Traces 9781503619326

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Traces

M E R I D I A N

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher Editor

Translated by Anthony A. Nassar

Stanford University Press

Stanford California 

TRACES

Ernst Bloch

Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation ©  by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Traces was originally published in German in  under the title Spuren © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main . The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe Institute. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloch, Ernst, ‒. [Spuren. English] Traces / Ernst Bloch ; translated by Anthony A. Nassar. p. cm.—(Meridian, crossing aesthetics) Includes bibliographical references.  --- (cloth : alk. paper)— --- (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Nassar, Anthony A. II. Title. III. Series: Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) .  '.—dc  Original Printing  Last figure below indicates year of this printing:           Typeset by Classic Typography in ./ Garamond and Lithos display

For Siegfried Unseld

Contents*

Not Enough*



Sleeping



Drawn Out



Always in It



Mingling



Sing-Song



Slight Change



Lamp and Closet



Learning Good Habits



The “Mark!”



        The Poor



Filth



The Gift



Different Needs* * Texts



indicated with an asterisk appear for the first time in this edition. Most are from the years when Traces was being written (–); a smaller number were written for this edition.

Contents

x Games, Regrettably



The Useful Member



Shaker of Strawberries*



Bread and Games



Narrow-Minded Comrades*



Disturbing Whim



   Passing It Forward



The Negro



The Watershed



No Face



Comte de Mirabeau



Rich Devil, Poor Devil



The Kitten as David*



Triumphs of Misrecognition



Scribe at the Mairie*



The Beautiful Appearance



The Rococo of Fate



Spirit Still Taking Shape



The Motif of Parting



Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved*



Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile*



Pippa Passes



The Long Gaze



Reunion Without Connection



The Muse of Restitution



Raphael Without Hands



Contents

xi

 Just Now



Dark by Us



The Fall into the Now



The Spur of Work



No Free Lunch*



Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train*



Silence and Mirrors



Ways Not to Be Seen



Imminent Boredom



Moment and Image



Potemkin’s Signature



Incognito to Oneself*



Motifs of Concealment



Just Knock



The Corner of the Blanket



Short Excursion



Terror and Hope



Excursus: Human and Wax Figure



Nearby: Inn of the Insane



Tableau with Curve*



Some Patterns from the Left Side



The Twice-Disappearing Frame



The Motif of the Door



 Half Good



The Next Tree



Contents

xii Flower and Unflower*



The Leyden Jar



The First Locomotive



The Urban Peasant



The House of Day



Montages of a February Evening*



An Odd Flâneur



Eating Olives Precisely*



Making a Point*



The Reverse of Things



Greeting and Appearance



Motifs of Temptation



Appendix: No Man’s Land



A Russian Fairy Tale?*



The Clever Way Out



Disappointment with Amusement*



The Invisible Hand



Tales of White Magic



Wonder



The Mountain



Dead and Usable*



The Pearl*



Notes



Traces

Not Enough One is alone with oneself. Together with others, most are alone even without themselves. One has to get out of both.

Sleeping By ourselves we are still empty. So we easily fall asleep with no external stimuli. Soft pillows, darkness, quiet let us fall asleep; the body grows dark. When one lies awake at night, that is hardly waking, but rather a stubborn, exhausting creeping in place. One notices then how unpleasant it is with nothing but oneself.

Drawn Out Waiting likewise makes one desolate. But it can also make one drunk. Someone who stares too long at the door where he expects another to enter can become intoxicated. As by tuneless singing that draws and draws. Dark, where it draws us to; probably into nothing good. If the man, the woman whom one awaits doesn’t arrive, the clear disappointment doesn’t really undo the intoxication. It only combines with its result, 

Not Enough One is alone with oneself. Together with others, most are alone even without themselves. One has to get out of both.

Sleeping By ourselves we are still empty. So we easily fall asleep with no external stimuli. Soft pillows, darkness, quiet let us fall asleep; the body grows dark. When one lies awake at night, that is hardly waking, but rather a stubborn, exhausting creeping in place. One notices then how unpleasant it is with nothing but oneself.

Drawn Out Waiting likewise makes one desolate. But it can also make one drunk. Someone who stares too long at the door where he expects another to enter can become intoxicated. As by tuneless singing that draws and draws. Dark, where it draws us to; probably into nothing good. If the man, the woman whom one awaits doesn’t arrive, the clear disappointment doesn’t really undo the intoxication. It only combines with its result, 

Not Enough One is alone with oneself. Together with others, most are alone even without themselves. One has to get out of both.

Sleeping By ourselves we are still empty. So we easily fall asleep with no external stimuli. Soft pillows, darkness, quiet let us fall asleep; the body grows dark. When one lies awake at night, that is hardly waking, but rather a stubborn, exhausting creeping in place. One notices then how unpleasant it is with nothing but oneself.

Drawn Out Waiting likewise makes one desolate. But it can also make one drunk. Someone who stares too long at the door where he expects another to enter can become intoxicated. As by tuneless singing that draws and draws. Dark, where it draws us to; probably into nothing good. If the man, the woman whom one awaits doesn’t arrive, the clear disappointment doesn’t really undo the intoxication. It only combines with its result, 



Always in It

a particular kind of hangover that occurs here too. Against waiting, only hoping helps, which one must not only drink, but cook somewhat too.

Always in It We can’t be alone for long. One doesn’t suffice with it; in one’s very own room something’s not right. Nonetheless one takes the room along everywhere, especially when young. Many are drawn strangely back into themselves; they make themselves mute. It rattles down as with chains and buries those who are only in themselves. Precisely because they can’t get out of themselves, they grow scared, right in the corner where they are. Into which they’re driven, even without anything bringing them there. We always dread only what we don’t see. What visibly assails us causes awe, if we’re weak, or resistance. But against dread, because it comes out of us alone, when we’re alone, all that helps is to love oneself or forget oneself. Whoever cannot do so adequately gets bored. Whoever can, either takes himself seriously or takes what he does outside of himself just as it is. They aren’t so far apart, and alternate in most of us. They let us get up every morning even when we shouldn’t have to, and during the day both disperse only halfway.

Mingling Is it good? I asked. Children like it best at someone else’s home. They notice soon enough what’s wrong there too. If it were so nice at home, they wouldn’t leave so eagerly. They sense early that, here as elsewhere, much could be different.

Sing-Song Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves.



Always in It

a particular kind of hangover that occurs here too. Against waiting, only hoping helps, which one must not only drink, but cook somewhat too.

Always in It We can’t be alone for long. One doesn’t suffice with it; in one’s very own room something’s not right. Nonetheless one takes the room along everywhere, especially when young. Many are drawn strangely back into themselves; they make themselves mute. It rattles down as with chains and buries those who are only in themselves. Precisely because they can’t get out of themselves, they grow scared, right in the corner where they are. Into which they’re driven, even without anything bringing them there. We always dread only what we don’t see. What visibly assails us causes awe, if we’re weak, or resistance. But against dread, because it comes out of us alone, when we’re alone, all that helps is to love oneself or forget oneself. Whoever cannot do so adequately gets bored. Whoever can, either takes himself seriously or takes what he does outside of himself just as it is. They aren’t so far apart, and alternate in most of us. They let us get up every morning even when we shouldn’t have to, and during the day both disperse only halfway.

Mingling Is it good? I asked. Children like it best at someone else’s home. They notice soon enough what’s wrong there too. If it were so nice at home, they wouldn’t leave so eagerly. They sense early that, here as elsewhere, much could be different.

Sing-Song Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves.



Always in It

a particular kind of hangover that occurs here too. Against waiting, only hoping helps, which one must not only drink, but cook somewhat too.

Always in It We can’t be alone for long. One doesn’t suffice with it; in one’s very own room something’s not right. Nonetheless one takes the room along everywhere, especially when young. Many are drawn strangely back into themselves; they make themselves mute. It rattles down as with chains and buries those who are only in themselves. Precisely because they can’t get out of themselves, they grow scared, right in the corner where they are. Into which they’re driven, even without anything bringing them there. We always dread only what we don’t see. What visibly assails us causes awe, if we’re weak, or resistance. But against dread, because it comes out of us alone, when we’re alone, all that helps is to love oneself or forget oneself. Whoever cannot do so adequately gets bored. Whoever can, either takes himself seriously or takes what he does outside of himself just as it is. They aren’t so far apart, and alternate in most of us. They let us get up every morning even when we shouldn’t have to, and during the day both disperse only halfway.

Mingling Is it good? I asked. Children like it best at someone else’s home. They notice soon enough what’s wrong there too. If it were so nice at home, they wouldn’t leave so eagerly. They sense early that, here as elsewhere, much could be different.

Sing-Song Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves.



Always in It

a particular kind of hangover that occurs here too. Against waiting, only hoping helps, which one must not only drink, but cook somewhat too.

Always in It We can’t be alone for long. One doesn’t suffice with it; in one’s very own room something’s not right. Nonetheless one takes the room along everywhere, especially when young. Many are drawn strangely back into themselves; they make themselves mute. It rattles down as with chains and buries those who are only in themselves. Precisely because they can’t get out of themselves, they grow scared, right in the corner where they are. Into which they’re driven, even without anything bringing them there. We always dread only what we don’t see. What visibly assails us causes awe, if we’re weak, or resistance. But against dread, because it comes out of us alone, when we’re alone, all that helps is to love oneself or forget oneself. Whoever cannot do so adequately gets bored. Whoever can, either takes himself seriously or takes what he does outside of himself just as it is. They aren’t so far apart, and alternate in most of us. They let us get up every morning even when we shouldn’t have to, and during the day both disperse only halfway.

Mingling Is it good? I asked. Children like it best at someone else’s home. They notice soon enough what’s wrong there too. If it were so nice at home, they wouldn’t leave so eagerly. They sense early that, here as elsewhere, much could be different.

Sing-Song Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves.

Slight Change



Even during pauses—while counting, say—many hum something we can’t understand, they themselves can’t hear, in which, however, there may be a lot. The masks fall away, or new ones rise; the thing is crazy enough. Alone, many go a little crazy; they sing a bit of what went wrong with them once and was never set right. They are skewed, and puppets in a dream, because they were forced to grow up even more skewed and vacant.

Slight Change I used to know someone who didn’t put on airs. As a child, he would say, he’d actually been quite vain; at games he had to be the first. Whoever would not parry would be beaten, and usually the little prince would be on top, if only because the other wouldn’t properly hit back. But later that was gone, of course, at a stroke, as though swallowed up. Those of us from his earlier grades could still remember: he was quite a pitiful boy then. Others’ awkward years took their toll on this new coward; they threw him in the pool, tied a rope to his leg on the playground and made him jump. From the boy who’d done the least to him, he stole a notebook, for which the other was punished; in short, he’d become a wretched boy, bad and unsteady. But then something remarkable happened: at fourteen years, or a little later, in the first flush of puberty, the same proud boy returned, and the wretched boy fell away; his character reversed for the second time; he grew strong and soon became the leader of the same grade. He had his personal slogans, with quite genuine force, insolent conviction, and little affectation; he would enter pubs with the cry, “Hats off, Fritz Klein is coming”; the patrons were already hatless. Another, somewhat later slogan was: “Who rejects me condemns himself ”; but he didn’t need to say such foolish stuff, there was already something about the young man that was quite special, and actually rather difficult to explain, something he shared with others I would later meet, and who by the way were not always the best people: he radiated power. One could hardly pull away. Yet the same man now went on to say that later—many years later, naturally—he was riding high, he had a plum job. He was setting up house, and the builders suddenly had a feeling, or rather an old, long forgotten joke at his expense, he could describe it no better, but his other self from

Slight Change



Even during pauses—while counting, say—many hum something we can’t understand, they themselves can’t hear, in which, however, there may be a lot. The masks fall away, or new ones rise; the thing is crazy enough. Alone, many go a little crazy; they sing a bit of what went wrong with them once and was never set right. They are skewed, and puppets in a dream, because they were forced to grow up even more skewed and vacant.

Slight Change I used to know someone who didn’t put on airs. As a child, he would say, he’d actually been quite vain; at games he had to be the first. Whoever would not parry would be beaten, and usually the little prince would be on top, if only because the other wouldn’t properly hit back. But later that was gone, of course, at a stroke, as though swallowed up. Those of us from his earlier grades could still remember: he was quite a pitiful boy then. Others’ awkward years took their toll on this new coward; they threw him in the pool, tied a rope to his leg on the playground and made him jump. From the boy who’d done the least to him, he stole a notebook, for which the other was punished; in short, he’d become a wretched boy, bad and unsteady. But then something remarkable happened: at fourteen years, or a little later, in the first flush of puberty, the same proud boy returned, and the wretched boy fell away; his character reversed for the second time; he grew strong and soon became the leader of the same grade. He had his personal slogans, with quite genuine force, insolent conviction, and little affectation; he would enter pubs with the cry, “Hats off, Fritz Klein is coming”; the patrons were already hatless. Another, somewhat later slogan was: “Who rejects me condemns himself ”; but he didn’t need to say such foolish stuff, there was already something about the young man that was quite special, and actually rather difficult to explain, something he shared with others I would later meet, and who by the way were not always the best people: he radiated power. One could hardly pull away. Yet the same man now went on to say that later—many years later, naturally—he was riding high, he had a plum job. He was setting up house, and the builders suddenly had a feeling, or rather an old, long forgotten joke at his expense, he could describe it no better, but his other self from



Lamp and Closet

an earlier time was back. At least the fellows acted that way, grinning. So something in him, he thought, must not have been right, or remained weak from those bad old days. If dogs can sense someone’s sex, the workers in that small town (and such workers!) had a sense that was just as exact. A distant memory grew fresh to him too, and he said he learned from it that no grass grows over inner misdeeds—that one can again become the coward one was, and again do the ill that one did, when one’s younger brothers from the old days notice it so clearly. One of us, who simply did not believe in the individual self, sought a friendlier interpretation here. But of course it depends on someone’s situation; pitiful or benevolent airs, weak or strong actions are nurtured accordingly. If that honest man had had no track for his new self, or rather his childish self, to roll onto, he could never even have related this instructive stuff. Instead, the workers would have found him in the news, where the little scoundrels fall under the wheels or are hanged, especially the weak or lapsed.

Lamp and Closet Someone claimed: the only thing that still lives today is for two at a time, at most for three. He was thinking of love, friendship, conversation; he was a kindly, desperate man who froze at work and did not see what could come out of all this. In all this he made absolutely nothing out of individual or impressive persons, but was rather totally on the side of the people—a proper, lively, nonexistent people, of course. So he withdrew, as unbourgeois as possible, to the petit bourgeois side, not into a house, but where a lamp still stood on the table. But another related: as I was fixing up my room, and thinking quite convivial thoughts, something peculiar happened. I’d bought old furniture, but when I finished, I noticed—or rather, women and friends noticed—that all the chairs seemed to be missing. Along the walls stood chests, credenzas, modest closets and above all large ones; in the middle lay a rug that covered the floor. But a place to sit and talk, which I thought I loved, had been forgotten. Even the lamps, not forgotten of course, stood not so much conversably, readably, as simply radiantly and outwardly, like lanterns detached from the wall. What a man is, said a shrewd woman, he sees walking ahead of him; but one should not be so



Lamp and Closet

an earlier time was back. At least the fellows acted that way, grinning. So something in him, he thought, must not have been right, or remained weak from those bad old days. If dogs can sense someone’s sex, the workers in that small town (and such workers!) had a sense that was just as exact. A distant memory grew fresh to him too, and he said he learned from it that no grass grows over inner misdeeds—that one can again become the coward one was, and again do the ill that one did, when one’s younger brothers from the old days notice it so clearly. One of us, who simply did not believe in the individual self, sought a friendlier interpretation here. But of course it depends on someone’s situation; pitiful or benevolent airs, weak or strong actions are nurtured accordingly. If that honest man had had no track for his new self, or rather his childish self, to roll onto, he could never even have related this instructive stuff. Instead, the workers would have found him in the news, where the little scoundrels fall under the wheels or are hanged, especially the weak or lapsed.

Lamp and Closet Someone claimed: the only thing that still lives today is for two at a time, at most for three. He was thinking of love, friendship, conversation; he was a kindly, desperate man who froze at work and did not see what could come out of all this. In all this he made absolutely nothing out of individual or impressive persons, but was rather totally on the side of the people—a proper, lively, nonexistent people, of course. So he withdrew, as unbourgeois as possible, to the petit bourgeois side, not into a house, but where a lamp still stood on the table. But another related: as I was fixing up my room, and thinking quite convivial thoughts, something peculiar happened. I’d bought old furniture, but when I finished, I noticed—or rather, women and friends noticed—that all the chairs seemed to be missing. Along the walls stood chests, credenzas, modest closets and above all large ones; in the middle lay a rug that covered the floor. But a place to sit and talk, which I thought I loved, had been forgotten. Even the lamps, not forgotten of course, stood not so much conversably, readably, as simply radiantly and outwardly, like lanterns detached from the wall. What a man is, said a shrewd woman, he sees walking ahead of him; but one should not be so

The ‘Mark!’



much a man, said the teller, or a man who simply has everything move or stand along the objective wall. Who in this case had been so unobjective, perhaps, that his room finally wore only lovely, heavy, proud showpieces, almost like a woman. That was a lesson to me, concluded the astonished man, and he visited his friend, the same man we told of above, who was so humane that he even detested thick neckties.

Learning Good Habits People sense quite precisely when things aren’t going well for them, at least emotionally. Their thoughts are somewhat murkier—there they’re easily diverted. But like their bodies, their feelings imitate the jerking and swaying of the vehicle that takes them to the factory or office every morning. Only habit helps a little here, as a very weak intoxicant one hardly notices as such. All of bourgeois life is pervaded by it, and is only thereby tolerable. If on the other hand the situation gets entirely desperate, not only monotonously but devastatingly bad, then a much stronger antidote forms, one that comes out of us. Boys already know the peculiar thrill when their grades keep getting worse and misfortune is really flying. Adults feel it differently but relatedly: if someone has bet everything on his last hand and lost, there sometimes comes a completely deceptive joy that it’s finally over. A soft joy that absorbs the blows, so that for a time they strike past or to the side. No strength comes out of it, but when habit degrades and numbs us, the tiny, glittering thrill in misfortune is the enjoyment of a defiance, a defiance that seems to have no need to defy, that liberates us strangely if only briefly. There a bit of something that never came is hidden: partly as penny jar, partly as lamp, and not just an inward lamp.

The “Mark!” More and more appears among us to the side. One should observe precisely the little things, go after them. What is slight and odd often leads the furthest. One hears a story—say, about the soldier who arrives too late for muster. He doesn’t insert himself into the ranks but rather stands next to the officer, who “thereby” notices

The ‘Mark!’



much a man, said the teller, or a man who simply has everything move or stand along the objective wall. Who in this case had been so unobjective, perhaps, that his room finally wore only lovely, heavy, proud showpieces, almost like a woman. That was a lesson to me, concluded the astonished man, and he visited his friend, the same man we told of above, who was so humane that he even detested thick neckties.

Learning Good Habits People sense quite precisely when things aren’t going well for them, at least emotionally. Their thoughts are somewhat murkier—there they’re easily diverted. But like their bodies, their feelings imitate the jerking and swaying of the vehicle that takes them to the factory or office every morning. Only habit helps a little here, as a very weak intoxicant one hardly notices as such. All of bourgeois life is pervaded by it, and is only thereby tolerable. If on the other hand the situation gets entirely desperate, not only monotonously but devastatingly bad, then a much stronger antidote forms, one that comes out of us. Boys already know the peculiar thrill when their grades keep getting worse and misfortune is really flying. Adults feel it differently but relatedly: if someone has bet everything on his last hand and lost, there sometimes comes a completely deceptive joy that it’s finally over. A soft joy that absorbs the blows, so that for a time they strike past or to the side. No strength comes out of it, but when habit degrades and numbs us, the tiny, glittering thrill in misfortune is the enjoyment of a defiance, a defiance that seems to have no need to defy, that liberates us strangely if only briefly. There a bit of something that never came is hidden: partly as penny jar, partly as lamp, and not just an inward lamp.

The “Mark!” More and more appears among us to the side. One should observe precisely the little things, go after them. What is slight and odd often leads the furthest. One hears a story—say, about the soldier who arrives too late for muster. He doesn’t insert himself into the ranks but rather stands next to the officer, who “thereby” notices

The ‘Mark!’



much a man, said the teller, or a man who simply has everything move or stand along the objective wall. Who in this case had been so unobjective, perhaps, that his room finally wore only lovely, heavy, proud showpieces, almost like a woman. That was a lesson to me, concluded the astonished man, and he visited his friend, the same man we told of above, who was so humane that he even detested thick neckties.

Learning Good Habits People sense quite precisely when things aren’t going well for them, at least emotionally. Their thoughts are somewhat murkier—there they’re easily diverted. But like their bodies, their feelings imitate the jerking and swaying of the vehicle that takes them to the factory or office every morning. Only habit helps a little here, as a very weak intoxicant one hardly notices as such. All of bourgeois life is pervaded by it, and is only thereby tolerable. If on the other hand the situation gets entirely desperate, not only monotonously but devastatingly bad, then a much stronger antidote forms, one that comes out of us. Boys already know the peculiar thrill when their grades keep getting worse and misfortune is really flying. Adults feel it differently but relatedly: if someone has bet everything on his last hand and lost, there sometimes comes a completely deceptive joy that it’s finally over. A soft joy that absorbs the blows, so that for a time they strike past or to the side. No strength comes out of it, but when habit degrades and numbs us, the tiny, glittering thrill in misfortune is the enjoyment of a defiance, a defiance that seems to have no need to defy, that liberates us strangely if only briefly. There a bit of something that never came is hidden: partly as penny jar, partly as lamp, and not just an inward lamp.

The “Mark!” More and more appears among us to the side. One should observe precisely the little things, go after them. What is slight and odd often leads the furthest. One hears a story—say, about the soldier who arrives too late for muster. He doesn’t insert himself into the ranks but rather stands next to the officer, who “thereby” notices



The ‘Mark!’

nothing. Apart from the amusement that this story provides, an impression is still working: What was that? Something moved! And it moved in its own way. An impression that will not let us come to rest over what we heard. An impression on the surface of life, so that it tears, perhaps. In short, it’s good to think in stories too. So much just isn’t done with itself when it happens, even where it’s beautifully told. Instead, very strangely, there’s more going on there. The case has something about it; this is what it shows or suggests. Stories of this kind are not just recounted; instead we also count what something struck there—or we listen up: What was that? Out of incidents comes a “Mark!” that would otherwise not be thus; or a “Mark!” that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples. They point out a “less” or “more” that will have to be thought in the telling, retold in the thinking; that isn’t right in these stories, because things aren’t right with us, or with anything. Some things can be grasped only in such stories, not in a more expansive, elevated style, or then not in the same way. How some such things came to notice will be retold here, and tentatively marked; lovingly, marking in the retelling; by marking, intending the retelling. It’s little strokes and such from life that haven’t been forgotten; our refuse is worth a lot these days. But an older impulse was also there: to hear stories, good ones, poor ones, stories in different tones, from different years, remarkable ones that, when they come to an end, only really come to an end in the stirring. It’s a reading of traces every which way, in sections that only divide up the frame. In the end, everything one meets and notices is the same.

The Poor What are you doing? I asked. I’m conserving light, said the poor woman. She sat in the dark kitchen, a long time already. That was certainly easier than conserving food. Since there isn’t enough for everyone, the poor step in. They work for the rich even when they rest, alone.

Filth How low one can go! I heard that yesterday, and everything that goes with it. In the Rue Blondel lay a drunk woman; the watchman rousts her. Je suis pauvre, says the woman. That’s no reason to throw up in the street, shouts the watchman. Que voulez vous, monsieur, la pauvreté, c’est déjà à moitié la saleté, says the woman, and sighs.1 So she described, explained, and canceled herself, in one stroke. Whom or what could the watchman still arrest?

The Gift Everything has a price, they say, just not happiness. On the contrary, precisely happiness; children begin early with it. An eight-year-old girl 

The Poor What are you doing? I asked. I’m conserving light, said the poor woman. She sat in the dark kitchen, a long time already. That was certainly easier than conserving food. Since there isn’t enough for everyone, the poor step in. They work for the rich even when they rest, alone.

Filth How low one can go! I heard that yesterday, and everything that goes with it. In the Rue Blondel lay a drunk woman; the watchman rousts her. Je suis pauvre, says the woman. That’s no reason to throw up in the street, shouts the watchman. Que voulez vous, monsieur, la pauvreté, c’est déjà à moitié la saleté, says the woman, and sighs.1 So she described, explained, and canceled herself, in one stroke. Whom or what could the watchman still arrest?

The Gift Everything has a price, they say, just not happiness. On the contrary, precisely happiness; children begin early with it. An eight-year-old girl 

The Poor What are you doing? I asked. I’m conserving light, said the poor woman. She sat in the dark kitchen, a long time already. That was certainly easier than conserving food. Since there isn’t enough for everyone, the poor step in. They work for the rich even when they rest, alone.

Filth How low one can go! I heard that yesterday, and everything that goes with it. In the Rue Blondel lay a drunk woman; the watchman rousts her. Je suis pauvre, says the woman. That’s no reason to throw up in the street, shouts the watchman. Que voulez vous, monsieur, la pauvreté, c’est déjà à moitié la saleté, says the woman, and sighs.1 So she described, explained, and canceled herself, in one stroke. Whom or what could the watchman still arrest?

The Gift Everything has a price, they say, just not happiness. On the contrary, precisely happiness; children begin early with it. An eight-year-old girl 



Different Needs

recently rescued a boy from drowning. Or screamed, seeing the boy turn blue, until others came and pulled him out. For screaming, the child received a twenty from Santa Claus, a lot of money; not too much, as we’ll hear. As the girl later looks out the window again, something elongated is drifting on the water. She runs out in front of the house: Mister, there’s twenty dollars in the water again! (It was just a log, however.) Considering the possible consequences (seeing a drowned corpse, and so on), here the trauma was remarkably resolved by money, indeed prevented. Two evils canceled each other out; the girl angel came to rest. It’s the lowest sort of misfortune to be poor. Santa Claus, who rarely comes, doesn’t cancel it, but at least puts it in its proper place.

Different Needs It is told that a horse and a dog were friends. The dog saved the best bones for the horse, and the horse put the most fragrant bunches of hay before the dog; each wanted to do his best for the other, and neither one was fed. This depicts exactly the misery shared by two people close to each other: particularly a man and woman, when they can’t leave their own house, but even more casual acquaintances. More modest expectations of what others offer, usually kindly, would help a great deal, of course. For when one sees their bundle of hay—their evening, their Sunday—one cannot understand how they can bear to live.

Games, Regrettably 1. The day didn’t promise much. No money; even Paris seems smaller then. Went to the old workingman’s tavern; there are worse places that are no cheaper. But there I saw someone doing it right. So truly, so shamelessly enjoying himself, as one should. The man across from me grasped lobsters in his callused hands, bit off and spat out the red shells till the floor sprayed. But to



Different Needs

recently rescued a boy from drowning. Or screamed, seeing the boy turn blue, until others came and pulled him out. For screaming, the child received a twenty from Santa Claus, a lot of money; not too much, as we’ll hear. As the girl later looks out the window again, something elongated is drifting on the water. She runs out in front of the house: Mister, there’s twenty dollars in the water again! (It was just a log, however.) Considering the possible consequences (seeing a drowned corpse, and so on), here the trauma was remarkably resolved by money, indeed prevented. Two evils canceled each other out; the girl angel came to rest. It’s the lowest sort of misfortune to be poor. Santa Claus, who rarely comes, doesn’t cancel it, but at least puts it in its proper place.

Different Needs It is told that a horse and a dog were friends. The dog saved the best bones for the horse, and the horse put the most fragrant bunches of hay before the dog; each wanted to do his best for the other, and neither one was fed. This depicts exactly the misery shared by two people close to each other: particularly a man and woman, when they can’t leave their own house, but even more casual acquaintances. More modest expectations of what others offer, usually kindly, would help a great deal, of course. For when one sees their bundle of hay—their evening, their Sunday—one cannot understand how they can bear to live.

Games, Regrettably 1. The day didn’t promise much. No money; even Paris seems smaller then. Went to the old workingman’s tavern; there are worse places that are no cheaper. But there I saw someone doing it right. So truly, so shamelessly enjoying himself, as one should. The man across from me grasped lobsters in his callused hands, bit off and spat out the red shells till the floor sprayed. But to



Different Needs

recently rescued a boy from drowning. Or screamed, seeing the boy turn blue, until others came and pulled him out. For screaming, the child received a twenty from Santa Claus, a lot of money; not too much, as we’ll hear. As the girl later looks out the window again, something elongated is drifting on the water. She runs out in front of the house: Mister, there’s twenty dollars in the water again! (It was just a log, however.) Considering the possible consequences (seeing a drowned corpse, and so on), here the trauma was remarkably resolved by money, indeed prevented. Two evils canceled each other out; the girl angel came to rest. It’s the lowest sort of misfortune to be poor. Santa Claus, who rarely comes, doesn’t cancel it, but at least puts it in its proper place.

Different Needs It is told that a horse and a dog were friends. The dog saved the best bones for the horse, and the horse put the most fragrant bunches of hay before the dog; each wanted to do his best for the other, and neither one was fed. This depicts exactly the misery shared by two people close to each other: particularly a man and woman, when they can’t leave their own house, but even more casual acquaintances. More modest expectations of what others offer, usually kindly, would help a great deal, of course. For when one sees their bundle of hay—their evening, their Sunday—one cannot understand how they can bear to live.

Games, Regrettably 1. The day didn’t promise much. No money; even Paris seems smaller then. Went to the old workingman’s tavern; there are worse places that are no cheaper. But there I saw someone doing it right. So truly, so shamelessly enjoying himself, as one should. The man across from me grasped lobsters in his callused hands, bit off and spat out the red shells till the floor sprayed. But to

Games Regrettably



the tender creature within he spoke cheerfully once he got it, quietly and sensibly. Here, finally, was a good not defiled by bourgeois enjoyment; the sweat of the deprived, the disgrace of capital gains didn’t affect the flavor. Odd enough in Paris, where no bourgeois yet is embarrassed to be one: to call himself not just casually but proudly a rentier. The worker with the lobsters reminded one of something else too, of the great breakthrough back then, long ago. A certain something, later, glimmering, when money no longer barks at every good nor wags its tail in it. When we’re spared the terribly stupid choice between pure conviction and pure taste.

2. That night one didn’t walk at all the same way. Didn’t try to avoid the street, even the middle where the cars surged by, right and left, high and low, fast and right at us. Instead the middle of the street came alive; something was even growing on it. The barrage of traffic that usually owned it was laid down, withdrew into the distance or to the edges; the glorious asphalt was inhabited. Colorful paper lanterns strung across made a low ceiling: beneath it, there was dancing. The houses became walls, the illuminated windows roundabout glowed like lamps, like mirrors with their own light source, again with people in them. And the most beautiful thing was that the dance floor was enclosed only on the sides but otherwise had the long street to itself, and the side streets too. At the next corner there was already music again, and couples roamed through the glowing quarter. This was a Parisian street on July , the great day. As the Bastille was stormed, the people also danced on the ground to which the fort had been leveled. It stood for the Fields of the Blessed, and that has remained; of course back then one danced differently after nature. But even if the revolutionaries have been pacified since then, long since thrown off their horns and wings, a distant memory sometimes still courses through this “national” holiday. Hardly belonging wholesale to the nation; rather, without a truce with the bourgeois gentilhomme. On July , , as a car driven by a man with a straw hat wanted to push through one of these dance streets, the people would not make room, even though no one was dancing at the moment, and mere taxis had gone through in numbers. The straw hat must have annoyed them—usually nothing special, but here, remarkably, a symbol of the ruling class, perhaps because of its light



Games Regrettably

color and because machines tend not to be operated with straw hats. The annoying straw hat would not give way, and instead hit the gas, right through the crowd. But twenty hands had grabbed the car from behind, dragged it, despite the raging exhaust, back up the street, back and forth, in a discreet tempo on the voluntary jousting grounds; even the driver performed calmly, with a certain grim reactionary sportsmanship. Only at one point could he have broken through, but then came the second profound delight: a young girl jumped suddenly in front of the car, danced, cheerfully and fearlessly, a flower in her hand, then between her teeth, gave the driver signals, and as the car stopped, curtsied with wonderful, with lovely mockery. Here the driver should really have let himself be pulled back, but the ruling classes capitulate only falsely, abstractly, and undialectically: in short, instead of grasping the situation and sublating himself in it, the provocateur shifted the force of his advance into a noless-arrogant reverse, turned around, and, with this difficult and twisted maneuver, now truly drove into the crowd. Several women were pushed against a wall, the men had no more leverage behind the swerving vehicle, and the air quickly tensed; obscenities were shouted, the car was grabbed from the side, very mutinously, and it would have been overturned if the driver had not regained control of the wheel again, and the car sped forward, escaping. Yet the straw hat at least learned what happens to the white lily in every form.2 A young fellow had knocked the hat from his head, threw it in the air; others caught it. Already the music began to play and couples danced, but not only with their feet and their bodies; their hands were kept busy looking for the straw hat as it was knocked through the air from one couple to another, until it lay on the ground, ragged and flattened, a very slight, very allegorically trampled representative of the Bastille. Obedient taxi drivers who now approached and wanted to regain the narrow boulevard immediately turned around; the party of business takes no part in the civil war. And even the rebel street soon forgot that it was the only one in Paris to dance a little “July .” So the straw hat didn’t end up in a police report, let alone in history, but only in this little, expectant story.

3. Likewise in Paris, a quiet man had set the following in motion two years earlier.

Games Regrettably



He sat with a green schnapps, occasionally reading. The café at this hour was quite full, the conversation was animated, political unrest was in the air. This guest had a book with him that took him far away from inflation and devaluation, or perhaps not so far at all, but thirty years had already gone by since. Since the fin de siècle, as one said at the time, and the smart set seemed to have forgotten it, in spite of the troops “consigned” in the barracks. Yet “older readers,” so read the book, older readers will perhaps still recall the times, and the great agitation that went through the world as the newspapers would time and again report, in very short articles, of anarchist bombings in Paris that were obviously the work of an extensive gang whom the police could only partly apprehend. The bombs seemed to fly randomly into houses, into an elegant café by the St. Lazare station, into the Chamber of Deputies and into a little restaurant, even into an empty Ste. Madeleine’s. A barracks was blown up, the Serbian ambassador was shot at on the street, Sadi Carnot, President of the Republic, was stabbed on the ride to the theater. It was the age of Revachol, Vaillant, Henry, Caserio, and other dangerous propagandists of the deed, the age of dynamite and the most covert threat to bourgeois society and morality.

Right into rumor, indeed into childhood nightmares led the book: even the anarchist gangs selected bore the terrifying names of urban legend (which has no sense of humor). There were the “Hairy Lads of Billancourt,” the “Panthers of Batignolles,” the “Oak Hearts of Cettes,” the “Children of Nature,” the “Jailbirds of Lille,” the “Pillory of Sedan,” the “Yatagan of Terre Noire.” The handbills themselves, after harmless classifieds, displayed a standing rubric with the epigraph, “Directions for the Manufacture of Nonbourgeois Products.” Here our guest had to pause, for a younger couple sat down at another table and began conversing. The couple were so elegant they must have been dressed in heaven, as “ladies” and “gentlemen” like to think. Now the quiet reader stood up quite innocently; he only wanted to buy some cigarettes, no longer even thought of the Panthers of Batignolles. Rather, Nana was more present—before he’d gone a step away from his table there was such a terrific explosion that the couple jumped up, tables fell over, the entire passage stood still.3 Even the reader’s knees trembled, though as a whole he was unhurt, like the couple as well, which was fortunate: for how easily the shards from the seltzer bottle could have hurt someone when he knocked it over on his way to the counter. The manager came



The Useful Member

and demanded compensation; the reader paid him, relieved though almost ashamed to have come away without injury. In the rest of the café too, the emotional landscape settled; the elegant couple ordered a fresh aperitif, by deep instinct not entirely satisfied with the man’s merely financial penalty. The reader soon left this scene, the very historical book of dynamite under his arm, finally got his cigarettes at the counter, like peace pipes, and drove to his customary restaurant. There he recounted his heroic story, in which out of bad luck an assassin materialized, out of a seltzer bottle the court of history. How quickly the genie had returned to the bottle! Yet the man’s dark shame, the couple’s anger at his punishment still hung tangibly in the air. The intellectual’s dismay, the bourgeois’s ancestral memory: both played over the inept incident. Replayed a past that never ended, a future from which not even the Parisian bourgeois feels absolved. What became a celebration like the th of July is already past, but the fear that was also in it is still raw. If every worker ate lobster, the splinters from the seltzer bottle would hurt no feelings.

