last shattering of memory, the dream grew beyond itself, he growing with it: his thinking had become greater than any form of thinking, and in achieving this it became a knowledge of the spheres which is greater than destiny, greater than chance; it turned into a second immensity, including the first and being included by it, it became the law which caused the crystal to grow, the law of music, stated in the crystal, stated through music, but over and above that, expressing the music of the crystal. It was a secondary memory, the memory of aeons and universal experience which, though lost to recollection, aghast at the world, aghast at form, had dissolved itself to a secondary form; it was a secondary human language predestined for eternity, if not yet eternal in itself, yet holding the irretrievable in recollection, and in the newly disclosed and re-arched heaven, in the law of its being, perishable even in imperishability, the stars were circling again as an ever-enduring wonder, exempted from chance; immortally cool came the music of night, gently stroked by the unrelenting-soft breath of the moon, carried in it immobile, drenched by the motionless tide of the Milky Way, the ringing silver space encompassed by the incomprehensible, but still encompassing in itself the incomprehensibility of all things human, the homecoming, the second homecoming of dream—,

  —, oh homecoming! oh homecoming of him who must no longer be a lodger! irretrievable is that smile in which we were once imbedded, irretrievable the smiling embrace, that fullness of being on awakening or just before awakening, day-brightened but still obscure; oh irretrievable is that tranquility into which we were wont to bury our face, to assure ourselves that what we had seen should not prove to be mere chance; oh everything was ours in being bestowed upon us again, nothing came accidentally to us, nothing was perishable because universal time is imperishable, without continuity; oh universal time, in which nothing was mute to the mute eyes of the child, and everything was a new creation—,

  —, oh homecoming, oh music within and about us! submerged in us it has remained with us as a knowledge of yore; submerged in us, we shall be lifted through it into its greater being, and submerged in us, greater than ourselves, it is ours beyond all chance; oh music within and about us! only that which the self harbors is greater than we are, it is immortal for us and exempted from chance, singing along with the word of the spheres, but that which we do not carry within us, that is chance and remains chance, it is mortal for us, neither now nor ever is it greater than we are, it never confines us—,

  —, oh homecoming! everything is taken in by a child, everything is music to him, everything is immortal, everything has the greatness of allness, being always there to protect and fulfill him with its smile, since he may fly to its embrace, eye sunk into eye; the universe in all things! Oh, it is irretrievable for us, irretrievable because of our very growth! And should we wax ever so greatly, so that our arms branch out like rivers, our body spread out over continents and oceans unto the utmost limits of the worlds, the moon in our hair, we filling all of space, we ourselves the starry pinnacle of night, the glittering dome of dream, endless, endless in sheer radiation, yet we remain outside of ourselves, we are still expulsed, no night embraces us and no morning welcomes us, because we are bound and dazed, without flight or goal for flight, unsurrendered even to ourselves, because our arms have drawn nothing to our hearts—,

  —, oh homecoming, homecoming into the utterly-incomprehensible that will be granted to us when we shall have become prepared to fly to it again; oh, the utterly-incomprehensible that we seek for even in dreams because in dreams fate, our fate, becomes dreamily comprehensible for us; mortal is dream, mortal is fate, both such things of chance that we, bound and dazed even in dream, dazed because of our mortality, bound by chance, dazed by death, seeking escape, fearing escape through flight into dream, shudder back from it, dismayed by the impossible; oh mortal is that chance which is not contained in ourselves and in which we are not contained; all that we comprehend of it is death, for death reveals itself to us in the phenomenon of chance, verily only in chance, but we, neither containing ourselves n,or contained in ourselves, bearing death within us, are only accompanied by it, it stands at our side, as it were by chance—

  —, oh homecoming, homecoming into the divine, homecoming into the human! mortal to us, indeed, our fellowman whose fate we have not taken upon ourselves, on whom we have bestowed no help, the unloved human being, whom we have not included in our own life and whom we have thereby rendered unable to embrace us inclusively in his own being, oh he seems undivine to us, we seem undivine to him, so enchanced in chance that we hardly know if he, who appears before us as living, who passes by us, who staggers by us and turns the next corner, whether he, creature of fate like any other, like ourselves, has not long since died or perhaps has not even yet been born—

  —, oh homecoming! oh, Plotia!—

  —, oh homecoming! irretrievable homecoming; mortal are we along with all that is mortal, mortal in ourselves are we who have taken no fate upon us, having in this way made ourselves one with chance, our occurrence and being and knowledge inescapably arrested in the blank form of fate, mortal are we in the midst of immortality, mortal under the music of the stars, mortal through guilt, strayed into a thicket of voi
ces, girded round by the mute-pressing light of the indiscriminate, forfeited to dream-death, forfeited to a death of growing cruelty that no longer holds aught of immortality—

