An Inventory of Losses
Page 21
Needless to say, the allocations from the council were never-ending, and soon forever relegated any efforts to preserve all goods—including the creation of an indelible memory containing everything that ever has been and will be—to the realm of impossibility, along with any prospect of a return to Earth, which turned serenely like a white-clouded marble before our eyes, having not the slightest inkling of our labors. I was not alone in finding this sight increasingly hard to bear. And so, when my long-awaited promotion finally came to pass, I was able, without encountering any appreciable resistance, to implement my plan to relocate the archive initially to the side facing away from the planet, and eventually to move it entirely underground. Demoralized and spurred on in equal measure by the failure of my predecessors, I created there, in the lightless depths of the Lacus Luxuriae, a system whose supposedly illustrious centerpiece consisted in the directive henceforward only to retain goods that made reference to the moon, this seeming to me the most worthy approach, if only for the reason that in the works destined for Earth’s satellite, the story of the self-absorbed planet forever turning on its own axis is replicated like the product of a dream. For, as Aristotle once suggested, the dream and the cesspit are inseparably bound to one another, and the moon, like the bowel from which dreams emerge, is the true seat of the soul, nurtured by the longings of our lunar confraternity, like a cheerful, diverse population of simpleminded, insatiable bacteria.
It was an indescribable blessing to be rid of all those goods we had been keeping which had committed the unforgivable error of not mentioning our homeland, the moon, at least once—if only in the improper, metaphorical sense of the Romantics or their numerous successor movements. Those items that had measured up to my strict selection criteria and survived the tumult of long-established regulations were admitted to the Lunarium. The centerpieces of the innermost department were a Babylonian canon of eclipses, an album of Japanese ink drawings of pink protuberances, a strange silent film called The First Men in the Moon, a mechanical musical box containing a Selene riding on a gilded centaur, and the print template of Galileo’s The Starry Messenger, in which he likens the shape of a moon crater to that of my homeland Bohemia, along with vast quantities of lunar rock recovered in response to repatriation requests, to which some notable improvements were made in the course of my negotiations. In short, this seemed like a splendid arrangement, until the time came when I ruled, in my professed wisdom, that it was no longer sufficient just to mention the moon; rather it was necessary for it to be referred to in its true sense, since, after all, even the most brilliant lunar theories had always suffered from the flaw that, in the moon, they were only really looking for the Earth, only wanted to see in it their own inadequate self, a small, stunted twin, the remnant of that prehistoric cataclysm when the fledgling Earth collided with a nameless planet—the event that sparked life itself—and a piece was violently ripped from it which, as a satellite, settled into its own orbit, a late-born, wayward copy, a blind mirror, a star gone cold.
Oh, if only I had moderated my mania! For when I examined the stores of items again, between the Nebra sky disc and an early wax relief of the lunar mountains crafted by Wilhelmine Witte, wife of Court Councilor Witte, I happened upon a bundle of selenographs which, to my silent horror, were signed with my own name in an unknown hand. Kepler must have felt similar emotions when he came face to face with his demon in a dream. In me, likewise, all manner of sensations were awakened which I thought I had left behind on Earth, since in those drawings, which betokened more diligence than talent, I encountered again the mountain formations I had long idolized, the sight of which had shaken me less when in their immediate vicinity than when I used to observe them from afar, an activity to which I had devoted the best of my years on Earth. And so, from behind the veil of oblivion, a memory reemerged of that blessed afternoon on which an unusually favorable opportunity had arisen, on account of the secondary earthshine, to observe the night side of my present place of work and to record it in drawings: Aristarchus shone brightly, the Mare Humorum stood out with dark clarity, Grimaldi appeared grayish-black, and, as I savored the aftertaste of the memory jogged from its slumber, I was again overcome by that long-dormant urge that had once brought me to this remote place, to this labyrinth of lightless caverns with its interlocking villous aisles, a place where—it now irrefutably dawned on me—the object of my highest admiration had become for me one of daily chores, and the radiant future had faded away into an inaccessible past. Only the present, the tender blossom of the moment, had always contrived to hide itself from me.