The Useful Member As Bernhard and Simon visited their coffee house again to play chess, all the boards were taken. They therefore went over to two proven players. Suddenly Bernhard, growing bored, shouted, “I bet five marks on Westfal!” Simon bet the same on Dyssel. At first the two outstanding players noticed nothing of the bet; only others’ encouragement grew louder, and their reproofs harsher. Yet soon the men became racehorses to be bet on, and they not only became but felt themselves to be such. Finally, bit by bit diverted from the noble disinterestedness of the game, they saw themselves as wage slaves, harnessed to capitalism, spilling their toil and their wits. The winner’s anger was perfectly clear as Simon wanted to buy him a coffee with a fraction of his winnings; his labor power was already sufficiently exploited in life. Business is pleasure for some, but pleasure easily became business again. So exactly is even play subject to the forms in which the earnestness of life flows away; one cannot flee it, not even in flight. Even the most resistant are taken on capitalism’s wings; to some, this actually seems an elevation.



The Useful Member

and demanded compensation; the reader paid him, relieved though almost ashamed to have come away without injury. In the rest of the café too, the emotional landscape settled; the elegant couple ordered a fresh aperitif, by deep instinct not entirely satisfied with the man’s merely financial penalty. The reader soon left this scene, the very historical book of dynamite under his arm, finally got his cigarettes at the counter, like peace pipes, and drove to his customary restaurant. There he recounted his heroic story, in which out of bad luck an assassin materialized, out of a seltzer bottle the court of history. How quickly the genie had returned to the bottle! Yet the man’s dark shame, the couple’s anger at his punishment still hung tangibly in the air. The intellectual’s dismay, the bourgeois’s ancestral memory: both played over the inept incident. Replayed a past that never ended, a future from which not even the Parisian bourgeois feels absolved. What became a celebration like the th of July is already past, but the fear that was also in it is still raw. If every worker ate lobster, the splinters from the seltzer bottle would hurt no feelings.

The Useful Member As Bernhard and Simon visited their coffee house again to play chess, all the boards were taken. They therefore went over to two proven players. Suddenly Bernhard, growing bored, shouted, “I bet five marks on Westfal!” Simon bet the same on Dyssel. At first the two outstanding players noticed nothing of the bet; only others’ encouragement grew louder, and their reproofs harsher. Yet soon the men became racehorses to be bet on, and they not only became but felt themselves to be such. Finally, bit by bit diverted from the noble disinterestedness of the game, they saw themselves as wage slaves, harnessed to capitalism, spilling their toil and their wits. The winner’s anger was perfectly clear as Simon wanted to buy him a coffee with a fraction of his winnings; his labor power was already sufficiently exploited in life. Business is pleasure for some, but pleasure easily became business again. So exactly is even play subject to the forms in which the earnestness of life flows away; one cannot flee it, not even in flight. Even the most resistant are taken on capitalism’s wings; to some, this actually seems an elevation.

Bread and Games



Shaker of Strawberries The rich get the best of everything and everyone. At the curb of an elegant street in Paris, quite out of place, stood a poor devil of an invalid. Both hands trembled, his arms flapped back and forth; that’s what he’d taken home from the war, a so-called shaker. Brillat-Savarin passed by, watched, gave not the usual alms but, in departing, his address.4 The shaker should apply to his chef, pour sucrer les fraises. Better that than standing on the unpleasant street! Certainly Brillat-Savarin was an inventive gourmet, providing joy to his peers. But the unquestionably exquisite gentleman obviously had this in common with the merely rich: that he could derive a particular use from misery, even earn its gratitude. Instead of the many poor blowing him up, they merely shake his strawberries, operate larger machines just as mechanically. Indeed if the boredom of unemployment or the perpetual chill of their condition increases their unrest, even this can now be used to divert them, train them to sacrifice their peers, betray them doubly, fascistically. This is new; up to now the better ranks had only the Lumpenproletariat, or of course mercenaries. No bitterness, let alone revolt, could thus ever become a danger from the left instead of the right. So the pauper becomes a particularly good cook for those who’ve made him a pauper or worse.5 Then it’s not only the fist in the pocket that won’t get dangerous ideas.

Bread and Games I know someone who was suddenly impoverished and saw himself forced to move into ugly quarters. The next day, stepping out onto the street after a sleepless night, he was astonished at how utterly he’d become nothing to himself. How seriously he missed the little, familiar things: paint on the walls, the cozy rectangle of the desk, the aurora of the lamp, things he used to take with him when he went outside. Only the tobacco smoke still formed a buffer between him and the bare world, carried him, enclouded, encrypted his being somewhat. The man was insufferably honored by the hotel porter’s bow; was inclined not only to bow first to this minor dignitary but to bow deeply. That is how quickly people collapse, lose their bearings, when deprived of a fixed outside point. (Even ascetics,

Bread and Games



Shaker of Strawberries The rich get the best of everything and everyone. At the curb of an elegant street in Paris, quite out of place, stood a poor devil of an invalid. Both hands trembled, his arms flapped back and forth; that’s what he’d taken home from the war, a so-called shaker. Brillat-Savarin passed by, watched, gave not the usual alms but, in departing, his address.4 The shaker should apply to his chef, pour sucrer les fraises. Better that than standing on the unpleasant street! Certainly Brillat-Savarin was an inventive gourmet, providing joy to his peers. But the unquestionably exquisite gentleman obviously had this in common with the merely rich: that he could derive a particular use from misery, even earn its gratitude. Instead of the many poor blowing him up, they merely shake his strawberries, operate larger machines just as mechanically. Indeed if the boredom of unemployment or the perpetual chill of their condition increases their unrest, even this can now be used to divert them, train them to sacrifice their peers, betray them doubly, fascistically. This is new; up to now the better ranks had only the Lumpenproletariat, or of course mercenaries. No bitterness, let alone revolt, could thus ever become a danger from the left instead of the right. So the pauper becomes a particularly good cook for those who’ve made him a pauper or worse.5 Then it’s not only the fist in the pocket that won’t get dangerous ideas.

Bread and Games I know someone who was suddenly impoverished and saw himself forced to move into ugly quarters. The next day, stepping out onto the street after a sleepless night, he was astonished at how utterly he’d become nothing to himself. How seriously he missed the little, familiar things: paint on the walls, the cozy rectangle of the desk, the aurora of the lamp, things he used to take with him when he went outside. Only the tobacco smoke still formed a buffer between him and the bare world, carried him, enclouded, encrypted his being somewhat. The man was insufferably honored by the hotel porter’s bow; was inclined not only to bow first to this minor dignitary but to bow deeply. That is how quickly people collapse, lose their bearings, when deprived of a fixed outside point. (Even ascetics,



Narrow-Minded Comrades

in whom poverty is supposed to be a great inner radiance, always build themselves an inner home before leaving the outer one, where furniture, even rugs and easy chairs, is not lacking.) The best sedative is sleep; the best means of keeping slaves in their state, poor “but” honest, likewise seems to be utter poverty itself. For as the deep impulse to greet the porter shows, poverty in itself is in no way rebellious. On the contrary: as they themselves have nothing to hold on to, the utter contempt of the upper classes flows into the merely poor, and keeps them on a leash. Otherwise it would be a mystery that there aren’t more “criminals” who simply grab what otherwise only high birth or skillful fraud can bestow respectably. Otherwise it would be an even greater mystery that the rich few can hold on to power while the workers don’t in every case prefer the va banque of the barricades to their dog’s life. If hunger does not pull one upward—in itself it only induces looting, and is placated as soon as it’s fed—if, above all, leaders from another class do not talk down to the mute ones like a ship’s captain through a speaking tube into the boiler room, there is nonetheless a rather mysterious impulse that belongs to being revolutionary. It never stems from poverty alone, which often obscures it, but rather from a feeling of the unpossessed “possession” one deserves, out of a secret splendor that becomes explosive in the proletariat. All honor to the call for panes; it’s brought much rebellion and sets the first, immediate, objective paths; but without circenses it would neither remain nor ever be more than revolutionary. That revolt is even possible after such primordial enslavement, and such habituation to it, is so extraordinary that it could, in its way, make one a believer.

Narrow-Minded Comrades When it seemed inappropriate for me to work any longer on a political journal that had very subaltern contributions, a friend, unconcerned, replied: If a hundred cats stand before the Berlin castle and meow, I don’t care that they’re cats, but rather that they’re protesting; I’ll stand next to them and meow with them. That is certainly well put; the likeness fits. Only: there are, especially today, far too many people who have no right to be right. Who went along with the cold war, and even the hot one beforehand, and now sound almost like the loyal reds who hate what’s become of



Narrow-Minded Comrades

in whom poverty is supposed to be a great inner radiance, always build themselves an inner home before leaving the outer one, where furniture, even rugs and easy chairs, is not lacking.) The best sedative is sleep; the best means of keeping slaves in their state, poor “but” honest, likewise seems to be utter poverty itself. For as the deep impulse to greet the porter shows, poverty in itself is in no way rebellious. On the contrary: as they themselves have nothing to hold on to, the utter contempt of the upper classes flows into the merely poor, and keeps them on a leash. Otherwise it would be a mystery that there aren’t more “criminals” who simply grab what otherwise only high birth or skillful fraud can bestow respectably. Otherwise it would be an even greater mystery that the rich few can hold on to power while the workers don’t in every case prefer the va banque of the barricades to their dog’s life. If hunger does not pull one upward—in itself it only induces looting, and is placated as soon as it’s fed—if, above all, leaders from another class do not talk down to the mute ones like a ship’s captain through a speaking tube into the boiler room, there is nonetheless a rather mysterious impulse that belongs to being revolutionary. It never stems from poverty alone, which often obscures it, but rather from a feeling of the unpossessed “possession” one deserves, out of a secret splendor that becomes explosive in the proletariat. All honor to the call for panes; it’s brought much rebellion and sets the first, immediate, objective paths; but without circenses it would neither remain nor ever be more than revolutionary. That revolt is even possible after such primordial enslavement, and such habituation to it, is so extraordinary that it could, in its way, make one a believer.

Narrow-Minded Comrades When it seemed inappropriate for me to work any longer on a political journal that had very subaltern contributions, a friend, unconcerned, replied: If a hundred cats stand before the Berlin castle and meow, I don’t care that they’re cats, but rather that they’re protesting; I’ll stand next to them and meow with them. That is certainly well put; the likeness fits. Only: there are, especially today, far too many people who have no right to be right. Who went along with the cold war, and even the hot one beforehand, and now sound almost like the loyal reds who hate what’s become of

Disturbing Whim



their leading comrades. Only this latter kind of dissident, in contrast to the mere cats of the cold war, can stand up like a man, literally, in word and deed, not like an opportunistic slacker.

Disturbing Whim Most are kept dark and hardly see themselves. The man on the assembly line who performs the same motion eight hours a day is as hidden as the miner. No one loves the fifth estate for the beautiful eyes it already has. But then somebody who had time for the proletariat and had done much with them, in other words not a hostile or even unfriendly figure, but rather a mournful one, said to a Communist: A bourgeois was hidden in the citoyen; God save us from what’s hidden in the comrade. He added: That’s why you’re so careful too, and never want to say what this new world will look like. Instead you’re precise like Prussians, all order of the day, but if someone wants to know what kind of society is supposed to break through here, you all become Austrian, postpone everything till tomorrow, even the day after. In , when the third estate was revolutionary, one didn’t need to be so formal, nor such a cautious dreamer. Of course there was more content then; the Caliph Stork of those days didn’t need to buy a cat in a sack and simply believe it was a dream princess.6 Now, as cautiously as you consider the future, you still dream constantly of the miracle in the working class; here you’re utter believers. Here you don’t pursue just the sober abolition of want and exploitation but paint the whole person, the new person, into the undecided setting—whereas the proletarian today is usually just an unsuccessful petit bourgeois; runs to the racist parties or to the shopkeepers on the podium. From within his class consciousness, though you think you’re deep inside it, you hear a melody that’s unclear or inaudible to us. There is nothing but simple dissatisfaction there, and a very understandable, very modern will to live. There is as much powerful melody in the noise of a car, to which you can also sing all kinds of songs, or even something more precise. Thus spoke this irascible man, and was homeless; drank only rarely from the bottle of the subject, or of friendship, which still had some life for him. Only he forgot, when giving the other such grief, that a comrade could never disappoint him. For he represents nothing at all, in contrast

Disturbing Whim



their leading comrades. Only this latter kind of dissident, in contrast to the mere cats of the cold war, can stand up like a man, literally, in word and deed, not like an opportunistic slacker.

Disturbing Whim Most are kept dark and hardly see themselves. The man on the assembly line who performs the same motion eight hours a day is as hidden as the miner. No one loves the fifth estate for the beautiful eyes it already has. But then somebody who had time for the proletariat and had done much with them, in other words not a hostile or even unfriendly figure, but rather a mournful one, said to a Communist: A bourgeois was hidden in the citoyen; God save us from what’s hidden in the comrade. He added: That’s why you’re so careful too, and never want to say what this new world will look like. Instead you’re precise like Prussians, all order of the day, but if someone wants to know what kind of society is supposed to break through here, you all become Austrian, postpone everything till tomorrow, even the day after. In , when the third estate was revolutionary, one didn’t need to be so formal, nor such a cautious dreamer. Of course there was more content then; the Caliph Stork of those days didn’t need to buy a cat in a sack and simply believe it was a dream princess.6 Now, as cautiously as you consider the future, you still dream constantly of the miracle in the working class; here you’re utter believers. Here you don’t pursue just the sober abolition of want and exploitation but paint the whole person, the new person, into the undecided setting—whereas the proletarian today is usually just an unsuccessful petit bourgeois; runs to the racist parties or to the shopkeepers on the podium. From within his class consciousness, though you think you’re deep inside it, you hear a melody that’s unclear or inaudible to us. There is nothing but simple dissatisfaction there, and a very understandable, very modern will to live. There is as much powerful melody in the noise of a car, to which you can also sing all kinds of songs, or even something more precise. Thus spoke this irascible man, and was homeless; drank only rarely from the bottle of the subject, or of friendship, which still had some life for him. Only he forgot, when giving the other such grief, that a comrade could never disappoint him. For he represents nothing at all, in contrast



Disturbing Whim

to the old bourgeois who would so disappoint. In the triumph of the bourgeoisie we have what great words, even human values, mean when the base is not in order. Whereas the proletariat is the only class that does not want to be one; it does not and certainly could not claim to be particularly grand as such; every kind of Proletkult is false, and a bourgeois infection. It claims only that it will provide the key to the larder of humanity when it is abolished; yet it does not claim to carry, let alone to be, this larder. In its dehumanization it teaches, with radical precision, that there has never yet been human life, but always just economic life, which drives human beings about, making them false, making them slaves, but also exploiters. What comes then? At least no exploiter will jump out; indeed, if something worse happens, the table will at least have been cleared, and we will have at face value what free men and women are about, or not yet. Even without poverty we will be sufficiently unlike ourselves, or falsely conditioned; there will be misfortune, sorrow, fate enough, and no elixir against death. But what’s in the comrade: that will truly be in him, and not in the relations that deform us even worse than we are. Thus spoke the Communist, shocking even his friend, and was finally not such a believer—for humanity is something that has yet to be discovered. As much by taking the cat and leaving the sack as by first discussing the potential princess, until she becomes one.

Passing It Forward As one or another, everyone certainly already seems to be here. But no one is what he thinks; certainly not what he presents. And in fact everyone is not too little, but too much, from the outset, for what they will become. Later they get used to the skin they’re stuck in; worse, into which they’ve been stuck, professionally or however else. But once a lad far from here found a mirror; he had never seen such a thing. He held up the glass, looked at it, and gave it to a friend: “I didn’t know this was yours.” The other didn’t own the face either, though it was quite handsome.

The Negro Someone already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a black man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train. He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank to the night, all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into 

Passing It Forward As one or another, everyone certainly already seems to be here. But no one is what he thinks; certainly not what he presents. And in fact everyone is not too little, but too much, from the outset, for what they will become. Later they get used to the skin they’re stuck in; worse, into which they’ve been stuck, professionally or however else. But once a lad far from here found a mirror; he had never seen such a thing. He held up the glass, looked at it, and gave it to a friend: “I didn’t know this was yours.” The other didn’t own the face either, though it was quite handsome.

The Negro Someone already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a black man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train. He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank to the night, all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into 



The Watershed

the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed, “Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!” The story’s told in different ways, but always with the same outcome. Was the man still half-asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never more awake than at that moment. So indefinitely near himself, yet his habitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable, in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly just like a distortion of themselves—nothing fits there; life is a sorry tailor. The black man would lose his suit even faster if he blinked hard just once.

The Watershed Someone said, It didn’t depend on you and me at all. At least not at first; I was hardly there when I was conceived. It probably happened quite accidentally between Father and Mother. Afterward one is here, unfolds from oneself, insofar as one is worth something. Is one here by grace of oneself? the man interrupted himself. No; here too, there’s too much accident, and it insults us. Our encounters, at least, are unbidden; our beginning with others and the fate from it (which wouldn’t exist without that beginning) depend on the most accidental causes. It can be the silliest cause, and often, astonishingly, the only one, always the same one; the other causes don’t flow then, or at least not far. For my part, I found after sufficient consideration in a disrespectful hour that my real life—my rebirth, as it were, or my adult baptism—depended on the discharge of a Bavarian officer whose name I don’t even know. As a young man I was very reserved; I sought out no one, and found no one. In my first semester at Munich, I boarded with a woman whom I took for a widow; sometimes she would boast of better days. An old man, clearly ill, had just joined us as a boarder, and might occasionally be seen in the hallway, groaning nobly. Once I came home late and passed the widow’s doorway, which stood open, strangely: there lay the old man, already nicely laid out in his bed; a nightlight still burnt, and right and left two long candles—the apartment empty, the woman gone, and I alone with the dead man. Night terrors had returned from my childhood, the same paralyzed legs, unable to flee this nightmare. Yet what the boy wished he had the grown man has in plenty: at least the nerve to run. A short



The Watershed

the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed, “Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!” The story’s told in different ways, but always with the same outcome. Was the man still half-asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never more awake than at that moment. So indefinitely near himself, yet his habitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable, in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly just like a distortion of themselves—nothing fits there; life is a sorry tailor. The black man would lose his suit even faster if he blinked hard just once.

The Watershed Someone said, It didn’t depend on you and me at all. At least not at first; I was hardly there when I was conceived. It probably happened quite accidentally between Father and Mother. Afterward one is here, unfolds from oneself, insofar as one is worth something. Is one here by grace of oneself? the man interrupted himself. No; here too, there’s too much accident, and it insults us. Our encounters, at least, are unbidden; our beginning with others and the fate from it (which wouldn’t exist without that beginning) depend on the most accidental causes. It can be the silliest cause, and often, astonishingly, the only one, always the same one; the other causes don’t flow then, or at least not far. For my part, I found after sufficient consideration in a disrespectful hour that my real life—my rebirth, as it were, or my adult baptism—depended on the discharge of a Bavarian officer whose name I don’t even know. As a young man I was very reserved; I sought out no one, and found no one. In my first semester at Munich, I boarded with a woman whom I took for a widow; sometimes she would boast of better days. An old man, clearly ill, had just joined us as a boarder, and might occasionally be seen in the hallway, groaning nobly. Once I came home late and passed the widow’s doorway, which stood open, strangely: there lay the old man, already nicely laid out in his bed; a nightlight still burnt, and right and left two long candles—the apartment empty, the woman gone, and I alone with the dead man. Night terrors had returned from my childhood, the same paralyzed legs, unable to flee this nightmare. Yet what the boy wished he had the grown man has in plenty: at least the nerve to run. A short

The Watershed



time later I was among living people again, in a bar that I would assuredly not have sought out except for the dead man. Here is the crux of the story: I had really never been in this bar, because it was shabby, and because quite disagreeable acquaintances hung out there. On this particular night, I went there demonstrably only because I needed human warmth without eye contact. The hair in my soup was at least human, and the fleck of dirt in the vinegary wine floated like a serene spirit. Most important, a man was there on this night who otherwise never came, and whom I got to know—indeed, through whom, in a veritable chain reaction of collision and mutual ignition, I would then get to know all the people who became important to me. First a female student, for whose sake I attended a small university I would otherwise never have thought of. Then a Hungarian woman, a Russian girlfriend, a German friend of the purest grade of absurdity—all people who moved me just as they were, and who cannot be replaced by others. I would never have visited Budapest (at least not at that time) without the Hungarian woman; without her I would never have gotten to know the Franciscan father (at least not at the time, a time that would decide everything) who later had such a vivid influence on me. And again: through the man I met in the bar, I met my future wife in a remote inn; decided even the residence where I would write my book (not unconnected with the landscape). It goes without saying that there are other, certainly less accidental threads in this causal nexus: but none is so central, none is above all so provably originative; none so aptly determines all my new beginnings. The small university, and what followed; the remote inn in the Isar valley, and what followed: my entire fate would never have taken place without the man in the bar. Berlin, where students go anyway, wouldn’t flourish like this for a long time; only recently has the causal force of the fortuitous corpse and the acquaintance from the bar lessened. The old man whose deathbed I fled, however, had in fact been an officer, cashiered over an earlier scandal with a Munich dancer long before I was born. Deathly ill, he had returned to his wife, whom I thought to be a widow and who would only now become one. His end, in that room with the door open, with a nightlight, in the abandoned apartment, granted me the beginning of my adult life. What is even further upstream? asked the strange storyteller. From my entry into the house to become a tenant; from the officer’s first glimpse of the dancer; from unrelated, distant inconsequentialities that have absolutely nothing to do with me. That a roof tile should fall on someone’s



No Face

head, that someone’s plans should be fortunate, another’s unfortunate, might still seem purposeful to the superstitious, like what they call karma or providence. But in these little, eerily faint, moreover eerily remote and past causes, one can grasp with bare hands what is arbitrary, “accidental,” worthless as it were, unworthy, about the doctrine of karma. Why the private affairs of this unimportant officer, whom I encountered only on the very periphery? What has that to do with my heredity, let alone with the law by which I began “intelligibly,” and which avoids the jumble of such determinations? Everyone should look for the little first causes in his own life; they will usually be just as trivial, even strange or comical. There’s still no production budget for the realization of our existence, said the man, and spat symbolically into his cupped hand. Afterward, of course, most things look just right, from the viewpoint of the middle and especially the end of life. Adaptation to the past pretends to be intentional, sometimes a law of necessity, by which one must complete the circle of one’s existence. Sometimes courage and logic—yes, grace of oneself, by which the subject and ultimately the group make history and fate. But life is still confused, and not built for us; it soon falls into a puddle in the yard, soon on a hill, and seldom on St. Gotthard; yet there too a stone can create a watershed, can by the tiniest diversion make this water flow to the Mediterranean, that to the North Sea. Even the logic of a courage that perhaps ultimately created a life out of dancer, corpse, and bar—truly created it, as out of other possible elements—is still as obscure when it enters, if not as arbitrary, as external “accident.” The power to enter into a great fate, the freedom to have one’s law, the law by which one began and that comes through in every strength, is finally far more “freedom,” thus accident, good accident, than law.

No Face A young girl, pretty, lively, ambitious, seemingly talented, fled the parental home. Burned the candle at both ends. Sought the extraordinary; regarded herself above all as such. Became an actress at a small theater; mailed the initial critical praise home. Maintained for a long time the impressive il-



No Face

head, that someone’s plans should be fortunate, another’s unfortunate, might still seem purposeful to the superstitious, like what they call karma or providence. But in these little, eerily faint, moreover eerily remote and past causes, one can grasp with bare hands what is arbitrary, “accidental,” worthless as it were, unworthy, about the doctrine of karma. Why the private affairs of this unimportant officer, whom I encountered only on the very periphery? What has that to do with my heredity, let alone with the law by which I began “intelligibly,” and which avoids the jumble of such determinations? Everyone should look for the little first causes in his own life; they will usually be just as trivial, even strange or comical. There’s still no production budget for the realization of our existence, said the man, and spat symbolically into his cupped hand. Afterward, of course, most things look just right, from the viewpoint of the middle and especially the end of life. Adaptation to the past pretends to be intentional, sometimes a law of necessity, by which one must complete the circle of one’s existence. Sometimes courage and logic—yes, grace of oneself, by which the subject and ultimately the group make history and fate. But life is still confused, and not built for us; it soon falls into a puddle in the yard, soon on a hill, and seldom on St. Gotthard; yet there too a stone can create a watershed, can by the tiniest diversion make this water flow to the Mediterranean, that to the North Sea. Even the logic of a courage that perhaps ultimately created a life out of dancer, corpse, and bar—truly created it, as out of other possible elements—is still as obscure when it enters, if not as arbitrary, as external “accident.” The power to enter into a great fate, the freedom to have one’s law, the law by which one began and that comes through in every strength, is finally far more “freedom,” thus accident, good accident, than law.

No Face A young girl, pretty, lively, ambitious, seemingly talented, fled the parental home. Burned the candle at both ends. Sought the extraordinary; regarded herself above all as such. Became an actress at a small theater; mailed the initial critical praise home. Maintained for a long time the impressive il-

Comte de Mirabeau



lusion of her fame, with a constant eye to her parents, her former circles, her youthful tormentors, and the misunderstanding that would finally have to capitulate. Finally, driven from one dump of a theater to another, failed to find work anywhere. Stranded with empty hands and aching feet in the same stupid town she had fled. Returned with her ambitions clearly not satisfied; became a secretary in an office; distributed ration cards, apparently voluntarily, during the War; even that was made possible only by her father’s respectable status. Some weeks later the former actress Karoline Lengenhardt, not yet thirty, was put in an institution. What happened in this girl until she got where she is should give most of us sleepless nights. Her misfortune lacks even the grandeur that tends to console the vanity and ambition of others on their way down. Here not even the inner realization, to say nothing of the outer, agrees with the will behind it. The inept fervor of her will could not even come through. The girl even lacked talent. She was not just unfavorably situated or misjudged; she had not been misjudged at all. Yet there is a flagrant disproportion between her initial fame and the accidents that hindered or derailed it. Her face never took shape, and her life between classes, her unbourgeois ramble, had no goal, indeed no horse, and finally no rider; nothing came out well, or even came out. The arbitrariness of her lot was enormous, and stifled the inner calling to which she hearkened, and that was truly there. What was alive in her fantastic quest sufficed only to put her in an asylum. Why, asked an authority on women, must we, bounded in every way, suffer so boundlessly?

Comte de Mirabeau One who was stuck in a good skin saw a quite pitiful man going before him. Right away it was clear to him: this man before me is my walk, my way of raising my eyebrows, even my face. Or rather, all this would be my body and soul, my identical twin, if things turned out as they should. Things had not turned out as they should have. The count did not dance to the piper of outward, fortuitous appearance; his unfortunate brother before him was so only approximately, or just his brother in humanity, as good folks like to say, though it costs them nothing. He was strange to him from the outset—or perhaps only since some watershed? He couldn’t

Comte de Mirabeau



lusion of her fame, with a constant eye to her parents, her former circles, her youthful tormentors, and the misunderstanding that would finally have to capitulate. Finally, driven from one dump of a theater to another, failed to find work anywhere. Stranded with empty hands and aching feet in the same stupid town she had fled. Returned with her ambitions clearly not satisfied; became a secretary in an office; distributed ration cards, apparently voluntarily, during the War; even that was made possible only by her father’s respectable status. Some weeks later the former actress Karoline Lengenhardt, not yet thirty, was put in an institution. What happened in this girl until she got where she is should give most of us sleepless nights. Her misfortune lacks even the grandeur that tends to console the vanity and ambition of others on their way down. Here not even the inner realization, to say nothing of the outer, agrees with the will behind it. The inept fervor of her will could not even come through. The girl even lacked talent. She was not just unfavorably situated or misjudged; she had not been misjudged at all. Yet there is a flagrant disproportion between her initial fame and the accidents that hindered or derailed it. Her face never took shape, and her life between classes, her unbourgeois ramble, had no goal, indeed no horse, and finally no rider; nothing came out well, or even came out. The arbitrariness of her lot was enormous, and stifled the inner calling to which she hearkened, and that was truly there. What was alive in her fantastic quest sufficed only to put her in an asylum. Why, asked an authority on women, must we, bounded in every way, suffer so boundlessly?

Comte de Mirabeau One who was stuck in a good skin saw a quite pitiful man going before him. Right away it was clear to him: this man before me is my walk, my way of raising my eyebrows, even my face. Or rather, all this would be my body and soul, my identical twin, if things turned out as they should. Things had not turned out as they should have. The count did not dance to the piper of outward, fortuitous appearance; his unfortunate brother before him was so only approximately, or just his brother in humanity, as good folks like to say, though it costs them nothing. He was strange to him from the outset—or perhaps only since some watershed? He couldn’t



Comte de Mirabeau

say. So many a Dickens had never been sung a lullaby about himself; not even “on his own power” could he bring about the transformation of David Copperfield from a condition into a book. All the more disturbing, shameful, and strange were the irregular’s feelings as his ideal type went before him on the street, the pure product of “inheritance” and “milieu.” His mirror, yet in no way a mirror; his identity, and yet at the same time so utterly disparate that he was not even his opposite, that nothing in him even resisted this most dissimilar of doubles, that the man did not even become a complex for him. The problem of the impostor appeared here, the impostor with such corriger la fortune that he no longer fools anyone, least of all himself. The man spoke of this later, and let it not unclearly be known that his good fortune was more certain to him than anything, yet still more remarkable than the misfortune, the normal fortune, that he’d just seen before him. Soon everyone turned to the price the imposter must pay, who must daily regain his dream. One can also just dream, began the man, of having one more sausage. Someone like that settles where he ends up, falters on success. The energetic striver gets somewhat further, especially in more unstable times, when the old positions of power can more easily be had. His proper arena is the bourgeoisie, liberalism, capitalism; this type flourishes today. But usually the striver alters nothing, neither his type nor the old world; he only shifts more badly into the old positions of power, as parvenu. The striver too has been distanced from his origins not by his nature but only by his intensity; he is constantly aware of his stages, so that his development, at best a series of small steps, connects him to his beginnings. A special case is the master suddenly become servant, along with the suddenly elevated pauper—say, Shakespeare’s tinker Christopher Sly (from Taming of the Shrew). Either he breaks, because his self no longer finds affinities (a similar process as in the sorrow of those driven far from home, though domestique gentilhomme does not even want to, can not, get homesick), or a long exploited nature wrests from a new perceptual world the base means of pleasure and power that it needs in order to erupt out of long repression as a tyrant. Much, much higher, however, continued the born but reluctant man of fortune, much higher and more important than the striver and the parvenu is the impostor, for he does not become, like the striver, but is; appears as seigneur because he feels himself de jure to be one. So many children already dream of secretly being royalty, understand Hauff ’s “Legend

Comte de Mirabeau



of the False Prince” very well, and what happened with the tailor’s apprentice when he sat deep in thought, stared fixedly ahead, and had something so peculiar in his aspect and manner that the other apprentices would always say of this state only: “Labakan has his noble face again.” There is much less self-interest to be found here than fastidiousness, an invincible confidence, folly. If this confidence should assume aristocratic forms, it is not to step down again like the parvenu—let alone the servant-as-master!—it is not to affirm aristocracy as such; the self-suggested seigneur is not class-conscious. Instead, there are even transitions from him to a type by rights opposed to him, the rebel. Transitions against his will, insofar as Casanova and Cagliostro deprive their societies of their strongest hold, namely, tradition. Transitions by will: a heterogeneous figure such as Lassalle still led the workers like a sort of Labakan; in other words, it is not so much the aristocratic as the fabulous, at worst the mythic aspect of the great names of history that captivates him, and that he projects even into the ground of revolution.1 Until after all this renunciation, this longing, he collapses completely into legend and becomes a little Quixote. This, said the man, is the actual case I see behind the confidence man, or rather, such a newspaper article of that kind came especially alive again for me as a legend when I saw that man on the street, all the peculiar emotions I had for him. Such a dream prince a non lucendo, a little Quixote, lived in Helbra, for example, until his fortieth year, under the name Emil Witzel, as mechanic and son of an invalid miner; then one day he suddenly declares that he was only given into the invalid’s custody, but was in fact the son of Prince Lesetto Riquetti of Mirabeau and his wife Marguérite, née de Racine; his name was thus in truth Prince Riquetti Paul of Mirabeau.2 “In truth” the mechanic felt himself to be a prince, and in any case he believed it himself; indeed, how do we ever know who we are? How absurd must it seem to an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting in a kitchen, as a maid, or see oneself objectified as mechanic! How falsely the usual sunrise wakes us, the clock dial, the city street, the job! How wrongly people find themselves in these systems—our time isn’t there, our space isn’t there, not even our name is there—the addressee for whom the alarm clock rings is identical to only a few, and the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false. Mechanic Witzel, with his ludicrous and outmoded imposture, is brother to Gottfried Keller’s tailor’s apprentice Strapinski with his velvet



Comte de Mirabeau

waistcoat and nobly melancholy visage, with the dream of a purer, nobler, higher existence in his heart; here is the false Prince Mirabeau, there the false Prince Strapinski; both are dream princes with nobility as a selfless symbol, or as the awareness of being “in truth” no mechanic, no tailor.3 The presumptions of such imposture are not a deception, but actually correct a deception, if in a curious way; they correct, if childishly and illusorily, the falsification and the disgraceful situation in which most of humanity must still live. Fate stifled their voices in the cradle (like a bandit who abducts children); now they’ve become the mechanic Witzel, or this pitiful man who passed before me, and remained abducted. The royal title enchanted Witzel, though he meant something entirely different: something fabulous, as we already said, a sign of the ultimate unknowability of a person, and the phototropism that will resolve it. This drive needs symbols, Witzel’s pompous, another’s perhaps obscure and profound, in order to find these others, the true symbols that are right almost accidentally. No advance “upward,” not the truly productive one, ever begins without self-assertions that are not, or not yet, true. Even the young composer Beethoven, who suddenly knew or declared that he was the greatest genius that had ever been, practiced an imposture of the most absurd style when he felt himself to be the equal of Ludwig van Beethoven, who he was not yet, after all. He used this unwarranted presumption in order to become Beethoven, for without the audacity and even insolence of such predictions nothing great has ever been accomplished. Mechanic Witzel certainly had no right to call himself Prince Mirabeau, but why no right, in this accidental, hideand-seek world where even Easter eggs are an accident that one may conjure up, and not a “right”? The real Prince Mirabeau inherited his name, the real Beethoven perhaps his talent (some say from himself, from an earlier life), but why does one inherit and not another? And do not all artists, if not all believers, have to appear to be, before they become? Would we not need far more corriger la fortune in the root sense in order finally to eliminate the mystery of the great brother on the street? The “sources” of imposture, concluded my friend rather wearily, might then be exposed, and could truly live by daylight. Imposture remains something quite remarkable: it reveals the glory that all mean and all deserve. Yes, that and legend (it has many knights of fortune, and grants them fortune) excuse the existence of princes and princesses, because they imitate it and depict it. Someone once said that people are in Heaven and don’t know it; Heaven certainly still seems somewhat unclear. Leave everything from his statement but the will that it be true—then he was right.

