The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  —, oh homecoming in that deed which signifies love, for only the serving helpful deed, in that it bestows the name and fulfills the empty form of fate, is stronger than fate itself—

  —, not quite here but yet at hand! And it was knowledge at the heart of an inconceivable loving distance that was buried in the innermost heart of the dream, it was awareness of the similarity in that tidal flood, the heart of this side and the heart of the beyond pulsing and beating within each other, the divine symbol kindled in the human being to a common language, the language of the divine-human pledge of allegiance, the language of everlasting creation in prayer and more prayer, mounting and subsiding in creative images; and it was the knowledge of this language of the redeeming deed, of this language of loving sacrifice, which floated as far above every human offering as the envoiced other-worldliness of the one voice floated over the babble of voices on earth, as the loving other-worldliness floated above every love that operates from man to man, the divine-human heart contained in divinity and humanity, containing both god and man; but it was likewise an awareness of him who— because the voice to be credible on earth must have an announcer—was destined to be the bearer of the creative deed, the deed and the doer born into earthly life from an unearthly conception, for only he who in his very origin is already exempt from chance is able to reunite chance with the miracle of that ultimate lawfulness to which fate itself is subjected; for only he who originates from a destiny beyond fate and who, despite this, drains the destined calamity to the last drop, only he is given grace to turn calamity into salvation again and to become the bearer of salvation; oh to him and only to him, the divinely-conceived figure in heroic human form, is it permitted to carry the father across the fires of iniquity, and he alone is entrusted with the rescue of the father, he is allowed to carry the one who conceived him, taking him on his shoulders and bearing him off to the ship and to the homecoming flight into a new country, into the land of promise that has always been the homeland of the father. Not quite here, but yet at hand! That land lay before him in the knowledge of the enjoining, name-giving father-summons which embodies the divine in the human and inspirits the human into the divine; it lay before him in radiation and counter-radiation, it lay before him in the knowledge of the salvation-bearer and in the salvation-bearer's knowledge, full of humanity, full of divinity, the brands of iniquity changed to pure sacrificial flames, the rigidity shattered, the gravestone of the middle lifted, good and evil parted and purified, god and man enlarged to a resurrected creation, the prophecy reclaimed in a future in the name of the father, forever sanctified in the name of the son, forever affianced in the spirit, not quite here but yet at hand, the promised one. Was that which he perceived already recognition? was it only the recognition in dream? was it already the awakening? Oh, it was still this side of the boundary, but even though the dream palpitated against it, it had not broken through the border; the vision was not to be grasped, it was not recognition,, it was only awareness, a dream-awareness, a dream-recollection, a distant memory of the never-heard, ever-resounding voice of a Once, the furthest recollection of the never-encountered land beyond the border, through which he had always wandered, a land enlarged by distance, reduced by distance, the source, the estuary; it was the memory-strengthened approach to the border, but it was still a spellbound quivering, a throbbing, expectant illumination. And just for that reason, even in this peering knowledge, in this extremely transparent blindness, that without being recognition was a form of recognition, a transparent bandage over his eyes, yes, for that reason, although sunk into the dream-meadows and overgrown by their bracken, he found himself placed abruptly on the peak of a very high mountain, as if he had been ordered there so that he might look beyond the border, he a beholder, but still not an announcer, placed there and held there by a gentle-unyielding hand, held into a future yet always existent actuality, beat upon by the throbbing of a heart that though enshrined in him yet enshrined him by being greater than himself; breathing with reality and animated by this throbbing, he was enabled to release his arms from the crystalline transparency and to stretch them upward, upward toward the luminous dome wherein the stars were shining and great suns were beginning to revolve, a single star above them all: he gazed out over the fields of dream, over the fields of those countries predestined to be the theater of the deed, the theater of his vision, beyond touch, beyond tread, yet his own from the very start; he gazed out, spellbound, dreambound here as he was, unable to part from or to be removed from his dream, gazing out over the landscape in which, though it was beyond his touch and tread, he was stretched out with his own dream radiation and his own dream illumination and, surveying both the landscape and the dream, he saw that