The Mountains of Parnassus

by Czeslaw Milosz

  So this was Karel’s lot, even as he raked in the honors and money. Supposedly worthy of envy, but personally convinced that they should be treating him in a sanatorium, which would still have been an unbearable humiliation: to be struck down by the HBN as a patient whom scientific inventions would send off into a state of artificial bliss. No, better for what was to fall upon him to fall, in the midst of ridiculous and freely accepted activities, and even in freely accepted illness. At least Karel’s periodic affliction and the constant nagging background were congenial to thought, or perhaps even sprang from thought, and he had no intention of renouncing thought, even if he knew that there could be no remedy for him as long as thought still turned inside his head. Perhaps in the end it was not even a question of thought, but rather of a way of seeing. If he were to have stripped a woman naked on the street with his eyes, it would simply have been consoling, as the pink nipples and the dark triangle under her dress would have quickened the beating of his heart with animal warmth. Yet he stripped both women and men with his eyes; he stripped them of their clothes, but also of their bodies and of time itself, constantly plagued by the insufficient reason for their existence, and for his own. In costumes, finery, and trinkets, in total submission to the collective crazes and fashions of the crowd, so that not a single particle belonged to them, he saw the repulsive ridiculousness of nothingness dressing up as nothing. Meanwhile, the city exuded a particular aura or vibration, which he perceived with a sixth sense. From the spires of its buildings, from the aerial roads, from the docks and airports, from its pulsating glow, the city slammed into him as a cross between the buzzing of an enraged bee and the hiss of a venomous snake poised to strike. Senseless material, senseless brutality. How could he begin to coexist with it? Could he cease to be an unearthly spirit observing it from beyond? So-called adjustment was not Karel’s strong suit; in fact, it was doubtful that anyone could have managed it.

  On Methods of Governing

  Karel heard that Ephraim had returned from seven years in exile, and he met him shortly afterward. He found before him a strong, stocky man with a black beard heavily streaked with gray, and the beady eyes of a cunning animal. In the very idea of exile there was something of the relict from the distant past, and this interested him. Long ago, the more energetic rulers had made the strange assumption that the minds of the ruled were a threat if they could not be convinced by persuasion or fear. Enormous sums were spent on shaping and convincing those minds by means of so-called culture—or, as it was also known, literature and art. A certain predetermined percentage of the population was locked up in prisons, in barracks ringed by barbed wire, or exiled into the wilderness, not necessarily because these prisoners themselves represented the seeds of rebellion, since this was impossible to ascertain, but rather because the very fear of ending up behind bars had a salutary effect on the others. These primitive methods reflected the primitive level of technology. The simplest things are generally the most difficult to discover, and, in this case, it soon became apparent that the state of mind of citizens was more or less irrelevant to the exercising of power, and that—with the exception of those belonging to the Astronauts’ Union—it was best to leave them to their own devices within certain sensible limits. Of course, the freedom of the various clubs, groups, and teams was ever only ostensible; some suspected even the Arsonists’ Association of secret dependence on the Union, which could have been truth or fiction. Above all, the great transformation should be attributed to the disappearance of the so-called investigations, which soon became unnecessary. Only the form remained of the old penal codes linking the punishment to the crime, though this form would stubbornly persist for some time, pedantically molding imaginary crimes when something else was really at stake—namely, improper tendencies of mind. Eventually, a turning point would arrive with the publication of The Theory of Individuality, which soon became a foundational work, while the Astronauts lauded its author, Professor Motohiro Nakao, as one of their great organizers.

  Ephraim had been exiled to Seal Island—an unusual sentence, though it did not contradict the premises of The Theory of Individuality. Professor Nakao’s achievement had been to break down individuality into its fundamental components, which he then submitted to various arithmetic operations. In his well-known example of two children placed in identical conditions, Nakao demonstrated that a single minor divergence in the reception of sense impressions could initiate two different “tracks,” and that one needed only a certain amount of data to understand the direction of these “tracks,” just as opinion polls were not conducted among ten or twenty million individuals, since it sufficed to take a sample of typical attitudes, which would then check out mathematically. Considering the diversity of individuals, multiplied by genetic chaos (as if the genes kept playing tricks on the geneticists), Nakao taught that the focus of attention should be exclusively on those particular “tracks” of perception that might turn out to be harmful to the rational social order defended by the Astronauts. The need for tedious police surveillance of suspects disappeared, as did the need to lock them up in prison to submit them to investigations that were unpleasant to both sides, since the computer (which was very tolerant) could make a diagnosis on the basis of easily accessible and apparently insignificant data.