Rich Devil, Poor Devil



Rich Devil, Poor Devil Someone with enough money can often become remarkably good. He can concede something to others, pick out something nice for them. The rich like to play, for which they use the poor. Just as a rich American did when he announced a most unusual contest. A young man was needed, preferably a miner, strong and clever. Of the one hundred thousand entries one was selected; the winner came forward. A handsome fellow, he had to do no more than fulfill some further requirements: eat and drink in fine style, wear fine clothes with flair, cut a figure. A tutor instructed him in the worldly arts: riding, golf, elegant conversation with ladies, and whatever else an American gentleman requires. All with his sponsor’s money; at the conclusion of his polishing the lucky man departed on a three-year journey around the world, letters of credit in his pocket granting fulfillment of the most exotic wish. There was just one last term to be met: after his journey the young man would have to return to the mines as though nothing had happened. He would have to remain there at least another ten years, a miner as before. This term too the lucky devil undersigned, thinking only of the life more directly before him. The time of his shining youth now began. He visited the operatic splendor of Europe, enjoyed the favors of women, and showed a talent for it; hunted tigers in India and dined with viceroys; in short, lived the life of a prince, with contrast lighting into the bargain. Until the day of his return, when, almost sated, he thanked his patron like a guest taking his leave. He donned his old clothes and descended into the pit again, to the coal, the blind horses, the comrades who had become strangers to him and despised him. Descended into the mine again— unimaginable, those recent days, months, the reflection, and now the backing, the waking at dawn, the backbreaking work, the sweat, the coughing, the coal dust in his lungs, the poor food, the beds for three. Now, the fellow could of course have broken the contract—in fine style, using style to find another position; or in revolutionary style, as leader. Instead he struck in an astounding way: drove to New York, saw his benefactor, shot him. For the worker post festum there was sympathy; the court exonerated him. Explanation: is the life that toys with us any different from the rich man, the good rich man? Of course he must be abolished, so the miner shot him; the merely social fate that the rich set for the poor must be abolished. But the rich man still stands as an idol of the other fate, the natural



The Kitten as David

one with death at the end, whose brutality the rich devil only imitated and made apparent, until it became his own death. However miserable, however varied and brilliant a life might have been, death extinguishes it in the same way, and sends it into the pit; in short, the capitalist despot also lives under the very final fate that sets the tempo for half our lives and afterward consigns us to the void. The American devil even has similarities with the most evil despotism into which fate was ever projected, with Calvin’s God. There no one can know what awaits him beyond; predestination, whether one is graced or damned cannot be known down here; but in certain people, says Calvin, God has caused a sign of grace, as though they were particularly sure of Paradise. These are the people whom God will most surely damn; he caused the signs of grace only that they may be more terribly surprised by Hell; and the saint already imagined himself to be walking on the parquet of Paradise. Calvin here, Hell there: in death, which is not and per definitionem cannot be anyone’s true death (for our space is always life, or something more, but not what is less than life)—in death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it. No one could think ill of the “saint” who shot this God like the worker the millionaire. But we have never heard anything definite about these things; nor is the court known that could acquit us. The great cat allows only minor guest roles in life; nonetheless the worker’s revolver is already quite appealing.

The Kitten as David Pull yourself together, we say. Especially where there’s danger, and there’s nothing to laugh about. Most often the little man makes himself even smaller than he already is, so as not to be seen. It sounds better to say: if you want to survive, you have to gather your strength and not waste it. Of course that can also go wrong, as with the steady drip when it’s not steady enough to erode the stone. It might also not want to remain an obedient and diligent drip. A kitten fortunately did it differently, though it was an unusual one. First something about its owner, a Munich paperhanger and upholsterer who also enjoyed his ease, relaxing and owning. He could do all this after earning enough money renting out mattresses during carnival; took con-



The Kitten as David

one with death at the end, whose brutality the rich devil only imitated and made apparent, until it became his own death. However miserable, however varied and brilliant a life might have been, death extinguishes it in the same way, and sends it into the pit; in short, the capitalist despot also lives under the very final fate that sets the tempo for half our lives and afterward consigns us to the void. The American devil even has similarities with the most evil despotism into which fate was ever projected, with Calvin’s God. There no one can know what awaits him beyond; predestination, whether one is graced or damned cannot be known down here; but in certain people, says Calvin, God has caused a sign of grace, as though they were particularly sure of Paradise. These are the people whom God will most surely damn; he caused the signs of grace only that they may be more terribly surprised by Hell; and the saint already imagined himself to be walking on the parquet of Paradise. Calvin here, Hell there: in death, which is not and per definitionem cannot be anyone’s true death (for our space is always life, or something more, but not what is less than life)—in death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it. No one could think ill of the “saint” who shot this God like the worker the millionaire. But we have never heard anything definite about these things; nor is the court known that could acquit us. The great cat allows only minor guest roles in life; nonetheless the worker’s revolver is already quite appealing.

The Kitten as David Pull yourself together, we say. Especially where there’s danger, and there’s nothing to laugh about. Most often the little man makes himself even smaller than he already is, so as not to be seen. It sounds better to say: if you want to survive, you have to gather your strength and not waste it. Of course that can also go wrong, as with the steady drip when it’s not steady enough to erode the stone. It might also not want to remain an obedient and diligent drip. A kitten fortunately did it differently, though it was an unusual one. First something about its owner, a Munich paperhanger and upholsterer who also enjoyed his ease, relaxing and owning. He could do all this after earning enough money renting out mattresses during carnival; took con-

Triumphs of Misrecognition



siderable trips, buying souvenirs indiscriminately, some as good as a leopard cub, for example. Well, he finally moved into a cottage near Garmisch, complete with a lightning rod adorned with a brass half moon, also a souvenir; a Rottweiler guarded the whole place with its treasures. The dog was trained to attack six men at once, and only his master could chain him up by day, letting him run free in the yard at night. The leopard cub, meanwhile, was taken tenderly onto visiting ladies’ laps all day long, purred, lapped milk, carefully sheltered from the guard dog’s fury. Until one night: the owner was awakened by a terrible duet in the garden, by the raging dog, the weakly mewing cub. So the cub had escaped, and the outcome could not be in doubt. The paperhanger mourned his cub, and waited till morning, when he could easily tie the dog up again. As the owner then entered the garden, however, he saw a shockingly large puddle of blood, in it the dead Rottweiler, and as he looked around for the leopard cub that should have been devoured, it was sitting in a tree, completely unharmed after the unequal contest. In its moment of need it must have concentrated on the one weapon it had been given, on the instinctive leap at the enemy’s throat; therein lay its only strength, while the canine giant flung its strength in every direction, and so only weakly, or completely aimlessly. The Rottweiler’s surprise must have been great, as great as the cub’s, which had now lapped more than just milk. Of course the ladies no longer took it as tenderly onto their laps as at a gala on behalf of sweet little pickaninnies; hardly remarked in this case that God was strong in the weak. The uneducated paperhanger, on the other hand, thought simply: never torment a creature for sport, for it might be loaded. But the moral of the story was of course this: against a guard dog, trained one-sidedness quickly found its target. The weak of society, the oppressed, are hardly leopard cubs with an instinct for the leap at the throat. But it’s been known to happen: not only David, the still fragile boy, does best to strike Goliath at his weakest point.

Triumphs of Misrecognition How the girl looked, he no longer quite remembered. Who she was, he thought he knew. A girlfriend, sometimes charming, sometimes annoying. The smell of sewing hung about her, something of the shop as well.

Triumphs of Misrecognition



siderable trips, buying souvenirs indiscriminately, some as good as a leopard cub, for example. Well, he finally moved into a cottage near Garmisch, complete with a lightning rod adorned with a brass half moon, also a souvenir; a Rottweiler guarded the whole place with its treasures. The dog was trained to attack six men at once, and only his master could chain him up by day, letting him run free in the yard at night. The leopard cub, meanwhile, was taken tenderly onto visiting ladies’ laps all day long, purred, lapped milk, carefully sheltered from the guard dog’s fury. Until one night: the owner was awakened by a terrible duet in the garden, by the raging dog, the weakly mewing cub. So the cub had escaped, and the outcome could not be in doubt. The paperhanger mourned his cub, and waited till morning, when he could easily tie the dog up again. As the owner then entered the garden, however, he saw a shockingly large puddle of blood, in it the dead Rottweiler, and as he looked around for the leopard cub that should have been devoured, it was sitting in a tree, completely unharmed after the unequal contest. In its moment of need it must have concentrated on the one weapon it had been given, on the instinctive leap at the enemy’s throat; therein lay its only strength, while the canine giant flung its strength in every direction, and so only weakly, or completely aimlessly. The Rottweiler’s surprise must have been great, as great as the cub’s, which had now lapped more than just milk. Of course the ladies no longer took it as tenderly onto their laps as at a gala on behalf of sweet little pickaninnies; hardly remarked in this case that God was strong in the weak. The uneducated paperhanger, on the other hand, thought simply: never torment a creature for sport, for it might be loaded. But the moral of the story was of course this: against a guard dog, trained one-sidedness quickly found its target. The weak of society, the oppressed, are hardly leopard cubs with an instinct for the leap at the throat. But it’s been known to happen: not only David, the still fragile boy, does best to strike Goliath at his weakest point.

Triumphs of Misrecognition How the girl looked, he no longer quite remembered. Who she was, he thought he knew. A girlfriend, sometimes charming, sometimes annoying. The smell of sewing hung about her, something of the shop as well.



Triumphs of Misrecognition

Occasionally a flicker, though it would not burn; too nervous. Or it lit no more than the path to a small, honest marriage bed. Just this was not for her, so it all went nowhere, and they parted. After some years the man returned to the town. Much had happened. The girl might have been dull, but he was no hero—or he would never have begun, as one may imagine. Now the faded lover learned that the girl was lying in a nearby hospital. For reasons that are often, in such cases, not the best—sympathy, regret, curiosity, whatever—the man drove to the hospital, signed in. The doorman claimed not to know the name; up to the head nurse, who led the visitor, since the patient was not yet ready, to the head doctor’s office. A few seconds while the man lowered his expectations; then the chief nurse opened the door to the adjoining room and said, Fräulein Doktor will see you now. In other words, the little girl from back then had become the head doctor, momentarily ill but otherwise unrecognizable, confident, calm, distinguished, and smart. The vain man felt strange before this inferior who had risen, and whom he had in any case not recognized in his time. Shortly thereafter she would shrink again in his presence, but that comforted him even less. He could not recover from the joy, he would say, that the bit of misfortune he had wanted to visit was so different, was quite enough fortune. The ups and downs can be reversed, as a father learned who sought his daughter in the most unusual way. She failed to return home after a walk down the street in Reval, while foreign troops were marching right through the town. Run away, abducted, dead: he could choose her misfortune, and not even exactly. Until finally one day a letter arrived from a middling German city—perhaps not the girl’s first, but the first to arrive, a very joyous sign of life, telling of her having been discovered for the theater, enclosing a picture with an all-too-practiced signature and the usual glowing reviews. The father was long held back by Baltic turmoil; as he finally arrived in this German city, his daughter had moved to Munich. When he asked about her in Munich he learned that the young actress had died of influenza a month ago, and the distraught man was directed to her grave. After all these detours, death had finally taken her; her image, not as a child murderer’s victim, of course, but lovely and perfected, rose before him, taken from him at the height of her fortune, and framed. From the cemetery the man went to the police to learn his daughter’s last address. Her last address? said the clerk, shuffling papers with annoyance. She already has a new address? The young lady was here just yesterday, register-

Triumphs of Misrecognition



ing a new address. As the father kept stammering on about death, and a grave, and the gravestone he had ordered, the clerk become still ruder, cursed all foreigners and their ingenuous nature, finally threw the new address at the man. The story ends more tonelessly than one can even imagine. For as the man climbed the stairs to the apartment, rang, asked for his daughter— really the dead one, reborn, no longer mortal, quietly fulfilled, he no longer knew what—she came out of her room. The father saw her and said only, Why aren’t you taller? We don’t know what the girl should have said, the real girl and not the dead and buried heroine of the novel, who had been larger in every way, so sad and so Romantic. The shock of the moment was bound up with the disillusion of the image to which his daughter had seemed adequate. It had already sustained him by night; in any case one can certainly imagine the father’s joy at finding his daughter again. Let us return to the first story, which anyway ends more positively, and add an equally positive, not to mention magnificent, story, which might be only a legend, a Chassidic one, lying beneath much underbrush even in Buber, but nonetheless shows real backgrounds. It takes place in Alexandrian or perhaps Napoleonic times, in a great commercial city, wherever.4 There lived, it is told, an old man, getting by miserably. He rarely left his garret, daring to come out only in the evening. Street urchins threw stones at him, and the good citizens would watch, laughing to see him run away so pitifully. It was hardly a good town; the poor were subject to the provost, the churches mere currency exchanges between this side and the other. But as the old man came onto the street again one day, he was astounded to see a transformation: disquiet, indeed fear was in the air. Throngs stood at the intersections and the plazas, conferring in hushed voices. The old man heard of a great army that was advancing on the town, of an emperor whom no enemy had withstood, and the land went up in flames before him. An angel of death had taken over the town, and the citizen’s fat shoulders shook, not in laughter; the old man said softly to himself: Could he be the one? Turned away and walked through the town, under the great gate and onto the fields, following a great crowd scattering to and fro across the plain to see the campfires. Ever further marched the old man, now up a small rise where other gawkers still stood, among them the councilmen, who were considering offering no resistance and instead going to the emperor the next day to hand over the city: when suddenly a patrol came around the hill, through the thicket; and after a brief chase



Triumphs of Misrecognition

the twelve, who were trying to hide behind trees, were caught, fettered, escorted to the camp in step with the horses. There the password, entry, laughter and clamor around the campfires, the emperor’s order that the spies immediately be brought to him. Down the path to the imperial tent: there stood the whole motley crowd, councilmen beside commoners, and in the middle the old man, completely exhausted. The emperor stepped forward and quickly looked them over; yet no sooner did he see the old man, his quiet face and his frail body, than he threw himself to the ground and kissed the man’s outstretched hands. And all knew: if the emperor was the master of the sword, the old man was the Master of Prayer, whom the mighty of the town could not recognize; he was too much for their needs, and too great for any role. But the emperor recognized him, and he recognized him before all the council, with the old man’s stupendous triumph in the wake of this recognition. The old man had not sought this triumph, and even avoided it in accordance with his ultimate rank, in which there is no shame and not a whisper of vanity. The councilmen were not granted triumph, or rather his was granted to them, and to the listener as well; one takes unselfish pleasure in it. The Master of Prayer went on his way, a great noble, as we see, and more.  Yet is our joy really pure at seeing him so great? That was the question, and a discussion ensued; an unpleasant feeling said, No. Not everyone felt that way, least of all the older people, who still had some Wilhelm II in them; they loved “great” and “small,” above all “great” and “most high,” or when valor is decorated as from a thunderclap. After some back and forth the teller of the tale reversed himself, somewhat unwillingly, but he couldn’t allow himself the point of his stories. Otherwise, he said, another’s misfortune obviously does not always displease us. It pleases us only conditionally when he rises up; some are debased by envy. They might not always be so, but here they are bad company, with an evil eye one has to take into account, as it isn’t evil everywhere. Yet all envy changes as soon as the lucky other is not alive but only being read about; as soon as the reader can read himself into his place. In this way, so it seems, a creature no longer suffers under another’s splendor, no longer feels joy at another’s degradation; has of course only changed places, not itself. Let it go well for the hero at another’s expense, or better yet, grandly; one’s own mediocrity is avenged, finds itself happily

Triumphs of Misrecognition



compensated, to everyone else’s shame. Even boys, I remember clearly, love such heroes, poor riders, poor shots, and then all of a sudden appears the dead aim, or some other sign, and everyone recognizes Old Shatterhand.5 Even Andersen’s tale of the ugly duckling swims somewhere in that water, however profound its motion otherwise: the common birds part and a swan describes its proud circles, definitely a swan; perhaps it did not know that it was one, and so dazzles more consolingly—perhaps its higher rank was concealed, and so emerges more triumphantly. Between duckling, swan, the Fräulein Doktor of our story, and the Master of Prayer at the end, there are certainly great gaps, but what this entire sphere, or at least our pleasure in it, has in common, apart from splendor—one can hardly ignore it—is the impulse, first repressed, then gratified, to be somebody. Even such favorites as the stories of good Kaiser Josef, even such sublime moments as the recognition of Odysseus the beggar—for their dubious catharsis, and so not only for their splendor—therefore belong here.6 Bourgeois culture, like feudal culture (in spite of the latter’s stronger group formation), is an elite culture, with ranks above ranks decorated by persons. The downward effect of this individualist glory is to intimidate, to create particularly acute feelings of inferiority; their partial abreaction makes up the mixed pleasure of such sudden greatness, of which we partake in the reading. A no-longer-individualistic democracy, contended the storyteller, would hardly still understand the power of these motifs, or would resist them. Small and great, great and small—we prefer the small, said nearly everyone. The doctor deserves credit for getting to that level, surely, and the fellow before her for being capable of shame. The father deserves credit, or perhaps not, that he had such a picture of his lost daughter, however framed, who in her grave was indeed lost and called forth feelings as in a novel. Literary and legendary fate slightly corrects, and rightly so, the reality where people live and that is not really theirs; nonetheless, as greatness in the sense of the aforementioned Mirabeau, or even the powerfully emergent Master of Prayer, there is finally no adequate fate, no correction to fate. In the girl, greatness appeared only as the first sign that she was not just a doll; but greatness, as something necessarily personal, is no final sign of an entry into the right fate, but of an entry beyond fate and into our space. Except for tyrants, and seldom even for them—often only when Rubens sees them, but not Van Dyck, and certainly not Rembrandt—and in heathen solar mythologies. But in the Bible, the hero appears only in his



Scribe at the Mairie

reduction to the Christ child, to the servant Isaiah, due as much to paradox as to his highest ascent into nearness to humanity; even God appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes. In the Master of Prayer, too (who could be a Biblical hero and is a Chassidic one), all kinds of such depth are at work, a denial of the powerful, “imperial” expression of self, certainly also a light that is not comprehended and so is not entirely one. Yet precisely because of this light, the old man should not in the end flash monarchically; instead many a depth shows itself otherwise, perhaps by a sign nearby that is not royal purple. The old man may be as hidden as he needs to be, but no one can be secretly grandiose, for grandiosity appears right away. When it belongs in the Bible, the Bible gives not even God an allonge periwig but has him as a likeness of man, almost as a companion who goes alongside him. Even the old man lost his reward—or rather, he would not even take it until the emperor disturbed him, or until he let himself be disturbed. Without an emperor, in a more level world, such anonymi would have it easier. Should they still exist, should they still be needed, a future society will have no such sorrows and triumphs of personal misrecognition, but will force the fate that always hinders, never helps us, over to our side in open and collective struggle. All or no ducklings will be rescued swans in the light; there will be no other privilege or private greatness.

Scribe at the Mairie Little people have often vented their shabby wrath at the office. But they have not always crossed out what would go against their grain if they were sergeants. That was the experience of a highly placed young lady whose husband was sentenced to death by firing squad for resisting wartime orders. The independent actions of this French officer had perhaps won the battle, but even a good example might make a bad habit here. The officer’s young wife, in accordance with her station, drove to Versailles, where she had a friend in Madame Pompadour; to no avail. Pompadour even brought the young lady before the king, Louis XV, normally weak before a woman’s tears. But even he could not overturn the ultimate verdict—could not even, and especially not, as supreme commander, offer a pardon.



Scribe at the Mairie

reduction to the Christ child, to the servant Isaiah, due as much to paradox as to his highest ascent into nearness to humanity; even God appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes. In the Master of Prayer, too (who could be a Biblical hero and is a Chassidic one), all kinds of such depth are at work, a denial of the powerful, “imperial” expression of self, certainly also a light that is not comprehended and so is not entirely one. Yet precisely because of this light, the old man should not in the end flash monarchically; instead many a depth shows itself otherwise, perhaps by a sign nearby that is not royal purple. The old man may be as hidden as he needs to be, but no one can be secretly grandiose, for grandiosity appears right away. When it belongs in the Bible, the Bible gives not even God an allonge periwig but has him as a likeness of man, almost as a companion who goes alongside him. Even the old man lost his reward—or rather, he would not even take it until the emperor disturbed him, or until he let himself be disturbed. Without an emperor, in a more level world, such anonymi would have it easier. Should they still exist, should they still be needed, a future society will have no such sorrows and triumphs of personal misrecognition, but will force the fate that always hinders, never helps us, over to our side in open and collective struggle. All or no ducklings will be rescued swans in the light; there will be no other privilege or private greatness.

Scribe at the Mairie Little people have often vented their shabby wrath at the office. But they have not always crossed out what would go against their grain if they were sergeants. That was the experience of a highly placed young lady whose husband was sentenced to death by firing squad for resisting wartime orders. The independent actions of this French officer had perhaps won the battle, but even a good example might make a bad habit here. The officer’s young wife, in accordance with her station, drove to Versailles, where she had a friend in Madame Pompadour; to no avail. Pompadour even brought the young lady before the king, Louis XV, normally weak before a woman’s tears. But even he could not overturn the ultimate verdict—could not even, and especially not, as supreme commander, offer a pardon.

The Beautiful Appearance



The young lady left the castle. Blinded by tears, she walked right past her equipage, and on down the dusty highway back to Paris. There she met quite a wretched little man, who marveled at such aristocratic splendor going on foot, and stood there with hat in hand. The noblewoman, brought low by misfortune, related her story yet again, whereupon the little man said: If that’s all, then nothing could be easier. I’m scribe at the Mairie, with the case file in my desk; between today and tomorrow the entire verdict could vanish without anyone caring. The documents indeed vanished; the execution did not take place; a grain of sand in the gears functioned; the lower bureaucracy for once showed what it could do for better this time and not for worse. With hat in hand, of course, before a gracious young noblewoman, not before little people on the same level, say, who would not even have attained to a scribe’s uniform, let alone before the intellectual monsters who disturb order. Otherwise everyone could come along and make files disappear. Where would we be then?

The Beautiful Appearance One always hesitates to begin something too beautifully. Not only because it tempts fate; rather, ideal types are sickly. The first struggle brings everything back out again that had no place in the refined, still air. Things should not be as they’re painted, or they won’t last long in this life. Sometimes one reads about noble deeds that from the start are too noble to be true. Some are even true, but how mysteriously they like to turn into their opposite, so that nothing is left over for the museum of morality. To name one example that many may have seen in the newspapers: Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly a famous man, and we owe him much; he is known for the most enjoyable ingenuity, and recently almost as much for his legal courage in the struggle for justice. For the sacrifice, effort, public appeals, spirit voices of all kinds he dedicated to the unfortunate Oscar Slater, who had sat in prison innocent for twenty years or more. Here humanity appeared spontaneously, quite without political motivations or even such motivations as in the Dreyfus affair; here was the rescuer, here the victim, both ready for myth, or as though embodying it. But no sooner was Slater freed, rehabilitated, compensated, than his complexion improved beyond recognition; with a great cigar in his mouth

The Beautiful Appearance



The young lady left the castle. Blinded by tears, she walked right past her equipage, and on down the dusty highway back to Paris. There she met quite a wretched little man, who marveled at such aristocratic splendor going on foot, and stood there with hat in hand. The noblewoman, brought low by misfortune, related her story yet again, whereupon the little man said: If that’s all, then nothing could be easier. I’m scribe at the Mairie, with the case file in my desk; between today and tomorrow the entire verdict could vanish without anyone caring. The documents indeed vanished; the execution did not take place; a grain of sand in the gears functioned; the lower bureaucracy for once showed what it could do for better this time and not for worse. With hat in hand, of course, before a gracious young noblewoman, not before little people on the same level, say, who would not even have attained to a scribe’s uniform, let alone before the intellectual monsters who disturb order. Otherwise everyone could come along and make files disappear. Where would we be then?

The Beautiful Appearance One always hesitates to begin something too beautifully. Not only because it tempts fate; rather, ideal types are sickly. The first struggle brings everything back out again that had no place in the refined, still air. Things should not be as they’re painted, or they won’t last long in this life. Sometimes one reads about noble deeds that from the start are too noble to be true. Some are even true, but how mysteriously they like to turn into their opposite, so that nothing is left over for the museum of morality. To name one example that many may have seen in the newspapers: Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly a famous man, and we owe him much; he is known for the most enjoyable ingenuity, and recently almost as much for his legal courage in the struggle for justice. For the sacrifice, effort, public appeals, spirit voices of all kinds he dedicated to the unfortunate Oscar Slater, who had sat in prison innocent for twenty years or more. Here humanity appeared spontaneously, quite without political motivations or even such motivations as in the Dreyfus affair; here was the rescuer, here the victim, both ready for myth, or as though embodying it. But no sooner was Slater freed, rehabilitated, compensated, than his complexion improved beyond recognition; with a great cigar in his mouth



The Beautiful Appearance

he appeared in illustrated weeklies, and he invested his compensation in very successful ventures. Conan Doyle, however, was either bored with morality or disgusted at having entered battle for ecce homo and won it for a businessman; in short, he added up the money that the appeal had cost him and sent Slater the bill. Yet Slater was even further beyond idealism (which he had had, as victim), and replied that he had not appointed Doyle, and did not owe him the money. Now, Conan Doyle had accused his Florestan; the man whom he had freed from one court he now dragged before another, and asked that he be moved from death row to debtor’s prison.7 So rescue and innocence diverged with great force into their opposites; this is how they end, because both were too beautiful, so elegantly cut, and almost flawless. Not as though something bad only came out that was there before. Those are of course the normal cases, where the ending only strips away the grand words and money shows its smirk again. The interests then reach out that were hiding from the start behind the sweet, disingenuous face. But precisely in the present case, the reversal goes far beyond the economic grounds; here is less interest in money than the interest of an idealist who reverses himself and now becomes unideal like no one else. Where there’s a china shop, the bull cannot be far; on this occasion he was already among the porcelain, right in the middle, growing, and so hardly needed to be brought in from outside. Too beautiful days, too beautiful virtues, are appearance, which might be edifying, but where no one can survive for too long without turning into the opposite, to the point of absurdity, because of the envy of our inner gods (who are no such thing yet). This prisoner seemed so poetic; Slater not only seemed but was—as prisoner—noble enough for the best bit of pathos; indeed, everything about him was mythic endurance, with Conan Doyle like Perseus. Then the figures start to move on reality’s ground floor, the opera of rescue continues in real life, where the writer Conan Doyle finally becomes even more poetic than the businessman Slater, and the sublime becomes not only ridiculous but coarse. Even where the case is less ideal and the virtues less abstract, a remarkable opposition still appears in case the poetry cannot hold out; there is a dissatisfaction that comes out of people, a sort of destructive energy in the poetry itself (when it’s not poetically concrete enough). Friends who stop greeting each other have not become strangers as they were before, but enemies, and decayed love is poisonous beyond measure. Couples who want

The Rococo of Fate



to divorce carry even more hatred before the judge than he needs, or take appalling pleasure in making public what previously could not have been more intimate and private. Which is why a writer of antiquity offers the noteworthy maxim, as thoughtful as it is courageous, truly kind: “Treat your friends as though they could become your enemies again.” A very Attic way to keep them from ever becoming enemies.

The Rococo of Fate It cannot go on like this, we often hear. Usually some wild stuff is meant; something is askew, and makes the bourgeois uncomfortable. Then he puts his hands to his head, sometimes in defense. Too much of a good thing is unhealthy; the mean will prevail again. In higher cases, however, this “too much” frightens us differently, more subtly. That is the testimony from a story of a double reversal, nicely compact. It is probably Arabic and can be found in the little book On Chance, yet there is more in it, the crest that breaks.8 A vizier was walking through his garden in the cool of the evening, toward a new fountain. Bent over the water toward his reflection; considered the day, the years, the caliph’s generosity, his fabulous good fortune. A ring slipped from his finger and fell. It was his favorite ring, and just at the moment of impact he was gripped by an insane desire: if only the ring would not fall into the water! It did not fall; a thin layer of oil must have formed over the water, the ring remained suspended. As the wish had before, a strange fear now gripped him, for this could not last; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of fortune, that the wave would have to break. It had probably already broken, for as the vizier returned to the palace he was seized by the caliph’s watch and thrown into prison. His slanderers had won out. In the dungeon he remained many years as a forgotten prisoner of the state, come to terms with his fate. Of his wishes there remained only one, almost laughably small: before his death he would like to eat pomegranate seeds one more time. The sympathetic warden brought him some, but at just that moment a rat rushed in from the passage, overturned the bowl, and ate up all the seeds. Again a strange joy went through the old man: things could not go on like this; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of misfortune, that the wave would have to

The Rococo of Fate

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to divorce carry even more hatred before the judge than he needs, or take appalling pleasure in making public what previously could not have been more intimate and private. Which is why a writer of antiquity offers the noteworthy maxim, as thoughtful as it is courageous, truly kind: “Treat your friends as though they could become your enemies again.” A very Attic way to keep them from ever becoming enemies.

The Rococo of Fate It cannot go on like this, we often hear. Usually some wild stuff is meant; something is askew, and makes the bourgeois uncomfortable. Then he puts his hands to his head, sometimes in defense. Too much of a good thing is unhealthy; the mean will prevail again. In higher cases, however, this “too much” frightens us differently, more subtly. That is the testimony from a story of a double reversal, nicely compact. It is probably Arabic and can be found in the little book On Chance, yet there is more in it, the crest that breaks.8 A vizier was walking through his garden in the cool of the evening, toward a new fountain. Bent over the water toward his reflection; considered the day, the years, the caliph’s generosity, his fabulous good fortune. A ring slipped from his finger and fell. It was his favorite ring, and just at the moment of impact he was gripped by an insane desire: if only the ring would not fall into the water! It did not fall; a thin layer of oil must have formed over the water, the ring remained suspended. As the wish had before, a strange fear now gripped him, for this could not last; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of fortune, that the wave would have to break. It had probably already broken, for as the vizier returned to the palace he was seized by the caliph’s watch and thrown into prison. His slanderers had won out. In the dungeon he remained many years as a forgotten prisoner of the state, come to terms with his fate. Of his wishes there remained only one, almost laughably small: before his death he would like to eat pomegranate seeds one more time. The sympathetic warden brought him some, but at just that moment a rat rushed in from the passage, overturned the bowl, and ate up all the seeds. Again a strange joy went through the old man: things could not go on like this; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of misfortune, that the wave would have to

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The Rococo of Fate

break. Had broken, in fact, for on that evening the caliph came to his cell: his slanderers had been toppled; he restored the vizier to his offices. A nice story, even if somewhat too clearly dressed. Closely reminiscent of the ring of Polykrates, yet the central motif is entirely different.9 The lord of Samos throws his ring into the sea in order to assuage the jealous gods; the gods return his sacrifice to him inside a fish. They consider it indecent (in the subtle remark of Wilhelm Scholz) to accept gifts from a man they have already resolved to destroy. What is frightening here, then, is not at all the immoderate good fortune by which the king cannot lose his ring even as it falls into the sea; he does not lose it, after all, but offers it up. And Polykrates’ guest senses the motives for the gentlemanly return: the undiminished envy of the gods. He turns away in horror, rightly. Quite different, however, the present material: the supernatural is absent, and accident as well plays no role, or at most in the unusual form today designated by the phrase “of all things” (ausgerechnet)—brash enough when applied to some absurd absence or incident. A rat from the passage, of all things, eats the pomegranate kernels in the cell when they finally appear; that is certainly quite accidental, or more precisely quite unpredictable or irrational, even in a less constructed situation. Yet conceding even this absurdity, nothing irrational is intended in the Arabic story; instead everything is a sign. Indeed, a sign occurring in the smallest things, only there. The premises are first, a measure, a closed series of fortunes or misfortunes. So in fact a certain sense of equilibrium that lets the bourgeois (in the vizier himself ) shake his head at excesses, that forbids trees to grow up to the sky. Trees have already grown taller and excess has already been attained earlier when they had to begin growing quite far below—in other words when viziers become uneasy because they have already come too far from their origins. Napoleon actually thought of fortune as a personal quality, like the shape of a nose; the world had a duty to bestow good fortune on him, always more, never enough. Yet in the less aristocratic view of his mother, his luck “cannot last,” precisely because it has risen too high, too “unnaturally.” Where a measure is there, however, and the measure is reached, even the smallest thing suffices to bring it to overflowing. That is the mechanical function, as it were, of the small in terms of measure; it presumes, perhaps too strongly, a vessel, a bourgeois apportioning (which is not always there for viziers, and never for those born to it). It transforms even the subtle, the small, from a sign into a cause of the end. More important,

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therefore, is the second, the more qualitative kind of smallness, namely this: that it stands at the end of the course, of a track, no matter if natural or immoderate. Then, even where no ration has been exceeded, but only a formal limit, the rococo is easily seen as the sign of running out, of coming to an end. Constructed people and cultures often have this rococo at the end of their respective sequence of fortunes, misfortunes, fate. Even for the manic or depressive aspect of fate, there are then variations, Belgian lace and Alhambras, arabesques with rings here, rats there, where the wave breaks. The demonic effortlessness of success is often related: not effortlessness ante rem, which pertains to its preparation, its façade, its beautiful appearance, but rather effortlessness post rem, likewise appearance, entirely improbable success. Indeed, a kind of incest of fortune, of misfortune, finally appears here, to which the births become ever easier, more elegant, frailer, smaller. The story of the vizier illuminates so many a miniature of the end, shows them as the crests and arabesques of a closed spiral, which also signify the close. What is small here is not also endearing. It is not the inconspicuous thing where the best can be hidden, the subtlest power of escape and the final door. It is especially not the proper fairy-tale world and proper sign, that truly final sign after which change no longer goes on. In the smallness of the crest there is merely a shift from one series into another, and so on. There is no sign of the true end in it, as in certain inconspicuous experiences where terror or joy are surpassed by sheer amazement. Signs of the true, emerging end might be the way this pipe lies here, the way the light shines on the street, or anything else; with this vertically deep impression, or rather sign, the seesaw stops, and the stupid conversion into other series. Smallness, then, announces no new series, but leads out of them, not far away, but somewhere almost unknown. Only in the end might there be certain connections between the suspended ring, the suddenly rustling rat, and the wonder at such things.10 The comedian Valentin once found his ring on the drum just as wanted to beat it; he had put it there himself earlier, and forgotten to put it on again—unimaginable, completely understandable the smile with which he discovered the ring lying there and observed this little surprise, this great liberation; he momentarily escaped the turmoil of musical compulsion. This tiny and almost mute thing became a rescue, at least the sign of a rescue from the “merciless pursuer,” from the compulsion to work, into which he had been harnessed.

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Spirit Still Taking Shape

These signs of the small will not be mistaken; they have some of the smallness of the true end that is dispersed into every true beginning, that gives it the direction and flavor of our direction. They can be found in most lives (if one wants to listen properly), give the sign for the exit from the series (a final sign, today still impotent), for the entry into a potential fatelessness, at least a workable fate. These amazing little signs now operate only individually—that is, within the course of a single life; earlier they operated collectively (as symbols of the Christ child, say, or of the spirit’s freedom from the stupid giant of necessity), and they will return. The rococo and the wonder at the inconspicuous share the smallness of the end in at least this way: breaking here, breaking through there.

Spirit Still Taking Shape A student who has mastered clauses knows Latin. —Karl Ludwig Roth11

Felt myself breathing softly, in and out, seethed quietly. Noticed as well that I could feel; cried, but heard nothing. Sometimes it’s still like that, so fleeting and warm, neither here nor there. When it got lighter there was crawling, or I crouched here and there. Before the cracks in the red sandstone and the scurrying ants; otherwise there was nothing. Somehow the cracks got smaller as soon as I grew; my hand covered too much of them. Other things rose up: bushes, the garden behind the house, quite overgrown; I dared to go anywhere, the wind in the leaves. When I closed my eyes, the little black pump could no longer see me. The bush behind it and a young dog I called Meinetwegen were my first friends.12 A stand for the washtub had that name too—no, it was that: “meint” was the long post, “wegen” the crossbeam. Totally clear: the stand was not only called that, but said so incessantly. The streets always looked different on the way there than they did leaving; that’s why they were alive. We ran as far as the bakery and the mean lady’s house, and the clock in the tower tolled. Later, fear of being alone, especially when it got dark. White faces appeared behind the doors that were never quite locked. They spied on me, and their bodies were in rags; behind them was a jingling. The path from

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Spirit Still Taking Shape

These signs of the small will not be mistaken; they have some of the smallness of the true end that is dispersed into every true beginning, that gives it the direction and flavor of our direction. They can be found in most lives (if one wants to listen properly), give the sign for the exit from the series (a final sign, today still impotent), for the entry into a potential fatelessness, at least a workable fate. These amazing little signs now operate only individually—that is, within the course of a single life; earlier they operated collectively (as symbols of the Christ child, say, or of the spirit’s freedom from the stupid giant of necessity), and they will return. The rococo and the wonder at the inconspicuous share the smallness of the end in at least this way: breaking here, breaking through there.

