In addition to that activity, which I performed with the single-minded zeal characteristic of young provincial officials of the pre-1848 period, I dedicated my few free hours deliberately not to the fodder plants and crops that dominated the agricultural cycle, but to the wayward phenomena of toxic flora, having since my young days felt a particular attraction to those plants which bring no benefit to mankind, but rather tend to cause harm to people and their livestock. What captivated me most of all about them was the mysterious way in which they worked, seemingly according to a wholly obscure system that manifested no firm features whatsoever by which one might have distinguished these often life-threatening plants from benign ones, for one and the same family frequently included both nontoxic species—even edible vegetables—and ones that induced breathing difficulties and vomiting. In those days, fungi formed an important part of the diet of the rural Bohemian community; mothers used to place bunches of Solanum nigrum in their babies’ cradles to help them sleep or, rather, forcibly send them off to sleep; herbalists everywhere carried on their deadly trade in sacred Anemone pulsatilla; and every now and again some simpleton lured by their beauty into partaking of the glossy black fruits of the Atropa belladonna would find himself struck down by raving madness.
So I collected and examined the plants that grew in abundance along footpaths and streams, on heaths and in meadows, studied the burned entrails of livestock that had come to grief following a fateful indulgence, and filled my observation journals, all with the worthy aim of publishing a compendium of the poisonous plants of Bohemia and a paper on the fungi found in this part of the country—some of them eminently edible, but many more of them toxic. The study of cryptogamia, long-neglected at the time and admirably revived by Krombholz only a short time previously, was an activity that would prepare me like no other for my subsequent field of endeavor: the unseen work of legacy preservation.
The results of my research were favorably received, notwithstanding the fact that no general underlying principles could be deduced from my observations. An amiable scientific dialogue ensued, and as a newly elected member of several learned societies I soon came to regard myself as one of the select circle of those who have added to our knowledge of the world, even in a discipline as lowly as botanical classification. They were good times. I botanized, oversaw the accounts of the princely estate, excelled both as a strict supervisor and an eager subject, and took a fancy to a woman who reciprocated my affection to a sufficient degree that I was not deterred from making my proposal. The years went by; grain harvest was followed by corn threshing, hop picking by fruit harvest, green fodder distribution by beet sowing, and meanwhile the numerous measures I had taken to maximize the amount of arable land available proved as effective as intended: woods were cleared, heathland cultivated, moors drained and ponds emptied down to their peaty bottom. With my attention so focused on the future and on practical considerations, my research gradually ground to a halt during this time, and the more closely I scrutinised the natural world through my magnifying glass, the more it seemed to me in every one of its countless metamorphoses to embody unbridled chaos untamable by any governing hand—a phenomenon familiar to anyone seeking to unite theory and practice. One goes to great lengths to organize and configure this chaos in one’s mind, only to confuse the scientific picture just when one believes oneself to be enriching it.
And so the glorious vision of an all-encompassing system became bound up in my heart with an unspeakable feeling of worthlessness, bitterly fueled by a series of flagrant offenses against forest laws. Every mangled trunk was a thorn in my side, the flesh around it festering with a sense of injured pride—the poison of weakness, which I endeavored to dispel on lengthy forays into the forest, which gradually became my habit in place of attending church. Indeed it was on a Sunday, as I roamed the impenetrable undergrowth of the Bohemian Wood as was my wont, making my way into its dark heart of nothing but spruces, where all the tree debris blown down by the wind had caused bare patches littered with dead trunks, which lent the wood an almost wounded appearance, that, visited by a peculiar fear that I am inclined in hindsight to call prophetic, I pulled from the ground the frond of an especially magnificent fern, and on closer examination it became apparent that the roots of the regal plant presented the shape of a waning crescent moon, no less. This moment, which has since haunted me like a vision, was embedded in a solemn silence uninterrupted by any song, call, or indeed the slightest sound from any bird. And as if this unmistakable sign, which I was immediately willing to acknowledge as the mark of a higher power, did not already weigh heavily enough on my soul, only a few days later—in the early hours of July 8, 1842—the big circle of the moon cast its gray-blue shadow over me, although my place of abode at the time was not granted the pleasure of a total eclipse of the sun, something that one would have been able to witness a mere hundred miles further south. When, on that day, the fireball narrowed to a thin sliver and its now deathly pale light transfigured the courtyard, the poultry fell silent again and fled to their coop, while all my blood rushed vertiginously to my heart, and all at once it struck me with glittering clarity that anyone wishing to scale the sturdy botanical branch of the tree of science all the way to its outermost fork must reach up towards the mighty phenomena of the all-overarching sky. No sooner had I embarked on my new studies than the logicality of turning from plants sprouting in obscurity to the secret order of the stars became for me a fortifying certainty. After all, throughout the ages, the vast majority of alchemists had been botanists first and foremost, and the most prominent alchemists had simultaneously been astrologers and astronomers, like the architect of that compelling theory which posits that every plant has its own heavenly twin in the form of a star. The degree to which the study of poisons and the study of the heavens are intertwined is manifest not least in that verse from the Book of Revelation, unfathomable at that time, which had predicted the fatal impact of the comet Wormwood, known to have wiped out a third of the Earth’s population as well as the DNA quartz glass archives designed to last forever, consequently rendering our work here all the more urgent, although our activities have very wisely always been confined to those goods generally classified as analog, and not those belonging to that ephemeral, electrical device-dependent state between zero and one. In those days the human race, fooled by its confidence in the infallibility of its supreme ingenuity, experienced once again the most appalling consequences of its lack of knowledge. The Earth was not a safe place and never would be.
