The Mountains of Parnassus

by Czeslaw Milosz

  But why did Felisa come to my room one night, emboldening me to kiss her neck before opening her nightgown, under which she was naked? Why did she decide to initiate me into the affairs of love? Until then, I had thought of her not as a woman but simply as an older person, since at that age even a few years can seem like an enormous gulf. Did she simply feel sorry for a lonely adolescent whom she thought she could cheer up at such little cost? Had the boredom of her daily hustle and bustle become a burden to her? Or was it possible—though I didn’t believe it—that there was somebody who saw a handsome boy in me after all? One way or another, the revelation I experienced fell upon me all the more suddenly for the fact that the same old Felisa, harried and preoccupied by her duties, turned out to be an entirely different being, and I couldn’t comprehend how I could possibly have failed to see it. Her physical beauty cut right through me; for months, I walked about in a trance, screaming silently with rapture. Not that there had been any shortage of naked girls around me, but their all-too-obvious public nakedness was to Felisa’s mysterious nakedness what the plump, common forms of pigeons or sparrows were to the flash of a wild bird in a thicket. If I sometimes felt guilty toward Wincenty, the feeling soon faded; I trusted her completely, and if she wished to bestow this gift upon me, then clearly this was how things were meant to be. I would never have presumed to judge her. Even if there were some ordinary polygamous instincts at play, almost on principle, greed didn’t enter into it, for it wasn’t Felisa’s style just to snatch tasty morsels for herself. And later on, in the unit, when the recollection of certain details—looks and intonations—convinced me that Hauki couldn’t have owed his place in the home to friendship alone, I still didn’t judge her at all.

  I’ll leave it at that, for though my fate would carry me far away from those experiences—so far that even my shared identity with that timid adolescent seemed doubtful—on a much deeper level, under various layers, the memory was preserved, and it reemerged once I began to yearn for Earth onboard the ship. Trees, flowers, and mountain streams appeared to me shrouded in the spell of my first discovery, back then in my helpless and ridiculous youth. Perhaps they were even more beautiful, transformed and magnificent, because I had lost them forever. I hoped to see Earth again, but never the Earth evoked by that one extraordinary year. And, yes, I did eventually set foot on the grass again, the narrow green tongues bending in the breeze, and I heard the song of the cicadas. But the past was gone—both mine and other people’s—and I found myself reeling, suddenly half an earthly century older, a traveler to an unknown land, to a civilization of people who were not my peers, and which I would have to learn anew.

  I shouldn’t have ventured beyond our circle, searching for the impossible. I met the familiar faces of Astronaut colleagues, and I held the hand of Ilen, my contemporary. Yet the obsession that had begun on the ship forced me to seek out continuity, perhaps even continuity with myself. I began a timid and roundabout search, convinced in advance of its futility. Then, an extraordinary thing happened: I discovered that Wincenty and Felisa were still alive, even living in the same house. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the receiver, as I was afraid to see their faces on the screen. I wrote a letter. And before long, incredibly enough, I held in my hands a quarto of paper covered with pointy-lettered writing, even pointier than before—Felisa’s writing. She reported that although Wincenty had stopped working long before, they had stayed in the old house, that the water level of the lake had dropped and a new biological station had been built, that their health was poor—Wincenty could barely see and walked with a cane—though somehow they got by, that I was no doubt very busy, but that since I had expressed my interest, for which they were very grateful, they would be glad to see me once more before they died.

  The longest section of the letter was devoted to answering my question about Hauki. As I had no doubt heard (I had not heard), Hauki had become an official at the United Bureaus, though he had suffered terribly, as the job had not interested him at all. Fortunately, he had found a suitable woman, and this had saved him. Here a name was mentioned, and I paused over it, for my memory connected the name with a vague figure, barely an outline, as when we try to reconstruct a dream upon waking. Hauki used to ride out with the very same girl on expeditions of several days, strapping rucksacks and sleeping bags to their saddles. In other words, I hadn’t realized at the time that we were at such different stages. I saw Hauki as a carefree lord of life; in my immaturity, I could have no understanding of his seriousness or of his search for a permanent alliance with someone. They must have already sealed their union back then, making it lasting and final. A few years after my departure on the Sardion expedition, they had committed suicide together, and in the note left behind they wrote of a joint decision prompted by “the senselessness of everything.”

