The Mountains of Parnassus

by Czeslaw Milosz

  A little farther down, the forest is increasingly mixed, before finally becoming a broadleaf forest. After another few dozen miles, at around the park’s edge, a panorama of grassy hills dotted with scattered buildings unfolds before us, descending in layers down into the valley. A bluish haze suffused with flashes and vague outlines allows us to guess at the structures of the city down below. The road darts away from the river, passing into spiral intersections and over arterial bridges as it descends, until, almost imperceptibly, as we emerge from a kind of half-tunnel, we find ourselves over roofs in the company of shimmering glass skyscrapers. This is a bothersome and tedious section to travel, despite the green strips, lawns, and gardens. But eventually it comes to an end, and—having coasted over the eight-lane strip of concrete on raised pillars that cuts across these neighborhoods from north to south—the traveler once again finds himself in the park, in a land of meadows, hollows, and conical rocks capped with trees. And here the river returns: the same, but different, swollen with water, uncoiling before the traveler’s eyes in long, gentle curves, with the jetties and houses of old farms clinging to its banks. Cows—real cows—stare at it, or at nothing, as they chew their cud. Near its outlet into the ocean, the Hominka is enormous, and it is difficult to believe that one has seen it not so long before as a little stream. Its majestic expanse, where a fishing cutter sailing along under the forested slopes of the far bank is little more than a white smudge, makes one think with tenderness of the once famous names of the much humbler European rivers. In the Hominka, they fish for sturgeon larger than men. The fish were almost wiped out last century, which was no surprise considering the scale of the industry that had established itself at the mouth of the bay. Here the ocean receives the waters of two rivers, the second being the Sukunka, which flows from distant regions, swinging northward in an arc from Mount Tomak. It was the Sukunka, as the old photographs show, that had once filled the bay with a tangled raft of floating wood, and—indirectly—the air with the foul-smelling smoke of the paper mills. Yet the wood had vanished from the surface of the bay, and the old factories had vanished, giving way to gigantic test tubes and furnaces with a very different purpose.

  There was once somebody who found himself on the banks of the River Hominka because his friend Karel had suddenly recalled that he owned a house in Onwego. In fact, it was not really a house but simply whatever still remained of a hundred-year-old ruin that had long been boarded up and abandoned. Even the road, which climbed up the hill almost vertically, was overgrown, so they continued on foot, stopping now and then to catch their breath. The house stood on the edge of an expansive plateau, hidden behind a screen of young cedar trees. A scholar with a famous name in biochemistry had supposedly built it. This was all Karel knew, as he had long since forgotten the name. The rotting planks of the terrace sagged under their steps, so they trod cautiously, especially where one side of the wooden balcony hung suspended over an abyss. Down below, an emerald green river with white rapids glittered under the crests of the overhanging trees. In those moments, as he gazed at the river or raised his eyes to the mountain range, to the single snowy peak that etched its soothing outline into the bluest of skies, somebody said “hmm,” and perhaps the entire project was contained in that “hmm.” For let us consider what occupied their thoughts: namely, an Earth without fatherhood. Long ago, fathers had existed, towering over the generations like the cool, calm peak of Onwego over the resinous monotony of the forests. People could depend on their wisdom and knowledge, and even rebelling against them gave some sense of security. Yet the fathers had departed, and the children were left alone in their kindergarten. They—those who exercised power—did not deserve the name of fathers; people referred to them with a mixture of fear and contempt, as they did to the computers playing out semantic tournaments with themselves. Except that the yearning for patriarchal majesty had not disappeared, and many hoped or even believed that their own solitary thoughts corresponded with the heartfelt needs of many solitary others. If the fathers had departed, then the children could surely do nothing else but strive to become their own fathers.