Spirit Still Taking Shape A student who has mastered clauses knows Latin. —Karl Ludwig Roth11

Felt myself breathing softly, in and out, seethed quietly. Noticed as well that I could feel; cried, but heard nothing. Sometimes it’s still like that, so fleeting and warm, neither here nor there. When it got lighter there was crawling, or I crouched here and there. Before the cracks in the red sandstone and the scurrying ants; otherwise there was nothing. Somehow the cracks got smaller as soon as I grew; my hand covered too much of them. Other things rose up: bushes, the garden behind the house, quite overgrown; I dared to go anywhere, the wind in the leaves. When I closed my eyes, the little black pump could no longer see me. The bush behind it and a young dog I called Meinetwegen were my first friends.12 A stand for the washtub had that name too—no, it was that: “meint” was the long post, “wegen” the crossbeam. Totally clear: the stand was not only called that, but said so incessantly. The streets always looked different on the way there than they did leaving; that’s why they were alive. We ran as far as the bakery and the mean lady’s house, and the clock in the tower tolled. Later, fear of being alone, especially when it got dark. White faces appeared behind the doors that were never quite locked. They spied on me, and their bodies were in rags; behind them was a jingling. The path from

Spirit Still Taking Shape

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the forecourt to the bedroom was loaded; that’s where they came from— the same forecourt reappeared in the dream. Almost every night the bed seemed to stand outside, the white, jingling ghost clowns around it. By day they hung at the bottom of the wall on a washed-out poster; the circus it announced was long gone. But at night they danced with the serving girl who was so dutiful by day; on stilts, in brownish gray rags, always the same steps, back and forth. Impossible to say a word about it; better to go in the kitchen and sharpen pencils against the mineral deposits. That helped. Bluish gray strokes; I took the pencils back to bed. On the streets we would take to school, there was light in the morning. We had little pieces of wood in our hands that we used to make noise and frighten ourselves. Boys soon began fighting; under the bush too, there’s no more room.

The Red Window What one hears about as a child is almost always taking place right nearby. The mean old lady appeared hundreds of times, in fairy tales too; she stirred her porridge and stole. Behind the top window of the tall house on the corner lived Little Muck: for hours we would sit and look up at the ugly brick.13 Sometimes we’d see a face at the window; on his feet were surely the huge slippers, surely the little staff in his hand. Once we asked the mailman about him, but he said nothing and shook his head. We expected that from adults, when asking about misshapen things; we knew more certainly that they existed. Brother Lustig roasted a calf in the city’s woods; left, right, left, right marches the soldier during math class; Fatme sounded more familiar than Anna.14 Almost like legends were the clickers or marbles we played with; one likes to have something colorful in one’s hand. They were Arabian stones, ringed with red or green, sometimes with stars, even with miniaturized lands; these we carried in our pockets. But it was at six in the evening, out on the field, I hear the bells ringing in the clock tower exactly. I was gathering pebbles from the Rhine; as I looked right at them in the dusk and the clock struck, little men were moving there, fleet as shadows. I ran home, expecting to find friends there—dark, colorful friends who’d come to take me away. No one was at home. I never saw the little men running in the pebbles again; the memory of them is acute and sober. I also had a snake, always in my pocket, next to the cage made from a hollowed cork, a grate of pins, flies behind the bars. Next to the maybugs,

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Spirit Still Taking Shape

whose heads we would eat “as salad”; they tasted nutty. But the snake was a little brass casting, a pen holder, with a rough back that went up and down like a cable car. I prayed to the snake long afterward in bad times at school and home. With sounds that were always the same, and almost empty, humming courage to themselves. It fits that boys see just as precisely as they read literally. Scratched and dulled, the marbles lay in the window, not marbles at all, but rather bringing that distant land closer, all the more because it lay beneath. In the apothecary’s store lay a plate with some dried thing labeled “China peel”; I thought the chunk was a shard of the Chinese wall. Grooved clay heads and clay piglets on which one can plant grass often stand in florist shops; these were idols, and the entire store an idol shop, the same one that Abraham’s father ran and that the young Abraham once destroyed; the theology teacher told us about it. Eight years, and the most remarkable thing was the sewing box in a shop window on the way to school; it stood between skeins and mats, embroidered by feminine hands, which could interest no one. But on the box was an illustration with many dots or flecks of color on the smooth paper, as though the paint had run. It showed a hut and much snow; the moon was high and yellow in the blue winter sky; in the windows of the hut burned a red light. Below the little image stood “Moon Landscape,” and at first I believed it was a landscape on the moon, a great piece of China peel, as it were; but I felt utter turmoil looking at it that I could hardly express, and never forgot the red window. Probably everyone feels that way at one time, some time, and then later about something else, whether it’s words or images that affect one. A person starts early with it; if he didn’t stop just as soon, the image would become more important than himself. This case is related only very indirectly to the I experience of those years; it came that same year on a bench in the woods, and I felt “myself ” as the one feeling, looking outward, of whom I would never get free, as terrible as he was wonderful, who sits forever in his own room with a globe. Whom one always has in store, even among friends, and who finally dies alone; but of course he has the red window, will always stand behind it. Everyone has a sign from those days that is nothing, neither domestic nor from nature, and not from the familiar self, but it will cover everything if one wants. Completely silly stuff that belongs nowhere but among the few things that would remain after one counted up everything else that there is. Here it was the window on the box; next to it, beneath, was yet a far

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more crooked rudder, among the images in the ads of that time; they were the first gallery. Away with high heels! announced such an ad; an oversize heel was printed there, and crossed out; it meant nothing to us, but it was somehow exciting. Or one of us would show off Dr. Retau’s Self-Preservation, lustfully, and right below, the illustration: Nena Sahib, a voluptuous woman with eyes black as ink; we thought the book was some sort of Indian pornography. The strangest was a nocturnal still life that would appear from time to time, an image of laundry all by itself, without any people, that was intended to praise a detergent (children are familiar with kitchen things anyway). Quietly the basin with the soaking laundry hung in the air, right behind it a black cellar window with a white grill, and at an angle across it hung a huge, slender, pale new moon. The moon peered into the window all night, saying, Soak with Mondo overnight, next day’s laundry duty light. In this image was music that slept as it woke, and always played the same. I often held the image up to the light, and feared having to go into the cellar that I had loved as a small child. Later there was something of the more cheerful window, the red window on the box, in the attic room of a much older seventh grader, with whom I put gunpowder instead of salt on my buttered bread; rather, the wonder of that red window took on some of the smell in this room where the older boy paced back and forth, studied, and smoked, manly and learned. But the room itself meant nothing; the intended essence could also live in the very different sentences that one read in Christmas books. Such as, “The icy cold North wind blew across the desolate prairie.”15 There was an uncanny warmth in this cold sentence; a self behind a window rode with the cowboy through the transfer image that separated wondrously. In “better” images or books there’s never that window. But of course, I forgot, the room at Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes lives, is sometimes behind it even today: when the rain beats against the windows, Holmes sits by the chimney with Dr. Watson, and the bell rings. With the window put on like a mask, one stepped out, finally outward, into the open.

The God of Life Morning soon ended there, or changed. Twelve years make a boy restless, masculine, and so even more serious. Lots of coarse boys in the class; school was also not to my taste. Friends: a brunette boy (we were disobedient,

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Spirit Still Taking Shape

walked in the country and smoked; loved each other, and respected each other, which one has more need of at that age), a blond boy with poor color (he’d been stuffed into Bleyle’s suits for boys, but he carried them with bearing, and in his green eyes lay power; he pressed plants, and lent us books in which the sea breezes whistled). We also held stamps, a magnet, and a spyglass. The magnet pulled, and the glass was a strong man who would transport us to the farthest objects; we wanted to get away. Back then I would also ask: Why do things weigh differently?—and wrote it down. I stuck with the balloons from the fair, which of course are not heavy at all. On the contrary, they rise into the air, and in fact if one lets them go they rise until the air around them is as light as the gas in them. They strive all the more, the further from this point they begin. Cotton and stone, on the other hand, have their consistent densities where they would be at home, not above but below ground. Which is not even what matters, for only separation from the same causes the attraction, makes something nostalgically heavy, as it were. And differently heavy depending on how far things have to go to find the same density; that is where they strive to be, all the more, the greater the separation. In short, I myself didn’t like staying home; the room that was “like” me was outside. Fifteen years: one got even further beyond life, namely, educated. School of course remained appalling, consuming nine, even ten years of one’s youth; one did not always attain the class’s standard. Such petit bourgeois, such fools, hoplites, lesson plans over me; I was their dog, and rebellious. One, maybe two teachers were fresher, but they could do nothing against the fustiness of the institution and knew nothing of our young, callow, important attempts to find ourselves. The way to what was “like” us got ever colder. We read Social Democratic brochures; quite remarkable images made it clear that the society we lived in was a deception, and the world a machine. Only the girls with whom we rode the roller-coaster would dress themselves up: but a few steps from the gleaming metal bars, the droning calliope, stood the gasoline engine that drove it all. Here were quantities, and precise vectors; the true relationship of dream and reality, the former nostalgic motif of gravity now also began to fade. Or in stereoscopes, which still existed then, one needed only look under the curtains hanging before one’s feet: behind was an empty space with a stool in the middle, on it stood a laughably small yet very precise apparatus that threw the shining images of Hammerfest or the Holy Sepulcher. Machinery and matter were thus the crux of the problem, albeit a very masculine and mature one; babies

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come from women, life comes from carbon, carbon consists of atoms. As I was being confirmed, and was supposed to say the creed at the altar, I inserted threefold I am an atheist!—pronouncing the ei as a diphthong, for we had only read and never heard the word, in little freethinker’s tracts titled Strolls with an Atheist and the like. A text appeared, “The Universe in the Light of Atheism”: “No incorporeal being had a hand in it,” “Matter is the mother of all existence,” our sexual education was complete, the secret of the world was out.16 What one called God was nothing but the infinite sum of matter, energy, and (unconscious) reason; all consciousness is mere combustion, like lights in the night, behind which the dark dynamo stood. Indeed, consciousness itself seemed dearly purchased; on one’s youthful bosom, or rather deep within it, one could feel a peculiar weight, the slight but persistent weight of life, speaking figuratively, yet not only figuratively. For it was physically quite exactly focused and palpable; this slight pain—so it seemed—was the seat of consciousness, or the source. It also heals, but likewise outwardly, in outward unconsciousness, above all in natural beauty, especially inorganic beauty, in the beauty of rivers, mountains, and cliffs. The natural sciences heal even more exactly; their methods are already unfeeling, and their object is nothing but dead matter and energy. A strange channel for the obscure erotic desires (probably) of those days, certainly also for death wishes, which in puberty are not only physiological but as it were physical—above all this impatience is a desire to go cold. Perhaps these connections don’t accord with that time (such things are hard to remember exactly; there’s been too much maturation); yet my notebooks are still there, and they have an erotic-antierotic tone that very much suits a boy. The tracts of my materialist period (the nineties) also diverted the night of love into the night of matter, where the “transformation of our bodies” is at any rate certain.17 But now came the age of sixteen; I became much younger, and dreams meant precisely—everything. I had long ago flunked and was in another class; school remained just as stupid, but my classmates were better; it was truly a community. Among us in the new class were grown lads and honest comrades who took something wild and first-born into the quiet streets, especially at night; the last in school were the first by nature. On the ships that came down from Holland, we listened to the sailors tell of snakes they’d eaten; one of us nearly got a tattoo. They probably often lied, and we too needed something to go with the Dutch tobacco, with beer and pretzels; we

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Spirit Still Taking Shape

masqueraded in the forbidden taverns as beggars and captains, told of termites in the wooden leg, of our horse in the attic, of the carriage behind the Protestant church, above all of the sulfur tanker in the winter harbor, where Raggedy-Ass served: trite stuff, but well shaken.18 Lonely and solemn strolls too, “Off in the distance a train whistle blows,/The workers are sounding their horns”; sometimes we thought we were by the Thames, where Captain Marryat’s police boats raced, or by the Susquehanna.19 Particularly under a high cloud cover, toward evening, in the autumn, the barren and smoky plain had everything. And then the fair, twice a year (oh, what we made of it!); it vitalistically overcame our precocious materialism, lived or received. A clear feeling for girls displaced our solemnity, and the booths taught us so much, above all that everything is like this, with a curtain over the entrance and mysterious inside. From there we boys drew the energy for which the time had finally come: namely, the fervent dream-kitsch of the nineteenth century, seen naïvely. One drove to the fairground on a beautiful day; men bedecked with musical clocks or playing hurdy-gurdies stood along the way. If one came nearer to the exhibits, the wooden horses would do their round, the mirrors would revolve splendidly, the silver and gold tassels would sparkle. Dented tin men cranked their hand mills in the shooting galleries; the round lenses of the panoramas glinted like portholes, like the wreck of the Grosvenor, and less warmly; the waxworks stood motionless in the clamor.20 On the whole fairgrounds there was a music of commotion. Vertically stood the terrible or lascivious images: the execution of Schill’s officers, or “The Victor’s Spoils”; Madame sits like a Rumanian at her till with kerosene lamp, tarot cards, and money; behind the shabby tapestry are the clown ghosts of childhood, but without fear.21 A gong sounds, and Doktor Faustus appears in the booth; there was hypnosis too—these are the mysteries of the South Pacific. There lay the world, or the symbol of the world, from all the books from before and from now, which one read again and again because one would forget them like dreams. The light in the booths burned, and behind the trees it glowed; the Gypsy woman had stolen the king’s baby; Rumpelstiltskin dwells where the wolves and the foxes say goodnight; the magic horse flies, the magnetic mountain looms, Zaleukos, is this how you welcome your guest?22 Lazily the sails flapped against the mast of the brig; meanwhile Kilian sat in his hut, midnight was long past, and before morning breaks the Yumas must be surrounded; Sam Hawkens, Old Wabble, Old Death, Old Surehand, Old Firehand were roaming the

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wide prairie. Nscho-Tschi shone like the sun; Winnetou embraced Old Shatterhand, and now he was finally recognized again; the blizzard raged, the hurricane, the monsoon, the typhoon; with a rumble like an overblown tuba it began, and now the great caravan swung around, away from Fourche la fave, from Little Rock, from deserted Llano estacado and the Rocky Mountains, deep into hot, teeming Asia; the way from Baghdad up to Istanbul, Halef riding faithfully at one’s side; the banished Krumir himself our guide across Schott Dscherid, the terrible salt sea. Light and dark, Omar and Abrahim-Mamur, Schimin the Smith, Busra the beggar, old Mübarak, the Death of Schut and The Empire of the Silver Lion all met powerfully.23 As that all frothed together, it nurtured and resounded in a boy’s soul, combined all its desires; ever more strongly did girls, lively banquets, the Thousand and One Nights shine in. Across the valleys, plains, gorges, mountains, dangerous cities, there soon glowed the Northern lights of our first metaphysical notions. In short, there was almost no everyday in those times beyond school; everything was amplified, or became completely still in first love, by the fountains of the rococo gardens, in the intoxication of the first speculative books. We felt ourselves drawn, to the point of pain, into the beauty of trees, clouds, the night sky, with a sorrow of muteness before it all that drove us almost to hallucinations. We lads on the shore truly sensed nymphs, tree gods, on extraordinary evenings when the swells on the Rhine stood like glass. The red and green lights at port and starboard on the ships, as they drew red and green through the waters, and nothing else existed. Fabulously near, as though burned in, Orion stood in the winter sky; one never tired of seeing this fiery declaration, the three stars slanting up, the scabbard hanging beneath. The “same” had become magical; a long gaze would transport us into that constellation. Here an utterly enchanted essence moved about that was much too hot to hold. The pubescent feeling for love and for nature often speaks poems, sometimes concepts; we had no poet among us, and the god of life would not become conceptual. “In systems,” says my entry, thoughts are like tin soldiers; one can set them up as one likes, but they will never win an empire. Our philosophy has always been suspended from grammatical hooks or from the systematics of exhausted old men; science takes the root of life, art raises it to a power, and philosophy? Our blood must become as the river, our flesh as the earth, our bones like the mountains, our brain like the clouds, our eye like the sun.24

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Spirit Still Taking Shape

The world was even more pervaded with All-Life in a second manuscript, which we debated, and which I wrote down: The essence of energy cannot be calculated, but only experienced in the flesh. Blood and individuality are the two essences of life; the first creates reality, the second shapes its values. This philosophy provides an approach to the Renaissance, and to the unknown territory beyond the Renaissance: toward German and Greek antiquity as Weltanschauung. Our philosophy of energy not only resolves every substance and every element into energy, like science, not only interprets the Ding an sich as an energetic general will that has as it were missed its calling, aimlessly flows back into itself and its cycle: rather, the essence of the world is the urge and the power to shape, toward the unlocked secret of life at every point; the Ding an sich is objective fantasy.25

Seventeen years: boys of that age hate the Bible, or, when mere mechanics becomes untenable, take from the Scriptures anything but the Ten Commandments, let alone their opposition to “life.” A sort of Bedouin attitude was affected, was allied to the Teutonic without any perceived leap, meant the universally buried “religion of nature” that was to be revived— the thunder deity Jehovah swung Thor’s hammer. Or a precise permissiveness was meant, with a magic carpet at the entrance and the cosmic maiden of objective fantasy within, with a secret that could not be solved but only named, for it was essence. But later, of course, the red window returned, from the moon landscape on the sewing box in the display window; it came almost as a lunar landscape by day. The In-Itself that still lies within it, or humanity as it still is and ferments, set itself against the course of the world, which is not yet so Bacchantic, or not only. The gaze into the red window, the entire human and musical ensemble set with it, drove out the illusory All-Life of before. Something human, or the dream of a human cause that has not yet come, entered the world, where the dream exists as tendency and only sometimes already as testimony. The secret window might thus make one hostile to the world (precisely because it affirms “life,” this life); it is the collector lens for the utopian material of which the earth consists. Private collection was never intended, and will not be continued.

The Motif of Parting

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The Motif of Parting In parting, the Now that was stays with us, but differently, above all when it has not been lived out to its end; that is, it haunts us. About this halfness, this meeting in first bloom, there is a story that not coincidentally dates from the late Biedermeier period, by the provincial writer Friedrich Gerstäcker.26 A tender, emotional story in the nineteenth century’s dim mustiness, with all the Romantic colportage that the motif of parting demands. Its vagueness attains its truest color in partial sincerity; parting itself is sentimental. But sentimental with depth; it is an indistinguishable tremolo between illusion and depth. We will retell how the young artist again and again listens for the bell that is already long gone, gazes at the broad horizon where everything had been; this love, this girl, a happiness that never even came to be, but already went under in its first demure bloom. I know no more beautiful story of parting, its particular wistfulness, its likely decline, or again the dreamy mellowness of its images, than this one. How cheerfully the young lad strode forth! Wide open lay the clear, autumn landscape. Here and there on the horizon appeared a steeple. The stranger was just coming around a bend in the road toward a birch; under it sat a farm girl gathering fall flowers. As she heard the steps, she sprang toward the lad with a cry of joy, blushed, hung her head, and said, “He’s not coming.” The lad smiled at her, yet before he could ask, she repeated in the same fearful voice, “Heinrich isn’t coming.” With these words, she walked back down the narrow path leading from the birch, the stranger at her side, ever more aware of the young girl’s truly wondrous beauty. “Is Heinrich your sweetheart, and is he keeping you waiting?” The girl sighed, and replied with a forlorn expression, “Perhaps he could not come; perhaps he’s sick, or even dead. I am so unfortunate, sir! You’ve come through Bischofsroda, haven’t you? Did you hear nothing about him? Heinrich Vollguth is his name, and he’s the sheriff ’s son. The day is short, and now I’ll never see Heinrich, not until our day comes again.” The lad didn’t know what to make of the question. “Certainly I was in Bischofsroda, but the sheriff ’s name isn’t Vollguth at all; of course I didn’t meet everyone. I am an artist, and never stay long in one place; I must take advantage of the lovely autumn days.”

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The Motif of Parting

From the village they were approaching one could now clearly hear the bell. But it tolled so harsh and tinny, as though it were cracked, and as the young man looked across the fields there seemed to be a thin fog over it, despite the morning. “Yes, our bell sounds bad,” said the girl indifferently. “We should have had it recast long ago, but there’s never time, and there are no bell-founders hereabouts. But if you’re a painter, I should bring you to my father, the village sheriff. My name is Gertrud, and I’m from Germelshausen. Perhaps you could touch up the paintings in the church; they look quite sorry.” They went across moors that seemed to stretch quite far in these parts; finally some alder hedges came into view before a partly collapsed ring-wall; behind, the small church, and at some distance the village with its sootblackened houses. Gertrud had become ever more taciturn and was now entirely mute as they walked up the village street toward her father’s house. Amazed, the painter saw the farmers as they walked by in their archaic dress, all just as still and impassive, without any greeting. And how decayed the old houses looked! Their windows were often covered only with oiled paper; the gables and broad-beamed thatch roofs were all shrouded in that thin moor haze that never lifted, even as he came closer, and the sun shone through only with a very peculiar grayish yellow. “It is midday,” said Gertrud, “and folks aren’t much for talking then; tonight you’ll find them all the merrier. Over there is my father’s house, and you need not fear that he’ll be unfriendly, even if we don’t waste many words.” They knocked, and the sheriff was already at the door, greeted the painter without any superfluity, led the two inside, and bade them take a place at the lavish Sunday table. Of course even the sheriff ’s house seemed derelict: the air in the rooms was cold and stale, the whitewash was flaking away, and often just swept hastily aside. Yet the neatly set table in the middle stood invitingly, the supper companions smiled warmly, the hearty meal tasted delightful, and at the end the sheriff brought out a wonderful, rough cider. Then the farmer’s wife, in a quiet voice, sang a song about the cheerful life in Germelshausen, and the sheriff brought out a flute; he played so joyously for the dance that the painter took the blushing Gertrud and whirled about the room with her, carried away by the girl’s loveliness and the rising surge of happiness. Gertrud looked at him and smiled for the first time; but the old man broke off in the middle of playing and pointed out the window, so low that the people outside almost

The Motif of Parting

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leaned into it. A small cortège went by: men carrying the coffin, and behind them, holding candles, a woman with a little girl. It was all very strange to see: the dark coats, the candles, the grayish yellow sunlight and the silent, forlorn procession. Already before, before they entered the village, the painter had sketched the low steeple; now he added the procession down the deserted street to his portfolio. Gertrud watched the image take shape, with a wholly enigmatic expression; at that moment the painter grabbed a new sheet and wanted to begin, when Gertrud interrupted him and held his arm. “If you want to draw me, then, I beg you, draw me into the first picture. There is still room enough; I don’t like standing alone, but in such serious company no one could think ill of me.” He granted her this strange favor, and soon the image of Gertrud appeared among the procession like the Virgin in anguished glory over the dark earth. Because the painter now wanted to see more of the old village, he rose and bade Gertrud accompany him. The sun already stood low, and they did not want to tarry long, for toward evening, the sheriff had said, they would see music and gay clothing enough at the dance in the inn. The couple strode along the broad village street; already it was not so quiet as it had been at midday. Children played in front of their houses, the old folks watched, and everything would even have had a quite pleasant appearance if the haze had not grown even thicker, now already mixing with the evening fog. Gertrud and the painter slowly ascended the rise on which the church stood, almost outside the village, surrounded by God’s acre, and again the painter noticed the very antiquated style of the church, shot through with dangerous cracks; the gravestones roundabout were entirely weathered and mossy. Only a single fresh grave lay at the edge, where today’s procession must have ended, but otherwise the churchyard seemed long abandoned, lay there in such silence and contented seclusion as the painter had never felt before. He walked about, seeking in vain to decipher the inscriptions and dates on the gravestones, Gertrud next to him in the gathering darkness, wordless and quietly crying, immersed in a silent prayer. Quite nearby the cracked bell now tolled in the steeple; he had not heard it since the morning. Gertrud started. “Now we may no longer mourn; you hear, the bell is ringing out. We want to go to the dance; this is how our every day ends. Promise me you’ll stay at my side that long. How I thank our Savior that you have

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The Motif of Parting

come, and that I may go with you; perhaps God has not yet forgotten me entirely.” Forcefully she took his outstretched hand and descended the rise with her friend, down into the utterly transformed village. On the streets was laughter, about the inn swayed torches and an eager crowd. Quickly the girls greeted Gertrud and embraced her, and lads strode forward and found their sweethearts; already the music was stamping and piping within. He entered with Gertrud; the ardent friend held her in his arms; the couples whirled in the piping sound of the old dance. One thing only struck the painter beyond measure: namely, every time the clock from the church on high struck the hour, the celebration would stop momentarily, the music would die out, and the dancers would stand immobile. Gertrud herself, whom he wanted to question, seemed also to be counting the strokes. The stroke of eleven was past; more frantic than before, the music burst out again, transporting the painter, beside himself with happiness, and the elated girl. Now the trumpets blew a fanfare for the last dance before midnight. Gertrud tore herself away, gave her friend a long, pained look, and led him, astonished, out of the roaring hall, down the path they had walked at midday, up to the church and even further, up to the outer ring-wall, into the open field bathed in moonlight. “Promise me,” cried Gertrud, “please promise me you’ll stay here just a short while, till midnight. Promise me for love of our Savior that you won’t take a step, neither to the right nor to the left, until the bell has died out.” The lad drew his bride to him and kissed her; Gertrud kissed him back wildly, then tore herself from his arms. “Farewell; I’ll wait for you before the door of the dance hall. After midnight! Think of that, and forget me not!” Again she stood quietly, embraced her friend, and her soft tread vanished in the dark. Dismayed, the youth stayed put, her strange words echoing; he thought he was obeying a love game. And now he saw how the night had changed. A sudden wind gusted across the field; the dim moon disappeared behind a pale, whirling mist. Only the windows of the dance hall shone warmly, and the wind from that direction carried the piping and trilling with it, the wedding music where Gertrud waited after midnight (“Forget me not!”). Now, finally, the old bell in the church steeple struck, in the middle of a gust so strong that the lad had to throw himself to the ground so as not to be flung against the wall. The storm howled by. The time had to be

The Motif of Parting

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past, because the bell had long died out; the painter stood up and looked for the way back down to the village. But he strayed into moors in every direction. Dense clumps of alder rose everywhere where he expected the path; nowhere could he yet detect a light from the village. He worked his way back into the thickets. At once bog water rose in his tracks; he turned back, sought the path elsewhere, ended up again and again in the deep, uncanny hollow. Finally he feared losing his way completely, and stayed on a rise in order to wait there until the clock struck one, and the stroke could lead him. But he must have missed the stroke, or the wind that still blew carried it to the side. Hopeless and exhausted, he finally decided to await the day. He listened again and again for the old, harsh stroke; the hollow remained still. Only toward morning did the lad arise from an uneasy, tormented sleep; right before him barked a dog, and an old hunter stepped forward from the brush. “How good it is,” called the painter, his words tumbling out with relief, “how good it is to see you! I’ve gone astray, and looked in vain all night. Won’t you tell me where I can find the way to Germelshausen?” The old man quickly stepped back, crossed himself. “God help us! Where are you from?” He looked at the painter, shaking his head. “Of course I know the way well enough. Yet how many fathoms beneath the earth the accursed village lies, that’s for God alone to know; doesn’t concern the likes of us, either.” The painter thought the old man must be drunk in spite of the early morning hour, and nodded agreeably. Pulled his sketches from his folder and showed him the steeple; the old man didn’t know it, claimed never to have seen it, but grew ever more jovial as he saw that the young man was neither a vagabond nor a ghost. “You must have heard something there, sir, and dreamed it. It can be frightening to lose one’s way in the hollow at night. But do me this favor, and never again speak that accursed name, especially on the spot where we stand. Let the dead rest, especially those who have no rest; they appear now here, now there, as they please. “In any case, sir,” continued the hunter, and struck a spark for his pipe, “those are the old stories hereabouts. Look! Right there in the marsh is where the village you name is supposed to have lain; then it disappeared in the night; no one knows how or why. Only the legend lives on that every hundred years, on the day when it sank, it is lifted up into daylight again; no one should be so unfortunate as to happen upon it.

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Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

“But you’re amusing yourself with the likes of us, sir! Go over to Dillstedt, straight down the road, into a warm bed. If you like I’ll go with you; it’s not so far out of my way.” The youth clutched at the air about him; the hunter tried to hold him; he shoved him and fainted dead away. When he reopened his eyes, he found himself alone; the hunter must again have been made uneasy by the feverish stranger. Slowly the painter gathered his pages, which still lay strewn on the ground. He saw the steeple, the procession with the outmoded clothing; saw Gertrud sketched onto the same page. He rose and went his way, toward the main road, and soon reached the crossing under the white birch where she had sat only yesterday, weaving garlands. Only there did he stop and look back one last time. “Farewell, Gertrud!” he said quietly, as great, glistening tears came to his eyes.

Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved Whether somehow or somewhere there are still hauntings, we may leave aside. Wherever such things are reported, however, it’s striking how inane the uncanny is. How with even the most elaborate shock there’s usually only something boring behind it—in the event that it’s not improved in the telling. Even so-called second sight, when it relates to something that does happen, is seldom such that it couldn’t be had more easily as a very ordinary prediction. And even the unexpected in it is mostly banal, or it doesn’t concern us. Unless, of course, a poet works on it, some Poe, some Hoffmann refabulates, transfabulates it. The ghost story with literary velvet collar has become more hallucinatory than the usual factually reported haunting. Of which the following, from the unpublished memoirs of the Viennese performer Girardi, offers a quite charming example, subsequently meaningful.27 The case itself begins in a quite everyday way, or perhaps everynight. Girardi left some friends in a Viennese outer borough, late, but sober. Outside, in a calm mood, he considered, since the tram was no longer running, whether he should take an expensive taxi or a healthy walk back to Hietzing. He decided on the latter, ending up in a quaint, narrow, Old Viennese alley that he’d never seen before. It was well illuminated from the windows, and out of many hung inviting young women clicking their tongues at him. Particularly arousing was

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Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

“But you’re amusing yourself with the likes of us, sir! Go over to Dillstedt, straight down the road, into a warm bed. If you like I’ll go with you; it’s not so far out of my way.” The youth clutched at the air about him; the hunter tried to hold him; he shoved him and fainted dead away. When he reopened his eyes, he found himself alone; the hunter must again have been made uneasy by the feverish stranger. Slowly the painter gathered his pages, which still lay strewn on the ground. He saw the steeple, the procession with the outmoded clothing; saw Gertrud sketched onto the same page. He rose and went his way, toward the main road, and soon reached the crossing under the white birch where she had sat only yesterday, weaving garlands. Only there did he stop and look back one last time. “Farewell, Gertrud!” he said quietly, as great, glistening tears came to his eyes.

Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved Whether somehow or somewhere there are still hauntings, we may leave aside. Wherever such things are reported, however, it’s striking how inane the uncanny is. How with even the most elaborate shock there’s usually only something boring behind it—in the event that it’s not improved in the telling. Even so-called second sight, when it relates to something that does happen, is seldom such that it couldn’t be had more easily as a very ordinary prediction. And even the unexpected in it is mostly banal, or it doesn’t concern us. Unless, of course, a poet works on it, some Poe, some Hoffmann refabulates, transfabulates it. The ghost story with literary velvet collar has become more hallucinatory than the usual factually reported haunting. Of which the following, from the unpublished memoirs of the Viennese performer Girardi, offers a quite charming example, subsequently meaningful.27 The case itself begins in a quite everyday way, or perhaps everynight. Girardi left some friends in a Viennese outer borough, late, but sober. Outside, in a calm mood, he considered, since the tram was no longer running, whether he should take an expensive taxi or a healthy walk back to Hietzing. He decided on the latter, ending up in a quaint, narrow, Old Viennese alley that he’d never seen before. It was well illuminated from the windows, and out of many hung inviting young women clicking their tongues at him. Particularly arousing was

Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved

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the one in a very narrow house, only two windows, one above the other, a pale old Austrian yellow around the white window frames; the girl herself delightful to see. Thanks very much, said the gracious man, some other time; I’m too tired right now, but tomorrow night, perhaps; I’ll remember the address. He’d already gone further when she called after him, Hey, don’t be stupid! Come on, I’ll do it Mexican for you! But the man walked on into the night, through ever more familiar areas, Rotenturmstraße, Kärntnerstraße, Ring, home by the Mariahilferstraße. He stopped suddenly: What did the girl mean by Mexican? For a long time he stood still as a ship blown by opposing winds; tore himself away, turned around, Ring, Kärnterstraße, Rotenturmstraße and so on, until he finally found the little old alley again, but nowhere was the once-so-striking little house with the girl in its lone window. Back and forth down the alley, asking the whores hanging out of every other window about the vanished house. You idiot, you wanna house or a whore? cried the tongue-clicking women, and still hurled insults after him as he finally withdrew. Not only shaking his head, very disappointed: both spirited away, the house and the young whore. The case itself was really quite silly, and his hard luck would barely have sufficed for an anecdote at his usual café table the next afternoon or evening, an all too meager shock, with very little that was not quite canny, entirely without salt. Until suddenly, already in the middle of Mariahilferstraße, the illumination, the key came to him, the true and only now complete ghost story, as it were. Thus (we quote verbatim the explanation, the now truly fabulous elaboration by the actor Girardi): There is an angel who can no longer stand to see how we botch everything. Has permission to come to earth every hundred years in the shape of a whore, to the Viennese alley, to the pretty, otherwise nonexistent, little house. May only, however, pick up a single man as he passes by, in order to reveal to him the way to this entirely different happiness. And her coded message is: Hey, I’ll do it Mexican for you! If no one accepts the call that will be granted only once, then the angel must disappear again for a hundred years. But no one has understand the call yet—not I, the last to hear it, and perhaps the last ever. For if no one goes with her, the angel will say: People just don’t deserve any better—and never come again.

Thus ended his interior monologue; with a curious regret, the sympathetic Girardi returned to Hietzing, to his unbewitched house. Yet Nestroy would have taken pleasure in this little invented postmagic, even if, indeed precisely because, it didn’t happen on the stage.

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Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile

Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile The farmer won’t eat what he doesn’t know. Yet there is also a song: happiness is always elsewhere. An old Persian story, and heretically early Christian as well, has something deeper to say about it. We see a young girl there, or rather we do not, for she is confined to the house. Her natural father keeps her there; from her chamber she can barely peer onto the street through the cracks in the shutters. One night the girl hears, just below her window, a stroke on the oud, and singing, so strange and yet primordially familiar, like nothing she has ever heard. The virgin, like Iphigenia, still searching with her soul for more than the land of the Greeks, forgot her fear of her father and opened the door outside to the strange youth with the oud, the song. But at that moment her father sprang after her, now no longer just smelling a rat, striking the youth down with one blow of the axe, seizing his natural daughter, who was nonetheless not his, as she fell on the dying youth with one utterly foreign word from his song. His last words were: I wanted to lead you home, where you have never been. I will never forget you, and I will return for you; take this ring as a sign of our troth. Whereupon the murdered youth vanished. The ring, however—so ends the legend, just as abruptly—is the New Testament. Something once completely foreign, in other words, is thus interpreted as what is nearest. Also, of course, as what was always meant, revealing itself to the presentiment without which it could never be recognized as primordially familiar. Of course the blue flower of “The Stranger’s Story” already applies here, especially as Heinrich von Ofterdingen had never seen it, but only “longed to see it.”28 What is much more apt here is the always-moving, indeed almost enigmatically shocking quality of the (in any case rare) recognition scene, plain in Joseph and his brothers, explosive in Electra’s outcry before Orestes, the still seethingly unrecognized, finally revealed brother, avenger. In contrast to the Persian legend, of course, there is in the Biblical recognition scene (albeit not so much in the Greek) basically more remembrance than presentiment. The leap to what never was is important, above all to what had been entirely foreign, what was Marcionitically the most familiar thing to this soul-maiden.29 Hail to those who will not let this appetite be diverted by the available or illusory nourishment.