they were reciprocally merged, he saw amidst the landscape all the crystalline formations, the light-cubes, the light-circles, the light-pyramids, the light-clusters of the dream; he saw, stretched out and imbedded in the dreamy confluence and boundless radiation of its light-paths, the landscape, made rich, transparent and magical through memory; indeed, it was imbedded in the dream with all its night-times and day-times, vacillating between light and darkness, inflating and deflating under the twofold dusk of morning and evening, filled with every possible kind of earthly shape, filled with a motley crowd of all creaturehood, filled with the roaring medley of all earthly voices, filled with intoxication, with torment, with yearning, filled with the created and the developing creation, filled with the silence of beaches, of undulating meadows and of fading mountain summits,—the heights bearing loneliness and the plains bearing cities,—filled with the peaceful glow of human life and living but also filled by the rustling and crackling of the evil flames, endless, endless, endless; everything there was to be wandered through, nothing could be trodden, dream and landscape imbedded one into the other, shining into and shading out into each other, joined in expectation, joined in yearning, joined in a readiness for awakening, waiting to receive him who would stride through them, bringing the voice of the awakening. And he too was waiting; with uplifted arms he waited with dream and landscape, he gazed over the still pastures on which the cattle were grazing without motion, he perceived the muteness of the motionlessly burning brands, and no bird-flight moved across the pavilion of the air; the flames rose higher into the immobility, the confusion of the manifold voices increased in the unbreakable silence, the yearning became deeper and deeper, the suns stood still and the throbbing of the heart beat more and more heavily against the walls of the boundlessness within and without—, oh when was the end to be? where was the end to be found? when would the desecration be quaffed to the last drop? Was there a nethermost stage to this deepening silence? And then it seemed to him that just such an ultimate silence had now been achieved. For he saw the mouths of men gaping at each other full of terror, no sound wrenched itself from the dry clefts and no one understood the other. It was the last step of silence on earth, it was the ultimate silencing of men; and beholding this his mouth also yearned to open in a last mute cry of horror. Still while seeing it, almost before he had really seen it, he no longer saw anything. For the visible had vanished into most abrupt darkness, the light of dream quenched, the landscape disappeared, the flames quelled, the people evaporated, the mouths abolished, this was night, timeless, spaceless, wordless, toneless, the most empty blackness, an empty night without form and without content; empty and black became the waiting, even the throbbing died down, sucked up by emptiness. The bottom of existence had been reached. He stood at the boundary, he stood at the edge of destiny, at the border of chance, he stood at the boundary with blank expectation, with blank listening, with blank looking, with blank wisdom, yet drained as he was and in this blankness he knew that the borderline would be opened. This began to happen very softly as if not to alarm him. It began as a whisper that he had heard once before, it began in his innermost ear, in his innermost soul, in his innermost heart, yet simultaneously surrounding him and penetrating him, stemming from the uttermost darkness, streaming in and ou
t of the night; it was the same quietly great power of the tone to which once before he had had to submit in repentance, swelling out now as then, fulfilling him, enwrapping him, although it was no longer the accord of many voices; it was not the accord of the voice-herds, it was not the accord of any voice-multiplicity, instead it was far rather a single voice, making itself more and more solitary, a voice of such great loneliness that it glowed like a single star in the darkness, nevertheless an invisible one shining in the invisible, for as the summons grew greater and more distinct, it was subsumed not less greatly into the infinite and inscrutable, which is inaudible because it is mute: what took place here was beyond the visible and the audible, it was beyond the reach of every sense-perception, it happened obscurely and for all that it was of a most compelling, perceptible clarity; it happened in a realm of shadows, yet included the forms of every essence, oh, it occurred as equilibrium, it was manifested as an infinite, inconceivably balanced order, giving meaning, content and name, comprised of all being and all memory, including the iron booming of seas as well as the silver susurrus of autumn, the celesta-stroke of the stars as well as the warm breathing of flocks, the flutetone of the moon even as the dew on the sunny hedges of childhood; it was a beholding of the unbeholdable, a listening into the inaudible, and he flooded in darkness, the world's diversity and entity likewise held in balance within the flood of darkness, in this last command to equilibrium which is the only reality and which annuls chance, he