Within the space of a year not only was I wholly familiar with celestial phenomena, I had also discovered my special liking for the closest of all the heavenly bodies, deriving unprecedented pleasure from studying its scarred form in detail and devoting myself nightly to the gradual discovery and detailed drawing of its peculiarly damaged yet chastely shimmering surface, which I learned to examine through a five-inch refractor with a focal length of three feet that I had purchased in Budweis, in the same way as I had once examined spores concealed in tender membranes. For that which is near is far off—and the higher truth is revealed in the most inconspicuous of creatures and the most remote—both under the microscope and through the telescope. Given that my previous labor of love had been concerned with outlying phenomena, it is not surprising that, with my new subject too, it was primarily its outermost edges that fascinated me, in other words those regions which, due to the slightly swaying proper motion of the moon in accordance with some complex law, may be glimpsed only in certain phases. The cratered landscape of Tycho with the incomparable shadows it casts at sunset, Plato, the circular mountain range, in the early dawn hours, Gassendi, the banked plateau close to the light limit, and the evenly shaped bowl of Linné were to me what Cicero, Seneca, and Virgil were to Petrarch: faithful friends and mute recipients of my nightly monologues. Not that they ever answered me. The moon is notoriously silent by nature. Yet it was a gracious silence, which, unlike that of the prince’s smug attendants, di
d not punish me with contempt, but seemed to reward each one of my rapt looks with benevolence and kindness.
Henceforward I lived each day only for the night, longed for its blackness which obliterated the earthly realm and caressed the starlight, and for the dark time of year, when the early sunset would allow me to neglect my worldly duties and silently devote that time to my new master.
Very few are prepared to go as far as I went, for it takes not audacity but humility to exchange people’s memory of you and the secure career of a civil servant for the vague prospect of attaining some higher truth or greater glory. To disappear, as long as one person remembers you, demands considerable skill, all the more so if you hold a highly responsible position on an estate like Krumau which, even after the fateful year when the authorities had to suffer the loss not only of serf labor but also of some of their best goods, still ranked as one of the most preeminent in the realm. The prince was known for visiting his estates year in, year out, watching them thrive like a father watching over his children, hence he followed my activities, too, with fond suspicion, since I was fatherless and only a few years younger and could have been his brother, or perhaps actually was, as my mother hinted to me on her death bed. Her funeral would be followed by other, more painful ones, until I elected never again to have to embark on this most harrowing of all processions and, of my own accord, chose the fate that overtakes us all one day, since it was now of no consequence whether my name were to fade to illegibility forthwith or only in four or forty-four generations’ time. Circumstances favored my undertaking more than they hindered it: the lands under my administration were now considerably smaller in area, and the two children who would have been able to carry tidings of me to future generations lay in the graveyard, borne off by plagues that my wife, laboring under an ineradicable misconception, ascribed, along with the catastrophic failed harvests of those years, to the sinister influence of the moon, and I was unable either to disabuse her or to ease her pain, which bore a silent reproach. She in turn could not abide my moon addiction—and possessed neither parents nor siblings who could have mourned or been suspicious of her abrupt passing. In any case, it was not possible, under the prevailing laws of nature, for me to take her with me; each one of us must leave everything behind, as if he were crossing the final threshold.
I landed, like all those before and after me, in the Mare Imbrium, the sunless lake, naked and freezing, fighting for breath, as befits a birth. As soon as the decreed quarantine period had elapsed, I was appointed as an assistant, and hence the lowest member of what seemed to me to be a completely and utterly perfect institution. Inspired by the irresistible regularity of its routines, I took care faithfully to perform all tasks entrusted to me, the most lofty of these duties consisting in the preliminary sorting of all incoming goods.
As everyone knows, Ariosto, in his Orlando Furioso, once set abroad a rumor that everything that is lost on Earth ends up here with us on the moon, an idea he had copied almost word for word from Alberti, who had previously overheard it from a muddleheaded washerwoman in Padua. Truly all three were overindulging their imagination if they thought to find in this fabled place everything they themselves secretly missed: bygone days and fallen empires, long-lost loves and unanswered prayers.