Pippa Passes

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Pippa Passes It’s terrible to be misled too little, and yet just enough. Not much more than a twinkling arises, short and sharp, that wounds. It excites and may well sow something, but only beginnings—nothing that blooms or could ever come to bloom. We should be clearer, and recount some stories. From our own experience, or stories we heard so intensely, they might be our own. A friend told a story like this, perhaps a quite silly one, a true tram conductor’s story as they’re called in Munich, like the ones a boring tram passenger tells about radishes that were too mealy and such, stories that interest no one but the teller. And because they interest him so much, he can only tell them badly; his own interest is exactly what he can’t convey, share. Most dreams belong here, and everything too personal; those are strange stories, to which one listens strangely. Enough, already. Our friend sat in the tram car, in Autobus AE bis in Paris, which goes from the Opéra to Montsouris Park, and across from him a girl, whom he barely looked at, about whom he noticed only her peculiar large pale blue eyes, noticed them dimly while talking to his companions. Had to notice, actually, for those eyes watched him steadfastly, not enticingly; rather, they were round and lonely, truly like stars. This man cannot tolerate when a woman to whom he is indifferent begins to love him; he doesn’t know how to say no to women, and so he prefers to avoid it. Now chance came to his aid: the man dropped his ticket. He picked it up from the floor, thereby lightly brushing the girl’s knee—truly so lightly and awkwardly, so inadvertently in that narrow space, that we need not expand on the reasons psychoanalytically. Immediately the girl turned away, and the man later related that he felt utterly Kierkegaardian. A strange joy came over him that the girl must now have held him for a lout or some predictable cad and so no longer had to love him. Soon the tram stopped, as the stars of her eyes now rose again (or perhaps had never set); my friend stepped off with his companions while the girl observed, now with a truly mysterious expression, and the tram disappeared in the direction of the park. The man claimed not even to have watched the taillights, so uninteresting did the matter seem to him, and so calm did he again feel. But no sooner was he seated at the table than

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Pippa Passes

there came, in the midst of the café, while he was still listening to light news about the last parliamentary session or the fall exhibition, a crash that almost buried him: love exploded on a timed fuse. Illusion began to operate, and the girl within it became the beloved, the one just lost, and neglected, hopelessly gone, with whom an entire life sank. A beautiful, long life, never lived yet deeply familiar, which he recalled almost in a hallucination, and which lacked nothing but its tiny beginning. If we add that the man, by virtue of his considerable imagination, always fell in love with distant beloveds, pretty or renowned girls that he had heard about—indeed, even rich, exceptional girls (leaving no doubt about his will to realization)—or that he once went half insane as a girl of whom he had only seen pictures and heard stories became engaged, then one can understand the next few days, which he described, unreservedly open and agitated, days of wandering, of madly pacing off the tram route, the often repeated trip at the same time along the same route, the search for the pearl in the haystack, though he didn’t exactly know that it wasn’t just a needle. At any rate, the proven, the missed chance existed that it was a pearl, while women were otherwise so indifferent, as though they were truly just needles, or some other paillette, worthless, widely available. His will to discover was just as empty as it was insufferably agitated; his feelings stood like a farmhand on the marketplace whom no one will hire. That this idolatry subsided after days, weeks, that the mystery woman slowly faded, goes without saying. That the worshiper type does not have an exactly firm grasp, likewise goes without saying—although he was hardly one of those dreamers about “the perfect girl.” The extreme case, anyway, remains one of youth as such, consists overwhelmingly only of youthful impetuosity and delusion, flaring and fading, again flaring and fading, that is the exact worldly correlate of the worst youthful impetuosity, particularly about women. Which is why Schopenhauer too praises as the joy of old age that it’s beyond everything: see, you haven’t missed a thing. But of course, age speaks of an entirely different world from that of youth. In the latter there is much to miss; youth has, above all, as was shown here, the idolatry of the unknown, wholly without libertinage, and devout in its way. Striking, how seldom the joys of the bygone are described, and how reluctantly. The man on the tram could tell his story, and it seemed not remotely so familiar as billions of stories of unlucky love. Probably—with

The Long Gaze

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respect to such brief woundings or extraordinary momentary impressions without consequences—the routine of repression is more strongly formed in normal persons. La passante is then more easily forgotten, even where she remains unrepressed; in Baudelaire, Flaubert, and every crown witness of the lost chance, she never quite emerges into day. About her there is no concrete, quite properly human suffering, although it moves us. Only warily, yet almost reverently, like an All Soul’s Day in the springtime, do we recall it. Here are devilries that can make us reckless, or drunk, or weak like Offenbach’s Hoffmann in the final act, when Stella comes. If our fate were more intentional, then it would not sing so bitterly from this almostnothing, this almost-everything.

The Long Gaze Whoever knows the long gaze, silently, in the twilight that reverie spreads over everything and everyone, when only the beloved’s eyes still regard us and we see how another sees us, in a past time, a past space that would be intolerable if it did not again possess the greatest weightlessness, in the smile of the moment of truth: he has left behind the merely male orgasm, has reversed the woman and consequently that space of love into himself that lives not in the brief ecstasies of masculine climax but only in the “afterglow,” indeed does not even require coitus as its key, and is at all times a feminine space. But a man cannot live there long. There is a love that begins with the great, long gaze, has that gaze wholly on its level, and must fade with it. Great music understands how to sing that song; the situation in the second act of Tristan belongs here, the motionless gaze almost without touching. It is as little a demure substitute for or allusion to intercourse as the love duet is its music. But it would be truer if Tristan left Isolde afterward, this not at all subterranean but rather very elevated and outlying mons veneris, where only the beloved can still breathe, only woman, with the open eye of a completely undarkened but also opaque ecstasy. A man will soon look timidly aside, unless he seeks in this silence without windows the space for everything profound and important to him, so that he can stay there. Seldom do infidelity and the greatest fidelity have a more terrible connection in the

The Long Gaze

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respect to such brief woundings or extraordinary momentary impressions without consequences—the routine of repression is more strongly formed in normal persons. La passante is then more easily forgotten, even where she remains unrepressed; in Baudelaire, Flaubert, and every crown witness of the lost chance, she never quite emerges into day. About her there is no concrete, quite properly human suffering, although it moves us. Only warily, yet almost reverently, like an All Soul’s Day in the springtime, do we recall it. Here are devilries that can make us reckless, or drunk, or weak like Offenbach’s Hoffmann in the final act, when Stella comes. If our fate were more intentional, then it would not sing so bitterly from this almostnothing, this almost-everything.

The Long Gaze Whoever knows the long gaze, silently, in the twilight that reverie spreads over everything and everyone, when only the beloved’s eyes still regard us and we see how another sees us, in a past time, a past space that would be intolerable if it did not again possess the greatest weightlessness, in the smile of the moment of truth: he has left behind the merely male orgasm, has reversed the woman and consequently that space of love into himself that lives not in the brief ecstasies of masculine climax but only in the “afterglow,” indeed does not even require coitus as its key, and is at all times a feminine space. But a man cannot live there long. There is a love that begins with the great, long gaze, has that gaze wholly on its level, and must fade with it. Great music understands how to sing that song; the situation in the second act of Tristan belongs here, the motionless gaze almost without touching. It is as little a demure substitute for or allusion to intercourse as the love duet is its music. But it would be truer if Tristan left Isolde afterward, this not at all subterranean but rather very elevated and outlying mons veneris, where only the beloved can still breathe, only woman, with the open eye of a completely undarkened but also opaque ecstasy. A man will soon look timidly aside, unless he seeks in this silence without windows the space for everything profound and important to him, so that he can stay there. Seldom do infidelity and the greatest fidelity have a more terrible connection in the



Reunion Without Connection

same act; a man’s love easily dies out in nothing-but-love, which is everything to a woman. Not through the insatiably sexual woman but through the insatiably erotic woman does the right man fail. He bears up to her when such women’s essence is so closely related to art.

Reunion Without Connection Even what was should not hold us as such. Nothing past should be sought so faithfully that one goes back, truly back. One often dreams of it, but one should beware. The desire for it is depraved, and one will pay for it too. Usually on the spot, the same spot that one sought and found. People and things have moved on, even when they look just as they did earlier. The interperson is gone who formed between I and Thou; this old third party is usually dead. Memory will not bring him back; he will not eat these preserves. So former friends look like revenants; their recollection is fitful, seldom comfortable, and almost always shallow. Not themselves but only the past is what they see in a lifeless memory; it never shifts from the spot, it stays past—in short, it’s over. More harmlessly confused is the wish to go back into the house where one lived as a child. The stairs that one almost still knows from crawling, the window on the last landing where one could see so closely onto the neighbor’s roof, and in the winter onto the chimney that smoked into the starry sky; or the balcony in the back with the years scratched into it, which children apply quite early and remarkably historically. Yet the return disappoints us here too; life then and life now have no connection, or merely one in melancholy. Things are all sealed up in pastness, helplessly, and don’t look out, or if so then only falsely. Indeed, from the disappointment of the journeyman with staff in hand, whom no one knows anymore, or the knight who returns from the Holy Sepulcher to find only ruins, totally unrecognizable, the returnee differs only insofar as he can no longer even feel like a journeyman, with his journey still within him, but instead forgets even this, to say nothing of the knighthood of the Holy Sepulcher; even the life from which he comes now lies in a vacuum. If things are going rather badly for the revenant and he stands before the houses of his former glory, where now only strangers live and no one no-



Reunion Without Connection

same act; a man’s love easily dies out in nothing-but-love, which is everything to a woman. Not through the insatiably sexual woman but through the insatiably erotic woman does the right man fail. He bears up to her when such women’s essence is so closely related to art.

Reunion Without Connection Even what was should not hold us as such. Nothing past should be sought so faithfully that one goes back, truly back. One often dreams of it, but one should beware. The desire for it is depraved, and one will pay for it too. Usually on the spot, the same spot that one sought and found. People and things have moved on, even when they look just as they did earlier. The interperson is gone who formed between I and Thou; this old third party is usually dead. Memory will not bring him back; he will not eat these preserves. So former friends look like revenants; their recollection is fitful, seldom comfortable, and almost always shallow. Not themselves but only the past is what they see in a lifeless memory; it never shifts from the spot, it stays past—in short, it’s over. More harmlessly confused is the wish to go back into the house where one lived as a child. The stairs that one almost still knows from crawling, the window on the last landing where one could see so closely onto the neighbor’s roof, and in the winter onto the chimney that smoked into the starry sky; or the balcony in the back with the years scratched into it, which children apply quite early and remarkably historically. Yet the return disappoints us here too; life then and life now have no connection, or merely one in melancholy. Things are all sealed up in pastness, helplessly, and don’t look out, or if so then only falsely. Indeed, from the disappointment of the journeyman with staff in hand, whom no one knows anymore, or the knight who returns from the Holy Sepulcher to find only ruins, totally unrecognizable, the returnee differs only insofar as he can no longer even feel like a journeyman, with his journey still within him, but instead forgets even this, to say nothing of the knighthood of the Holy Sepulcher; even the life from which he comes now lies in a vacuum. If things are going rather badly for the revenant and he stands before the houses of his former glory, where now only strangers live and no one no-

Reunion Without Connection



tices him, though he knows every doorknob, and the refrain How fortunate we were back then!—then at best he stands there as the lead in a sentimental film, who’s embarrassed before himself when he’s worth anything.30 Then the weakness and self-pity are revealed that live in the wish for such returns. Persons who’ve become nothing special, or nothing approaching what they had intended, have this drive for reunion in excess— naturally also its catastrophe, which everyone knows, in particular the excess. Here reunion takes on something of the faith one really keeps in a specific way only toward dead things (dolls, above all broken ones; closets; and other mythical forces), not toward living things, to which one is bound much more atmospherically. Above all, reunion with an utterly vanished as well as splendid past has some of the self-pity that is revealed in the usual sentimentality of such moments. Only then does the worst catastrophe of all take shape, the completely airless space: the reunion with ruins, with nothing but what is sealed up within them, easily becomes a departure from oneself, as from someone who never became. A dead man has then returned who goes through these rooms handing letters to others long dead, like the Flying Dutchman. The suspicion is always at hand, whenever a long past ends in a historical or domestic reliquary, that it has remained a tomb for mere velleities—that it doesn’t cook on in one living piece, and above all never assumed the only decent form for “becoming”: maturity and works. A test of oneself is therefore to dig out old and still dear things just to sell them. Books still wrapped in the newspapers from back then, on which the old date confronts us; antiquities, witnesses to an earlier life that might still be uneasy yet is just as dead. Separating oneself from one’s past is a test of one’s relative adaptation to fate, and of the salvaged example; one finds out then whether one left oneself badly in the past or somehow faithfully got out of it; whether a past stroke survives in one’s current actions and has become “something that has become” at another location, so that it represents no past but rather solidity, salvage, firma in every sense, and works. Who thus separates himself can throw away the loveliest reliquary objects as unthinkingly as Lessing did honor; he has the certainty that he can pick them up again at any time. In this sense, separation from books, furniture, a beloved past is a mobilization of resources that haven’t been eaten by rust or moths—in short, a rehearsal, even a double rehearsal, for death. For in one instance objects move away from us as though we were leaving



The Muse of Restitution

them; their departure is as though a train on the next track were swerving away, and we think we’re swerving: the effect is the same. Just this departure effect reveals what has become melancholy infatuation and what substantive memory, conservation that needs no more physical return. That former interperson between friends will also eat none of it, but true old age and perhaps also true death love this confection and need it. In short: there simply is no reunion with union. A sentimental reunion is poisonous, not nutritious. The true reunion is none at all, does not reenter the past or time’s remnants but has what is its own as an integral present—indeed, outside of time, as a small, thorough, preserved room where no furniture collides, and nothing is sad.31

The Muse of Restitution It turned out that the old violinist lived and played after a fashion, for better or worse.32 Friends the recluse had none; unhappily married, he kept to himself at home as well. To his chair at the opera house he would still return somewhat punctually, but utterly morosely. More often he would drift far away during rehearsals, distracted and as though listening to something else. At his part he would saw away the more unwillingly, the more trivial some cliché or other seemed to him, which at that time— the story is from about , and takes place at the court opera of a German capital—would have been Italianate. So the old musician, who promised to reform yet always showed renewed discontent, was reprimanded and demoted; his salary hardly still sufficed to keep his wife and his young daughter from hunger. Only his wife’s entreaties to the orchestra master momentarily prevented his dismissal. That his already unsuitable wife thereby became ever more quarrelsome is no surprise; perhaps only that she provoked even the girl against him, whom he had loved and once instructed in simpler songs; she even forbade her to speak with their shabby breadwinner. After rehearsals, after an evening performance, the musician now locked himself completely in his room—unnoticed, so he imagined. There he cut his lonely capers, improvising on the violin, singing too, howling, shouting, stamping deep into the night. The daughter, who had slowly begun to blossom but remained timid, he would occasionally encounter on the



The Muse of Restitution

them; their departure is as though a train on the next track were swerving away, and we think we’re swerving: the effect is the same. Just this departure effect reveals what has become melancholy infatuation and what substantive memory, conservation that needs no more physical return. That former interperson between friends will also eat none of it, but true old age and perhaps also true death love this confection and need it. In short: there simply is no reunion with union. A sentimental reunion is poisonous, not nutritious. The true reunion is none at all, does not reenter the past or time’s remnants but has what is its own as an integral present—indeed, outside of time, as a small, thorough, preserved room where no furniture collides, and nothing is sad.31

The Muse of Restitution It turned out that the old violinist lived and played after a fashion, for better or worse.32 Friends the recluse had none; unhappily married, he kept to himself at home as well. To his chair at the opera house he would still return somewhat punctually, but utterly morosely. More often he would drift far away during rehearsals, distracted and as though listening to something else. At his part he would saw away the more unwillingly, the more trivial some cliché or other seemed to him, which at that time— the story is from about , and takes place at the court opera of a German capital—would have been Italianate. So the old musician, who promised to reform yet always showed renewed discontent, was reprimanded and demoted; his salary hardly still sufficed to keep his wife and his young daughter from hunger. Only his wife’s entreaties to the orchestra master momentarily prevented his dismissal. That his already unsuitable wife thereby became ever more quarrelsome is no surprise; perhaps only that she provoked even the girl against him, whom he had loved and once instructed in simpler songs; she even forbade her to speak with their shabby breadwinner. After rehearsals, after an evening performance, the musician now locked himself completely in his room—unnoticed, so he imagined. There he cut his lonely capers, improvising on the violin, singing too, howling, shouting, stamping deep into the night. The daughter, who had slowly begun to blossom but remained timid, he would occasionally encounter on the

The Muse of Restitution



stairs and assailed her. Clearly she was in league with that old rat bag of a wife, was spying at her behest in order to search his room for money. There he actually found her one evening too, as he came home early, upstairs; trembling, she sprang from his desk, with its drawers open. The night before had just borne a strange fruit of which he alone knew, and which he kept more secret than his missing money. The second act of a completely inaccessible, unmarketable, hopeless opera was finished; it was titled Siren. The girl became even more cautious, staying in his chamber only when there was certain to be a performance, for many weeks on the lookout for the unhappy man. Until one day the musician was finally dismissed; he had refused to play along at rehearsals for the new opera by one of the fashionable composers he despised. Indeed he had fallen out so badly with the world that it cheered him not in the least to hear that his own daughter had been discovered as the new vocal sensation, and would be trained as a future prima donna on the cardinal’s orders. On the contrary, the sacked violinist now railed against himself too, the closer the new singer’s debut approached. After all, his own flesh and blood was supposed to present the opera of the composer of the day for baptism. Completely barred in his chamber, he no longer heard all the rumors circulating outside: about the young star’s moods, about the endless rehearsals for the new opera, about open scandals and intervention by the prince himself. The evening of the premier arrived. The recluse had even draped the windows of his sanctuary. A stranger comes through the door, presenting himself as the emissary of the artistic director himself: His Excellency’s coach is standing before the house to take him to the opera. Even now the man resists. They arrive at the theater; the opera has begun. Wild, jagged, deeply familiar music bursts from the hall; the old musician hastens forward—his daughter, as siren, is singing to the sea. Such a story is rare, yet it does happen, and still moves us afterward. If I love you, how does that concern you?—This statement is not only insolent; it can be daughterly too. Certainly the nasty old man left the maiden no choice but not to ask about his love. On the other hand, though, her father concerned her extraordinarily much; no love could be more selfless. The girl, as she took the score to herself, copied it, always trembling for fear of discovery, and kept herself secret and inaccessible until the last moment. Hardly any beloved could be so maidenly, in the most beautiful sense, no one so incognito and yet so strong.



Raphael Without Hands

As beloved, woman has always been celebrated fervently; as good wife, proudly and gratefully; as mother, reverently. But about daughters there are fewer good songs than familiar, stale ones. Yet the girl in this story is a special muse to the man, not one who brings fire from Parnassus, certainly, but one who is thoughtful, path-breaking, thereby hidden. It’s already like a loyal posterity, not like a present, in this girl, and as one who has the right to be called posterity. An Italian saying goes: tempo é gentiluomo, meaning, time rights every wrong, even misrecognition. This noble daughter performed her office so graciously that the gentleman isn’t even needed.

Raphael Without Hands No one began small by himself, at the bottom. We learn to speak as children, but only as youths do we try it, namely totally. Then comes the drive to let sap rise into the word, the remarkable drive to say our life, so momentary and full. It really grabs one by the throat to be young. Waking up and feeling the spring that a year ago was still completely different. Back then there were no girls in it, or only faintly, more in pastel. But now storm winds blow into the colors, and the world knows no more trifles. One’s head buzzes with all these high beginnings; they seem important beyond all measure. The rosy dawn illuminates tremendous things for boys, creates the need to feel them, paint them, speak them so grandly. To create a work that sets us into the world, the world into us. Every young person once burned like this, burned up his beautiful youth in it. For its beauty is not in its jealousies, rivalries, insults, or evil triumphs. Thus did Hölderlin call youth in a letter to his brother: “This time is really the time of sweat, and anger, and sleeplessness, and anxiety, and storms, and the most bitter ones of one’s life.”33 Its beauty is far more pure planning for unlimited time, often lyrical, more often gigantic, and then the oeuvre of a Balzac would not suffice to fill this space. But then comes the setback, when one writes this fullness down. If the frenzy lasts beyond the twentieth year, production comes as an overt or covert vocation. The little dilettante has it easier than the serious one; his already faded dreams put down faded words, and since absolutely no measure of cultivation is added, the dream becomes trash (that’s never picked



Raphael Without Hands

As beloved, woman has always been celebrated fervently; as good wife, proudly and gratefully; as mother, reverently. But about daughters there are fewer good songs than familiar, stale ones. Yet the girl in this story is a special muse to the man, not one who brings fire from Parnassus, certainly, but one who is thoughtful, path-breaking, thereby hidden. It’s already like a loyal posterity, not like a present, in this girl, and as one who has the right to be called posterity. An Italian saying goes: tempo é gentiluomo, meaning, time rights every wrong, even misrecognition. This noble daughter performed her office so graciously that the gentleman isn’t even needed.

Raphael Without Hands No one began small by himself, at the bottom. We learn to speak as children, but only as youths do we try it, namely totally. Then comes the drive to let sap rise into the word, the remarkable drive to say our life, so momentary and full. It really grabs one by the throat to be young. Waking up and feeling the spring that a year ago was still completely different. Back then there were no girls in it, or only faintly, more in pastel. But now storm winds blow into the colors, and the world knows no more trifles. One’s head buzzes with all these high beginnings; they seem important beyond all measure. The rosy dawn illuminates tremendous things for boys, creates the need to feel them, paint them, speak them so grandly. To create a work that sets us into the world, the world into us. Every young person once burned like this, burned up his beautiful youth in it. For its beauty is not in its jealousies, rivalries, insults, or evil triumphs. Thus did Hölderlin call youth in a letter to his brother: “This time is really the time of sweat, and anger, and sleeplessness, and anxiety, and storms, and the most bitter ones of one’s life.”33 Its beauty is far more pure planning for unlimited time, often lyrical, more often gigantic, and then the oeuvre of a Balzac would not suffice to fill this space. But then comes the setback, when one writes this fullness down. If the frenzy lasts beyond the twentieth year, production comes as an overt or covert vocation. The little dilettante has it easier than the serious one; his already faded dreams put down faded words, and since absolutely no measure of cultivation is added, the dream becomes trash (that’s never picked

Raphael Without Hands



up), retains a certain appearance of fullness. There is an underground literature here that no one knows and that is probably vaster than the visible; it was created in poignant leisure hours, often after a miserable day at the shop or the office. Manuscripts pile up in this diligence without effort, long novels and hefty tomes full of accumulated autodidacticism, in the style of a provincial newspaper, suspended between Eros and cosmos. Even madness has a place here: someone wrote a philosophy of the postal system in three volumes, which was certainly an epochal idea at one time. In comparison, the better dilettantes lose their voices like a natural singer after the first solfeggio exercises, as soon as they put words to their plan. The momentous vision shrivels; the intelligence that is supposed to serve the work cancels it, and one’s own adulthood turns the planned superwork into a dwarf. Indeed, even great talents suffer this shrinkage, but of course they do not despair, or bury the shattered youthful plan; rather, they know to localize it. When the trembling and all-embracing beginning unintentionally shrinks, they understand how to set it consciously into something small, into the detail. Seldom do they really want the work to be as great as it was meant to be, and might finally become. Instead it begins ten, a hundred paces behind the youthful plan; they refuse to be surprised by a setback but rather impose it themselves, as a reduction from the very outset. Just as a detour in life so often turns out not to have been one at all, just as a little offshoot can provide the revitalizing contribution, so does the plan resign and overgrow itself at the same time in many first (and many late) masterpieces. Various examples, various “small” beginnings appear here; they are certainly alike in one respect, that they are strong enough not to fall through the door into the house. Cervantes wanted only to mock chivalric romances in Don Quixote; the mockery became a parody of humanity as such, and even more its glory. Wagner planned an opera in the Italian taste, arioso, and as a public fall from grace; this compromise became Tristan and Isolde. Hegel wished only to write a sort of textbook, the progression of normal consciousness to the philosophical standpoint, and the Phenomenology resulted. Certainly there are masterworks backed by a great plan from the beginning; Faust is the example. But here too, there was no straight line from immensity to immensity; rather, the whole grew together from parts, occasions, partial experiences from which the work, beyond the great plan of the “Monolog,” first concretely “began.” “Auerbach’s cellar,” the Gretchen tragedy, “una poenitentium,” in fact so many



Raphael Without Hands

inadvertent inspirations were hardly foreseen; yet they altered the substantive direction of the original plan, and the original material in it. Usually the inspiration from which the masterwork commences is no longer, and in this case more “modest” than, the initial one of the youthful plan; the details above all, in which inspiration concretizes, come not from a frenzy but from observation and the mediation of experience. Adulthood still muffles the distant thunder, and “reason” (if it is not the normal disillusionment) cancels many primitivisms; but here they are placed in the service of the earlier waking dream, become not a destruction as in the dilettantes of adulthood but an affirmed detour, out of whose passionate sobriety the goal now first returns. Out of the irony of a new beginning, out of the incident and detail beneath the original plan, the work first appears that sometimes realizes it. But now, what was the beginning? Was it not just as abrupt as complete, everything at once? What was meant in it does not easily return, yet always surges forward again, as a dawn that must become loud and clear. Much is concretely added to it later, often something unexpected, certainly also new puberty with fresh faces. Yet an early mystery persists after all this, a red glow at the window of every first conception, itself not yet adequately manifested, not in any fate, nor in any creation. Mere unspoken intention is of course worth nothing at all; it must everywhere get out of its beginning, put itself into expression and exteriority—yet just as far from us be anything already complete! The youth at Saïs, who has nothing if he does not have everything: he stands in no masterwork either, although the masterwork always leads back, is always applied to what never lets up.34 The potion (not from any witch’s kitchen) is still unknown that would completely rescue youth beyond age, the beginning beyond the work, make them visible. Raphael without hands would never have become a great artist but, since he was nonetheless Raphael, perhaps an even more faithful remembrance of ourselves.

Just Now When do we ever get out, nearer to ourselves? Does one find oneself in bed, or on the road, or at home, where things seem better again? Everyone knows that feeling of having forgotten something in one’s waking life that didn’t come along and become clear. That’s why it often seems so important—something one had just wanted to say, but it slipped one’s mind. Leaving a room where one has lived for a longer time, one looks about strangely. Here, too, something stayed back that one was never able to find. One takes it along nonetheless, and starts with it again somewhere else.

Dark by Us What we have here and now, we probably notice least of all. If one gets what one wants, and walks out on the street, sees how a happy man looks from the inside, then that’s worth a lot, but at the same time something inside has been repressed. The dream from before that saw happiness moving before it so vividly, as it truly is, has repressed itself. Now the paycheck is really here, and so not here enough, stuck in the haze of what one just experienced, and soon in the water one usually swims in. Suffering breaks through more strongly, likely because it’s more related to us as we still are; we never truly have in hand something happy, as we would be, just for that reason. A red-hot idea, as they say, is usually not a good one. 

Just Now When do we ever get out, nearer to ourselves? Does one find oneself in bed, or on the road, or at home, where things seem better again? Everyone knows that feeling of having forgotten something in one’s waking life that didn’t come along and become clear. That’s why it often seems so important—something one had just wanted to say, but it slipped one’s mind. Leaving a room where one has lived for a longer time, one looks about strangely. Here, too, something stayed back that one was never able to find. One takes it along nonetheless, and starts with it again somewhere else.

Dark by Us What we have here and now, we probably notice least of all. If one gets what one wants, and walks out on the street, sees how a happy man looks from the inside, then that’s worth a lot, but at the same time something inside has been repressed. The dream from before that saw happiness moving before it so vividly, as it truly is, has repressed itself. Now the paycheck is really here, and so not here enough, stuck in the haze of what one just experienced, and soon in the water one usually swims in. Suffering breaks through more strongly, likely because it’s more related to us as we still are; we never truly have in hand something happy, as we would be, just for that reason. A red-hot idea, as they say, is usually not a good one. 



The Fall into the Now

Joy more easily cools off in the Now when it falls in. It is usually happier beforehand, or afterward, than just when it appears.

The Fall into the Now We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s never far from us. I know a little—almost a low—Eastern European Jewish story whose ending is of course remarkably disappointing. The ending is clearly meant to be a joke, a truly awkward and flat one, unfunny, but a joke meant only to fill up the hole we’ve fallen into. That hole is the Now where we all are, and which the story does not narrate away from as usual; the little trap door thus needs to be built on. They studied and debated till they were sleepy.1 Now the Jews in the prayer house of the village conversed about what they would wish for if an angel should come. The rabbi said he would be happy if he could just be rid of his cough. I wish, said another, that I had married off my daughter. Said a third, And I would wish that I had not had a daughter at all, but a son, who could take over my business. Finally the rabbi turned to a beggar who had wandered in the night before and now sat, ragged and miserable, on the last bench: What would you wish for, friend? God help you, alas, you don’t look as though you could wish for nothing. I would wish, said the beggar, that I were a great king, and had vast lands. In every city I would have a palace, and in the most beautiful a capital of onyx, sandalwood, and marble. There I would sit on the throne, would be feared by my enemies, loved by my people, like King Solomon. But in battle I don’t enjoy Solomon’s good fortune; the enemy breaks through, my armies are defeated, and every city and forest goes up in flames. The enemy is already before my capital; I hear the uproar on the streets, and sit all alone in the throne room, with crown, scepter, royal purple, and ermine, deserted by my standard bearer, and I hear how the people scream for my blood. Then I strip down to my shirt and throw off all my finery; I jump out the window into the courtyard. I make it through the town, through the commotion, into the open, and run, run for my life, through my plundered land. Ten days, to the border, where no one knows me, and I get across, to other people who know nothing of me, want nothing of me; I am saved, and since last night I’ve sat here.



The Fall into the Now

Joy more easily cools off in the Now when it falls in. It is usually happier beforehand, or afterward, than just when it appears.

The Fall into the Now We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s never far from us. I know a little—almost a low—Eastern European Jewish story whose ending is of course remarkably disappointing. The ending is clearly meant to be a joke, a truly awkward and flat one, unfunny, but a joke meant only to fill up the hole we’ve fallen into. That hole is the Now where we all are, and which the story does not narrate away from as usual; the little trap door thus needs to be built on. They studied and debated till they were sleepy.1 Now the Jews in the prayer house of the village conversed about what they would wish for if an angel should come. The rabbi said he would be happy if he could just be rid of his cough. I wish, said another, that I had married off my daughter. Said a third, And I would wish that I had not had a daughter at all, but a son, who could take over my business. Finally the rabbi turned to a beggar who had wandered in the night before and now sat, ragged and miserable, on the last bench: What would you wish for, friend? God help you, alas, you don’t look as though you could wish for nothing. I would wish, said the beggar, that I were a great king, and had vast lands. In every city I would have a palace, and in the most beautiful a capital of onyx, sandalwood, and marble. There I would sit on the throne, would be feared by my enemies, loved by my people, like King Solomon. But in battle I don’t enjoy Solomon’s good fortune; the enemy breaks through, my armies are defeated, and every city and forest goes up in flames. The enemy is already before my capital; I hear the uproar on the streets, and sit all alone in the throne room, with crown, scepter, royal purple, and ermine, deserted by my standard bearer, and I hear how the people scream for my blood. Then I strip down to my shirt and throw off all my finery; I jump out the window into the courtyard. I make it through the town, through the commotion, into the open, and run, run for my life, through my plundered land. Ten days, to the border, where no one knows me, and I get across, to other people who know nothing of me, want nothing of me; I am saved, and since last night I’ve sat here.

The Spur of Work



Long pause, and shock as well; the beggar jumped up, the rabbi looked at him. I must say, said the rabbi slowly, I really must say, you are a curious person. Why would you wish for everything again, if you will only lose it all again? What good were your riches and your splendor? Rabbi, spoke the beggar, sitting down again, I would have something, actually: a shirt. Now the Jews laughed, and shook their heads, and granted the king a shirt; by a joke the shock was overcome. This remarkable Now as End, or this End of the Now in the words: since last night I’ve sat here, this breakthrough of Being Here from right out of the dream. Mediated verbally, through the intricate detour that the beggar takes from the subjunctive form with which he begins, through the narrative present, suddenly to the actual present. Something comes over the listener when he lands just where he is; no son will take over this business.

The Spur of Work How easy it is to want do nothing! How hard it is really to do nothing! Even when need doesn’t drive us as usual. Even on vacation, when we’re allowed to yawn. To be perfectly lazy seems both sweet and simple. The older I get, said a friend, the more I see that the only right thing would be to do no work. The whole day, he said, he could just lie by a window onto a Southern coast, and there wouldn’t have to be anything out there, either. A dog will stretch on some vacant spot, yawn, take a few steps, and lie down again. A man will come down the steps of the city hall, where he was sleeping, and slowly cross over the square to fall sleep again on the church steps. A little beer later suffices, and some bowling, for everything deserves to have the sun shine on it; it certainly never shines at the office. Just as water almost carries us, and only slight movement is needed to keep from going under, so does or did the earth carry us, and its table is nearly set. For modest wishes, and if people didn’t live in the North, where they don’t belong. But that, said the friend, not expecting an audience, is how the sweat of one’s brow came along, and then just sweat. Below the automobiles race, the telephone rings like Des Knaben Wunderhorn, twelve hours’ work, and

The Spur of Work



Long pause, and shock as well; the beggar jumped up, the rabbi looked at him. I must say, said the rabbi slowly, I really must say, you are a curious person. Why would you wish for everything again, if you will only lose it all again? What good were your riches and your splendor? Rabbi, spoke the beggar, sitting down again, I would have something, actually: a shirt. Now the Jews laughed, and shook their heads, and granted the king a shirt; by a joke the shock was overcome. This remarkable Now as End, or this End of the Now in the words: since last night I’ve sat here, this breakthrough of Being Here from right out of the dream. Mediated verbally, through the intricate detour that the beggar takes from the subjunctive form with which he begins, through the narrative present, suddenly to the actual present. Something comes over the listener when he lands just where he is; no son will take over this business.