heard, no he did not hear, he saw the voice which brought this to pass; and it was not one of those voices which, belonging to the world, insert themselves into the structure of world-facts in order to turn them into a symbol, symbolizing one thing by another but also symbolizing the word by the word, this was not the voice of worldly truth, neither one of them nor the summation, of all such truths, no, it was un-terrestrially, inaudibly, invisibly beyond the world; it was the extra-worldly agent of truth, the extra-worldly agent of equilibrium, it was the essence of the outside, bringing near all the strength and all the amplitude of the outside as it brought itself nearer, comprehending all that is within in order to be comprehended by it, the all-embracing receptacle of the spheres; and thus he realized it, hearing by seeing, seeing by hearing the voice in the shadow of whose word peace and homeland are ever to be found, the voice of timelessness and of the everlasting creation, the judgment-voice of the beginning and the end, the equilibrating voice outside the dream, the voice of safe-keeping; its tone was brazen and crystal and flute-like in one; it was thunder and the preponderance of silence, and it was all sounds and yet a single sound, commanding and gentle, forgiving and discerning, a single lightning-flash, oh, an unspeakably gentle blinding, quiet because consummate; oh, thus it disclosed itself, grace fused with the pledge, disclosing itself not as word, not as speech, far rather as symbol of a word, as symbol of all speech, as symbol of every voice, as the arch-image of them all, overcoming fate in the form of the holy father-summons; it revealed itself as the tone-picture of the annunciating deed: "Open your eyes to Love!"

  SOMETHING was being done, and it was being done for him. He did not have to open his eyes, the beneficence opened them for him. He did not have to breathe, it breathed him. This had been a symbolization in the allegory of which the night was restored to itself, and, in the symbolization of the voice, muteness came home to silence as if silence were the first content with which the empty form must again be filled in order to be revived. And, by virtue of the fulfillment, the diverse directions of the dream were streaming back to the earthly spaces; they streamed back from an undimension into a dimension, turned into the flow of night, constituting a space that was flooded by the tides of night. Nothing was audible except the silence, nothing within, nothing outside of him; he was flooded in a saturation of night, the silence surrounded by night. Even the little oil flame of the hanging lamp had burned itself out, as though sucked up by the darkness in order that the all-fulfilling silence should not be interrupted or disturbed by the small hard point of light. In a like manner the great throbbing of the dream had quieted down, had ebbed and was ebbing further, lulling itself into a silvery drizzle that welling up from a nowhere and flowing off into a nowhere yet issued from the wall-fountain. Rinsed by the surrounding silence, the elusive had come to rest again between the past and the future in the vividly present now; softly the scale of time was swaying, softly tinkling were the silver chains of its saucers, which in their gradual rise and fall met and released symbol after symbol, weighing their truth, symbol after symbol given significance by the test of weighing; and the linking of this chain merged softly and silverly into the gentle stream of existence, newly fulfilled. Fulfilled by an imageless silence yet image-fraught. And the silence-bearing night, its bell-tone quiet and gentle, recreated itself there before his eyes, his eyes unfolded, he himself once more unfolded, the night again unfolded, mysteriously blind with silence, pregnant with shadows, liberal and loving in recovered naturalness, the night which was being swept along, carrying him onward in her branches, in her plumage, in her arms, in her breath, on her breast. He lay. He lay, he rested, he was allowed to rest on. But, even as he rested, he also knew that the silence of the night's happenings was only a prelude, that they must come to an end. For not only had the un-space flowed into the limits of space, but his body had been flooded back from there, he lay bodily in his bed, his feelings became more and more bodily, his was a bodily peace, and in the fullness of his peace he perceived that the fever had waned—beneficent and buoyant, the cool still waves of every night-ending as far back as he could remember. And just as the hour of lessening fever came back to the physical-earthly, so also the night came to the diurnal hour, hurried toward its rim, toward the hour of earth's recurrent fulfillment, of earth's recurrent efformation, toward earthly night. Still nothing happened, the night-darkness held, only the silence became deflated, lost its fullness, creased with scarcely perceptible tracings, very uncertain and perceptible only to the keenest listening, the silence seemed to ruffle itself back from its uttermost borders, to loosen up; darkness-en-flooded creation coming softly into being was being engraved into the uneventfulness of silence by a loving gentle hand. Name after name arose at the soft night-summons, formed itself to an entity with remembrance, became firm by memory, becoming through memory a participant in the creation. Did a cock crow in the distance? Were there dogs barking out there?