There I was, at the pinnacle of my life’s work, in the supposedly legitimate possession of supremely precious goods, from which the ghosts of my past joys and most recent sufferings drifted up to me, sensitive as an exposed nerve. The body in which I had, not long ago, considered myself as safe as in my mother’s womb, had suddenly turned cold, my high-mindedness had vanished and I felt a strong antipathy towards the prospect of uselessly repeating over and over like Sisyphus the task already performed countless times, since none of the future methods would be able to banish the thought that only now was ripening in me to a sad certainty: that the moon, like every archive, was not a place of safekeeping, but one of total destruction, Earth’s own knacker’s yard, and the only practicable way of saving my foolish work, the Lunarium, from the inevitable—its certain replacement by infinitely stricter and better conceived systems—was for me to preempt the downfall that awaited it myself.
To understand the moon means to understand oneself, and today, at the very limit of my wretched existence, I can make so bold as to say that I have succeeded in this to some small degree, though that realization did not, like the vast majority of truths, also serve to alleviate the pain it engendered but, on the contrary, the sheer size of the dose turned the medicine to poison. This insight gained too late tastes as bitter as the semiripe fruits of the nightshade. The moon has stayed the same, and the universe with its constantly twinkling lights of long-extinguished stars is the eternally old, historic place. I was a person like any other for whom the moon, like an ever-painful phantom limb, was merely a reminder of a now-lost state of perfection, of the immeasurable trauma of birth, whose raw violence inherently presents more of a riddle than ineluctable death itself. But because remembering can be learned, whereas forgetting cannot, I am denied the possibility of returning home, or of finding sanctuary in a belief in Linné’s classification or in Jesus on the cross, which is what saved my doppelgänger from my fate. So I am departing a life that is no longer deserving of its name, and perhaps never was, and an occupation which, strictly speaking, was no more pointless than any other. The terrible thing, I now know, has already happened and any terror to come is only the inevitable consequence of the beginning of all time, including the hour, so near and yet so far, when the central luminary—the sun—will burn up and all the celestial bodies associated with it will be vaporized. How I wish the remains of my mortal shell would go the same way as that tall spruce in Tusset wood, which was felled by lumberjacks while still healthy and in its 125th year, but whose trunk they were unable either to cut up or to process as no saw could be found that was large enough to span the width of the shaft, so that they were left with no choice but to leave the colossal trunk to rot where it lay. For whereas on Earth the rotten body of every toppled trunk is soon colonized by the richest flora of mosses and fungi, and decay fuels the cycle of life with a constant ardor, in the lunar disposal craters no rebirth awaits, but merely a disintegration into fine gray electrically charged dust—an irreversible process uniquely aided by the extremely thin, vacuum-like atmosphere of this place.
Index of Persons
ACOSTA, Mercedes de 104, 106, 109
* March 1, 1893 in New York
† May 9, 1968 ibid.
American author.
AL-BIRUNI, Abu r-Raihan
Muhammad ibn Ahmad 24
* Sept. 4, 973 in Kath
>
† Dec. 9, 1048 in Ghazna
Chorasmian universal scholar.
ALBERTI, Leon Battista 234
* Feb. 14, 1404 in Genoa
† Apr. 25, 1472 in Rome
Ital. humanist.
ALCAEUS OF LESBOS 123
* ca. 630 B.C. in Mytilene
† ca. 580 B.C.
Lesbian poet.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT 8
* July 20, 356 B.C. in Pella
† June 10, 323 B.C. in Babylon
Macedonian king.
ALEXANDRA (Doris Nefedov) 196
* May 19, 1942 in Heydekrug
† July 31, 1969 in Tellingstedt
Ger. singer.
ANAXIMANDER 120
* ca. 610 B.C. in Milet
† after 547 B.C. ibid.
Greek pre-Socratic.
APOLLONIUS DYSCOLUS 124
1st half of 2nd century in Alexandria
Greek grammarian.