The Spur of Work How easy it is to want do nothing! How hard it is really to do nothing! Even when need doesn’t drive us as usual. Even on vacation, when we’re allowed to yawn. To be perfectly lazy seems both sweet and simple. The older I get, said a friend, the more I see that the only right thing would be to do no work. The whole day, he said, he could just lie by a window onto a Southern coast, and there wouldn’t have to be anything out there, either. A dog will stretch on some vacant spot, yawn, take a few steps, and lie down again. A man will come down the steps of the city hall, where he was sleeping, and slowly cross over the square to fall sleep again on the church steps. A little beer later suffices, and some bowling, for everything deserves to have the sun shine on it; it certainly never shines at the office. Just as water almost carries us, and only slight movement is needed to keep from going under, so does or did the earth carry us, and its table is nearly set. For modest wishes, and if people didn’t live in the North, where they don’t belong. But that, said the friend, not expecting an audience, is how the sweat of one’s brow came along, and then just sweat. Below the automobiles race, the telephone rings like Des Knaben Wunderhorn, twelve hours’ work, and



The Spur of Work

at night streetlamps outside the bedroom window even.2 A world that needs hunger as a spur to exploitation, exploitation as a spur to work, but finally earns only in order to work more, and make life even harder. Some day we’re supposed to work according to our abilities, in order to enjoy according to our needs; I would rather have no abilities beforehand or needs afterward. Thus spoke my friend, and looked irrefutable; yet his life is different, not even unwillingly different. It should be so easy for him to live in harmony with his teachings. Instead he works all day, sullenly and admirably, preaches wine yet drinks water.3 Not only because it’s so hard to escape this constraint once we’re in it. And not only because we in the North have been driven so far away from indolence that we can no longer even find it. Only after the work is done is it good for Protestants and Jews to rest; this rest, said Kant, is the only happiness that does not include the least admixture of disgust. But not only the North sours our pleasure before business; what else then?—Well, our Now, our Being Here [Da-Sein] is dark, even under the sun; laziness itself isn’t right when lived out radically. Its teaching sounds irrefutable, but if even hunger and exploitation were eradicated, if the simple South were possible among us, laziness would yet remain a demon that no one could withstand; here it shows its affinity to loneliness. Both—laziness like loneliness—contain chemically related poisons, although laziness need not be lonely, and loneliness is seldom lazy. These are poisons of dark Being Within Oneself [Insichsein]. Its Now, if we do not drive and stir it, easily decomposes. It congeals, and not even animals, who always act their part, have the stomach for it. The continuously lazy, like the continuously lonely, remain in different ways in an intolerably empty existence, anxious and not right with themselves. On his entrance man is a seed, on his exit from work a corpse, factually as well as symbolically; the negative of this plain but inhuman fact takes effect before as well as after, as an early death frequently swallows up a meaningless life. Thus idleness contains a sort of embryonic poison, loneliness a putrescence; both converge in the negativity of the Not Yet around which we build and are built, without having built over it. Both taste desperate after a time, even if we do not take our dilettantishly lazy Sundays or our totally isolated loneliness as the model. No one has ever stayed quietly on the couch where he calmly lay down. Even if all the results of his work seem senseless, distasteful to him, given the brevity of human existence, complete inactivity is still more distasteful. Since all reli-

The Spur of Work



gions are founded against the insufficiency of mere existence, of mere creatureliness, none has yet preached inactivity, nor ever could have. The uncooked life (as my friend understood the dog on the pavement and the leisurely beggar) has never been attained, not even in the South, nor among aborigines. If they do not have our rage to work, and their days (not their celebrations) are more pervaded or as it were inlaid with calm than ours, still, the Romanticism of inactivity will find no examples here. No primitive people could stand to remain primitive. Even the Cynics, with their most radical reduction, brought it down only as far as the dog, and he was wrong. The “higher” avoidance of work by “privileged classes” (Athens, nobility, clergy) could not last long, as emptily higher as it may often have seemed; it would never have overcome the boredom and the disgust that are the share of an existence without work. Boredom is the reward that a life without work pays; it is that lonely deadweight from which one flees into work and society, the Nothing, or rather Nothing Yet, over which all people live, the bedchamber and yawnchamber of our all-too-immediate condition, that can easily become a chamber of horrors. Even in the circles of “pleasant days” there was at least a “labor” of pleasure, even of representation, as provocative or as false as it may appear, that still gave laziness color, and made it diligent idleness. There was, above all—separated from it by monastery walls—leisure [Muße], which, however, when it’s worth something, when something “happened” in it, is not only not idleness but far more attacks it at its very center, and not only contemplatively. If work was a flight from idleness, to create or build something against it, then leisure is the war against it there and then, so that it will be decontaminated and become substantive. In short, absolute idleness is our enemy dressed as a friend, and only at the very end our friend, when labor and above all leisure have fulfilled it; in idleness itself is the spur to work. Doing nothing is attractive to the extent that no one can hold out there. It attracts us because we seem to find ourselves there; it is intolerable because nothing there has really been prepared yet. The idler chases whims; the lonely man has a feeling of falling, or of being spellbound over a bottomless abyss. Ghosts and the fear of ghosts also have a place in loneliness, have had for ages; in company their manifestations vanish, whose true cause we ourselves are, the imprecise Being of our very selves. Laziness and loneliness (both lure us, and into nothing good; both lure us as quiet, or sometimes depth, yet make us intolerable or hard) have a connection



No Free Lunch

precisely there: they reveal that our basic being [Grundsein] is wrong. In an acute as well as still open way; only the advancing solution clarifies the problem as the problem of our human X. Sloth and solitude are the right and left posts of the door into a house of which so many dream, and where no one could hold out. Where even many artists, with their vocation, have likewise revolted against every kind of boredom. For leisure’s flight from work is none at all, as noted, but only another kind of work. It is war in the enemy territory of idleness itself, an armed attack on the locus of the problem. The labor of the everyday flees intolerable inactivity and subjugates the earth (which is otherwise inhospitable or unsuitable) so that we can be at home on it. The work of leisure (which is not comfortable or aristocratic, but the terminal concept of all emancipated labor) itself makes order in the gloom of existence; there it builds a house for another time. In the middle of existence it builds this house, where not just the here you may but above all the here you can of inactivity can finally be our friend (who until now was only disgust or desolation—that is, the very spur to work). That does not prevent inactivity and loneliness from having paralyzed even leisure up to now, because of its nearness, because of its entry into the lion’s den. Dürer’s idly solitary angel of melancholy pays for her desire by getting it. The temptations of the womb and the grave appear here within each other again: of the embryo that has it quiet, of the corpse that has it deep. But only completed work properly gives birth to us, drives out the poison of being uncooked and perishable. No work has ever been the right one; no rest could therefore ever last. We are not here to eat, but only to cook [kochen]; we can eat later, finally. Our Here and Now tastes bad without activity, not least because it could be so superb, and isn’t.

No Free Lunch He who wants to be a sickle must bend himself betimes. As in school primers, and wherever we learn to be good. To be satisfied with what we have; unfortunately, even the motif of Kanitverstan belongs here.4 Differently and at the same time less dubiously consolatory are the little petit bourgeois stories in praise of work, though they likewise reassure us in our confinement by denying our envy of wealth. “Johan the Merry Soap Boiler”



No Free Lunch

precisely there: they reveal that our basic being [Grundsein] is wrong. In an acute as well as still open way; only the advancing solution clarifies the problem as the problem of our human X. Sloth and solitude are the right and left posts of the door into a house of which so many dream, and where no one could hold out. Where even many artists, with their vocation, have likewise revolted against every kind of boredom. For leisure’s flight from work is none at all, as noted, but only another kind of work. It is war in the enemy territory of idleness itself, an armed attack on the locus of the problem. The labor of the everyday flees intolerable inactivity and subjugates the earth (which is otherwise inhospitable or unsuitable) so that we can be at home on it. The work of leisure (which is not comfortable or aristocratic, but the terminal concept of all emancipated labor) itself makes order in the gloom of existence; there it builds a house for another time. In the middle of existence it builds this house, where not just the here you may but above all the here you can of inactivity can finally be our friend (who until now was only disgust or desolation—that is, the very spur to work). That does not prevent inactivity and loneliness from having paralyzed even leisure up to now, because of its nearness, because of its entry into the lion’s den. Dürer’s idly solitary angel of melancholy pays for her desire by getting it. The temptations of the womb and the grave appear here within each other again: of the embryo that has it quiet, of the corpse that has it deep. But only completed work properly gives birth to us, drives out the poison of being uncooked and perishable. No work has ever been the right one; no rest could therefore ever last. We are not here to eat, but only to cook [kochen]; we can eat later, finally. Our Here and Now tastes bad without activity, not least because it could be so superb, and isn’t.

No Free Lunch He who wants to be a sickle must bend himself betimes. As in school primers, and wherever we learn to be good. To be satisfied with what we have; unfortunately, even the motif of Kanitverstan belongs here.4 Differently and at the same time less dubiously consolatory are the little petit bourgeois stories in praise of work, though they likewise reassure us in our confinement by denying our envy of wealth. “Johan the Merry Soap Boiler”

No Free Lunch



belongs here, poor but happy, diligently feeding on scraps, while the rich man, with all his soft pillows, supposedly has nothing to laugh about.5 Another story belongs here even more clearly, based on the principle— magically adorned, moreover—that ill-gotten gains profit nothing. The cheerfully industrious life applauds itself in particular here, only this early bird gets more than the worm. The unspoken meaning is that the rich are so only because they were diligent and thrifty; otherwise no one would be poor. The farmer in this story certainly found that out: the rich, though unjustly rich, goldsmith all the more. This farmer, usually called only “the little farmer,” met a witch in the forest while driving wood into town. As thanks for letting her ride along for a bit, she gave him a little gold ring. This ring, so she said, had a special power; one need only turn it on one’s finger and a wish (but only this one) would immediately be granted. After the farmer had unloaded his wood in town, he went to a goldsmith to have the ring assayed. The gold itself was of little value, but when the farmer told him about the witch the smith became especially friendly, poured wine, persuaded the farmer to stay the night, and as he slept, fabricated an exact copy of the ring in his workshop; he placed it onto the farmer’s hand, the real ring onto his own. No sooner was the duped child of fortune out of his house that dawn than the smith turned the ring, cried that he wished for four hundred thousand Taler, and at once they began to rain from the ceiling, ever more, up to his neck, over his head, until the four hundred thousand were complete. In the morning he was found suffocated; his heirs agreed this was too much of a good thing, so they split the inheritance more prudently. Meanwhile the farmer had come home and told his wife the story behind the ring. Instantly she wished that a little plot next to their field would belong to them. The peasant however was for careful deliberation, for taking time, and drove more wood; from the profits he was able to buy the plot anyway. And so on, ever new wishes from the wife, ever more work from the husband, until the couple in their old age became so prosperous that they forgot the ring—and finally their sons laid it in the grave between farmer and wife. So that was the end of the song, and the pedagogical, the petit bourgeois moral of the story: a penny saved is a penny earned, ill-gotten gains profit nothing. It is not that cheap tricks will never work (the magic ring granted the smith his gold, after all); instead the little man’s smugness and narrowness will triumph, without any excess, folly, novelty (unless ordered



No Free Lunch

by the authorities). That is why vagabonds or similar marginal figures appear in such schoolbooks no more than they are tolerated—very different, but just as philistine—in the complacency at the regulars’ table. How truly childishly a different sign affects us! Certainly not from some motivational reading, an example to all who want to make it in petit bourgeois life. It was related by the dear Alfred Klabund, on the contrary, and is supposed to have happened in August , of all times—in other words, in the springtime of the War, very unworldly.6 Early one morning, on the marketplace of a small upper Bavarian town, a covered cart rolled in, a man and his wife at the reins, and came to a halt. From under the tarpaulin, where something was growling, the man drew two stakes, nails, and a rope. He wanted to pound in the stakes. Now a policeman arrived because of the noise; the man showed him his permit, with a signature from the magistrate authorizing one day of frolics. The permit named Alois Krautwickerl and wife from Straubing, alias Salandrini the Wizard and the Queen of the Air.7 The policeman cited them: Did they not know that a war was on, and everything else was forbidden? The wizard did not know, did not understand it, and now had to chase the small bear that meanwhile emerged from the cart back in, and the festivities that night certainly did not take place. Distress and more hunger than usual set in. The hopeless man at last found an unskilled job in a gasworks, his wife took in laundry from better homes, and only the little bear continued to crouch in the cart for weeks on end, staring up at the literally ever more leaden sky. Not to forget, meanwhile, that a classified had appeared in the town newspaper, stating: Charitable ladies and gentlemen are urged to contribute scraps for Salandrini the Wizard’s fortune-telling bear. But only the Wizard and the tightrope-walking Queen of the Air contributed scraps, from their meager evening meals; the gathering cold in the cart of course remained. The man was only allowed to bring the little bear into a corner of the warm gasworks, but one morning it was dead, whether from hunger or from toxic fumes. The Queen of the Air threw herself sobbing onto the little carcass, and it looked, said Klabund, like a painting by Piloty. (For younger readers: Piloty was a historical painter around ; his most familiar painting, in Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, is called Seni by Wallenstein’s Corpse.) The fortune telling did finally bring in some money. The bear’s fur interested an apothecary on the marketplace, and he bought it from the wiz-

Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train



ard for a pittance, hung it up in his shop, and when he had guests, would occasionally point to it with a sort of nostalgia: “Yes,” he would say, “what a time that was, when I would hunt bears in the Montenegrin hills!” Because it was spoken by a “Those that have, get,” it should also have found favor in schoolbooks; a hunter’s tall tale in the parlor is no tightrope walker’s frolic.

Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train The rougher it is outside, the nicer it is be warm. It would be no fun to show off one’s money if everyone had it—if there were no misery to gnash its teeth and watch, as a double contrast. Thin, lonely, life begins at the top. But it’s no longer the fashion to set off one’s money. Truly set it off against the poor, so that it glitters like a star in the night. This means: the utterly ragged, the vast, scabby estate of the past is gone, more so than the great wealth. More so than even the great knights who scourged the peasants. Some might be capable of it, but calm, public pleasure killing, which alone makes a lord a lord, has become ever more difficult. The grand people of the Baroque had on their tables such angelically prepared, such subtly roasted geese that the birds would still cry out as they were carved; only before the eyes of the delighted gourmets did they finally die. Beggars in the dust, the mob before the gates, who would be trampled, human vermin in the city’s ditches and caverns, mad hut and torture chamber were as much a part of the splendor as the torment of the animal to be eaten became the diners’ pleasure. It’s quite significant that the submerged part of the iceberg must reach into the depths so that the peak can bask in the sun. Recently, however, a poor woman restored the correct proportion somewhat. Oddly, the reports could not grasp that, instead writing: “A wedding took place in St. Matthew’s yesterday that created a sensation: by its splendor, which stood in noteworthy contrast to the prevailing misery, and by a shocking incident that took place after the ceremony.” Whereas not even the contrast was at all notable—on the contrary, and the incident? The bride bore a train seven meters long behind her satin gown, which then finally threw a silhouette again, so becoming completely pure white. The spectacle in itself, and so all alone, made possible by exploitation, was not enough; rather, the poverty behind it is the foil that wealth

Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train



ard for a pittance, hung it up in his shop, and when he had guests, would occasionally point to it with a sort of nostalgia: “Yes,” he would say, “what a time that was, when I would hunt bears in the Montenegrin hills!” Because it was spoken by a “Those that have, get,” it should also have found favor in schoolbooks; a hunter’s tall tale in the parlor is no tightrope walker’s frolic.

Ten Years’ Jail, Seven-Meter Train The rougher it is outside, the nicer it is be warm. It would be no fun to show off one’s money if everyone had it—if there were no misery to gnash its teeth and watch, as a double contrast. Thin, lonely, life begins at the top. But it’s no longer the fashion to set off one’s money. Truly set it off against the poor, so that it glitters like a star in the night. This means: the utterly ragged, the vast, scabby estate of the past is gone, more so than the great wealth. More so than even the great knights who scourged the peasants. Some might be capable of it, but calm, public pleasure killing, which alone makes a lord a lord, has become ever more difficult. The grand people of the Baroque had on their tables such angelically prepared, such subtly roasted geese that the birds would still cry out as they were carved; only before the eyes of the delighted gourmets did they finally die. Beggars in the dust, the mob before the gates, who would be trampled, human vermin in the city’s ditches and caverns, mad hut and torture chamber were as much a part of the splendor as the torment of the animal to be eaten became the diners’ pleasure. It’s quite significant that the submerged part of the iceberg must reach into the depths so that the peak can bask in the sun. Recently, however, a poor woman restored the correct proportion somewhat. Oddly, the reports could not grasp that, instead writing: “A wedding took place in St. Matthew’s yesterday that created a sensation: by its splendor, which stood in noteworthy contrast to the prevailing misery, and by a shocking incident that took place after the ceremony.” Whereas not even the contrast was at all notable—on the contrary, and the incident? The bride bore a train seven meters long behind her satin gown, which then finally threw a silhouette again, so becoming completely pure white. The spectacle in itself, and so all alone, made possible by exploitation, was not enough; rather, the poverty behind it is the foil that wealth



Silence and Mirrors

needs above all for its display, if it wants not only to earn but to put its earnings on display as glamour. The misery of the Depression that watched this seven-meter train go by was hardly deep enough for so much wealth trying to gain the light of day, or rather of night. Only the shocking incident, as the reporters called it, really added something, criminally, out of prison. De profundis a white-haired woman stormed into this pageantry and threw herself in front of the train, allegedly screaming, “Give me back my son! Give truth its due! My son is in prison because of you!” If the train is out of Courths-Maler, the old woman is from those true regions of misery that were once part of feudalism, and that now so splendidly disturb the juste milieu of our day, too: a wedding in Baroque.8 Of the rich we still have enough, yet we lack precisely the picturesque poor. Of great lords we have enough, yet we lack the properly writhing worms beneath their feet, the bodyguards of contrast. From the unemployed there comes merely an uneasy—and sometimes very dangerous— misery, but not the necessary, attuned, corporatively attuned misery that once made the dungeons below the banquet tables groan, and so left everyone a place. This, finally, is national: to take from the rich their Jewish haste, to make them a nobility, a brilliant one. This, finally, is nationalsozialistisch: to teach the poor to be so, and to remain so, by opening up their view of the nobles again. When will kings again ride white trotters across the battlefield by evening light, over the bodies of cripples?

Silence and Mirrors I have a somewhat touchy friend who sees everyone very clearly, himself somewhat less so. Once he criticized a man at his table for all sorts of indications, with such painful exactitude that he completely spent himself. So I asked him how the inhabitant of his own apartment would appear to him if he didn’t know him, and could merely read him off his shoes, his clothes. The nervous man’s lips began to tremble; he must have seen more here than I had, or could have. In content hardly comparable, sublime and yet related, however, is a report by Herodotus, I later found—and other writers after him, slightly differently but more compactly—of a phenomenon that borders on my friend’s and everyone’s dark



Silence and Mirrors

needs above all for its display, if it wants not only to earn but to put its earnings on display as glamour. The misery of the Depression that watched this seven-meter train go by was hardly deep enough for so much wealth trying to gain the light of day, or rather of night. Only the shocking incident, as the reporters called it, really added something, criminally, out of prison. De profundis a white-haired woman stormed into this pageantry and threw herself in front of the train, allegedly screaming, “Give me back my son! Give truth its due! My son is in prison because of you!” If the train is out of Courths-Maler, the old woman is from those true regions of misery that were once part of feudalism, and that now so splendidly disturb the juste milieu of our day, too: a wedding in Baroque.8 Of the rich we still have enough, yet we lack precisely the picturesque poor. Of great lords we have enough, yet we lack the properly writhing worms beneath their feet, the bodyguards of contrast. From the unemployed there comes merely an uneasy—and sometimes very dangerous— misery, but not the necessary, attuned, corporatively attuned misery that once made the dungeons below the banquet tables groan, and so left everyone a place. This, finally, is national: to take from the rich their Jewish haste, to make them a nobility, a brilliant one. This, finally, is nationalsozialistisch: to teach the poor to be so, and to remain so, by opening up their view of the nobles again. When will kings again ride white trotters across the battlefield by evening light, over the bodies of cripples?

Silence and Mirrors I have a somewhat touchy friend who sees everyone very clearly, himself somewhat less so. Once he criticized a man at his table for all sorts of indications, with such painful exactitude that he completely spent himself. So I asked him how the inhabitant of his own apartment would appear to him if he didn’t know him, and could merely read him off his shoes, his clothes. The nervous man’s lips began to tremble; he must have seen more here than I had, or could have. In content hardly comparable, sublime and yet related, however, is a report by Herodotus, I later found—and other writers after him, slightly differently but more compactly—of a phenomenon that borders on my friend’s and everyone’s dark

Silence and Mirrors



bedchamber, that they found worthy of the following subtlety: as Psammetic, the last Egyptian pharaoh, after the disastrous battle of Pelusium, was led before Cambyses, the Persian victor, he was met along the way first by his daughter, as slave, and the pharaoh was silent; then by his son, who was being taken to his execution; the pharaoh remained unmoved. But as he saw a porter from his army with his hands in fetters, Psammetic cried out and lamented his fate with great force. Why does the king cry out, I asked this friend who saw others so sharply, and why does he cry so late? That there was something here that concerned us, and very usefully made us notice, was clear. Suddenly the event, so far-fetched, was in the house, the room where we were living. The simplest explanation was that the servant was like the drop that brings sorrow to overflowing. But this was too obvious to be likely; the story is about a pharaoh, not some ordinary citizen. The pharaoh’s sorrow comes so late, in another interpretation, because it is blocked, blocked by pride. Particularly in proud people, after all, the natural intervals between the stimulus to sorrow, the emotion, and the expression of it are considerably delayed. If the stimulus is a pot, then even with the usual kind of shock its cover is not in place but comes only later; the stimulus and the emotion coincide only afterward. Alteration through such a great shock as the pharaoh’s is much like a railroad collision, if one may use this anachronism; the wagons have been shoved so far together that with the servant the son suddenly rises up, and the true song of sorrow breaks into an entirely different rhythm. But this explanation too does not yet seem right, for it just pushes everything about the pharaoh onto the repressive pride of a great noble; that would not affect modern readers of his conduct as peculiarly as it does. This interpretation also makes the servant too accidental, too much a mere moment where the decisive sorrow belatedly, and syncopically, breaks through. Is it not likelier, asks a third interpretation, that our own dark Being Here and Now plays a role here too, especially muffling and obscuring, concealing, delaying? Such that what moves away from us, or indeed is at our lowest limit, may sometimes better reflect or betray own condition than what is much too close, complete with daughter and son? The pharaoh himself, then his daughter, and even closer to him the heir to his throne, his son, are his own flesh and blood, his immediate experience, and consequently in a zone of silence; but the servant, as something experienced quite distantly, something completely alien and yet still connected, breaks



Ways Not to Be Seen

through that, and the pharaoh cries. Just as anyone would cry, even in favorable situations, to see another in his place, in his habitat, and so could connect the intensity of his dark feeling of being with the estrangement of this view. The servant in fetters, without even any grand gestures, then becomes the mirror of one’s own state, which in itself is always critical. No one should be hailed as fortunate before his death, and certainly not in the mirror of his death.

Ways Not to Be Seen When a certain young vagabond wanted to conceal himself especially well, he went home. No one would suspect him of being there; he could outlast the search. On the street he would have been more easily recognized, because there he was as, and where, one envisioned him. As an English ship approached an island in the Fijis for the first time, no one there saw it, although it was considerably further away than that young man. But the natives not only did not suspect the ship’s presence; there were still other reasons it fell outside their range of vision. Thus the islanders, as the ship anchored offshore because of the reefs about the island, and sent out a canoe that sped toward the shore with a great heave-ho, saw only this canoe—as Georg Foster relates, concerning Cook’s ocean voyage—but not the ship. For the canoe, sleek as it was, they could still partly compare to their own crude dugouts, so they still had access to it optically. The majestic frigate, however, anchored offshore: to that there was no access; there was no jack-ladder of comparison. It remained literally below the horizon, which is the horizon of perception. Which of course has a parallel in culture, where the annoyed Babbitt stands blind before a work that goes beyond his range of vision. Such unseeing can of course be effected very deliberately, insofar as a gaze is shrewdly satiated before it finishes, finds its target. Thus one arranged for the very artificial unseeing of certain objects in , as the Prussians stood before Paris, again a sort of frigate, but a quite extraordinary one, a work of art. We are speaking of the Mona Lisa: she, at least, should not be plundered. So she was not only brought from the Louvre to Hôtel des Invalides, but a wall was pierced there, a junk-room set up behind it, with a great deal of scrap and apparently a century of dust on the



Ways Not to Be Seen

through that, and the pharaoh cries. Just as anyone would cry, even in favorable situations, to see another in his place, in his habitat, and so could connect the intensity of his dark feeling of being with the estrangement of this view. The servant in fetters, without even any grand gestures, then becomes the mirror of one’s own state, which in itself is always critical. No one should be hailed as fortunate before his death, and certainly not in the mirror of his death.

Ways Not to Be Seen When a certain young vagabond wanted to conceal himself especially well, he went home. No one would suspect him of being there; he could outlast the search. On the street he would have been more easily recognized, because there he was as, and where, one envisioned him. As an English ship approached an island in the Fijis for the first time, no one there saw it, although it was considerably further away than that young man. But the natives not only did not suspect the ship’s presence; there were still other reasons it fell outside their range of vision. Thus the islanders, as the ship anchored offshore because of the reefs about the island, and sent out a canoe that sped toward the shore with a great heave-ho, saw only this canoe—as Georg Foster relates, concerning Cook’s ocean voyage—but not the ship. For the canoe, sleek as it was, they could still partly compare to their own crude dugouts, so they still had access to it optically. The majestic frigate, however, anchored offshore: to that there was no access; there was no jack-ladder of comparison. It remained literally below the horizon, which is the horizon of perception. Which of course has a parallel in culture, where the annoyed Babbitt stands blind before a work that goes beyond his range of vision. Such unseeing can of course be effected very deliberately, insofar as a gaze is shrewdly satiated before it finishes, finds its target. Thus one arranged for the very artificial unseeing of certain objects in , as the Prussians stood before Paris, again a sort of frigate, but a quite extraordinary one, a work of art. We are speaking of the Mona Lisa: she, at least, should not be plundered. So she was not only brought from the Louvre to Hôtel des Invalides, but a wall was pierced there, a junk-room set up behind it, with a great deal of scrap and apparently a century of dust on the

Imminent Boredom

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floor, a clutter of old pews, and more. The new opening in the wall was cemented over again, not too carefully of course, just as when looters are actually supposed to be lured by a hastily improvised hiding place. The ruse came off a few days later: the spiked helmets burst in and in fact did not find the Mona Lisa. They found instead, in the middle of the room, the map of Orléans—authentic, by the way—which at that time had not yet been captured, and they stood there in quiet satisfaction; the raid’s objective seemed to have been achieved. A few steps away the Mona Lisa leaned her face to the wall, unseen, saved, as her visitors retreated. Had it been an image of the Virgin, believers of another age would perhaps have said that Maria interceded; she saved herself. A cool strategy to make something unseeable, the same usually used to expose: it diverted the covetous gaze from the main thing by satisfying it prematurely with much less. Which of course happens often to obsessives, less positively in that they forget, overlook, the most important thing. Yet on the other hand Mona Lisas are certainly very rare, and—putting it politely—better a canoe to imitate, or even a blueprint to distract, than nothing at all.

Imminent Boredom I once knew someone who must have wanted to get outside of himself, but it didn’t work out. In the attempt to be sociable, he went awry, fell mute again. Yet in the meantime one would watch curiously: how he wanted to be lively and yet always ended otherwise. If one asked him how he’d slept, the answer was: When? Last night? If one claimed that he looked particularly surly again today, he would feel as though he deserved it, as though he too had made a certain agreeable contribution to the friendship. His enjoyment did not stem from vanity, but just from the satisfaction of a desire to be liked. So he would answer, with his slight smile, You see it too? I saw it already last night in the mirror, while washing my hands. Or small, very flat, in any case generally unfamiliar fish were being served at the inn in Southern France where one had run into the melancholy Münchner: He bowed far over the plate and shouted, The Isar has flounder too! Then he started, and said softly, The Isarlust, I mean. And then, more softly still, Cake, I mean.9 So the fish and the words that the peculiar man drew from within himself visibly altered

Imminent Boredom



floor, a clutter of old pews, and more. The new opening in the wall was cemented over again, not too carefully of course, just as when looters are actually supposed to be lured by a hastily improvised hiding place. The ruse came off a few days later: the spiked helmets burst in and in fact did not find the Mona Lisa. They found instead, in the middle of the room, the map of Orléans—authentic, by the way—which at that time had not yet been captured, and they stood there in quiet satisfaction; the raid’s objective seemed to have been achieved. A few steps away the Mona Lisa leaned her face to the wall, unseen, saved, as her visitors retreated. Had it been an image of the Virgin, believers of another age would perhaps have said that Maria interceded; she saved herself. A cool strategy to make something unseeable, the same usually used to expose: it diverted the covetous gaze from the main thing by satisfying it prematurely with much less. Which of course happens often to obsessives, less positively in that they forget, overlook, the most important thing. Yet on the other hand Mona Lisas are certainly very rare, and—putting it politely—better a canoe to imitate, or even a blueprint to distract, than nothing at all.

Imminent Boredom I once knew someone who must have wanted to get outside of himself, but it didn’t work out. In the attempt to be sociable, he went awry, fell mute again. Yet in the meantime one would watch curiously: how he wanted to be lively and yet always ended otherwise. If one asked him how he’d slept, the answer was: When? Last night? If one claimed that he looked particularly surly again today, he would feel as though he deserved it, as though he too had made a certain agreeable contribution to the friendship. His enjoyment did not stem from vanity, but just from the satisfaction of a desire to be liked. So he would answer, with his slight smile, You see it too? I saw it already last night in the mirror, while washing my hands. Or small, very flat, in any case generally unfamiliar fish were being served at the inn in Southern France where one had run into the melancholy Münchner: He bowed far over the plate and shouted, The Isar has flounder too! Then he started, and said softly, The Isarlust, I mean. And then, more softly still, Cake, I mean.9 So the fish and the words that the peculiar man drew from within himself visibly altered



Imminent Boredom

their shape, like deep sea fish, as soon as he pulled them to the surface and handed them around in the light. Consequently he would take them back, but of course no longer in their previous form. One afternoon, after numerous rounds had been drunk, this Münchner, an expert on speechlessness, related a story, abruptly and laconically, yet with ironic intention. A gentleman who’d been around found something. It was given to him not on the street but in Brussels, at the theater. The play didn’t interest him, so he looked for the woman who had already struck his notice before, in the loge right above him. She was certainly very pretty, and supposedly, as in a novel, looked back at him, holding a note in her hand, and waved. The gentleman stood up and left the theater, up the stairs to the next level, to the beautiful woman’s loge. She passed the note to him with a quick glance, and pulled the door shut again. The gentleman read the note: that is, he wanted to read it, but he couldn’t, for he understood nothing in it; the words were completely incomprehensible, in an apparently unfamiliar language. The gentleman stood there, utterly baffled, but the usher was already beside him, looked at the note sideways, turned away, and said only, Come with me. The gentleman became rude, the usher ruder, and the gentleman angry; the usher went to fetch the supervisor. The stranger had already stopped paying attention and studied the mysterious note: the letters were written with a colorless ink, round and squiggly; he had no clue. Meanwhile the supervisor arrived, very surprised, but no sooner did he see the note than he turned, signaled security, and bade the gentleman to leave the theater. Completely dazed, the gentleman followed the officer down the steps to the cash register, where his refund lay ready, out the front and onto the broad, silent plaza. There the gentleman remained for some time, and could not get to the bottom of the matter. Finally he decided to hire a taxi to the hotel in order to get an explanation from someone who knew the city, called his manager, and described the improbable incident. His manager knew the stranger as an honorable man with fine clothes and refined manners, was appropriately indignant about the provinciality that predominated here, expounded on the absurd conditions in this city, especially at the theater. Yet when he himself saw the note, he chewed over all sorts of words, as though eating something he didn’t like, and said: That’s just how it is; I, too, would bid the gentleman to leave this hotel. Indeed I would advise, insofar as the gentleman was of

Imminent Boredom

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course here at our invitation, that he flee Brussels tonight, to France, or even across the Channel. The gentleman grew faint, and stumbled out into the fresh air; but here—thus continued the Münchner, reluctantly—one can easily imagine everything that would still happen that night, and afterward. The gentleman was basically a reserved type, and Brussels was unfamiliar to him; he’d never harmed a fly, so who would have something against him here? He only wanted to get away sometimes, out of his lifeless routine, or he sometimes wanted to recall something from the life that he otherwise didn’t notice, that he forgot from one day to the next. But it was not from a need for adventure, nor even from an impulse, that he had fallen into the hands of this unknown woman—indeed, with that note in his hand, of the unknown as such. Now he had it in abundance, and in England, whence he fled, the fantastic story did not improve. Here, too, rumors spread; acquaintances on the street stood back for a while, business relationships broke up in England as in France, Germany, even distant, indolent, but superstitious Spain. Yet no one ever explained; the mystery that everyone understood, or seemed to understand, could not be solved. Then one morning the gentleman, whose mail now consisted solely of slanders and threats, received a letter from North America, from an old business partner, from which he concluded that his misfortune was unknown over there. Full of a longing to meet impartial people again, full of a new hope of getting to the bottom of those ciphers, he shipped out to New York, and hurried immediately to the office of his acquaintance, an attorney and notary. I have a proposition to make, he said quickly; he locked the door and lay a Browning on the table. I won’t be caught up in anything again, he continued, and briefly told his story. Then: I know, Sir, that as soon as you’ve read the note, you too will forsake my company, and the boycott will just resume. So you may choose: explain the note to me, and I will give you ten thousand dollars, half of my present fortune. If you treat me as everyone else has, I will shoot first you, then myself; it’s all the same to me. The attorney looked at the check, looked at the revolver, offered the usual cigarette, and spoke: “Of course I will grant your wish. May I see the document, please?” The gentleman opened his briefcase, felt about, looked inside, found nothing; the compartments were empty. He had lost the note. So the Münchner told his exceedingly disappointing story; one could sense his regret at again falling so short. But even if nothing was tangible,



Imminent Boredom

the conversation continued, politely and thoughtfully. If no one could look into the note, still the effect was enough. Like the attorney and the unfortunate gentleman, the unsolved mystery drove the guests on, backward, forward, to the question, What could have been written on that paper? A journalist at once made a prize competition out of it such as the world had never seen. A novelist, otherwise very imaginative, resorted to cant, suspected some bizarre sexual proposition; but this structure quickly collapsed. A philologist retreated to the storerooms of his scholarship, emerged again with some traveling legend, an old motif, Indian, astral, that was secularized here. Yet he could not present it, but said only: The Americans, in their desire to baffle the rest of us, come up with the most exquisite delicacies. A metaphysician of the inessential was at the table, otherwise very competent in such matters; this specialist in cracking smaller cosmic nuts exclaimed suddenly, to the greatest elation, that he had the solution. But as one pressed him, it was only that he thought the whole thing just seemed right. Another thought of Oedipus, who had solved every riddle. Except that he was the son of Laertes; this the Thebans noticed sooner than he— he couldn’t read his note because it was much too close. Yet because between the modern gentleman and Oedipus, between the urban legend and the great myth, there was no greater similarity than that of parody, the allusion went nowhere; without this channel between the magazine story and antiquity, which a Surrealist might have found, he would never have gone abroad. The melancholy Münchner said no more, nor would he answer questions. But had he not perhaps told something, if not about himself, then about the stranger? About a reserved man who just wanted to recall something from his unnoticed life, about his awkwardness and his lonely sorrow? And was not the decipherment of the note actually long ago accomplished? Is not the final misfortune of loss just before the goal the very heart of the matter? Was not the folder empty from the beginning, as the inexpressible in us that has nothing to say, as depths within us that do not even exist, as the convoluted incognito of emptiness and ennui? Did not the gentleman in the story, just like his drably profound narrator, seem like the distillation of absolute boredom? This, his own sign, he cannot himself read; he knows it only by its effect on others, as an effect without a cause, as the escape from this effect without cause. Like the temporarily attached listeners of his story, he has only a vague curiosity, and an inces-

Moment and Image

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santly fruitless brooding about the void of his abyss, about the muteness of his letter. Yet it should be permitted to hear something more resonant from the Münchner, the one who had finally become so talkative. There are some people today, in this increasingly vacant, forlorn bourgeois age, who, just like the sudden narrator of this shaggy dog story, go about like a child eavesdropping on adults. These adults all know something that the child does not. Or there’s something that the adult as adult hasn’t found, that rather lies in the overloaded gaze when, on leaving a rented room, he looks about, wondering what he might have forgotten, or what lies in precisely that overloaded unease when he can’t find the words that were just on the tip of his tongue, which, precisely by vanishing, seem so tremendously important. The Münchner, in a not completely eccentric way, found himself permanently in a kind of adolescence, which is otherwise only sexual but here is existential. An eccentric who has thus become representative is even able, with this overloaded anecdote, to stand there as a figure from an unwritten though imaginable novel, like someone keeping his ears open, so to speak. Since this character is out of action, and alone, his ears are open to the kind of impression, or expression, of which a more solid citizen knows nothing, thank God. As when the Münchner, on the occasion of hearing a phrase in passing without understanding it, admits that an old suspicion arose in him that there was something particularly important there that he did not know, whose traces he would find only by accident. Others know it, he thinks, perhaps everyone knows it, even though they don’t know what to do with it, and don’t care; I alone don’t know it, and I’m wasting my life because I don’t know; what can it be? So the note stays lost, sought by the enfant perdu, without any Lost and Found Office. Of course no one, speaking of that equally unsatisfying story, should feel too safe from its arc light, as though exhaled by a death; it is after all hardly agnostic. Of course Kafka’s surveyor K., if he’d carried around such a public wanted poster, would also not have recognized himself in it.