  Karel’s Adventures

  Poor, poor youth. To be born aboard a ship on its way to an unknown destination from an unknown origin, and to grow up learning that there is no port and never will be. The Earth sailed or spun or drifted, or however else we might describe it—just like those artificial earths trapped in their orbits—while its passengers busied themselves with what language picturesquely, though recklessly, described as “killing time,” not foreseeing (if language could foresee) how ominous a meaning this expression would assume. Time both terrified and offended us, and thus it had to be destroyed and replaced with intensity of experience in every living moment, so that a great deal could happen before the hands of the clock revealed the passing even of a single minute. If the inhabitants of the terrestrial state communicated with one another at all, it was only to ask the question—“What are you feeling?” Yet because it was impossible to describe these feelings in words, they mostly kept silent.

  Like everyone else around him, if Karel was certain of anything, it was only of the illusory nature of all phenomena outside the shifting tensions of his own psyche. The gods—whose indestructible power had once guaranteed the existence of a legislated world—had disappeared; the sages—whose august dignity had once made it possible to imagine that time always moved toward something, just as it moved in their orchards from blossom to harvest—had found no successors. For the painted old men visiting the clinics for repairs now and then, with their wrinkles and edemas reminding them that the motion of the clock hands was insurmountable, preferred to vaunt their own immaturity—that is, their withered promise. It is a curious fact that almost every Earthling was tormented by the sense that time had lost its venomous monotony for other people: others continued to feel, and through feeling liberated themselves from the power of the minutes and hours, while he alone felt nothing; others were included in a great something, while he alone was excluded. In order to join them and experience the short-lived eternity that propelled the line of time, like music in the flourishes of its architecture, he could turn to the M37 current and erotic games. Unfortunately, a person cannot endlessly take pleasure in the current or endlessly amuse himself putting his thing in the other thing. Besides, a considerable if not overwhelming proportion of humanity consisted of the elderly or people unable to curb their genetic deviations from the mental norm. When in bygone days the poet Baudelaire (who was still known to specialists) had said that fornication was the lyric poetry of the people, he had displayed his contemptuous sympathy with the lower classes, who, deprived of access to the higher occupations of the soul, received consolation in their bodies, though this was only fair. But now everybody—even those who long ago might have spent their lives in monasteries or hermitages, in spiritual celibacy, in forced or voluntary asceticism—regarded the renunciation of sex as demeaning, and so they often exposed themselves to failure in the attempt to live up to their image of themselves as normal beings, leading to a substantial increase in the number of suicides.

  Karel was eighteen years old when he decided to kill time by killing himself. His loneliness and his sense that life was flowing by while he took no part in it had reached such an extraordinary level of tension that he was forced to conclude that he was gradually disintegrating, and that he would have to put an end to his slide into disorder. He made one failed attempt to heal himself with the help of a female friend, whose Chinese beauty had such an effect on him that—as his ancestors would have put it—he fell in love. He later experienced what the newspapers of the bygone era would have described as a broken heart. Of course, he could have resorted to psychotherapy, but he lacked the will to put himself through it. He also lacked the will to join the Arsonists’ Association, which might have been a refuge for him, albeit a temporary one.

  Of the various groups and sects promoting their diverse programs, the Association appealed to him most, for
he found in it his own kind of hatred. He was not in the least bit grateful to the generations of so-called intellectuals, who had dismantled their own philosophical toys with light-fingered curiosity. Liberated from phantoms, since all commandments and prohibitions were mirages that rose and fell in the constant communion of people with people, he could no longer ascribe any weight to his morally tormenting dreams, yet it infuriated him to think of these dreams as temporary bubbles of his subconscious, and that he himself was a bubble, whose birth and disappearance would be noted only by statistics. Against this world of forms as fluid as smoke, a world reduced to incest within the human species, the Association offered action without justification or aim. The magnificent fireworks that gushed out of the libraries and laboratories amid the deafening sound of explosions announced a liberation from the slavery into which the mind had driven itself through its very concern with its own freedom. And the dangers of conspiracy—the diligent preparation of the climactic moment of fire, the donning of masks, and running away—all intensified time much more effectively even than the hand-clapping worshipers of Baal could have managed. Of course, it was still true that anyone who spent his days moving to the rhythm of the dance, endlessly chanting the same thing over and over, could also drive away barren and fatal thought, coming to inhabit a pure now by taking part in the nameless. In essence, it all came down to active or passive means to embark on similar expeditions away from the line measured by the clock of time. Yet Karel had become so mixed up that the immediate liquidation of a world stripped of all its flavors and colors seemed the simplest way.