  —, oh homecoming! resting and hearkening in the infinite stretch of the Saturnian meadows, in the Saturnian landscape of the earth and the soul, in the golden, homelike peace of eternal earthliness, shielded from Janus, although this is a twofold hearkening, directed upwards and downwards, an intent listening into the depths of heaven and earth for the name of the thing bestowed on it by Saturn, shielded from the deadly cruelty of dissension and war, shielded from destruction, even though the hearkening is at the same time a forgetting, a forgetting of the names that are forgotten by virtue of their association with home—

  —, oh homecoming! he who is allowed to come home comes back to creation, he comes there where, behind the fluid boundaries of beginning and ending, behind the comprehensible and incomprehensible, he divines the ultimate statute, he escapes the indiscrimination in which good and evil are benumbed to blank fate-forms, he buries his face in the utterly-incomprehensible from whose relentless-mild voice, fate-bidden and predestined, issues the judgment that existence be loosed from its form and be sundered to right and to left—

  —, oh homecoming! oh sorrow redeemed by suffering, the miracle of immortality! Oh, we may be allowed to touch it, we may perhaps obtain an intuitive grasp of the incomprehensible if only for a moment's length, yet—the heart receiving the miracle—forever, if our including and included destiny take on itself that other, grown higher and wider in surrender, fleeing into yet giving cover to the other one until, with the miracle of the second self which we have borne through the flames, we are granted a second childhood, transformed and belonging to the father, knowledge beyond knowledge, perceiving and perceived, chance come to be miracle, having embraced all knowledge, all occurrence, all existence, fate overcome, not quite here but yet at hand, oh, miracle, oh, the music awakened once more so poignantly, within us and about us, the opened countenance of the spheres, oh, love—

  —, oh homecoming! for love is resolution! oh homecoming forevermore! for love is the readiness for creation—

  —, and resolution was that perception which, born from dreaming yet giving birth of itself, was flooded to him like an occurrence and yet passively from out the invisible, now become visible; it was a perception in the realm of the speechless and the wordless, a final effort of the dream that awakes of itself and recognizes its own borders, the dream constantly coming home in its own birth, encased in birth's darkness which, for all that, was still held within the full radiance of the dream. The perception was not in himself, it came out clearly from the invisible crystal of the structure, it was the crystal of dreams. Was this the perception of genii or angels, when they, the listening messengers inherent to the Creation, floating unborn with it, perceived the divine command? Was he floating with them outside of the dream-border? in dream? in recollection? The enormous effort to shatter dream, to shatter fate, did not relax; no, it increased, it became more pressing, directed more to the goal, more toward perception, and the more it grew the more perfect became the visibility of the dream, the more its boundless radiation was interwoven with the recollected or intuitive knowledge of all past earthly happenings, which, the content recognizable despite all change of form, was arising like a second dream within the dome of the first one, overlaying and enriching it, yielding image after image, storing landscape on landscape, in evidence here as of yore,—the dream-existence in the morning of childhood, transparent in its depth of memory, twined about by waters and wreaths, the arch of the unseen heaven above it sparkling with layer upon layer of stars, muteness and music coalesced into crystal, ever experienced yet never remembered, ever perceived yet never understood. And there, surrendering to the succession of images, there he listened to the heart of the dream, and softly at first, then more and more distinctly, he heard the beating at the heart of the dream. For in the memory which mounted up to him or into which he sank—the direction being indeterminable in the quiescence of the occurrence—in this upsurging and absorbing radiation, in this fluid meeting where things merged without movement, there was contained, not less immobile, not less symbolic, that which he had always sought for in language and in poetry and which was again evaporated to nothingness for the sake of understanding; here all speech was annulled, all poetry was annulled, so that only the deepest recesses of the dream-abyss might shine through, as if it were the final form of fate within the unavoidable multiformity, the form which is the pattern of all forms within the radiantly inevitable, knotted and looped, flowing and fixed, but within every form, in every figuration, stretched endlessly and invisibly over the light-plains of dream, dream opened up unto its root-depth to give birth to the dream: oh this, this very depth it was that floated up to the heart, oh in it the heart was floating, radiating up from and into it, interradiated to a knowledge utterly ungraspable through speech; it was the heart of dream entering, enpulsing and suffusing the human heart to a crystalline wholeness and consummation, and he deemed that fate was on the point of being transformed again in the vibration of light-surf into which he sank or which surged up to him as if here, in this last abyss of roots, the new reconciliation of form to its eternal content were about to succeed: the awakening! Oh, the rousing torment of a dreamed awakening, fate-conditioned this too, enclosed in borders within the dream, which presents itself even in the midst of perception although the boundary of dream has already been overstepped, already sundered, because the heart, once having started to beat, constantly pleading for admittance and ready for reality, palpitates even unto its borders and knocks on its portal—