—the footsteps of the guards, as if they too had been surrendered from un-space, were making their rounds of the palace as before, the wall-fountain drizzled more distinctly as if having gained in water-supply, and the window-sash framed anew the abundance of stars, the head of the snake conjurer flickering brightly in their midst. Breath-quickened the silence, breath-filled the night, and growing out of the night and the silence was that which was always at hand, the breathing world-sleep. The darkness was breathing again, becoming more and more formed, more and more creaturely, more and more earthly, richer and richer in shadows. At first shapelessly, scarcely recognizable, in a certain sense like a point of noise, in scraps of tone and in separate tones, then condensing and collecting into audible form, the creaturely was approaching; it was a creaking and rattling moan, and it came hither from the peasant-carts that were traveling along in ever-narrowing rows bringing victuals to the morning market; sleepy-slow they moved onward, with a rumbling of wheels in the pavement ruts, the creaking of axles, the gritty stroke of the wheel-rims on the curbstones, the click of chains and of harnesses, sometimes with the snorting groan of an ox, sometimes with the sound of a sleepy call, and often the soft, heavy pulling-gait of the animals came into an evenness of step that was like the march of the breath. Breathing creatures wandered through the breath of the night, fields and gardens and nourishment wandered with them, they too breathing, and the breath of all life was opened to receive the creature, opened to world-unity which includes love and form. For love begins in breathing and with breathing mounts to immortality. Down there the peasants were driving, sleepy-headed, heads nodd
ing they traveled on vegetable-carts piled high with cabbage-heads and lettuce-heads, and when one of them let his chin drop as far down as his chest he grunted just as a beast does in its sleep. Some elements of the plant and the animal are contributed to human sleep, and in death the countenance of a peasant seems like stiffened clay. Coming out of the fateless, leading into the fateless, with hardly anything assigned to chance, the peasant's path runs on the very brink of destiny and on the brink of sleep. Should his prayer, delivered from chance, be answered, then earth, plant and beast are without fate for him; and though he sees the stars only when he goes to market or when he must attend a cow, calving by night, and though he immediately falls back into the dreamless-light sleepy progress of his nights and days, he remains lovingly bound to that nature which is beyond fate, a nature that he lets run through his fingers as smooth, golden wheat, that he touches with softly stroking hand on the hide of an animal, that he tests, crumbling it through his fingers as fertile ground, so very lovingly, so very knowingly — oh ground, beast and fruit so well grasped—that he himself shall be grasped, held and hidden in the knowing-loving hand, peacefully held in it, the hand that shuts and opens itself around him in the passing of the years and days, he mingled with them, mingled in their tides, mingled with their restful warmth, mingled with the knowledge of their future chill, from which he will one day glide crumblingly into the fateless, sleepy womb of his beginning, the farmer dying into the earth; only his breath, the unearthly having become free and rid of its fetters, mounting into that which is beyond, into the invisible with its voices, into the divine: down there the peasants were driving, driving past and away, one cart after the other, on each of which crouched someone, sleeping, head-wagging, snoring, with hardly a fate, hardly a chance, every one in his creaturely cycle of night; so they traveled, old or young, full-bearded, stubble-cheeked, smooth-faced; so they drove on as their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had driven, embodied in the vast repose of their security, peacefully embodied in the vast tides holding them, .driving on in the tranquility of their fate-quelling patience, driving asleep, unmindful of the voice that floated above them, the voice of their obscure yearning, yes even, it may be, of their conviction, but which for all that they scarcely heeded, because in the timeless span from generation to generation there is no set time, and it is irrelevant whether the fulfillment be granted to the father, or grandchild, or greatgrandchild; confined in activity greater than themselves, and one that they confined in themselves with a careful sort of love, they drove on deliberately through the darkness toward the brink of night, and they dared to sleep. But he, even though once belonging to them, even though once having been likewise a peasant, he lay here cut off from them, cut off from the soil, cut off from plant and beast, still in the grip of fate he lay here, a night-seer: oh, submerged in every human soul there is some function, sheerly unreachable, a function that is greater than himself, greater than his