  To exterminate himself, he selected an old-fashioned method, perhaps because all the towers and soaring bridges were equipped with nets or protective glass. Thus human society, having already unleashed the desire for death from within itself, attempted with its usual irrationality to prevent at least one form of suicide. Yet a mere museum piece—a revolver once used by the police forces of various countries—could just as easily do the job. Of course, Karel would not have been such a milksop if he had truly believed in the final end of his personality. But he was no different from many of his contemporaries, who killed themselves to spite somebody or something in the vague hope that they would then be able to look on maliciously as the mother existence who had spurned them received her comeuppance—Karel, too, observed the rules of theatricality. He had a particularly strong tendency toward sly calculation, and he clearly yearned for the gesture more than its result, since he loaded only four bullets. He spun the cylinder, leaving his extermination uncertain, with the chances a mere four to two—in short, he played at Russian roulette. He placed the barrel to his temple and fired, only to hear the trigger’s empty “click.”

  Things could have turned out differently, and then he would never have learned the futility of his gesture. For shortly after this event, which remained known only to himself, there occurred certain developments of immediate concern to both him and everybody else. The new circumstance consisted in the appearance of the HBN, whose existence soon became very real and tangible to all. Nobody was sure whether the HBN, the Higher Brethren of Nirvana, was a legal or illegal institution. Its composition, its connections, and the rationale for its decisions remained secret, though—because, wherever people exist, what is hidden sooner or later comes to light—the most credence was given to a rumor that it was simply an ingenious computer, dependent on its own reasoning alone, but controlled by a secret cell of the Astronauts’ Union. As for the aims of its operations, the HBN laid them out openly in leaflets stamped with its initials, which seemed to appear from nowhere. Since excessive multiplication exposed every biological species to the dangers of degeneration and extinction, but one could only condemn the mutual murder of human beings in the paroxysms of passion and cruelty known as wars, the HBN proposed to come to the rescue in a strictly scientific, humanitarian, and detached manner, serving both the species and individual beings struggling under the burdens of life. The HBN announced that it would employ a method known to hunters for centuries as a cull. Before long, it became clear that the HBN was scrupulously delivering on its promise. In fact, its operations did not take the form of thunderbolts striking a timid herd of deer, leaving bloody carcasses in the wake of its flight. Instead, they always involved a simple disappearance, so sudden and complete that a person walking in front of us on the stairs just a second earlier could seem a mere delusion, while a hand clutching a glass appeared to hang suspended in a void. The bundle of molecules held together in the form of a human being lost its unitary quality in a single moment, without any transition through intermediate stages of dissipation, fading, or haziness. It was impossible to establish any rules as to the location or selection of targets. It could happen at home, in the car, or on the street; neither age, gender, profession, nor skin color offered any protection—nor did any particular thoughts or states of soul. The promise of the rescue was vague enough that its sentence could strike down both the despairing and the cheerful. If these were hunts, then the electronic dogs must have been tracking certain types of genes, though nobody could guess which ones.

  There was clearly a connection between the suicidal tendencies of the many people like Karel and the appearance of the HBN. The constant threat took the sense out of preparing for self-liquidation, while the present moment regained something of the flavor it must have held for the cave people, as they trembled before a night filled with the roaring of tigers. The secondary aim of the HBN may well have been to exert a tonic effect on the inhabitants of Earth, who thus remained capable, under the right conditions, if not of rejoicing in the fact that they were alive, then at least of wanting to live. Indeed, the number of suicides dropped significantly. Comparing the earlier graph of suicides with the graph of disappearances, it became clear that the latter slightly exceeded the former, suggesting that the overall plan—inaccessible to the masses of mere mortals—must have involved factors beyond the simple depletion of the population.