  My triumph. When a person envies, and I had envied Hauki, convinced that I could never compare with him . . . And now this was his failure. So I had won, not he. My strength, my skill, my mind. In the end, I had joined the elite, my image displayed with those of the other expedition members. I was still here—alive, young, and powerful—while nothing remained of Hauki, not even a handful of ashes, but merely a final trace in the memory of two elderly people. We can refuse to admit to ourselves that someone else’s failure is our triumph, but once we have admitted it—and I have admitted it—something starts to happen inside us. I tried not to think about it, but my imagination kept connecting the small number of available images to reconstruct their gradual slide into despair, apathy, and grayness; I even imagined their conversations. I cannot precisely describe how my triumph—because it was shameful—turned to sorrow. Perhaps it was sorrow that all beauty is in vain. And then, for the first time in ages, the wave of my oscillator began to twitch; if I had been tested, I wouldn’t have passed. My own victory appeared to me as unjustified, and I began to ask myself whether it might not have been more worthy of a human being to suffer defeat like them. In the end, their fate had been so much the worse as ours was better; as one scale went down, the other went up; the more faith in purpose and meaning for us, the less for them. So that suddenly I felt responsible for the misfortune of Hauki and others like him, for the whole order of things, though my rational mind still regarded this order as necessary.

  Unfortunately, I went out there. My account of the visit will be awkward. The smallness, fragility, and fine-boned nature of our planet moved me, just as the charming weakness of a child is moving. But to find myself in a shrunken house, among familiar and shrunken appliances, and to have it all before me as if inside a crystal ball in the palm of my hand? And what is the testimony of our senses, our perception, if the same table, the same door frame, the same threshold can be one thing, and then later something else entirely? Except that at least the table and the threshold had remained the same, while it was I who had changed. Admittedly, I didn’t recognize the pines around the house, and I got lost in the altered distances of the hillside, overgrown with new forest. But I would prefer not to speak of the actual moment of meeting them. One recognizes and does not recognize—pure terror. This faded, blind, shrunken human relic was the athletic and broad-shouldered Wincenty. This gray, shriveled old woman had once been my Felisa. A multitude of vertical wrinkles had contracted and obliterated her mouth; her teeth had slid forward, exposed from the gums, and it was they—not her faded eyes—that now dominated her face, or rather her skull, which was ready to dispense with the remains of its muscles, petrifying inside the parchment of skin that was stuck to it.

  I pronounced the word: sorrow. But perhaps it doesn’t fit, since I want to convey a feeling for which words haven’t yet been invented. Just as things that were once large had become small, so it was with desires, passions, betrayals, and faults—all reduced to miniature dimensions, their wretchedness crying out only for forgiveness. Not that some human being should forgive. There is almost a need for a kind of universal principle, a deity, which could do nothing but forgive, which
could take no offense at humans, since they are so poor and impermanent. They are not even this, for they cannot stop anything. Where was the real Felisa? Was she the one with the olive-scented skin from the song of love, or the one who stood before me now? On the sofa, whose dark wood was the same shade as long before, I recognized the checkered pattern, and its familiar design humiliated me. Even a thing that seemed so easily destructible could resist time, but not they, dependent on the pulsing of wearying hearts.