soul, and only he who achieves himself in this final preparation for death discharges his special function, he it is who watches vigilantly over the sleep of the mortal world. Oh homecoming, oh vigilance! Where was it? who kept watch over the world, who guarded those who drove on through the darkness, sleeping? Did the voice do it? was he doing it in having been found worthy of the grace to perceive the voice? Was he now placed on guard? Never! never would he be fit for it, he who was incapable of any help, unwilling for any service, he the mere word-maker who must needs destroy his work because the humane, the round of human action and the human need for help, had meant so little to him that everything which he should have retained and depicted in love was never written down, but simply and uselessly transfigured and magnified to beauty; what presumption to think that under such circumstances he could be ordered to watch, while the veritable watcher, the announcer of the voice had still to come! Was it all nothing but an empty dream? Had the voice in all its reality been actually bestowed upon him? Why then had it been silenced? Where was it? Where was it? He asked, he asked; he called on high for it, and yet as he asked—he asked no more! He kept on seeking for it and yet as he sought—it was no longer a search! For the revelation that he meant not to believe was present everywhere, he perceived it everywhere, perceived it in the groaning of the wagons, in the sluggish pulling-gait of the beasts, in the sleep-creased peasant faces, in their breathing, in the breathing of the darkness, in the breath of the night, and everything—the fateless as well as the fateful, the earthly and the human—had entered into him, had already become part of his own functioning, was his fate also, so much so that whether it remained unwritten, forevermore uncomposed, the promise of not-being-lost had come to be granted, the promise of an infinite further-bestowal in an infinitely further-bestowing love which would remain there through pure beneficence always and forevermore; the night as it vanished was listening, heavy as if with tears. Sleeping or not sleeping, it was all one, beginning and ending the same, fountain and source, root and crown, the flowing tree of the spheres, in the branching of which, fate-assigned and fate-delivered, humanity continues to rest. It existed, it was already in the world, and still it had not come to pass. And bound in with the whole, enslaved by its destiny, and bearing it in his own, he too rested, happily feeling the alliance, feeling it physically with all the fibers of his fever-freed being, happily feeling the coolness that forced him to wrap himself more thoroughly in his coverlet, happily aware of time gliding through the re-opened world of night and bringing coolness as it came, happily aware of the relaxed breathing assimilated into the drizzling breath of darkness issuing from all the fountains of the world, feeling the murmur of the world, feeling the naturalness, while the drizzling sounded cooler and cooler, the stars became cooler, their space became cooler, and cooler that which was audible therein. The wagon-train down there had gradually thinned out, the oncoming and outgoing teams differentiated by their sounds, the distance between them had increased, and finally only a few stragglers were left. And as the pauses between their journey-noises became greater, these were filled more and more distinctly by something like a susurrus that ran widely and silver-clear in and out of the great darkness; it was expected and full of expectation, it was the sea with its drizzling waves, surging in the darkness, although already called out to by the approaching morning. Maybe, oh it may be that he deceived himself—this nearly dismayed him—perhaps his hearing deceived him, perhaps he was ready only for another self-deception, perhaps it was only yearning, an empty yearning of the heart, a yearning for the sea, a yearning for the voice of salvation to surge within the sea-surge, so that he might be able to hold converse with it, a yearning for the voice to become irrefutable by the very strength of the surging, its annunciation irrefutable in the power of the natural—but no, oh no, it was the sea, the sea in its tritonic-immeasurable reality, the revealed activity of the inexpressible and inaudible voice was interwoven with the moon-swept silver rumbling, woven into the endless stour of the billows, woven into the unshackling below and the liberation above, woven into the darkness and into the light-veil with which the darkness had started to extinguish itself, woven into the paling stars, no, still more, more still: filled with the voice, the waters listened, the sea listened, the stars too, the darkness listened and everything that was human listened, the sleeping as well as the wakeful, the universe listened, all listening to themselves in that which fulfilled them. The natural conformed to the natural and there in this mutual conforming love was abiding. Did evil exist? had it been judged? had it been cast out already? The voice woven into the universe did not answer and it was almost as if the answer were not to be brought until daybreak, as if everything had come to be merely a waiting for the daystar, as if beside this nothing more were permissible. Night gathered itself in to its goal, intent on the goal, its blackness stripped of softness; the starry flickering out there played itself out into a greenishness. The color of air stood motionlessly in the darkness, picking object after object out of the shadows, and inch by inch, starting from the