The truth is that the centrifugal forces act in the opposite direction, just as it is not the Earth that keeps the moon in its orbit, but the moon that keeps the terrestrial body in its, which is why the moon essentially merits the title of mother planet, or at the very least that of the Archimedean point from which the world may be lifted off its axis. For the Earth is nothing, and the moon in its appalling feigned dependence, that mute, calcified mirror, is everything, especially since it is in any case only a matter of time before the cosmic page turns and Earth’s satellite finally assumes the dominant role in this fragile configuration, a role it has covertly played since its very origin. For it is invariably the servant who places an obligation on the master—and not the reverse, as my experience as a mediator between the domestic staff and the prince taught me on multiple occasions.
My relocation happened to coincide with the first crude experiments by the physiologist Mayer, which suggested that movement and warmth are merely different manifestations of one and the same force, and that consequently any loss of energy is a near-impossibility. This basic principle of energy conservation—which here on the moon had been known since time immemorial as the law of loss avoidance—governs the extensive interactions between the two stars and implies that anything that arrives here on the moon disappears on Earth, having been selected by an independent Moon/Earth Council on the basis of a fair yet ultimately impenetrable principle, before finding its way into this world and hence crossing into that weightless intermediate realm of the archive, which eludes the traditional assignment to either the living or the dead.
Only for a brief, yet glorious period now in the distant past were all incoming items kept without exception. If one believes the myriad stories passed down by word of mouth despite the prohibitions, these included the stones of the Olmecs; a clay model of the Cretan labyrinth from the workshop of the historical figure Daedalus; a vase depicting the feast of Hybristica held in Argos in honor of the Muses’ servant Telesilla, at which the women would wear men’s clothes and the men women’s clothes; the magnificent nose of the Sphinx of Giza; the second Arabic translation of the Almagest, inscribed in gold lettering on a 220-foot-long dragon gut, as well as Euripides’s play Polyidus with its line that shines out across the darkness of oblivion: “Who knows whether life is death and death is life?”—a line that seems to me to express most admirably that to which we are elected or condemned here; also half a dozen atomic bombs preserved in Greenland’s ice; a neat crucifix made out of the cross-bone of a frog’s head; several complete, but entirely different sounding transcripts of the Secretum Secretorum; Simone Martini’s elaborate portrait of Petrarch’s beloved Laura de Noves, which apparently served only to prove how conceited the much vaunted beauty was in reality; the grotesque codices of the Maya, which could be read only by their priests and by no one else, along with a remarkable number of works by women, whose titles alas I can no longer recall.
That era was followed by a time of transition in which the task of selection and safekeeping was entrusted to an army of chosen ones, which included some of the greatest experts in the art of memory, who had been unable to escape the call to our sphere, until they were replaced by some equally great experts in the art of forgetting, since it had gradually dawned on those in charge that the latter were more adept at managing the flow of incoming goods.
It was much like on Earth: each generation reorganized the goods, every new regime, for its own edification, invented a whole new approach, and if practical activity declined under one ruler, theory, by contrast, blazed all the more brightly. Periods of deliberate neglect were followed by spells of excessive concern, and the oft-raised objection that, while much was achieved in both, even more was omitted, fails to take into account the immense challenge posed by the general space problem that hangs over every archive from the hour of its birth, which no system yet invented is able to solve, particularly considering that space here is limited to an area not much larger than the Russian Empire at its most extensive.
On one occasion the order was issued to adopt the model of a permanent but limited library as the basis for goods storage, while another time the originals were replaced with improved, scaled-down copies, until it emerged that the material selected did not possess all the specific qualities advisable for an undertaking of this magnitude, and soon some of the most wonderful photocopies became unusable and were disposed of as expertly as their fragile originals before them.
The council’s directives frequently met with astonishment on the part of the lunar population, which was not, in fact, composed of the most worthy representatives of the human race, but rather resembled an arbitrarily thrown-together community of disparate peop
le with nothing in common save for the tender bonds they had once forged with Earth’s satellite, which from a distance presented itself in an entirely different light in each of their respective cultures. Indeed the moon, which, in accordance with both my native languages, I have only ever been able to conceive of as masculine, had charmed more than a few of the administrators here as the seductive Madame Luna; it even appeared to the Manchu as a divine rabbit holding a mortar, and alas occasionally it also—in keeping with the English expression—tempted lunatics and somnambulists into staying here. The madmen showed themselves to have a particular fondness for the wanton custom of reciting in seemingly never-ending songs the names of those monuments that had already fallen victim to the malignant action of the solar wind, an incantatory practice that continued through the long lunar nights, something that some, and not solely the most depraved of our colleagues, would pay for with the abrupt end of their eternal life, if one is disposed to refer to what we have here in those terms. A complete absence of history is the highest virtue in this life; not the feeblest remnant of earthly melancholy is tolerated here on high, and anyone who nonetheless falls prey to it forfeits his existence here, since the lunar archivist, more even than any terrestrial curator, is required to treat each object equally and, in the interests of all, must not become emotionally attached to any of the goods, particularly as the greedy ravages of time in any case allow only a fraction of the material to maintain its original form for a certain period.
An Inventory of Losses Page 20