  In the transformation that has taken place in me since that moment, what I have learned has helped me very little. I may have learned to disdain chaos, but now I had that chaos inside me, and it forced me to test my habits. What was the point of armor or a corset if it did not cover weakness? Perhaps we were similar to our ancestors, whose fear of the flaw inside them had made them line up in cohorts and follow orders, deluding themselves that the flaw in each of them would disappear when they marched together. Previously it had concerned me that we were not sufficiently pure or sufficiently removed from disordered and foolishly excitable humanity, but now those knightly or soldierly commandments of mine seemed to have lost their justification. In any case, this was surely not a matter of two separate accusations but rather the continuation of the same vague anxiety—in other words, I had never been a perfect Astronaut. The nature of my slow and gradual transformation is still not entirely clear to me today. The main thing was probably the appearance of a single growing desire: to lose. This dark, goading compulsion would not cease to torment me until I fulfilled its demands. It was as if solidarity with them—with people—was pushing me toward the edge, and I could be with them only by falling.

  Here I should add that my marriage to Ilen, instead of protecting me, only contributed further to my transformation. I looked at her as if into a mirror, while she continued imperturbably to be what I had ceased to be. Her virtues seemed to be made of glass, her insides washed out and transparent, when in truth the inside of a person is always unclean. She took pleasure in our return to Earth, in sports and entertainments, and I accompanied her, though more and more I kept silent. My condition worried her, but I didn’t want to infect anybody with my disease, or convert anybody, least of all her. The infirmity was mine, and mine alone. So our marriage had been consecrated, as we were contemporaries, but I was being dragged back down to that poorer earth, where there was nothing but fear and loneliness.

  If human life was what it was, then it meant to lose. As if, by meeting the fate shared by all, one could reproach some unknown power, shaming or provoking it. If it destroyed people with such indifference, then so much the worse for it. Like Hauki, I simply felt “the senselessness of it all.” You might call it a desire for death. But no, I consented only to the sands trickling through the hourglass, to the inner turmoil that artificially cultivated virtues could never conceal, to the thoughtlessness of the young Felisa, to the shared lot of the children of Adam. I wasn’t completely without hope. Until then, I had lived superficially, but now the time had come for meditation and wandering, in the expectation that things always become clearer when we remove the screen, suddenly exposing ourselves to time, which dismantles us piece by piece, so that we might be prepared for an abrupt end, better prepared than the Astronauts on their expeditions, who do not have to fear the HBN.

  I disappeared, without warning anybody, not even Ilen. I changed my name. Our longevity requires twelve procedures a year—one per month—and I’ve been out of the Union for two years now, so the job has been done. If they find me, I will no longer be one of them. I don’t regret it. I have been wandering and studying the Earth, while my flaw—my weakness—has become ever more apparent. Of course, it wasn’t easy just to abandon Ilen like that, but what use was my rebellion to her? Flawless and cheerful, she will write me off as a dead loss, faithful to the cause, and when I’m long gone, she will join new expeditions, forever young. And if it happened that she met me again as an old man, I doubt that it would bother her. I say I don’t regret it, since for me it all began with Hauki’s defeat, but now I think that if the whole human species had the choice either of losing or winning as we have won, then winning wouldn’t be worth it.

  Appendix

  Ephraim’s Liturgy

  Czeslaw Milosz

  PART ONE: COMMENTARY

  EXPLAINING WHO EPHRAIM WAS

  It all happened in times when human anxiety was less hidden than ever before, as the multitude of activities to which so much time and energy had once been devoted had revealed their futility and uselessness. It was with a certain astonishment that people attempted to reconstruct the course of that earlier transformation, all the more distant in time as even the period it had inaugurated was clearly coming to an end. Of course, theoretically, people understood why the ancestors, shaken in their customs by the Age of Reason and searching for surrogate cults, had gradually come to worship the humblest of occupations, so that the petty and insignificant became great and significant, only now to shrink back down to its proper dimensions. Yet theoretical knowledge—backed by computerized linguistic analysis of the prevailing mentality of a given month or year—could never fully explain the riddle of the honors and privileges awarded for the playing of the lute, the writing of sonnets, or the coating of wood or canvas with paint. For millennia, man had taken pleasure in the products of his hand and mind, delighting in the tangible proof of his versatile talents, but it had never occurred to him that what he created might be called Art, or that it merited idolatrous worship. So how, people asked, and when, had the breakthrough occurred? Indeed, it was a breakthrough of no small import, for it had added yet another division to the countless divisions of people into opposing categories: namely, a division between higher minds, capable of penetrating literature and art, and lower minds, condemned to crude and unrefined amusements.