  But why had they not used Cocooning on Ephraim? No one could guess. Cocooning was another invention of Professor Nakao; it had led to the complete disappearance of what were now considered barbaric practices of the central authorities. The mere states of somebody’s mind, and even the most subversive ideas flowing from these states, could bring no harm to the planetary order. Only communication among eccentrics and the dissemination of their ideas called for preventive measures. In order to communicate, people had to be tuned in to the same wavelength, or work mentally at the same speed. By interfering with this ability—for instance, by slowing or accelerating the speed of a person’s thoughts to deny him access to other people’s thoughts—the potentially dangerous individual suddenly found himself inside an invisible cocoon. The cocooned person would speak, but fail to understand why his logical and convincing arguments sounded like incomprehensible babble to everyone else. This was even more confusing after the era when he could still have dated his problem with language back to a certain visit paid to the Welfare Bureau, perhaps none too willingly, though even then his conversation with a polite official would have borne none of the hallmarks of police harassment. In those days, Cocooning still required a large stationary machine to work on the patient through the wall. The moment the process ceased to depend on a particular location, nobody knew whether he was having trouble finding a common language with others because he had been cocooned or simply because the natural development of his own tendencies was disturbing his interpersonal relations. Of course, there was never any shortage of people who were simply cocooned by nature, so to speak, and for them there was no need for any additional treatment. But others exhibited such a high level of immunity that the Cocooning had no effect on them. Either Ephraim belonged to the second category or the decision had been made for other reasons—in any case, he received the order to leave and move to a region he neither knew nor would ever have chosen to visit of his own free will.

  The Cardinal’s Testament

  What was hidden behind the thick, convex glasses of the little librarian in Miramar? Were those flashes of malice, irony, or good-natured humor? What was he thinking? What did he approve? What was he mocking? He had suggested to Ephraim the tape of an annual compilation of a magazine with a Latin title that had appeared at the end of the era of the Second Romanticism in such a small print run that it was doubtful that any copies of it had survived anywhere. Casually and in passing (since he was busy holding forth on the poor quality of the paper used by similar publishing houses, always yellowing and falling apart after a few years), the librarian mentioned the name of a certain Petro Vallerg. Of course, Ephraim immediately found the issue of this esoteric revue that had announced the p
ainful loss of Cardinal Vallerg, colleague and friend, together with the promise that the magazine would soon publish a manuscript entrusted to it by the deceased. The next issue included the cardinal’s composition: a last will, an appeal to the faithful, or perhaps simply a confession.

  So I have lived through my life, though when I was a young boy this seemed impossible. Old age is upon me now, in the knobbles of a bony hand like a metal vise, in elbows that grow ever sharper, in the rows of perpendicular notches around my mouth, and old age is inside me, in the mellowing and muting of the sorrowful feeling that this is it, that there will be nothing more than this. I was the only child of a pious mother, and I have fulfilled her expectations of me. Now I still see her as she walks home along the street from the market carrying a basket of vegetables, or as she washes the window, sweeping a rag across the glass against the backdrop of a spring cloud, since the sequence of time has been disturbed, and there is no division between earlier and later, just as there is no division between more important and less important. Frail, fragile, and lonely, always excluded from the games of my peers, I entered the seminary because this was her unspoken wish, or perhaps because the fear of incomprehensible, brutal, alluring, and repugnant life tormented me at night. I was not as frail or as fragile as I had imagined, but it took me some time to understand that what paralyzed me and divided me from others was my aristocratic fastidiousness, though there was nothing aristocratic about our family of bus drivers and postmen. Vocation? Who can say what a vocation is? I learned not to delve into the question, however many times I may have used the word.

  How difficult it is to live through life for a C minus. And I suppose one gets a C simply for living, so only the minus is my own. I have never kept a diary or written any memoirs, and now is surely not the time to begin. When I was growing up there was a general craze for recording the most graphic details or depicting them on the screen, but my objection to this violation of the human right to one’s own self was so strong that I respected only those who never made a sound. Now I endure with all my past, which returns in dreams, and—to my relief—will never be known to anyone. Yet if my past does not simply amount to nothing, then it might offer proof of God’s existence to nonbelievers, since someone must know it, after all. Let it suffice for me to confess to hours, months, years, and decades of longing, longing for what was quite ordinary to others, yet was always denied me. Not just the constant torture of the body’s impulses, but the imagined happiness of couples when I saw them holding hands, their enchantment with the air, a curve in a wall, a tree, a flower, fragrance and color, a rapture with its source in the amorously awakened body. When I closed my eyes, temptation enticed me with the rustle of fabrics, the intonations of speech, the very rhythm of everyday human life. Even when I had no desire to listen, the flutters and vibrations of omnipresent human space nuzzled against my cheek. I never held it against my colleagues that they left—and more and more of them kept leaving, until in the end only a handful of us persevered in celibacy. I never held it against them, because it is almost beyond human strength for a person to start the day having told himself in advance that nothing will happen to renew him from without or to nourish his sensual needs, and that only thought is permitted.