Moment and Image If we’re slack, we really don’t notice what’s happening. This is what occurred to a girl as her friend picked her up; she saw him again after a long

Moment and Image

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santly fruitless brooding about the void of his abyss, about the muteness of his letter. Yet it should be permitted to hear something more resonant from the Münchner, the one who had finally become so talkative. There are some people today, in this increasingly vacant, forlorn bourgeois age, who, just like the sudden narrator of this shaggy dog story, go about like a child eavesdropping on adults. These adults all know something that the child does not. Or there’s something that the adult as adult hasn’t found, that rather lies in the overloaded gaze when, on leaving a rented room, he looks about, wondering what he might have forgotten, or what lies in precisely that overloaded unease when he can’t find the words that were just on the tip of his tongue, which, precisely by vanishing, seem so tremendously important. The Münchner, in a not completely eccentric way, found himself permanently in a kind of adolescence, which is otherwise only sexual but here is existential. An eccentric who has thus become representative is even able, with this overloaded anecdote, to stand there as a figure from an unwritten though imaginable novel, like someone keeping his ears open, so to speak. Since this character is out of action, and alone, his ears are open to the kind of impression, or expression, of which a more solid citizen knows nothing, thank God. As when the Münchner, on the occasion of hearing a phrase in passing without understanding it, admits that an old suspicion arose in him that there was something particularly important there that he did not know, whose traces he would find only by accident. Others know it, he thinks, perhaps everyone knows it, even though they don’t know what to do with it, and don’t care; I alone don’t know it, and I’m wasting my life because I don’t know; what can it be? So the note stays lost, sought by the enfant perdu, without any Lost and Found Office. Of course no one, speaking of that equally unsatisfying story, should feel too safe from its arc light, as though exhaled by a death; it is after all hardly agnostic. Of course Kafka’s surveyor K., if he’d carried around such a public wanted poster, would also not have recognized himself in it.

Moment and Image If we’re slack, we really don’t notice what’s happening. This is what occurred to a girl as her friend picked her up; she saw him again after a long



Potemkin’s Signature

interval. On the way home he gave her a belated letter that he’d written. Whereupon the girl put her friend aside and read the written words, which were more important to her than the ones he’d just spoken. Incapable of doing the immediate, she took refuge in love as a letter—fled experience as such, passed in the middle of experience over into something external to it, into a memory, or something already set, that replaced direct experience. That was easier for her to see than the here and now that mists over, and that we can never hold on to for long. But when one is powerfully and personally there, the Now grows empty in a different way. Why aren’t you taller?—we recall the father who said that to his lost daughter; some of that belongs here too, to the lived moment where one sees little just when one is directly in it, without any letter. Of course we know the will to keep returning to the site of some great happiness. Yet when the beloved who granted this happiness is far away, lost, or dead, a peculiar scruple, upon noticing it, turns away from her return. One not only feels that one’s own existence should not be exploited in this way under the light. Rather, the darkness of the moment just lived immediately again back there cuts across, temptingly or destructively, a long-preserved memory. It cuts across the letter in memory that can make immediacy ever brighter, indeed that lets it mature as an image. For to the extent that one is worth something, one does not just meet life immediately, but also holds it together in memory, paces off the frontline of the past as a train of images. But because one did not have the moment back then, not even in one’s greatest fervor, its image will not come right. One turns back, and finds oneself refreshed in what one lived back then, but often less conscious of it, poorer in salvaged substance.

Potemkin’s Signature Prince Potemkin had hours when he would admit no one. His room would be deathly quiet then; no one knew what he was up to. Affairs of state idled, and his councilors had a good time. No report took place; the peak was clouded. Once, however, as an attack lasted an unusually long time, the most urgent documents arrived. They could be handled without the president, but not without his signature. His councilors waited in the antechambers; no one dared to step before the prince for fear of losing his



Potemkin’s Signature

interval. On the way home he gave her a belated letter that he’d written. Whereupon the girl put her friend aside and read the written words, which were more important to her than the ones he’d just spoken. Incapable of doing the immediate, she took refuge in love as a letter—fled experience as such, passed in the middle of experience over into something external to it, into a memory, or something already set, that replaced direct experience. That was easier for her to see than the here and now that mists over, and that we can never hold on to for long. But when one is powerfully and personally there, the Now grows empty in a different way. Why aren’t you taller?—we recall the father who said that to his lost daughter; some of that belongs here too, to the lived moment where one sees little just when one is directly in it, without any letter. Of course we know the will to keep returning to the site of some great happiness. Yet when the beloved who granted this happiness is far away, lost, or dead, a peculiar scruple, upon noticing it, turns away from her return. One not only feels that one’s own existence should not be exploited in this way under the light. Rather, the darkness of the moment just lived immediately again back there cuts across, temptingly or destructively, a long-preserved memory. It cuts across the letter in memory that can make immediacy ever brighter, indeed that lets it mature as an image. For to the extent that one is worth something, one does not just meet life immediately, but also holds it together in memory, paces off the frontline of the past as a train of images. But because one did not have the moment back then, not even in one’s greatest fervor, its image will not come right. One turns back, and finds oneself refreshed in what one lived back then, but often less conscious of it, poorer in salvaged substance.

Potemkin’s Signature Prince Potemkin had hours when he would admit no one. His room would be deathly quiet then; no one knew what he was up to. Affairs of state idled, and his councilors had a good time. No report took place; the peak was clouded. Once, however, as an attack lasted an unusually long time, the most urgent documents arrived. They could be handled without the president, but not without his signature. His councilors waited in the antechambers; no one dared to step before the prince for fear of losing his

Incognito to Oneself



position, or being exiled. Until a young scribe by the name of Petukov saw the great chance of his career. He fetched the sheaf of documents and went in to the president with one push, without knocking; Potemkin sat in a corner of the darkened room, hair unkempt, and utterly vacant, chewing his nails. Petukov set the documents wordlessly before him, handed the prince a pen, and the prince took his fingers from his mouth, undersigned decree after decree, with his eyes as though asleep, one after the other. The scribe burst from the room: Success! The prince has signed everything!— and held out the documents. Couriers hastened by to carry the decrees to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, to the regional governors. Yet before the envelopes were sealed, an older official took out one of the documents that had come from his jurisdiction. Started, pulled out the remaining papers, showed them: they had certainly all been signed. At the bottom of every document, in Potemkin’s hand, stood: Petukov, Petukov, Petukov. . . . Pushkin, who tells more or less this story, thereby provides not only the most uncanny documentation of melancholy, of the relentless brooding that burrows through the fog, of the mind lost in a nameless twilight, who takes the name Petukov because there at least something stirs, to that mind lost under the false sun that can still make any name gray—Petukov or Potemkin, whichever. Instead, insofar as the story concerns Prince Potemkin, the luckiest of men, the favorite, insofar as the lucky ones generally (not only despots) easily become melancholy at the peak of their lives (the still ambitious or wistful more easily get manic), one can see how little peak there is above the fog that is man, how his name and character often lie like an island within it, one perhaps more solidly elevated than Potemkin’s, but always prone to fog, Hebridean: indeed that this, which we already call Heaven, even when painted to the dimensions of our happiest days, might in the long run (which is what matters), be really just a hothouse of images that are still never far above the fog of existence, the sorrow of fulfillment.

Incognito to Oneself The incident was minor, but has something in it. It was reported only as a work accident at a circus encamped on the plaza. The clown was just supposed to fill a vacant moment, and therefore climbed over the forestage,

Incognito to Oneself



position, or being exiled. Until a young scribe by the name of Petukov saw the great chance of his career. He fetched the sheaf of documents and went in to the president with one push, without knocking; Potemkin sat in a corner of the darkened room, hair unkempt, and utterly vacant, chewing his nails. Petukov set the documents wordlessly before him, handed the prince a pen, and the prince took his fingers from his mouth, undersigned decree after decree, with his eyes as though asleep, one after the other. The scribe burst from the room: Success! The prince has signed everything!— and held out the documents. Couriers hastened by to carry the decrees to Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, to the regional governors. Yet before the envelopes were sealed, an older official took out one of the documents that had come from his jurisdiction. Started, pulled out the remaining papers, showed them: they had certainly all been signed. At the bottom of every document, in Potemkin’s hand, stood: Petukov, Petukov, Petukov. . . . Pushkin, who tells more or less this story, thereby provides not only the most uncanny documentation of melancholy, of the relentless brooding that burrows through the fog, of the mind lost in a nameless twilight, who takes the name Petukov because there at least something stirs, to that mind lost under the false sun that can still make any name gray—Petukov or Potemkin, whichever. Instead, insofar as the story concerns Prince Potemkin, the luckiest of men, the favorite, insofar as the lucky ones generally (not only despots) easily become melancholy at the peak of their lives (the still ambitious or wistful more easily get manic), one can see how little peak there is above the fog that is man, how his name and character often lie like an island within it, one perhaps more solidly elevated than Potemkin’s, but always prone to fog, Hebridean: indeed that this, which we already call Heaven, even when painted to the dimensions of our happiest days, might in the long run (which is what matters), be really just a hothouse of images that are still never far above the fog of existence, the sorrow of fulfillment.

Incognito to Oneself The incident was minor, but has something in it. It was reported only as a work accident at a circus encamped on the plaza. The clown was just supposed to fill a vacant moment, and therefore climbed over the forestage,



Incognito to Oneself

but nothing more came of it. The ringmaster asked him, as usual: What do you want here? The clown replied that he was looking for Mr. Table d’Hôte, who, he had heard, was due for dinner at this time. This answer had been agreed upon earlier, and likewise the question which the ringmaster then asked: But who are you? What is your name? Then something entirely against the script took place; the clown lost not only the thread but consciousness, at least of himself. He began to sway, flailed his arms about, mumbled the same thing over and over in a strange voice: Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. The ringmaster now also departed from the script, quite understandably: But you must know your name, who you are! Asked several times, to no avail. Yet Nobody was silent; the laughter from the public, esteemed local gentry, died out. Until the suddenly nameless man came to, awoke as it were, and back in line, like the public too, that understands and wants only amusement. The man who’d lost a grip on himself, however, now began to scream, confusingly: No! I’m a clown, and my name is Chuckles! Tears welled; the everyday, or everynight, had him again. In all this, of course, the clown, who the previous and sudden Nobody remembered himself to be, belonged to no prosaic occupation, à la judge or sales manager, whereby he might act important, as though he really were important. He belonged rather to the itinerants—that is, unsettled people, seldom respected, who don’t lap much milk and honey. Even so, they stand, shuffle, leap, tumble, lift weights at the margin of what the bourgeois calls the performing arts, and avoid any monotony. Yet the temporarily nameless clown made them think, just as if he had come to himself as such, and especially as if he had lost himself as someone from this or that slot. Is the everynight truly his role, into which he’s wrapped according to his pass and work permit, and is it ever our true definition, into which a settled occupation baptizes us, even a not-at-all-badly-chosen one? Do not the professionally well-accommodated, the well-named as it were, still have something nameless up their sleeves that was never even sung to them in the cradle, let alone by their future trainers in useful membership? Once it was believed that robbers carried children off in order to raise them, train them, for their gang. The case seems less like an old wives’ tale when we consider what is hidden from us in ourselves. What has never yet been accommodated, never had its day in any given name, not in Chuckles or any other. Don’t know, don’t know: this dimming of the self, suddenly forgetting one’s “own” identification card, this lapse and its onset were of course pathological. Yet the eventual, felicitous Aha! at being Chuckles, or

Motifs of Concealment

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even some other mask before one’s invisible visage is certainly not always healthier, doesn’t always restore us to identity. The fellow in the circus inspired as well as provoked such an insight in nuce, and perhaps some of his audience understood him, understanding him just when he thought of himself. How many at least own forged passes, just because they were validated at the registration office?

Motifs of Concealment Especially before others, we can almost always just show. Sometimes show through, but it remains doubtful whether this halfness, this becoming, is right. Not only the Now where we always find ourselves is still dark. Instead it is dark above all because we, as the living, find ourselves in, quite properly are, this Now. In this and as this dispersed Now lives the still dispersed person himself, according to his inner, intratemporal movement. Out of this always only “momentariness” comes the Manifold, then the individual particularity that no stranger easily enters, and oneself only inauthentically, and rarely. The worse (that is, the more selfish) someone is, the darker he will be by the same stroke; yet just for that reason, here too, one can never know, never already see inside, let alone perfectly. If a particularity is significant—not dispersed, but instead gathering existential powers— it will still be no clearer to others. It likewise has its individual courtyard, precisely around the “brightness,” in part because no eyes are yet ready for it, in part because the depths have too few inhabitants to be other than individual and lonely. That is the true, fruitful incognito, around whose clearing the whole affair turns; not the false one of boredom, which has nothing to say. We want to tell some little stories about the true one, mere, elaborated hints: Chinese, American, Russian-Jewish. Even this little Chinese story could give a lesson in respect before concealment. Once upon a time, some farmers were caught in the fields by a sudden storm.10 They fled under a haybarn, but the lightning did not pass; it struck all around the hut. The farmers realized that the lightning was meant for one of them, and they agreed to hang their hats outside the door. Whoever’s hat the storm first carried away should be chased out, so the innocent would not be destroyed along with the guilty. No sooner were the hats hanging outside than a gale caught the hat of farmer Li and

Motifs of Concealment



even some other mask before one’s invisible visage is certainly not always healthier, doesn’t always restore us to identity. The fellow in the circus inspired as well as provoked such an insight in nuce, and perhaps some of his audience understood him, understanding him just when he thought of himself. How many at least own forged passes, just because they were validated at the registration office?

Motifs of Concealment Especially before others, we can almost always just show. Sometimes show through, but it remains doubtful whether this halfness, this becoming, is right. Not only the Now where we always find ourselves is still dark. Instead it is dark above all because we, as the living, find ourselves in, quite properly are, this Now. In this and as this dispersed Now lives the still dispersed person himself, according to his inner, intratemporal movement. Out of this always only “momentariness” comes the Manifold, then the individual particularity that no stranger easily enters, and oneself only inauthentically, and rarely. The worse (that is, the more selfish) someone is, the darker he will be by the same stroke; yet just for that reason, here too, one can never know, never already see inside, let alone perfectly. If a particularity is significant—not dispersed, but instead gathering existential powers— it will still be no clearer to others. It likewise has its individual courtyard, precisely around the “brightness,” in part because no eyes are yet ready for it, in part because the depths have too few inhabitants to be other than individual and lonely. That is the true, fruitful incognito, around whose clearing the whole affair turns; not the false one of boredom, which has nothing to say. We want to tell some little stories about the true one, mere, elaborated hints: Chinese, American, Russian-Jewish. Even this little Chinese story could give a lesson in respect before concealment. Once upon a time, some farmers were caught in the fields by a sudden storm.10 They fled under a haybarn, but the lightning did not pass; it struck all around the hut. The farmers realized that the lightning was meant for one of them, and they agreed to hang their hats outside the door. Whoever’s hat the storm first carried away should be chased out, so the innocent would not be destroyed along with the guilty. No sooner were the hats hanging outside than a gale caught the hat of farmer Li and



Motifs of Concealment

blew it far across the field. Quickly the others threw Li out; in the same instant lightning struck, for Li was the only just man. If the good man was concealed in this story, then the bad man is concealed in another story that Richard Wilhelm rendered so beautifully.11 A sharecropper was riding home from the fields and stopped at a brook to water his horse. There he saw, not far below, a dragon lying half hidden by underbrush; flame quietly hissed from his nose and snout. The sharecropper jerked his horse back and raced through the forest so fast the trees seemed to rush past him, slowing to a trot only as he saw his village. There the neighbor boy came toward him, a boy of ten years, on the very path to the brook. The sharecropper snatched the boy up from the ground, placed him behind on the horse, and told him of the monster, not without looking about to see if the dragon could still hear him. The boy held fast to the sharecropper out of fear, and just kept asking: Did the dragon have huge eyes? And his teeth: could you hear them clicking? And did the flame hiss as he drank the water? The sharecropper berated the boy; there would be time for all that when they were under a roof. But the boy would not let up: Hey, watch this trick! Did the dragon look like this? Angrily the man turned: the dragon was behind him, and tore him open. That evening the neighbor boy again sat at the table in his own house, and the palm fronds before the doors were sanctified again against demons, after the villagers found the flayed sharecropper. Another story, conversely on the incognito of the light, goes like this, without ghosts, with the solemnity of the always possible, and probably really true. I remember it from a boy’s book, Cooper’s The Spy, and it comes from the time of the American Revolution, the war between the blue Revolutionaries and the British redcoats.12 A certain peddler had long traveled alongside the blue; he was fair, and treasured for his jests. Yet it began to seem that whenever Birch was around, the English would break through at some weak position. More and more often, and finally no doubt: the seeming peddler was a spy, the troops were warned, and a price was put on his head. The dragoons of Lieutenant Dunwoodie finally succeeded in flushing out the traitor, hidden in a gorge between the American and British troops. In his pockets was found an order from English headquarters itself, that the peddler Harvey Birch should have free passage next to His Majesty’s troops.

Motifs of Concealment



Locked in a barn with bag and baggage, a sentry outside, the spy was to be hanged at dawn. He was granted a chaplain at his own request, who at the time was squawking about the camp, grim of countenance; he entered the barn at nightfall to appeal to the sinner’s fear of God and began to drone the melody of a psalm. Only occasionally could one hear the peddler crying out, or sighing. Toward morning it was quiet; the man of God opened the door and asked the watch: Good man, does this camp have the book The God-Fearing Sinner’s Final Hours, or, Consolation for All Who Must Die a Violent Death? The sentry laughed and shook his head: No, but that must be a lovely book! The preacher thundered at him: Insolent sinner! Have you no fear of God? Fetch me my horse; I want to ask the minister in Yorktown if he has that breviary. Again one heard the pitiful peddler sobbing and whimpering within; the watch barred the door, and the minister rode off. But as they dragged the peddler to the gallows at the break of dawn, the preacher was still not back. The lieutenant wanted to say the prayer himself, but of course as it got lighter the man of God was punctually on the spot, too much on the spot, for one recognized him as the peddler, or rather as the minister beaten and dressed in the peddler’s clothes, and Harvey Birch had long since fled to safety. Months passed in the country. The American army’s main body, under incomparable leadership, advanced and decisively crushed General Clinton at Yorktown, and in the joyous October of the year  peace negotiations began. A free America elected its best man to the presidency. Many of the undecided now cheered the new republic, the formerly proscribed were restored to their civil rights, and only traitors remained excluded from the new brotherhood. Birch had disappeared. Only occasionally did someone claim to hear that he had slunk off to some new settlement in the North or West, under another name. Then one evening—since the War of Independence an entire generation had passed, and Washington rested in the grave—the American General Dunwoodie and his adjutant were riding across the fields near Niagara, where a late skirmish against redcoats from Canada had taken place. As Dunwoodie turned his horse, he saw to his surprise an injured civilian, an irregular obviously, or perhaps just a grave robber who’d fallen afoul. The general dismounted—and saw the long-proscribed man, bloody, and weathered since the time when a Lieutenant Dunwoodie had caught him



Motifs of Concealment

and locked him in a barn: the spy Harvey Birch. He gave the corpse a kick, flipping it over into the mud. A necklace fell from the dead man’s neck, from which hung a little tin box. The adjutant, on his sign, brought it to him, and Dunwoodie, to his astonishment, found a note inside, on yellowed paper; he read it, and his lips grew pale. For on the note was written, in a familiar hand: “Circumstances on which the good of the nation depended have until now prevented the proclamation of what no one but I knew. Harvey Birch was known as a spy in British employ, and so he was able to deceive them, and pass on to me the most important news of their plans. Even after the end of the War I could not reveal the truth, and restitute a man who refused any reward, to whom his country owes a profound debt, whom I, with great pride, call my friend. No man can repay what he has done; his reward is with God. George Washington.” General Dunwoodie lay his dagger on the dead man’s breast; the spy was carried to his camp and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, and laid to rest under cannon salvoes. How beautifully this already teaches a boy that others are dark, and no one can finally be judged. If this story separates what someone is and how he seems, a Russian Chasidic story extends that powerfully, somewhat in the same low mode as the vagrant beggar in the Chasidic house of prayer; we may recall him and his story of the former dream king. We may also recall the Master of Prayer, who stepped forward so grandly at the conclusion. But true greatness here operates secretly and inconspicuously, as a person and not a spectacle; here follows the Chasidic tale, conceived more deeply than the day, and deeper than even Rabbi Raphael of Belz at first understood his strange encounter to be. Once, as he was dreaming, an angel appeared to him. Whom will I sit next to on the other side? asked the rabbi. You will sit next to Yitzhak Leib ⁄ said the angel, and vanished. Now, Rabbi Raphael was famous in of Lodz, all Israel for his piety and esoteric knowledge. I will sit next to whom? he wondered. Next to Yitzhak Leib? In my whole life I’ve never heard that name before. The next day he had his horses hitched and set off on the long journey ⁄ It was Friday afternoon when he arrived, and he immediately to Lodz. called on the head of the congregation. He welcomed the great Kabbalist with reverences, but of Yitzhak Leib he could tell him nothing. They inquired of others together, among the old men, among the young, among the new arrivals, for a long time in vain, until one or another thought he

Motifs of Concealment



remembered: Near the town wall lives someone who’s often away on journeys, and never lets himself be seen; we think that’s Yitzhak Leib. ⁄ The rabbi had someone point out the way through wooden Lodz, which at that time was still a village; the first stars appeared as he stood before the right door, and he was overjoyed at celebrating the beginning of the Sabbath with this pious man. But Yitzhak Leib was not at home. He’s got business, said an old woman in the street, and grinned. Business on a Friday night?—The rabbi did not know what to think of these words. Well then, I’ll wait for him in his house. He sat long by the fire, and thought of his dream, looked at the miserable gear, and remembered the words of Rabbi Eliezer: it’s easier to save someone than to feed him. He thought of the Sabbath of the higher realms, and how he would celebrate it with the one who had come thence. He thought of Gideon, who had stopped the sun, and of the widow’s pitcher, of David and Jonathan—as Yitzhak Leib entered, a completely decrepit old man, and, it seemed, drunk.13 No sooner did Leib notice his guest than he asked doubtfully if he still wanted to do business with him. No, Yitzhak Leib, I came to you because—the rabbi got no further, for Leib had already begun eating, without saying the prayer. But Yitzhak Leib, you haven’t even spoken the blessing yet. The wretched man shook his head, said he’d forgotten how to pray, and the rabbi spoke the words for him. After the end of the meal, and numerous offers from Yitzhak Leib, none of which was an invitation to eat, when the rabbi did not suggest a counteroffer, the scoundrel grew angry and threw his guest out of the house with much cursing. The rabbi stood there on the street, on a wasted Sabbath, and in his own mirror. So I’m to sit next to this great sinner on the other side? Truly, my Lord, I must say, you have some strange ideas— and fainted dead away. When a man found him it was already day; he was shown the way to the inn, and ordered the stable hand to harness the horses at once to go back to Belz. All his honors he would throw off, and chastise himself, that God might show him his great flaw, and perhaps forgive him. Listlessly he sat in the carriage and did not notice as it came to a river that was flooding and had almost wrecked the bridge; the wheels only half gripped the planks. Fortunately they got across; then they heard shouting from the banks, and he saw Yitzhak Leib, jumping onto the bridge and calling. You can’t come across, the bridge is cracked, shouted the rabbi. Yitzhak Leib threw his caftan onto the water and rode it right over the water, right



Motifs of Concealment

across the river, onto the bank. I liked that prayer, said Yitzhak Leib. I heard it that way the last time from my father, but you must say it for me one more time; I have a weak memory and I can’t retain the words. Yitzhak Leib, said Rabbi Raphael, crying, what could I teach you? Give me your blessing! Yitzhak Leib shook his head, laid his hands on the head of the man bowed down before him, threw his caftan onto the water, and rode it back across, standing. Rabbi Raphael, however, consoled, rode back to the holy city of Belz. If this story is nothing, say storytellers in Africa, it belongs to the one who told it; if it’s something, it belongs to all of us. But of course no one has all of it here; the story won’t become clear. It also won’t finish up with that strange man who expresses himself first wrongly, then only in symptoms, and not even in riddles. Neither his features nor his actions show what is great about Yitzhak Leib, not even goodness in its obvious form. The fruit that he bears lets him at most suspect, but not know; for his walking on water is likewise just a symptom, one that in the world of the Kabbala and elsewhere, as we know, has the highest magical rank, but still reveals no content. With the three hermits of Tolstoy’s folktale, who have something in common with the Chassidic story, and who likewise walk across the sea to a ship in order to learn the Lord’s Prayer, everything is much more blatant, and much more predictably decided: “They always smile, and shine like the angels in heaven.”14 They appear just as one imagines the pious, and they already stand with Jesus. But in the incognito of Yitzhak Leib, absolutely nothing is yet habitable, as it were; there is perhaps a key, and the house is ready, but the key will not turn, will not open the “angel’s door” in the least, not even halfway; perhaps just because it really is ready. This is Chassidic: that the zaddikim on whom life depends are hidden, perhaps even from themselves; they may know that they are great, but they do not feel it. Above all, concerning our final initiation into ourselves: in very few stories is the incognito, even of the consummate person, maintained so disquietingly, so extraordinarily conscientiously, against every prior psychological, social, religious determination. There are certainly stable characters, dependable visages and lines of vision; but they too never get completely out of the ultimate undecidedness (that they may also have before themselves). They are rounded, but not closed; nothing steps forward from this strict overtness already closing itself; the great sage also saw his own primordial moment, that is to say ours, still unrevealed, to say nothing of the

The Corner of the Blanket



rabbi who at first misunderstood and later sensed it but likewise never knew it. Sooner or later, says Tolstoy, one will experience all of that: one will know what people, partial or whole, are about; the concealment will lift that is always one’s own concealment. The potential splendor will rise that, when it exists, is always the human splendor, or part of it. Tolstoy means that the key to us all is death: that would hardly suffice for the purpose.

Just Knock If we were not at all yet, then we’d also not be there for anyone. But the halfness in which we are can easily be disturbed from outside. It is too little to resist, but not too little enough, and then again not yet collected enough. In what disturbed us, however, there is already too much dying, and it disperses us even more than we already are. The knocking that tears us from our sleep, even out of hard work, not only frightens but stabs and lames us. Something of death is already audible in these disturbances; hard work hardly collects enough—on the contrary, it makes us even more vulnerable. And being torn away does not always lead to ourselves, discloses nothing good. Then something untimely can taste good, even if faintly, and probably falsely, but it’s still here, and it halts. Friends easily become strange then, of course; it’s revealed what we are and what they are to us when the disturbing little thump ends. One feels then that one isn’t done yet, just can’t really stop. In any case, it is not always the expected that knocks on the door.

The Corner of the Blanket The same thing was experienced by someone even more directly, and drove him even further from himself. He had injured himself somewhat during a solitary excursion, while washing his hands. A piece of rusty metal went quite deeply into his skin. But the wound didn’t bleed, or rather just neatly and inwardly, so that no bandage was needed, and his afternoon was completely uninterrupted. Toward evening the man, unable to think of anything better, went down to the garden of the pavilion; a summer stock theater had set up there, a pitiful revue for some idlers. At the moment a

The Corner of the Blanket



rabbi who at first misunderstood and later sensed it but likewise never knew it. Sooner or later, says Tolstoy, one will experience all of that: one will know what people, partial or whole, are about; the concealment will lift that is always one’s own concealment. The potential splendor will rise that, when it exists, is always the human splendor, or part of it. Tolstoy means that the key to us all is death: that would hardly suffice for the purpose.

Just Knock If we were not at all yet, then we’d also not be there for anyone. But the halfness in which we are can easily be disturbed from outside. It is too little to resist, but not too little enough, and then again not yet collected enough. In what disturbed us, however, there is already too much dying, and it disperses us even more than we already are. The knocking that tears us from our sleep, even out of hard work, not only frightens but stabs and lames us. Something of death is already audible in these disturbances; hard work hardly collects enough—on the contrary, it makes us even more vulnerable. And being torn away does not always lead to ourselves, discloses nothing good. Then something untimely can taste good, even if faintly, and probably falsely, but it’s still here, and it halts. Friends easily become strange then, of course; it’s revealed what we are and what they are to us when the disturbing little thump ends. One feels then that one isn’t done yet, just can’t really stop. In any case, it is not always the expected that knocks on the door.

The Corner of the Blanket The same thing was experienced by someone even more directly, and drove him even further from himself. He had injured himself somewhat during a solitary excursion, while washing his hands. A piece of rusty metal went quite deeply into his skin. But the wound didn’t bleed, or rather just neatly and inwardly, so that no bandage was needed, and his afternoon was completely uninterrupted. Toward evening the man, unable to think of anything better, went down to the garden of the pavilion; a summer stock theater had set up there, a pitiful revue for some idlers. At the moment a

The Corner of the Blanket



rabbi who at first misunderstood and later sensed it but likewise never knew it. Sooner or later, says Tolstoy, one will experience all of that: one will know what people, partial or whole, are about; the concealment will lift that is always one’s own concealment. The potential splendor will rise that, when it exists, is always the human splendor, or part of it. Tolstoy means that the key to us all is death: that would hardly suffice for the purpose.

Just Knock If we were not at all yet, then we’d also not be there for anyone. But the halfness in which we are can easily be disturbed from outside. It is too little to resist, but not too little enough, and then again not yet collected enough. In what disturbed us, however, there is already too much dying, and it disperses us even more than we already are. The knocking that tears us from our sleep, even out of hard work, not only frightens but stabs and lames us. Something of death is already audible in these disturbances; hard work hardly collects enough—on the contrary, it makes us even more vulnerable. And being torn away does not always lead to ourselves, discloses nothing good. Then something untimely can taste good, even if faintly, and probably falsely, but it’s still here, and it halts. Friends easily become strange then, of course; it’s revealed what we are and what they are to us when the disturbing little thump ends. One feels then that one isn’t done yet, just can’t really stop. In any case, it is not always the expected that knocks on the door.

The Corner of the Blanket The same thing was experienced by someone even more directly, and drove him even further from himself. He had injured himself somewhat during a solitary excursion, while washing his hands. A piece of rusty metal went quite deeply into his skin. But the wound didn’t bleed, or rather just neatly and inwardly, so that no bandage was needed, and his afternoon was completely uninterrupted. Toward evening the man, unable to think of anything better, went down to the garden of the pavilion; a summer stock theater had set up there, a pitiful revue for some idlers. At the moment a



Short Excursion

trainer was standing above, and tormenting little dogs, Spitzes and fox terriers, who had to jump through hoops or mince into little houses and then come out again, or put on nightcaps and get into bed, or sit on a toilet, and similar tricks. Here it should be added that a year earlier the traveler, as untalented in illness as possible, had nonetheless or therefore acquired a slight infection in his hand, which had just healed. He knew, then, what infection was— knew at least the signs, with all his disgust for it. Now the dogs were assembling for an unspeakably stupid march, each with its forepaws on the back of the poor dog before it; the music grew lively, and the audience laughed. Then, in the middle of this adorable scene, he felt a violent pain in his arm, so that the cup of coffee he was holding rattled on its saucer. The moment might well remind one of wounds, especially on this evening, before the disgustingly comical stench of the poor animals nearby; one could easily expire in a place such as this, if one were unlucky. This minor peril was furnished in just the right way; it could easily remind one of dying, of what is so to speak Saxon, beddish, about dying.15 The vacuity, plainness, paltriness, pastiness up there waved one corner of the banner of death. Of course the visitor stood only at the beginning of these feelings, and they didn’t concern him at all, but he followed them as they followed him, far back, back into diapers and bedpans and female caregivers all around. Here was a piece of true strangeness: one had been carried there, and not on an adventure, but the opposite, far away from one’s people. Petit bourgeois kitsch generally goes quite well with the deathly pap that children get.

Short Excursion Someone falling asleep can also become alone, can of course be like someone traveling. Awake, we prefer to sit with the wall behind us, our gaze fixed on the locale. But how amazing: when falling asleep, most turn toward the wall, thereby turning their back to the dark, now unfamiliar room. It’s as though the wall suddenly attracted us and the room paralyzed us, as though sleep had discovered something about the wall that usually comes only to the better kind of death. It’s as though sleep, like disturbance and strangeness, also trained us in dying. Then this scene certainly looks different; it discloses the dialectical appearance of home.



Short Excursion

trainer was standing above, and tormenting little dogs, Spitzes and fox terriers, who had to jump through hoops or mince into little houses and then come out again, or put on nightcaps and get into bed, or sit on a toilet, and similar tricks. Here it should be added that a year earlier the traveler, as untalented in illness as possible, had nonetheless or therefore acquired a slight infection in his hand, which had just healed. He knew, then, what infection was— knew at least the signs, with all his disgust for it. Now the dogs were assembling for an unspeakably stupid march, each with its forepaws on the back of the poor dog before it; the music grew lively, and the audience laughed. Then, in the middle of this adorable scene, he felt a violent pain in his arm, so that the cup of coffee he was holding rattled on its saucer. The moment might well remind one of wounds, especially on this evening, before the disgustingly comical stench of the poor animals nearby; one could easily expire in a place such as this, if one were unlucky. This minor peril was furnished in just the right way; it could easily remind one of dying, of what is so to speak Saxon, beddish, about dying.15 The vacuity, plainness, paltriness, pastiness up there waved one corner of the banner of death. Of course the visitor stood only at the beginning of these feelings, and they didn’t concern him at all, but he followed them as they followed him, far back, back into diapers and bedpans and female caregivers all around. Here was a piece of true strangeness: one had been carried there, and not on an adventure, but the opposite, far away from one’s people. Petit bourgeois kitsch generally goes quite well with the deathly pap that children get.

Short Excursion Someone falling asleep can also become alone, can of course be like someone traveling. Awake, we prefer to sit with the wall behind us, our gaze fixed on the locale. But how amazing: when falling asleep, most turn toward the wall, thereby turning their back to the dark, now unfamiliar room. It’s as though the wall suddenly attracted us and the room paralyzed us, as though sleep had discovered something about the wall that usually comes only to the better kind of death. It’s as though sleep, like disturbance and strangeness, also trained us in dying. Then this scene certainly looks different; it discloses the dialectical appearance of home.

Terror and Hope



In fact a dying man who was saved at the last moment gave an explanation: I turned toward the wall, and felt: what’s out there, what’s in the room, is nothing, no longer concerns me, but in the wall I’ll find my cause. Later it seemed to the man as though in statu moriendi an organ of death had developed; the wall opened up, the almost dying man thought he was traveling into the wall, and a new eye looked inside, as though smeared with the dervish’s salve from the Thousand and One Nights, that lets one see the inside of cliffs and mountains as something sparkling, if not as one’s own.16 The interior of the wall was small, but his reversed senses saw something in it that seemed particularly important. Exit, exodus—indeed the likeness recurs even more strongly outside of bed, or more understandably, in the outwardly distancing condition of departure. Even everyone’s obvious inability, even the friendliest and inwardly richest person’s, to converse from the car down to the platform on leaving, or the other way around, is due to the fact that the one staying back looks like an egg, the one leaving on the other hand like an arrow; both already inhabit different spaces, closed off from one another almost hermetically, with different contents, curves, and forms. Moreover, the one leaving is usually proud, the one staying back, melancholy. On arrival both are in the same position and mood, though with the variation that the guest is still blinded by the new day, whereas it seems granted to the host to teach him. If one indifferently watches an arrival, say of a great ship where one isn’t expecting anyone, the potential emptiness of the disappointment combines with a strange phenomenon that concerns us as well. The pride of departure, in which joy and pride at dying already resonated, is here clearly fulfilled by some triumph of arrival. Above all when the ship pulls in with music; then, concealed in that kitsch (which is not petit bourgeois) is something of the joy of a (potential) resurrection of all the dead.