  The decline of a set of views that had been adopted more or less automatically over the lengthy course of the whole period was made inevitable by sheer weight of numbers. In the middle of the nineteenth century, painters and poets were regarded as somewhat inferior persons of dubious mental health. They formed little groups of so-called bohemians, lamenting their low social status and speaking contemptuously of their well-fed fellow citizens, describing them as everymen, philistines, and even as swine. As for the novelists, they diligently toiled away in the hopes of providing the public with interesting tales, though certain individuals among them began to reveal greater pretensions and ambitions, spending weeks on a single page of prose, while convincing themselves that their martyr’s self-discipline had some higher meaning inaccessible to ordinary people. At the same time, the snobbism of the moneyed classes offered a glimpse of the future, when the art galleries and libraries, often built in the midst of sprawling parks, would be seen as temples of civilization.

  By the middle of the twentieth century, the number of artists, sculptors, poets, and prose writers reached into the hundreds of thousands. From then on, it would grow exponentially, partly as a result of the technological acceleration that would deprive the masses of any influence on political and economic decisions, while guaranteeing, to whoever wanted it, a small income with no obligation actually to work, thanks to automation. This circumstance merely encouraged the spontaneous development of a phenomenon that had arisen for other reasons, but it also explains why at the beginning of the next century there were millions of individuals officially registered as “people of the arts,” a category that included jugglers, magicians pulling rabbits out of hats, tightrope walkers, and makers of moving images projected onto screens. In any case, the figures are unreliable, since millions of others—unrecorded by statistics—devoted themselves to molding sculptures from glass and metal, writing poems and novels, and mixing paints on palettes. Even more telling are the tacitly accepted moral taboos of the time. While the most dubious slogans, including the propagation of suicide and child murder, met with benevolent indulgence, and the most vulgar sexual eccentricities offended nobody, the prohibition against
blasphemy refused to go away. Those who committed it soon confronted faces pale with horror, discovering that they had effectively excluded themselves from human society. All it took was to say that art was just a game, or a mere display of technical skill, or that it was wrong to find the revelation of elusive mysteries in its productions. After all, the libraries were mostly stocked with microfilmed books about these mysteries (which, as we have seen, included the pulling of rabbits out of hats), together with more books about these books.

  The existence of such an extraordinary multitude had to have its consequences. In earlier times, much had been written about “creators” and “consumers,” but now these expressions had become completely obsolete, since only “creators” remained—that is, if we exclude that portion of the human species preferring to busy itself exclusively with money-making, sex, or underwater hunting. It was like an enormous hall filled with endless rows of pianos. Everybody was playing his own instrument, straining to drown out the others, and even if he were to have stopped playing for a brief moment, he would have heard only his immediate neighbor in the general din. The ridiculousness of this activity—which was meant to be aristocratic, but had become common—dismayed the more discriminating. Meanwhile, other factors were preparing the way for a sudden crash. To find the first symptoms of the declining faith in art, we must cast back to the years when so-called structuralism came into vogue, joyfully adopted for a time by those who were both creators and commentators, as it seemed to confirm the sense of their own gravity and grandeur. Unfortunately, while each of them had hoped to save himself from oblivion by committing his name to a book or to the corner of a painting, structuralism heralded the frustration of this aim. For structuralism taught that it was not they who used language, but language that used them, not they who created style, but style that created them, so that all baroque sonnets became one sonnet written by the baroque episteme, and all baroque paintings were one painting, a teaching that clearly applied to the present as well, undermining their confidence in the supposedly unique and individual qualities of whatever they produced. Structuralism was made to the measure of the new era, where 100,000 almost identical poems appeared in print every day, and 100,000 almost identical products of the so-called fine arts were exhibited to the public.