by Joseph Roth
And now, arrogant as we are, many among us believe that we can deny Him because we are powerless to know Him. We therefore take revenge for His severity. If He withholds the grace of knowing him, we say that He doesn’t exist.
Among us, the common blind, are those who are specially blind, those to whom one cannot explain the difference between night and day.
How could we have so misused our reason? And how is it that this, a gift from God, as mentioned, the unique and last memory of Paradise Lost, has led us to folly and the vice of arrogant behaviour, to blasphemous and false views?
It was in no way foolish, reckless or arrogant to use our faculties of reason, as I have said earlier, but in the course of its application a power that we cannot perceive with the help of our five senses has forced itself between us and the grace of reason that is our heritage; and thus the blessing became a curse. When we believed that we were capable of thinking clearly and logically, we were already confused. And, truly, it was not with the type of confusion that occurred at the time of the Tower of Babel but, rather, a confusion within the clarity itself. This clarity was not the same as the false clarity of a wanderer in the desert who takes a fata Morgana as reality and heads towards it. No, it was such that reality itself became a fata Morgana! It did not dissolve into the air when we reached it. It was physical; it was tangible. It was not our tired senses that gave in to an illusion but our fresh and well rested senses. As we were being led astray we were not suffering from what might be considered sickness or exhaustion; rather, it appeared to us to be quite natural. Our reasoning was intact, our senses were alive and the goal lay very clearly in front of us. We even reached it. But it was, none the less, a trick. And thus we are like wanderers in the desert who are capable of catching up with the deceptive mirage that beckons them, of taking up residence in houses and castles that do not exist, of quenching their thirst from fake springs, of resting in the shade of palms that are not there and refreshing themselves with dates that are not really fruit. They then believe that their thirst has been quenched, but they are still thirsty; that their bellies are full, but they are still hungry; that they have shelter, but they have none. So it is. Our satiety is still hunger and thirst; our home is still homelessness; and what we call reality is still an illusion, for what we call knowledge is a hoax. We believe that we are drinking from plentiful springs, but they are parched wells that are themselves thirsty.
HOLLYWOOD, THE HADES OF MODERN MAN
This could be recognized in the ancient faces. They were all distinguished from each other as symbols of the inexhaustibility and abundance of God, and they were at the same time all like one another because of the consciousness that all diversity is born from a single Creator. This eternal combination of similarity and difference, both through God, characterizes the ancient faces. – Max Picard, The Human Face
If I may take but a single example from the vast field of our progress: we are able to speak with each other across thousands of miles, but can we therefore understand one another? Are we speaking the truth to each other simply because we have placed a miracle between us, one that consists of making our voices heard across thousands of miles? And when a friend in Australia speaks to his friend in Colombia, as they say ‘by wireless’, does this ‘technical wonder’ eliminate malice, lies or treachery from their speech? Isn’t it, in fact, easier to lie when the speakers are not face to face? And even if it should become possible for me to see my friend in Cairo while he sees my face in Paris, would we recognize each other more easily that way than when we are standing next to each other in the same room? Shouldn’t it be more difficult to recognize each other? Can a telescope transform the inability of my eye to recognize into an ability to recognize? On the contrary – the telescope, even if it is perfect, merely strengthens the visual acuity of an eye, no matter if the eye sees falsely or correctly, but it cannot change a deceptive, lying eye into a genuine and true eye. And if the false heart of a false friend were to tell me of his affection from a million miles distant, through use of the most powerful loudspeakers, the so-called technical wonder would not have transformed the falseness of his heart into integrity but would only have magnified it. And if we have succeeded in making shadows move on the screen of the cinema as if they were living people and, further still, to speak and sing, their motions, words and songs are by no means honest and genuine; rather, these wonders of the screen signify that the reality that they so remarkably copy wasn’t difficult to recreate for the very reason that it wasn’t real. In fact, the real people, the living ones, had already become so shadowy that the screen shadows were bound to seem real.
When, now and then, I come upon an actor whom I recognize because I have seen him in a film in the theatre, it seems to me that because I have seen him on the screen I am not looking at him but at his shadow, although it is certain (and my intelligence tells me so) that he is the originator of the shadow that I know from the screen. Nevertheless, when I meet the living and breathing man he becomes for me a shadow of his own shadow. If it were plausible – that is to say, if it were truly possible to animate the shadows that we project on to the screen with technology’s assistance – I should certainly see in the living actor something more than just himself, a living being. I should rather see a person who has the power to infuse his shadow with the very breath of life. It is thus a mysterious force that condemns a living person, God’s creation, bestowed with the divine gift of being able to animate his shadow on the screen, to appear as his own shadow. Yes, one could say that he is even less than a shadow of himself, since the shadow is actually his true existence; he is not himself but, as it were, his own doppelgängers – a doppelgänger that has no existence; he is, this actor, the doppelgänger of his own shadow, one that he projects on to the screen daily. A single time he had his own form captured on film. A single time, but for all eternity the most fleeting of all fleeting things of our earthly existence (namely a shadow) will last as a reality. To be one’s own doppelgänger would in itself be a frightful event! But what can we say to the fact that the doppelgängers of their own shadows are among us – living people, walking, living, eating, drinking and loving?