  As was so rightly observed long ago, the adaptive capabilities of our tribe are almost limitless. When one of our ancestors headed into the forest with a club and spear, never to return, the loss simply had to be accepted. And did the families of fighter pilots shot down in battle not have to reconcile themselves to the very same implacable fact? The HBN was met at first with terror. Yet many of the noble impulses of universal compassion had reached a crisis point during the War of the Lovers of Racial Peace, when fears over the poisoning of the planet had brought people in their millions to attack one another with knives, so that one could say without exaggeration that all had swallowed a substantial dose of callousness and indifference. In any case, it now appeared that man had always felt more indifference toward the deaths of others and more resignation toward his own death than had ever been captured by a language that dramatized the experience from the simple need for expression. The holes caused by the HBN soon healed over, and life continued along the same old track, even if the nonappearance of a lover at a café sometimes meant that she no longer existed, and a mother could enter her baby’s room to find an empty crib.

  The experiences of that night, when Karel had played his game of roulette, turned out to carry certain prophylactic advantages, as they immunized him against the HBN. Something had snapped in his head, so the night must have constituted more than a mere performance for his own delectation. He had landed in a zone of clarity, inner composure, and perfect functionality, while his handwriting formed an external sign of the transformation. Instead of his earlier clumsy scrawl, which had seemed uncertain whether to slant to the left or right, he began—almost from one day to the next—to set down compact letters, clear and confident of their direction. He also noticed a sudden expansion of his mental abilities, as if a veil had been torn away to reveal something he sensed was there, but did not recognize. He decided that from then on he would make full use of these abilities. By devoting themselves to learning in the schools known as universities, people had once merely fulfilled the reg
ulations justifying the existence of these institutions, which now belonged to the past. From the moment they had been appointed another task—namely, to enrich the concept of play, and with it to occupy all those children from the age of seventeen to twenty-five for whom there was no employment—learning had been regarded as a caprice or dubious privilege of the few. They were known as “the hardheads,” and there were enough of them to sustain the economy. Karel’s successes were so substantial and rapid that he seemed destined to take his place among the chosen ones abducted by the Astronauts’ Union. In the end, he managed to avert this fate, as he had no desire to become a mere counting mule, a genius thanks to the chemical substances that the highest authorities dispensed only to their own.

  Both during his studies and in his later career, when everything he did was a success, he discovered a disquieting gift in himself. While others called it his good fortune or his intelligence, he himself almost felt fear, as if he had received too much. We constantly find ourselves within an ever-changing system of elements in unceasing motion, and our defeats usually spring from ignorance of the rules according to which this motion unfolds. Karel had convinced himself that he could predict how the elements would behave, and into what new combinations they would arrange themselves. In the game with fate, he could see his opponent’s cards, as if they were transparent. A suspicion began to grow inside him, soon becoming a conviction, that his diligence and mechanical sense of duty had made him a dangerous psychopath, all the more so since his psychosis was hidden, unlike that of the more obvious lunatics running about with flowers in their hair. In other words, his gift was a payment, and by using it he had been forced to make a deal. But a deal with whom? There is no need to enter into his reasons; perhaps he wanted to suffer—anything to satisfy his desire for justice or decency. Let it suffice to say that he experienced recurring cycles of pain, not in his body, but still acute. It usually began as a gradual worsening of the state in which he permanently existed, accustomed to it as if to a nagging toothache. Certain signs warned him that an attack was approaching, and he was even able to calculate how many days it would take to arrive. It took the form of an inner trembling that rose to fever pitch, as if some unknown force were raging inside him, pulverizing him from within, lasting from two to three weeks on each occasion. If not for a supreme effort of will, he would have been incapable of anything but lying down and trying to find a position to appease his adversary—for instance, it helped to curl up into a ball and assume the fetal position. Yet Karel learned to impose on himself the normal conduct of his work, never giving himself away to those around him, which was such a difficult task that he admired himself for accomplishing it. The ever longer chain of these imperious acts of self-control produced an ever stronger discipline within him, and he thought of it as his secret, as his Samson’s mane.