ARIOSTO (Ludovico Ariosto) 234
* Sept. 8, 1474 in Reggio nell’Emilia
† July 6, 1533 in Ferrara
Ital. humanist.
ARISTOTLE 17, 133, 238
* 384 B.C. in Stageira
† 322 B.C. in Chalkis
ARMSTRONG, Louis 22
* Aug. 4, 1901 in New Orleans
† July 6, 1971 in New York
American jazz musician.
ATHENAEUS 124
2nd/3rd century in Naucratis
Greek author.
AUGUSTUS (Gaius Octavius) 15, 50, 56, 124
* Sept. 23, 63 B.C. in Rome
† Aug. 19, A.D. 14 in Nola
First Roman emperor.
BEATON, Cecil 103f., 106, 108ff., 114, 115
* Jan. 14, 1904 in London
† Jan. 18, 1980 in Broadchalke
Brit. photographer & set designer.
BEHR, Carl Felix Georg von 137
* March 8, 1804 in Stresow
† June 18, 1838 in Bandelin
BEHR, Carl Friedrich Felix Graf von 137
* Apr. 24, 1865 in Behrenhoff
† Sept. 5, 1933 ibid.
BEHR, Johann Carl Ulrich von 137
* Jan. 1, 1741 in Bandelin, Busdorf
† Sept. 27, 1807 in Behrenhoff
BEHR, Karl Felix Woldemar Graf von 137
* July 23, 1835 in Behrenhoff
† June 10, 1906 ibid.
BEHR, Mechthild Gräfin von 137
* July 17, 1880 in Cartlow
† Nov. 11, 1955
BERGER, Ludwig (Ludwig Bamberger) 107
* Jan. 6, 1892 in Mainz
† May 18, 1969 in Schlangenbad
German director.
BONHOEFFER, Dietrich 137
* Feb. 4, 1906 in Breslau
† Apr. 9, 1945 in Flossenbürg concentration camp
German theologian & dissident.
BORGES, Jorge Luis 18
* Aug. 24, 1899 in Buenos Aires
† June 14, 1986 in Geneva
Argentinian author.
BOUGAINVILLE, Louis Antoine de 31
* Nov. 11, 1729 in Paris
† Aug. 31, 1811 ibid.
French seafarer.
BOURDEILLE, Pierre de (Seigneur de Brantôme) 131
* ca. 1540 in Périgord
† July 15, 1614 in Brantôme
French author.
BUDDHA (Siddhartha Gautama) 120, 159, 165
* 563 B.C. in Lumbini
† 483 B.C. in Kushinagar
CARUSO, Enrico 194
* Feb. 25, 1873 in Naples
† Aug. 2, 1921 ibid.
Italian opera singer.
CASSIUS DIO 15
* ca. 164 in Nikaia
† between 229 & 235
Greek chronicler.
CHARAXUS 122
CHRYSIPPUS OF SOLI 124
* 289–277 B.C. in Soli
† 208–204 B.C. probably in Athens
Greek Stoic.
CICERO, Marcus Tullius 232
* Jan. 3, 106 B.C. in Arpinum
† Dec. 7, 43 B.C. near Formia
CLAUDIUS (Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus) 49, 60
* Aug. 1, 10 B.C. in Lugdunum
† Oct. 13, A.D. 54 in Rome
Roman emperor.
CLEÏS 122, 128
CLIFFORD BARNEY, Natalie 132f.
* Oct. 31, 1876 in Dayton
† Apr. 24, 1972 in Paris
American author.
COLTRANE, John 8
* Sept. 23, 1926 in Hamlet
† July 17, 1967 in New York
American jazz musician.
CONFUCIUS 120
* probably 551 B.C. in Qufu
† probably 479 B.C. ibid.
Chinese philosopher.
COOK, James 31ff., 38, 41
* Nov. 7, 1728 in Marton
† Feb. 14, 1779 on Hawaii
CORTONA, Pietro da (Pietro Berrettini) 83
* Nov. 1, 1596 in Cortona
† May 16, 1669 in Rome
Roman painter & architect.