And it gets still more terrible. For even a doppelgänger must die – one day both the original and his doppelgänger will die. And when an ordinary man dies his shadow also disappears. But the actor who plays in the cinema will live for ever on the screen, the only real milieu of his actual life. That is to say, his shadow or, more accurately, his true self (for he is only the doppelgänger of his shadow) is ‘eternal’. That is also to say, certain men have lived not as men but as shadows and therefore cannot die. They cannot die because they have never lived. They are shadows. They have willingly, more or less voluntarily, become shadows. They have sold their shadows for money and said these were not shadows but actually themselves. And they sold not only their lives; they also sold their deaths. Hollywood paid them. In exchange they forfeited their hope of salvation. They were not only shadows for their entire lives; they remained shadows after their deaths. On the screen, for which they had lived when they were still alive, they still had the chance to be alive and remain that way for all eternity. Because during their lifetimes they saw their shadows as themselves and sold them as themselves, and under such circumstances death was not a phenomenon with which they concerned themselves – once they had signed a contract with Hollywood. Perhaps an ordinary man still counts on eternal salvation. But a man who lives by being a shadow while he is alive possesses, as it were, his own eternal salvation. He is convinced – and not without merit – that the screen, for which he has already lived as a physical phenomenon, guarantees him a comprehensible, rationally believable eternity even after he is dead. The inventor of film has offered people the prospect of an immortality that they can understand while they yet live. The ancient world knew of a Hades that was the residence of the dead, those who had crossed into the shadow world.
The world in which we now live knows a Hades of t
he living – it is the cinema. Hollywood is the modern Hades. There, shadows become immortal during one’s lifetime.
Indeed, ‘modern’ people are distinguished from ancient people mainly by the fact that they have already introduced Hades, the realm of shadows, into the world. The Hades of modern man is Hollywood.
THUS INVENTION, A GIFT OF THE MIND, BECAME AN ELEMENT OF THE ANTICHRIST
But it would be easy and foolish, as I have already clearly stated, to curse invention and the reason from which it is born. For the inventor has done nothing other than apply God’s gift of sense. If, however, one makes use of a divine gift and it then acquires an evil purpose, the evil element must have injected itself between the moment of invention and that of its application in real life. And just as gold, for example, should have been a gift of nature, a blessing of the earth, but has become an element of the Devil so, too, invention, a gift of reason, has become an element of the Antichrist. For the Antichrist becomes most clearly recognizable by the fact that he transforms what is essentially noble into something lowly. It is truly the nature of his existence and activity to desecrate the holy, to degrade the sublime, to pervert the true and to scar the beautiful. Not satisfied with his reign over what is in essence vulgar – for this is admittedly also a component of the earthly world – he seeks to extend his dominion over the noble. However, it could never fall under his power if it remained noble, so he first transforms it into something evil. He is like a dictator whose own land is a desert and who, in order to vanquish his flourishing neighbours, first turns those thriving places into wastes so that they are like his own. If he did not make them like his own, they could not be subservient to him.
But he, the Antichrist, is therefore worse than such a tyrannical ruler because a dictator can be seen, heard, felt and hated, whereas the Antichrist has the power to transform a thriving country into waste land and, in doing so, to dupe us into believing that the waste land is flourishing. And, when he destroys, we think he is creating. When he gives us a stone we believe he has given us bread. The poison from his glass tastes like the elixir of life. We think that he himself, the Prince of Darkness, is a son of both Heaven and earth; so long as we live, this seems to us more than being the son of Heaven alone. He enters thusly; he speaks thusly: ‘You were promised Heaven, but I give you the earth. You were supposed to believe in an unfathomable God, but I turn you yourselves into gods. You thought that Heaven was more than earth, but earth itself is really a heaven!’