  My contemporaries ceased to be capable of fasting or asceticism, for they drew a dividing line between what was natural and healthy—that is, happiness—and what was unnatural and morbid—that is, unhappiness. And one can never overcome happiness with unhappiness; happiness can be opposed only by more happiness. For me, the demonic insidiousness of sex was not an invention of Christianity, which supposedly had destroyed the splendid indulgence of the pagans by condemning certain physiological functions as dirty. I never supported those fervent theologians who strove to blur or conceal the Christian dread of the diabolical temptations, proclaiming the blessings of hygiene with splendidly modern openness and ever old-fashioned sweetness and light. After all, one need not share the views of the Manichaeans, Bogomils, and Albigensians to agree that nothing so entangles us in the world of falsity and pain as the very instinct that prolongs our existence in this world. Oh, the body itself is not dirty; if anything about it is dirty, it is only the death prepared within it. Neither is animal instinct dirty, except that—unhappily—it is not instinct alone that works within us, but also the consciousness inextricably intertwined with it. If we must be children to enter the Kingdom, then our childishness ends where innocent trust ends and the greed of possession begins. What was natural and healthy for the opponents of asceticism signified to me an acceptance of their condition as the only sick creatures among all living things. For it is a fatal disease to have instinct tainted with consciousness or consciousness tainted with instinct.

  In the name of the Kingdom. I made sacrifices, not to obtain happiness, but in order that an otherworldly happiness might be possible, as if it might suffice for at least one man to reject the world from a boundless desire that nothing could satisfy. The very prayer for the coming of the Kingdom can itself be the Kingdom, bringing a fullness—it is hard to explain—more powerful than any longing for a woman’s playful hand to cover one’s eyes. This does not suggest strength of faith; it is not for me to extoll my own constancy or steadfastness. I have doubted deeply and often, finding refuge only in the exercises that Ignatius of Loyola set his followers, transporting myself by force of will through space and time, in reverse, past winters receding into falls, springs receding into winters, funerals almost simultaneous with the begetting of carcasses imprisoned in black caskets with nickel-plated clasps, the last emperors shrinking into children on their thrones and then being born as the founders of dynasties, cities shaved of streets and squares until they became but a single street, the first street, in reverse, back to a small province of the Roman Empire, to Galilee, when Jesus was teaching there. Guided by the will, my imagination led me along paths through the fields as an invisible shadow beside his disciples. Did I not remember his words: “But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world”? On the paths of Galilee, as an unhappy soul with no consolation beyond the far from unwavering conviction that these disciples had faithfully translated his words into Greek, that they had not embellished them with their own fantasies, I said to the Teacher: “Lord, you alone can heal me of my unbelief, but if you are merely a madman, proclaiming that you were there before Abraham, if you did not rise from the dead and Thomas did not touch your palms punctured by nails, then still I wish to accompany you into death and nothingness. Beloved, dearest one, if you—the highest accomplishment that humanity has attained and will ever attain—fell victim to delusion, then there is not and will never be a purpose with which man may endow his life, and therefore, following you, may he curse this universe without beginning and without meaning. For who am I to demand for myself more than you demanded, with nowhere to rest your head?”

  The body is shaped not only by the training to which we subject it in the gymnasium or on the sporting field, but also by sacrifice and by the rechanneling of constantly dissipating energy in a single direction. The face I scrutinize in the mirror bears the marks of spiritual battles, and, in spite of my age, I feel in my movements the precision of their responsiveness. Yet this hard-won, vigilant bodily attention has been the cause of another, more difficult battle. A wrestler walks among his flabby, ungainly, and corpulent peers, superior to them by all the hours he has devoted to his training. I was a wrestler with little generosity of spirit, and what constantly assailed me was contempt for others. They scuttled after their petty amusements, chasing money, tipping back their glasses, wolfing down steaks, writhing about in bed, and I was forced to recognize them as brothers and sisters, though my own fortified mind had weakened or annihilated the temptations that seduced them. When a smoker gives up cigarettes, smoke begins to annoy him; a vegetarian turns away in disgust when a ruddy-faced man at a neighboring table ties up his serviette and cuts into a bloody piece of meat; the gluttony of lovers is irrational to a person who tells himself
that the charms of breasts and thighs have no objective existence, while a dog lying in the bedroom where the couple is locked in amorous embrace yawns indifferently. The pride of the body, ornamented, hips swaying, feeding on admiring glances—but what would happen to it on a deserted island? No, neither their fashions in clothing, music, or performance nor their clashes over money brought me any closer to them, but perhaps only the ambition common to us all—a defiant, stubborn passion, especially strong among recluses and old men, sneering at the humility imposed by reason, and even at prayer. My ambition wore many disguises. One of them was contempt, and who could say that compassion had not been another. Yet only compassion would save me. They grabbed hold of one another, huddling together in their unreal spectacle, and yet every one of them was his own singular failure and his own singular lament. Now I can only cling to the hope that in my contempt I have accepted their failure and their lament as my own.