COUÉ, Émile 197
* Feb. 26, 1857 in Troyes
† July 2, 1926 in Nancy
French inventor of autosuggestion.
DAJO, Mirin (Arnold Gerrit Henskes) 192
* Aug. 6, 1912 in Rotterdam
† May 26, 1948 in Winterthur
Dutch artist.
DARWIN, Charles 197
* Feb. 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury
† Apr. 19, 1882 in Downe
DICKINSON, Emily 127
* Dec. 10, 1830 in Amherst
† May 15, 1886 ibid.
American poet.
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS 124
* ca. 54 B.C. in Halicarnassus
† after 7 B.C. in Rome
Greek scholar.
ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM 131
* probably Oct. 28, 1466, 1467 or 1469
† July 11 or 12, 1536 in Basel
Dutch humanist.
EURIPIDES 235
* 485–480 B.C. on Salamis
† 406 B.C. in Pella
Attic playwright.
EURYGIUS 122
FRANK, Anne 8
* June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am
Main
† Feb. or early March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
FREUD, Lucian 17
* Dec. 8, 1922 in Berlin
† July 20, 2011 in London
British painter.
FREUD, Sigmund 21, 197
* May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia
† Sept. 23, 1939 in London
GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas 101
* May 14, 1727 in Sudbury
† Aug. 2, 1788 in London
English painter.
GALILEI, Galileo 239
* Feb. 15, 1564 in Pisa
† Jan. 8, 1642 in Arcetri
Italian polymath.
GARBO, Greta (Greta Lovisa Gustafsson) 102ff.
* Sept. 18, 1905 in Stockholm
† Apr. 15, 1990 in New York
GASKILL, Anne 129
GILBERT, Martha 128
* Nov. 30, 1866
† 1943 in New York
American poet.
GILBERT, Susan 127
* Dec. 19, 1830 in Deerfield
† May 12, 1913
American publisher.
GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von 196
* Aug. 28, 1749 in Frankfurt am Main
† Mar. 22, 1832 in Weimar
GOURM
ONT, Rémy de 200
* Apr. 4, 1858 in Bazoches-au-Houlme
† Sept. 27, 1915 in Paris
French author.
GRAFFUNDER, Heinz 209
* Dec. 23, 1926 in Berlin
† Dec. 9, 1994 ibid.
German architect.
GREGORY VII (Hildebrand of Sovana) 119
* 1025–1030
† May 25, 1085 in Salerno
Italian pope.
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS 119
* ca. 329 in Arianzum
† Jan. 25, 390 ibid.
Cappadocian Doctor of the Church.
GUERICKE, Otto von 65
* Nov. 30, 1602 in Magdeburg
† May 21, 1686 in Hamburg
German physicist.
GUNTHER, Jane 106, 109f., 116
* Aug. 17, 1916 in New York
† ?
American editor.
HEPHAESTION 8
* ca. 360 B.C. in Pella
† Winter 324/323 B.C. in Ecbatana
HERODOTUS 12
* 490/480 B.C. in Halicarnassus
† 430/420 B.C. in Thurii
Greek chronicler.
HESIOD 121
* before 700 B.C. probably in Ascra
† probably 7th century B.C.
Greek poet.
HITZIG, Friedrich 137
* Apr. 8, 1811 in Berlin
† Oct. 11, 1881 ibid.
German architect.
HOFMANN, Ernst 101
* Dec. 7, 1890 in Breslau
† Apr. 27, 1945 in Potsdam
German actor.
HOMER 121
2nd half of 8th or 1st half
of 7th century B.C.
HORACE (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 123
* Dec. 8, 65 B.C. in Venusia
† Nov. 27, 8 B.C. in Rome
Roman poet.
HOWE, James Wong (Wong Tung Jim) 114
* Aug. 28, 1899 in Guangzhou
† July 12, 1976 in Los Angeles
Chinese-American cameraman.
HYPATIA 17
* ca. 355 in Alexandria
† March 415 or March 416 ibid.