And since it is in our innate nature to yearn eternally to become God – because we never forget our origins and are reflections that are always searching for their prototype – we are seduced by the Antichrist. He can easily transform our most noble longings into lowly envy. For longing and jealousy are twin sisters, the one beautiful and the other ugly, who can nevertheless be mistaken for one another. It is inherent in our nature to want to be gods. The Antichrist, however, tells us we are already gods. And, as it is inherent in our imperfect nature that we grow tired and permit our senses to be tricked, he exploits our weaknesses and changes the milestones on our long path into goals. And we believe him. We are always searching, as long as we live, for our eternal home. But long before we have reached it we think that we are already there, thanks to the tricks of the Antichrist. And because our feet become weary, we believe him. Our home is still infinitely far away. But by no means do we go towards it. We halt by the wayside. We remain in the desert and imagine that we have reached our eternal home.
When a poor man tires of his poverty, how soon he stops fighting it and begins to see it as wealth! A prisoner who is serving out a life sentence in gaol believes after ten years of solitary confinement that the prison yard is actually freedom. And thus we, who can separate our shadows from our bodies so they act independently, as though they were human, believe that we already possess the divine power to bring something to life that does not exist. What an illusion! We have, in fact, brought nothing to life!
We have instead granted the greater part of the short life that was gifted us to our shadows! We have not created life; we have lost it! We have not created; we have squandered! And we have squandered sinfully.
THIS IS THE AIM OF THE ANTICHRIST! TO DESECRATE ONE WONDER THROUGH ANOTHER
It is not possible to talk about the Antichrist if one has not met him; and by this I mean if one has not met him actually and in the flesh. As for me, I have met him in many forms. Since my early youth our paths have crossed. I spoke before in such detail about the theatre of shadows because it was there that I first encountered him.
My first contact with the Antichrist happened many years ago, when I was still a boy and saw the wonder of the living shadow for the first time. There came a large vehicle, powered by unseen forces, which stopped at an open plaza outside of town and sent forth a large machine that was covered with a small canvas tent. Then a large tent, also of canvas, was pitched, spread and domed, and one could see upon entry that the interior of the dome was a blue sky with numerous gold and silver stars scattered about. And it was as real as the firmament. The human eye is not capable of seeing more of the actual heavens than can be shown on the spacious dome of a marquee, and the spectators’ eyes therefore saw just as much or as little as they can see of the heavens when they look up at night. Blue was the dome, and the stars were just as unreachable and just as distant as real stars. Since we are not tall enough even to reach the roof of a circus tent erected by men, it was all the same to the people who sat under this roof if the sky was real or a reproduction. Neither one of them was within reach of their hands.
Consequently, they were quite willing to believe that the fake was real. And as it was very dark below and within this canvas tent the people inside believed that they were sitting under a bright and starry summer-night’s sky. We heard an unfamiliar rattling and a humming and buzzing and chattering and thundering from some strange origin. And above and below we saw some kind of four-sided cone that was born from a minuscule square hole, the brightness of which was enveloped by black walls. This cone grew slowly and symmetrically over the spectators’ heads, ever fuller, ever clearer, with its edges becoming more clearly visible in the pale light until it reached and filled the screen, as though a river of pale light were to pour itself into a sea of pallor, illuminating the latter through its own brightened pallor, so that it became visible as a four-sided sea. And we could see the vertical and horizontal threads stretched out on the four-sided sea. The four-sided cone that whirred above our heads made an incredible noise, and when we looked at it we were led to believe that the ruckus came from the billions of dust particles within rubbing against one another. Our ears were shocked that such minuscule molecules of dust and nothingness, even though there were billions of them, might be able to emit such an audible whir. So that we could no longer hear the sound of the dust molecules, an orchestra below the screen began to play marches and waltzes. And this, indeed, drowned out the whir of the dust molecules.
When the first shadows came to life on the rectangular screen and the marches and waltzes played up from the orchestra, the drums beating and the cymbals clashing, we could no longer hear the whirring of the dust particles. But we felt that the little square hole above our heads at the back of the crowd, the birthplace of the dust-laden cone, was the place where the life-sized shadows acquired their lives. Clearly, they sprang from the tiny four-sided hole and could remain unseen throughout their travels along the swelling cone until they made themselves visible on the screen in their deceptively large size. Yet they were shadows! They were less than the molecules of dust whose tiny bodies whirred so loudly in the cone of light. These shadows travelled unnoticed within the billions of dust particles, from the tiny, four-sided hole in the apparatus behind our backs to the four-sided sea that took form before our eyes.
There I saw naked women for the first time, that is to say, the shadows of naked women.
It is not my intention to suggest that this is a means of temptation used by
the Antichrist.
For it was God who created naked people and not the Antichrist. And as we do not inherently see sin in nakedness, thus does the Antichrist want to seduce us by nakedness alone. No, not through nakedness does he reveal and betray himself but, rather, through the purpose for which he uses our nakedness and also our clothing.