  —, for love is abiding readiness, containing every prospect and all peace, for love is creative readiness: not quite here but yet at hand, this is the threshold on which love stands in the forecourt of reality, there where the portals shall swing back to allow the borders of reality to be crossed, opened to awakening, opened to rebirth, opened to the resurrected, the re-animated, the never-heard, the forever-yearned-for language of a new life in ultimately redeemed consummation, opened to the final word of judgment which shall ring beyond any dream-life whatsoever, beyond the world, beyond space, beyond time; oh it is before such a renewal of creation that love stands, still enveloped in twilight and merely hearkening, yet itself the awakening help, the incipient awakening—

  —, and the brightness of the dream-dome quivered up and away from itself like the beating of a heart, the dome itself quivering, vibrating in the infinite and voluminous voices of its radiant completeness, in the diffusion, the concentration and refraction of its boundless beam-tracks and light-paths; and the starry pinnacle trembled also, the dream as a whole inhaling and exhaling itself, the breath waiting, the dream waiting, waiting in the recesses of his heart, the receptacle of the spheres waiting. Would the new speech, the new word, the new voice be wrung out of such a breath? Would the voice-source of time's beginning and ending open of itself, disclosing the cross-road common to all paths in the infinite abyss of dream? Would there, oh, would there be intoned from the dream that spontaneous echo-accord of world-unity, world-order, world-comprehension which would, which must be the final resolution of the earthly task, comprised in the totality of voices and comprising them? Merely an intimation, it was no more than that, an intimate trembling up from the roots of dream, but trembling on and on to the furthest reaches of dream, shutting off the voices and releasing the voices in the wavering light-breath of the occurrence; earthbound still the heart's beating, but transcending earth in its waiting, still earthbound as the dream-instrument of that fatal force which, unsevered from evil, malice and chance, carried death in itself, but already transcendent in its readiness to hear the command, supernal in its vigilant readiness. Verily, nearer to the unearthly than anything else was this willingness to awaken, nearer than the readiness for death, which was bound up with dying to mundane things, saturated with self-seeking and fame-seeking, with intoxicati
on and hatred; verily, it was nearer to the revelations of death, nearer to it than his own readiness for death, under whose relentlessly unavoidable regency he had placed his life, fancying to force a homecoming through the offering of himself, breaking through the boundaries and listening for the voice as if he could imitate it through his own dying, and win it over by virtue of this imitation. It had remained inimitable, for this was a voice that could not be won over. For this voice of all voices was beyond any speech whatsoever, more compelling than any, even more compelling than music, than any poem; this was the heart's beat, and must be in its single beat, since only thus was it able to embrace the perceived unity of existence in the instant of the heart's beat, the eye's glance; this, the very voice of the incomprehensible which expresses the incomprehensible, was in itself incomprehensible, unattainable through human speech, unattainable through earthly symbols, the arch-image of all voices and all symbols, thanks to a most incredible immediacy, and it was only able to fulfill its inconceivably sublime mission, only empowered to do so, when it passed beyond all things earthly, yet this would become impossible for it, aye, inconceivable, did it not resemble the earthly voice; and even should it cease to have anything in common with the earthly voice, the earthly word, the earthly language, having almost ceased to symbolize them, it could serve to disclose the arch-image to whose unearthly immediacy it pointed, only when it reflected it in an earthly immediacy: image strung to image, every chain of images led into the terrestrial, to an earthly immediacy, to an earthly happening, yet despite this—in obedience to a supreme human compulsion—must be led further and further, must find a higher expression of earthly immediacy in the beyond, must lift the earthly happening over and beyond its this-sidedness to a still higher symbol; and even though the symbolic chain threatened to be severed at the boundary, to fall apart on the border of the celestial, evaporating on the resistance offered by the unattainable, forever discontinued,.forever severed, the danger is warded off, warded off again and again, the chain of symbols closed when the unattainable deigns to transform itself into the attainable by descending to earth, by becoming an earthly event, solidified to an earthly deed, so that the chain of expression in ascending and descending could close to a cycle, to a cycle of truth, to a cycle of eternal symbols, true in each of its images, true because of the cyclic balance in play around the opened borders, true in the constant interchange of the divine and the human act, true in their common symbolic quality and in the symbol of their mutual resemblance, true because the creation renewed itself in them forever, entering into the law, into that law of constant rebirth which was charged with the overcoming of chance, of fixation, of death; no earthly preparation for death, were it ever so intuitive an imitation of the divine sacrifice, was able to summon the earthly enactment of the subliminal; only the contemplative preparation for the awakening was really valid, and the dreamer, bound like fate to the dream, unredeemed and averse to death though death-enclosed, harbors in his dream only the preparation for the awakening, made susceptible to it alone by his knowledge, unbetrayable in his dream-knowledge, in his unerring knowledge of the awakening and its universal validity, for the sake of which the dream has revealed itself, opened up in the singing abysses of its unsearchable depths, in the darkly radiating root-abyss of its shimmering shafts, with its heart, even more conscious, opening still more, trembling to a voice that was no longer a voice, far rather a deed, the deed for which it descended to retrieve the name, fate-bidden to turn around, to return for the summons to homecoming—