window, the room became a room again, the walls again became walls. Shone upon by the last star in the window, the candelabrum in front of it rose up black as a tree without foliage, its branches still hung with the shreds of night. And in the alcove, indistinct but recognizable, the boy rested in the armchair, asleep; he had drawn his legs under the seat, his face was supported in his hand, his dark hair was like shadow, the clear eyes invisible, hidden under the shadow of the closed lids, but his listening could be observed, a listening to that which he had announced to himself in his sleep, suffering and dissolving suffering, without help and yet helping, desiring and desireless, love without greed of lust, the unborn angel in the earthborn man: the sleeper. Oh, vanishing night, that bears away the sleeper unto the last drawing of his breath, on and on, eternal in your branching, bearing him in your arms, upon your breast! Once more the great bow of night was stretched out before him, starting with the reddish fumes of hell and with the clamor of voices outside the windows, mounting to the craters of all death, accompanied by all the grimaces and discordances of death, hurtling into the void of most abased nothingness, but taken up again by the commanding, gentle, name-calling voice of annunciation in order to filter —a fading bell-tone—into the first seeping of light, emptied into the light and merging with it into dawn. Could it be possible that all of it had happened before this same window, that something was still happening here? What was transient had sounded up and sounded off, had been unrolled and rolled up, and had come to be enduring, the day rising before him was transient, and for a long time he had given up glancing toward it; his eyes were veiled although they remained open, tear-veiled without tears, but through the veil he saw with estranged glance the coming of day; he saw the dawn, observing wistfully how softly it laid its colorless color, layer after layer, on the roofs outside; he saw it yet he no longer saw it, his seeing had come to be a sensing, and in this sensing, by means of this sensing, the day was born, for him, becoming his own with its new light: the early morning grew apace; it was1 wafted to him in the increasing cleanliness of its smell, in its very distinct, very light-gray clarity, across which, without mingling with it, the thinly acrid threads of smoke from the first hearth fires were drifting; it was wafted to him with the morning-fresh sharpness of the silver, salt breath of the sea, quicksilverly arising from the silver surf, soft in the distance, arising from the first shimmering of the cool, damp shore which, with its clean sand and pebbles rinsed by the silver waves of dawn, had been made ready to receive the morning sacrifice; it was wafted toward him, unfolded and unfolding as the natural beginning of a new creation, and in receiving the unfoldment and being received by it he felt that he himself was being flooded on by its drizzling action, carried on in surge upon surge, enfolded in its heaving breath, as though on wings that were cool to the touch, as though in a vast breath, and yet securely on earth as if, resting in the shadowy fragrance of a laurel bush after an hour of rain, he were breathing it in, rain-dark and dew-clear and refreshed. Thus he was borne along, on and on, and yonder where the flight settled, landing lightly among the blond harvest-billows of the fields, yonder where the sheaves were tossing, grapes hanging on the thorn-bush and the ox lying side by side with the lion, there stood an angel before him, not exactly an angel, more like a boy, but for all that an angel, wrapped in the cool wings of the September morning, dark-tressed and clear-eyed, one whose voice was not that of the deed, the symbolic annunciation of which filled the universe, no, it was much more the quite distant echo of the symbolic arch-image hovering in the empyrean, very soft as he spoke, but nevertheless the bronzen shadow of the aeons: "Enter into the Creation that once existed and again exists, but let you be called Virgil, your time has come!*' This is what the angel said, terrible in its gentleness, comforting in its sadness, unreachable in its yearning, this is what he understood from the lips of the angel, this he had heard as the language within language, in all its earthly simplicity; and hearing it, called and assigned to the name, he saw again the waving fields spread out from shore to shore, infinite the waves of grain, infinite the waves of waters, both stroked by the cool, slanting light of earliest morning, coolly glistening the near at hand, coolly glistening the far away, he saw it, and then there followed the sweetness of perceiving everything and perceiving nothing, of knowing everything and knowing nothing, of sensing everything and sensing nothing, there followed the sweetness of complete forgetfulness, sleep without dream.—