Terror and Hope We don’t always approach the beyond in such a good mood. Sleep also knows more dispiriting voids; they are probably those where we fall rather than radiate. There a thick air is brewing, and it is why the clear air blows much more seldom here. An ailing woman dreamed that while she could not move from the spot, an old woman kept coming toward her, grinning horribly, with hands

Terror and Hope



In fact a dying man who was saved at the last moment gave an explanation: I turned toward the wall, and felt: what’s out there, what’s in the room, is nothing, no longer concerns me, but in the wall I’ll find my cause. Later it seemed to the man as though in statu moriendi an organ of death had developed; the wall opened up, the almost dying man thought he was traveling into the wall, and a new eye looked inside, as though smeared with the dervish’s salve from the Thousand and One Nights, that lets one see the inside of cliffs and mountains as something sparkling, if not as one’s own.16 The interior of the wall was small, but his reversed senses saw something in it that seemed particularly important. Exit, exodus—indeed the likeness recurs even more strongly outside of bed, or more understandably, in the outwardly distancing condition of departure. Even everyone’s obvious inability, even the friendliest and inwardly richest person’s, to converse from the car down to the platform on leaving, or the other way around, is due to the fact that the one staying back looks like an egg, the one leaving on the other hand like an arrow; both already inhabit different spaces, closed off from one another almost hermetically, with different contents, curves, and forms. Moreover, the one leaving is usually proud, the one staying back, melancholy. On arrival both are in the same position and mood, though with the variation that the guest is still blinded by the new day, whereas it seems granted to the host to teach him. If one indifferently watches an arrival, say of a great ship where one isn’t expecting anyone, the potential emptiness of the disappointment combines with a strange phenomenon that concerns us as well. The pride of departure, in which joy and pride at dying already resonated, is here clearly fulfilled by some triumph of arrival. Above all when the ship pulls in with music; then, concealed in that kitsch (which is not petit bourgeois) is something of the joy of a (potential) resurrection of all the dead.

Terror and Hope We don’t always approach the beyond in such a good mood. Sleep also knows more dispiriting voids; they are probably those where we fall rather than radiate. There a thick air is brewing, and it is why the clear air blows much more seldom here. An ailing woman dreamed that while she could not move from the spot, an old woman kept coming toward her, grinning horribly, with hands



Terror and Hope

outstretched and eyes gaping, ever nearer, murmuring: There’s nothing to be afraid of, there’s nothing to be afraid of, there’s nothing to be afraid of. This didn’t even awaken the sleeper; she actually fainted. She ground her teeth to mush out of fear; for days she felt lamed. Now it is hardly credible that the piercing horror of such images points to humanly known or even unconscious disturbances, to sexual or other desires and repressions. Instead, nightmares seem to be especially good travelers through caves and hideaways, providing a postvital fright, a quick and isolated death fright. The supposition arises: here are the hallucinations of certain sinisterutopian possibilities of either our incognito itself or of what our incognito awaits (when it is not positively fortified and cleared). Even the specter in the aforementioned nightmare seems remarkably true, in the split between its laughter and hands, its hands and words; the macabre spectacles at the carnival, the old, derisive, almost cheerfully horrible images of monsters, can sometimes sing that lullaby. There is no known, immanently adequate reason for these images; more likely they are mythically reminiscent, but for that as well they’re too strong, alien, and above all too present. Far more rarely does joy come out of the beyond to show the way home. It was there in the simple pleasure in the wall, in the joy of departure, in the pride on arrival. It is nourished by sources equally as strange as the nightmare, and likewise has no adequate external cause. The terror of the nightmare image perhaps corresponds on the other side to the warm, dreamy kitsch of Hannele Goes to Heaven.17 In the film Hannele walks across the holiday market, shyly touches the garlands and decorations with a nameless smile; a street singer plucks a harp, and the miserable child stands under a light. Impatiently she feels herself called, and the lovely sprig blooms, the defenseless, downtrodden one; even in the water where she drowns herself Jesus still calls to her, and her fever dream in the coffin, when he flies up with every fantastic image of fulfillment, has no likeness to Hannele’s life as it empirically was. It receives only the fairy tales heard in it, the one day that shone more brightly, a presentiment of true existence that floats down to her from distant heavens, a primordially simple anticipation of Paradise, or the summons to it. In the end of course we see the dismal bed again; of the dream there remains merely a benign deception that won’t cancel the pessimism about this side, the atheism about the other. Nonetheless—even in the most complete lucidity of disillusionment—an ideal of God, who, seen by day (or by night), has disappeared from the whole scene (this one, and realer ones), has not wholly disap-

Excursus: Human and Wax Figure



peared, but survives in the smile over the little trinkets that a poor child could never have, or only by grace of a fever dream that truly hallucinates angels and saviors out of such a secret core. The winter of the world has no more refuted this bright core than some springtime could refute the excess of nightmares or other terrors that are also in this core. But even awake, many a joy radiates across, without yet lighting anything. Many remember the happiness they felt as boys when they could give a handyman his tip. The empty house when a stranger rang the bell already made them happy; just reaching out the window gave a joy to which even first love could not compare. It was a grand gaiety in little things, in a hand gesture with something in it, and it had a certain, precise mysticism, as though something out of a wish dream, or better, had appeared here. Kant, in his psychological lectures, speaks of the “moral” organs, and how remarkable it really is that the impractical ability for moral action should even appear in an organism. But, Kant goes on, just as the child in the womb already has lungs and stomach, although these organs are of no use to him in his condition, so does man—even though surrounded by the wickedness of this world—nonetheless have an organ of his higher determination, his other citizenship. In any case it requires strong anticipation (in Kant’s uncritical likeness itself ) to put not only “disinterested” action into its space, but also the feeling of evidence that appeared in the tip to the handyman as happiness, as something extending outside the body, a slight moment of the good death, afterdeath. Here, too, something grows more tropically than the familiar limits of our subject (and of the world) would already allow; immoderate fright, like “baseless” joy, has hidden its cause.18 It is hidden in people, and is not yet out in the world; joy is out the least, and yet it would be the main thing.

Excursus: Human and Wax Figure Everything was already quiet below. Evening streets with no pedestrians. Drowsy counter; the rooms above seemed empty. An hour before closing, the best time for this. The gallery was not at the fair, but in the middle of the city. In a grimy building from the s, like those where one had lived as a child. In the lobbies stood ornamental plants in artificial grottoes; our parents arranged them nicely.

Excursus: Human and Wax Figure



peared, but survives in the smile over the little trinkets that a poor child could never have, or only by grace of a fever dream that truly hallucinates angels and saviors out of such a secret core. The winter of the world has no more refuted this bright core than some springtime could refute the excess of nightmares or other terrors that are also in this core. But even awake, many a joy radiates across, without yet lighting anything. Many remember the happiness they felt as boys when they could give a handyman his tip. The empty house when a stranger rang the bell already made them happy; just reaching out the window gave a joy to which even first love could not compare. It was a grand gaiety in little things, in a hand gesture with something in it, and it had a certain, precise mysticism, as though something out of a wish dream, or better, had appeared here. Kant, in his psychological lectures, speaks of the “moral” organs, and how remarkable it really is that the impractical ability for moral action should even appear in an organism. But, Kant goes on, just as the child in the womb already has lungs and stomach, although these organs are of no use to him in his condition, so does man—even though surrounded by the wickedness of this world—nonetheless have an organ of his higher determination, his other citizenship. In any case it requires strong anticipation (in Kant’s uncritical likeness itself ) to put not only “disinterested” action into its space, but also the feeling of evidence that appeared in the tip to the handyman as happiness, as something extending outside the body, a slight moment of the good death, afterdeath. Here, too, something grows more tropically than the familiar limits of our subject (and of the world) would already allow; immoderate fright, like “baseless” joy, has hidden its cause.18 It is hidden in people, and is not yet out in the world; joy is out the least, and yet it would be the main thing.

Excursus: Human and Wax Figure Everything was already quiet below. Evening streets with no pedestrians. Drowsy counter; the rooms above seemed empty. An hour before closing, the best time for this. The gallery was not at the fair, but in the middle of the city. In a grimy building from the s, like those where one had lived as a child. In the lobbies stood ornamental plants in artificial grottoes; our parents arranged them nicely.



Excursus: Human and Wax Figure

A lady and gentleman entered. The stairway was white as marble, the banisters bronzed, red velvet handrails. It was out of some bad dream of a mansion. A visitor came down the stairs and looked the couple over, but he held his leg out in the air, would not set it down. He was made of wax, and the couple going up, the gentleman coming down, exchanged suspicious glances. Around the last landing, and one could look into a great, brightly lit ballroom. No one, as it were, was in it, but it was filled from top to bottom with princes, crinolines, uniforms, and giants by the entrances. The lady went no further, and her companion also halted, feeling a malicious pleasure. They sat down on the steps, and he told her of the fright he’d had as a boy when he would read of infamous castles where no one lived, but on stormy nights all the windows were lit. What was there, what sat there, what was that light, what did it fall on: the sight of this gathering is what he’d dreamed of, his body stretched up to the sill, his face at the window of this unspeakable ballroom. Or he told of Ali the Cairene from the Thousand and One Nights—a long time ago; he was the same age as we are now—and of the haunted house in Cairo he’d entered; for one year and a day no one had dared to enter, as whoever spent the night there would vanish by morning.19 In this house Ali went to bed, and all was still. Candles glowed on the fine furniture; there was not a shadow in the room where something could hide. Then, toward midnight, there was a call from outside, from the other end of the stairway: Ali, shall we come down? The voices were like children’s, and Ali did not answer. Then his bed rose up, the door opened, and Ali and bed flew up the stairs into the hall whence the voices had come. The childish voices were part of it, said the man, were cloying as chloroform; for true danger may be inanimate, but is always invisible. In the meantime they had come to the ballroom, among the rosy and staring assembly. Most were completely preoccupied with themselves as puppets. Only some wax figures wearing gabardine jackets bowed and watched the others. In front of a lieutenant, the visitors themselves fell silent; he was just like one of the officers from the old Gartenlaube, at grandmother’s by the stove.20 They walked across the Christmas fair, in spiked helmet, navy blue, and epaulettes; they sat bivouacked around the campfire at Mars-La-Tour. Bourbaki stood next to the waxen lieutenant, and indeed there was an entire diorama full of Germans and French: Napoleon III and Bismarck before the historic hut, also historic and Romantic scenes of every kind,

Excursus: Human and Wax Figure



the Kaiser, the Czar, and King Humbert, the virgin abducted by a gorilla, Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath, those tired of life, with noose or sea, the beautiful witch tied to the stake—patriotic and criminological exhibits of every kind from the crowd’s view. The displays themselves were a very complex intersection of the porcelain in cabinets and the stations of a Calvary, all dead stuff that is human, and would be just as terrible if it moved as it is mysterious that it does not. Its clothing hung from prostheses, from the stuffing sticking out from a burst seam, but the head was flowering undertaker’s wax; the eyes glittered and the personality stood firm under the loupe of silence and glass. Into such a waxworks—the gentleman saw this once at the cinema—a pair of lovers were locked in overnight; and he told the story now. They sat on a bench under this dwarf palm. Across from them they had Napoleon’s coronation in Notre Dame: the Emperor, the Pope, the kneeling marshals. The lover in the film was just kissing his girlfriend on the bench, and one got a close-up of their eyes—closing, not closing, open as never before— when they screamed. For with eyes agape they saw: the Emperor Napoleon moved, the Pope set down the crown, and the waxen marshals cheered in the night. Here love was not stronger than death, or if it was, then not stronger than undeath. As an illusory life that suddenly appears as illusory death, so the narrator made a joke out of horror, as is only right, and reinforced his air of authority. On they walked, past the artificial corpses and likenesses; their own bodies became strange to them, the dead in bodily form no less strange. Then there was a call from below, from the register, that it was closing time. The heart of such a waxworks is called the Chamber of Horrors; in here one placed the robber and madman on one’s nose as glasses, in order to see flesh. But it was not the criminals who became visible here, though they stood in a circle, pale and soon bloody. Instead only their nearness to anatomy appeared, the edges of the wound and the delirium of the final torment. A severed head with blood dripping into its beard, a hanged man who’d bitten through his tongue—all in wax, under glass, behind the criminals who provided this view. A lot of room on our body for pain, found the man. Torture has been precisely adapted to it, or the body for torture, so much more abundantly than for pleasure. If one could turn the iron widow and the woman on her front half as high as we can extend her downward, into this hull of flesh, then a mountain of happiness would rise, and we would be the gods who live on it.



Excursus: Human and Wax Figure

Like gods? asked the woman; they would have to be of glass, and have no drop of blood in them, they would have to be made of nothing at all in order to be gods. She said this in the anatomical cabinet, where wax became entirely material, no longer seemingly alive or seemingly dead. Charlotte Corday no longer eternally stabbed Marat, nor was she condemned to do so as a “manifestation” in wax, even if she did move; instead the open body itself was present here as a thing, and just as irrevocably. In a casket like Snow White’s, Venus lay without expression, with nightshirt and Caesarean section. Severed doctor’s hands still bobbed over her body, with scalpel pointed downward and blue cuffs; they came out of the air and hovered like butterflies over the incision through which one could see the child. But otherwise Venus became a demonstration, no longer a figure; for the specimens all around—the putrefaction and hellish color of diseased skin, a demonic sculpture underneath the healthy one—were no longer those of the familiar, healthy body. First prize in anatomical modeling, said the diploma over the door—in fact deserved, for no sculptor has yet carved the intestines beneath the skin; a bronze Apollo is all surface; portraiture and art history only move along the body, never here in its depths. Over the two observers came a disgust otherwise known only to pubescence, this grim stare into the guts next to love, this X-ray vision of blood and shit next to springtime. Even afterward, even surgeons, when they have a body cut open before them, isolated, with the patient’s “face” covered, find no direct path from the bloody to the human phenomenon. What a machinery they saw again here inside our bag of flesh. A snare for Apollo, and for Christians a Babel, despite the “sacred head now wounded.”21 What a good ostrich policy we follow in health, which notices none of this; what a questionable policy with beauty, that in this clockwork of love sees only the dial, and then only one time zone. What a profound ostrich policy, but this, always and truly, is the orgasm that blinds our eyes with desire. Does blood have any other outlet than into the living, speaking, social human being (which it does not in fact have), a truly precise one, Dionysiacally opening, turning? Does the ostrich policy of orgasm, let alone the thrill of the serial killer, see the body of blood more truly or more futurally than our gentle, superficial eyes that sail only around the coast of the skin and shudder when they come into the interior? Here, before this severed heart with aorta, the aura of a squid, this pumping station of such mysterious and perishable material, there was in any case only the terror of not seeing oneself to the extent that one sees the body from the inside. First prize in

Nearby: Inn of the Insane



anatomical modeling here too, so much organic reason, but no one knows what’s inside the body of blood, other than the already visible external person, who of course is only halfway in it, and not even halfway. Here was no longer Ali’s story, but the haunted house itself, set in the clear light of day. Their mood was not Greek; the light of the humanistic world grew faint. The puppets and dioramas along the way back had transmitted their stare to the world of the living. The gallery closed; the ornamentals at the entrance got fresh water, and the eternally descending gentleman on the stairs was dusted off by the attendant.

Nearby: Inn of the Insane Someone who often went off the beaten path had this to say when asked about it. (He spoke in images, though not floridly or enthusiastically, as though trying to prophesy, but rather slightly frivolously, as if wanting to loosen things up with modest tropes. Far from the usual solemnity with which fool’s capers are transcribed and the insane scientifically classified, as though they were monkeys, and the psychiatrist himself, nothing.) The insane, he said, only want to see a bit of the country. They would like to take a little stroll outside our village. To the nearest inn, which they’ve heard good things about. But between the village and the inn there’s a forest; through this forest go the lunatics. In the forest there’s no path, only underbrush, fallen trees and such, so that it’s easy to lose the way. There are cockatoos, parrots, even monkeys, screeching loudly. The wanderers become dazed; rapt in murmurings and natural spirit voices, they finally shriek along in fun, in fear, in anger, so that they no longer know how they ended up in this forest. Indeed, they even forget what they actually wanted from this stroll. The doctors stand back at the edge of the village, facing the forest, shouting into it; they call to the lunatics, they should really come back. The lunatics hear none of this for all the din in the forest, don’t want to go back, but only to the inn. To the Sign of the Red Ox or the Merry Silesian or the Trinity, of which only the signs hang among us, but nothing is fulfilled. I myself (said the storyteller) have also heard of the inn, and you (turning to his friend), it seems, no less than I. I don’t go through the woods myself, but take a little detour around it. Maybe, quite possibly, I set one

Nearby: Inn of the Insane



anatomical modeling here too, so much organic reason, but no one knows what’s inside the body of blood, other than the already visible external person, who of course is only halfway in it, and not even halfway. Here was no longer Ali’s story, but the haunted house itself, set in the clear light of day. Their mood was not Greek; the light of the humanistic world grew faint. The puppets and dioramas along the way back had transmitted their stare to the world of the living. The gallery closed; the ornamentals at the entrance got fresh water, and the eternally descending gentleman on the stairs was dusted off by the attendant.

Nearby: Inn of the Insane Someone who often went off the beaten path had this to say when asked about it. (He spoke in images, though not floridly or enthusiastically, as though trying to prophesy, but rather slightly frivolously, as if wanting to loosen things up with modest tropes. Far from the usual solemnity with which fool’s capers are transcribed and the insane scientifically classified, as though they were monkeys, and the psychiatrist himself, nothing.) The insane, he said, only want to see a bit of the country. They would like to take a little stroll outside our village. To the nearest inn, which they’ve heard good things about. But between the village and the inn there’s a forest; through this forest go the lunatics. In the forest there’s no path, only underbrush, fallen trees and such, so that it’s easy to lose the way. There are cockatoos, parrots, even monkeys, screeching loudly. The wanderers become dazed; rapt in murmurings and natural spirit voices, they finally shriek along in fun, in fear, in anger, so that they no longer know how they ended up in this forest. Indeed, they even forget what they actually wanted from this stroll. The doctors stand back at the edge of the village, facing the forest, shouting into it; they call to the lunatics, they should really come back. The lunatics hear none of this for all the din in the forest, don’t want to go back, but only to the inn. To the Sign of the Red Ox or the Merry Silesian or the Trinity, of which only the signs hang among us, but nothing is fulfilled. I myself (said the storyteller) have also heard of the inn, and you (turning to his friend), it seems, no less than I. I don’t go through the woods myself, but take a little detour around it. Maybe, quite possibly, I set one



Tableau with Curve

foot in the forest for a short while, or even both when the path is too rough. You too, in any case (he addressed his listener again, although the latter didn’t want to know), you’re there more often than I; perhaps you don’t screech along with the jungle animals in the branches, but you throw coconuts along with them; at least it looks that way sometimes, or sounds that way. Yet if we keep to the outside path, we can very well find the inn beyond the forest. Between apples and oranges, there’s the nub of the matter. Cooked in fervent love, with the seasoning from our better dreams. Who the innkeeper is I don’t know, naturally; he probably only took shape gradually, and is not yet there himself. From there I’ll call to the lunatics—in short, to the lost souls who race about objectlessly, these decent and basically very sensible tourists. They’ll hear me, of course, quite unlike the doctors at their back, whose village no longer interests them at all. The parrots too will then have nothing more to say, for the object under their noses, which calls to them, will have a better sound. What was alive in their capers and their chatter, of course, was not these themselves, but only the missed goal. So I will drive out the woods by means of the goal, and “benightedness” by the lights of the inn (its mullions and transoms). Then insanity will be eradicated—a few stragglers from the first generation excepted, who remain in the forest. The people of the village will follow too, at least occasionally, as they prefer. To me, probably, they’ll raise a monument—next to the new highway, in the middle of the forest, where there are sharp bends. A monument in the shape of the letter S, or perhaps just a signpost with one arm. Of course without my head; that, no one will need anymore. Familiar postscript: the consummate psychologist (or Indologist, philosopher, etc.) will cease to be one in that moment when he is one. He becomes an object of psychology (or Indology, philosophy, etc.).

Tableau with Curve Desperation can easily make one credulous. Thus that poor man, hungry, sick, unemployed, who thought he heard a quite astounding voice in his sleep. It told him: under the second pier of the old bridge in Prague lay a treasure that for years had awaited its discoverer. The man, who needed some consolation, even or especially when being consoled, took the dream



Tableau with Curve

foot in the forest for a short while, or even both when the path is too rough. You too, in any case (he addressed his listener again, although the latter didn’t want to know), you’re there more often than I; perhaps you don’t screech along with the jungle animals in the branches, but you throw coconuts along with them; at least it looks that way sometimes, or sounds that way. Yet if we keep to the outside path, we can very well find the inn beyond the forest. Between apples and oranges, there’s the nub of the matter. Cooked in fervent love, with the seasoning from our better dreams. Who the innkeeper is I don’t know, naturally; he probably only took shape gradually, and is not yet there himself. From there I’ll call to the lunatics—in short, to the lost souls who race about objectlessly, these decent and basically very sensible tourists. They’ll hear me, of course, quite unlike the doctors at their back, whose village no longer interests them at all. The parrots too will then have nothing more to say, for the object under their noses, which calls to them, will have a better sound. What was alive in their capers and their chatter, of course, was not these themselves, but only the missed goal. So I will drive out the woods by means of the goal, and “benightedness” by the lights of the inn (its mullions and transoms). Then insanity will be eradicated—a few stragglers from the first generation excepted, who remain in the forest. The people of the village will follow too, at least occasionally, as they prefer. To me, probably, they’ll raise a monument—next to the new highway, in the middle of the forest, where there are sharp bends. A monument in the shape of the letter S, or perhaps just a signpost with one arm. Of course without my head; that, no one will need anymore. Familiar postscript: the consummate psychologist (or Indologist, philosopher, etc.) will cease to be one in that moment when he is one. He becomes an object of psychology (or Indology, philosophy, etc.).

Tableau with Curve Desperation can easily make one credulous. Thus that poor man, hungry, sick, unemployed, who thought he heard a quite astounding voice in his sleep. It told him: under the second pier of the old bridge in Prague lay a treasure that for years had awaited its discoverer. The man, who needed some consolation, even or especially when being consoled, took the dream

Tableau with Curve



seriously, however; upon waking, he readied himself for the journey, scraped together all the cash in his hovel, set out on the long road to Prague. There he obtained permission to dig under the pier, or to have someone dig, since that wouldn’t obstruct the traffic. The effect was and remained as the bridge attendant predicted: gravel and nothing but gravel. Until the man told his dream, complete with voice, to the attendant, who replied, You fell for that? I too once heard a voice in a dream, telling me that in a faraway city (here the attendant named the very city whence the man had come) a treasure awaited me, and much more handily than under a pier—right under my stove there, which I was just firing up. Do you really think I went there, that I would believe such nonsense? The attendant was indisputably correct; that, the curious gravel digger had to concede. Encouraged, naturally, that the attendant had named not only his home town but his street, incidentally and completely unsuspectingly. The failed treasure hunter stopped listening entirely, was rather ashamed before the still homebound, normal bridge attendant; set out, disillusioned, back home. But once he, this tiny Don Quixote, was back in his hovel, after all that departure and all this sad return, hungry and cold, he found no wood to fire up his stove. It made no difference now; he tore up his floor for the wood and found—tableau with curve!—his treasure at last. Tableau with a curve that winds back, in other words; here the story ends, wandering far away, and the good thing lay nearby. The man could doubtless have had the thing more cheaply, and he probably told himself so afterward. Yet the question still goes out to the thoughtful listener to his story (there is supposed to be a Chassidic version, and a related story appears in the Arabian Nights22): Was the journey to Prague in vain? Are not so many insights, profits, solutions achieved after, precisely by means of, remote detours? Which are then no longer detours, but appear as the true path to the goal, indeed maintain themselves gratefully in the goal? To the dull, of course, every detour—in life as in scholarship—seems useless and foolish; they get only distraction from it. The mind that truly seeks treasures will go to the furthest place to hear the magic word that leads to them, and to find the key to what awaits him back home. As Thomas Mann said, if Marx were finally to read Hölderlin, and Hölderlin especially to read Marx, we’d be in a different position.23 Whereas the poor devil who is supposed to have believed in his dream, and then almost in spite of it found what he sought, provides no example, certainly, but he might provide a sign, an amusing one besides,



Some Patterns from the Left Side

that question and answer sometimes don’t grow on the same stalk. This story, insofar as it has a “Mark!” doesn’t just make one want to travel to Prague, of course. It also lifts the floorboards in the miserable hovel of its protagonist, lifts them and raises them up—detour here too, not loyalty to tradition.

Some Patterns from the Left Side “Do we really dream,” someone asked, “only when sleeping, and never when awake? I think it’s always imaging down there; we notice it only when we’re tired—when someone just stares ahead, and the previous day, or the next, revolves within him. But perhaps we’re also dreaming when our foot strangely resists going somewhere, where we then break it. Or our flesh crawls like an animal’s where something is not right. Quite a lot crosses over from nightmares; from so-called warning dreams too. With open eyes one can sense the same dreamy air where something is floating, perhaps even haunting. If we rinse our face, then of course it’s gone, indeed as though it was never there.” “I wouldn’t say,” remarked Mr. A., “that there’s no such thing, but in any case it concerns us less than dreaming. Recently I read of the curious case of a Berlin attorney, a man whom I might nearly believe. He was standing in his office around eleven o’clock and dictating, when next to him a flame shot up to the ceiling. The secretary screamed, and as the attorney tore open the door the flare sank back into the floor it had come from; the parquet was completely undamaged, the ceiling sootless. If that was a waking dream, it was nonetheless dreamed by two, as though it had really occurred more outside than inside. The article went on: a quarter hour later a lone agent rang to remind them that the fireman had left. That made the greatest impression on me: such a roll of the drums, and so few soldiers behind it, if the agent was actually supposed to be the soldier. How stale that all is, remote from us, and stupid; maybe animals stay up to date with that sort of thing. But what comes of it humanly really seems like taking a herring to dinner in a coach and four.” “If that were only true,” replied Mr. B., “then these things would have to be at least as laughable as they are uncanny. I have the feeling that the flame at the insurance company never even arrives, perhaps never even has



Some Patterns from the Left Side

that question and answer sometimes don’t grow on the same stalk. This story, insofar as it has a “Mark!” doesn’t just make one want to travel to Prague, of course. It also lifts the floorboards in the miserable hovel of its protagonist, lifts them and raises them up—detour here too, not loyalty to tradition.

Some Patterns from the Left Side “Do we really dream,” someone asked, “only when sleeping, and never when awake? I think it’s always imaging down there; we notice it only when we’re tired—when someone just stares ahead, and the previous day, or the next, revolves within him. But perhaps we’re also dreaming when our foot strangely resists going somewhere, where we then break it. Or our flesh crawls like an animal’s where something is not right. Quite a lot crosses over from nightmares; from so-called warning dreams too. With open eyes one can sense the same dreamy air where something is floating, perhaps even haunting. If we rinse our face, then of course it’s gone, indeed as though it was never there.” “I wouldn’t say,” remarked Mr. A., “that there’s no such thing, but in any case it concerns us less than dreaming. Recently I read of the curious case of a Berlin attorney, a man whom I might nearly believe. He was standing in his office around eleven o’clock and dictating, when next to him a flame shot up to the ceiling. The secretary screamed, and as the attorney tore open the door the flare sank back into the floor it had come from; the parquet was completely undamaged, the ceiling sootless. If that was a waking dream, it was nonetheless dreamed by two, as though it had really occurred more outside than inside. The article went on: a quarter hour later a lone agent rang to remind them that the fireman had left. That made the greatest impression on me: such a roll of the drums, and so few soldiers behind it, if the agent was actually supposed to be the soldier. How stale that all is, remote from us, and stupid; maybe animals stay up to date with that sort of thing. But what comes of it humanly really seems like taking a herring to dinner in a coach and four.” “If that were only true,” replied Mr. B., “then these things would have to be at least as laughable as they are uncanny. I have the feeling that the flame at the insurance company never even arrives, perhaps never even has

Some Patterns from the Left Side



to arrive, or when it does land it is then often quite near us. You speculated that animals stay current with such things, and that’s quite remarkable; if I understand you rightly, you consider that weird flame as a kind of instinctual language, almost a kind of transmission within an animal nervous system. But if one gets into its circuit, one can be strangely frightened by the demonic sounds and images, as by our door. And I know cases where people, uneasy about a warning, actually arrived at their own house, mostly at just the wrong moment. I heard a similar story to the one about the attorney from a Pole, who told me the story about himself; perhaps he was also lying and had only read it; at any rate, he screamed too, and the agent afterward was not very comical. Recently, the Pole told me, he had been at the seaside, where, though he felt better than ever, he had a very peculiar vision. He stepped from his hotel onto a completely empty street and was surprised at the great noontime silence, when around the corner came an automobile of glass, and on it an open casket, likewise of glass; next to it walked a boy clothed in a sort of starry sky, with many buttons and polka dots, who asked him, as the wagon halted before the entrance, if he would please step into the casket. At that moment he heard his name called behind him, and the apparition disappeared; a young Englishwoman stood behind him, the same one with whom he’d enjoyed himself all these days, and she was now his wife. The first stop on their honeymoon was Paris, where they arrived toward nightfall, and they were just about to step into the lift to the dining room when the man pulled his wife back from the door. He’d seen exactly this configuration in his hallucination: this face on the bellhop, this uniform. As they went up the stairs they heard screaming; the elevator cable snapped, and the bodies of the passengers were carried out into the lobby. So the Pole told me, more or less,” concluded Mr. B., “his fortune in misfortune—I think the hallucination brought him something quite useful, more than just herrings. It seems to lie not only in the animal sphere, it’s not just for animals; life and death are in it too. We have that in common with all living things. Through this second sight something was detected, and avoided, just as surely as by means of the fire department; the foresight is of course different.” “You’ve ignored the dead for too long,” reflected a Mr. C., “that pallor that wanders in the moonlight. After all, we have premonitions about not just ourselves but the afterward, or the beyond, or whatever it’s called. Out of an unfamiliar state where neither humans nor animals live. I admit that our age doesn’t have it, nor did any prehistory, but it’s precisely a



Some Patterns from the Left Side

sunken world; prehistory just noticed it better. In this world grew night terrors, and even today the enjoyment of terror grows, which has no frivolity about it, even when it tries to. Instead just this, I think: the human, the almost warm embrace of a world that will surely be our world sooner or later. This world, it seems to me, is always around us, even when we just lap at its edges and no longer know how dark the night really is. The young still see it sometimes. I’d like to tell one of the strangest recollections from my life. “There was once a young man among us, rather fat and wan, whom none of us thought much of. We were nearly disgusted by him, and he even called himself syphilitic, but of course one could discuss the strangest things with him. He spoke as readily of the grave as of the bed, and of the worms that lift one’s chest as though one were breathing, of the horror that we will all become. Sixteen years old, we made a jaunt once to a neighboring town, and a quick death-and-afterlife return. Bourrier—that was the boy’s name—pulled out a photograph that was supposed to have been taken of a ghost, and I stayed somewhat back with him. We promised each other that whoever died first would appear to the other. “Just a year later my relation with Bourrier cooled considerably; he was absent ever more often from our class, and fell out of our circle. Then the teacher told us one morning, very unexpectedly, that one of our classmates had died after a long illness, and we were to keep the next day open to attend his burial. The valedictorian gave a eulogy at the edge of the grave, about caterpillar and butterfly, which he himself didn’t believe, with our weak memory; and we shoveled clods over the school friend who had so often slept with barmaids on the billiard table until Monday morning. “An unlicensed pub on the way home helped us all forget the burial, and on the evening of that day (my parents had gone to a ball) I could stay up as late as I wanted, had the book collection to myself, forbidden memoirs, Zarathustra and other gods, for which I’d come of age. As always on such evenings, I sounded out my student years, only I was surprised to find myself glancing from time to time into the darkness of the next room, distracted and finally strangely sad; listened to the rain that beat on the panes, to the steps on the street outside, which became ever quieter, finally dying out in the night. My reverie became ever more solitary, and now a distant memory, an image, shot out of the void: I saw that spring day again, on the country road to the next town with the late Bourrier at my side, and the pledge we’d sworn.

Some Patterns from the Left Side

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“Now I felt myself trembling from head to toe; I was already surrounded, and the time had come, terrifyingly placed into the empty apartment. Behind me was a door into the corridor, through which I would have to go to my bedroom; next to me was an open door into the dark salon, where the furniture stood dimly, and only some gaslight from the street fell on the ceiling. How I got to bed, I’ve forgotten, yet I walked a different path just afterward in nightmares, the dream path of our rapport from the shoddy pub back home; it was also an imprisonment on that path, just as in the room, only the reverse: behind me the street ended at my heels, and before me it fled in a wide angle to the side, up to my parent’s home. The front door was open too, despite the night—the window by the stairs, even the doors to the apartments on the first and second floors, everything wide open in the darkness. I went up to the third floor, where I should finally be home, yet another stairway led up again. I must have counted wrong. This door also gaped wide open, thick darkness behind it, and completely strange. Suddenly light fell on the brass nameplate, but it was not the usual one, but enameled metal as outside a waiting room, and on it stood a name: Bourrier, with a crucifix behind it. “At the moment I sensed I was being watched from above, and above me I saw about ten steps going even higher, and at the top stood Bourrier in a nightshirt, leaning over the railing with a candle, grinning at me. Before this smile I fell asleep, into the morning hours, and heard a scream only at the very end—I heard my mother screaming from the stairs, and as I stumbled out of bed to my parents, we thought we saw a great black ball fall from the upper story down the stairway, almost hesitantly, but right down the middle. The doors slammed shut, and we stayed awake till daylight. I told my dream—it was still more human than that great crudity out there, coming down the real stairway. Only a symbol, as you can see, yet probably from the grand army; it rides a corpse into our dreams, and rolls a ball before our feet like the sea a breaker—no more, no less.” The friends were silent, it was already late, the ball had hit home. Hallucination and mythology seemed to go through each other inextricably in this man; he might have lived through all that, but the grand army, and believing all that hellish stuff? Mr. D., who had as yet said nothing, started up briskly and made a hand gesture as though he wanted to set the whole beyond on its feet. “I don’t know,” he said, “but we can be frightened by much less already, even though it’s from this side. We might not need to go so far across, and

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Some Patterns from the Left Side

the fear is still the same. Just one little incident occurs to me here, but it shows what living people can do. I too went up my stairs late at night, not at all sleepy, but a healthy student—even sang something to myself. There, at the first bend, I felt fabric brush against me, something creased, now behind me, now before me, now dipping, now fluttering. I hurried down the steps; the shadow ran and jumped with me, even swaying noiselessly before the front door. Finally, I turned the key and threw open the door; the dancing specter shot up in front of me, and in the torchlight I saw an old woman’s face, white, and unspeakably distorted, which screamed like I had never heard before, nor dreamed—piercingly high, mouth, eyes, body, all gaping. “Two men came by, and the pub next door still had its lights on. When we grabbed this being, it still danced in our grasp, and cackled—a madwoman, as it later turned out, who had escaped and hidden right in my hallway. Here she’d gotten locked in, and likely danced about all night, searching through the darkened house where everyone was sleeping but she and the student on the stairway. I felt no better, though, even after this explanation; felt myself, even a day later, seized by an apparition—in fact I still have every ghost that I dream, hear, and cannot believe, present in that woman back there. The madwoman was, after all, a greeting out of the caverns of life, where something’s not right, not out of our dreams, or some problematic graveyard miasma. Rather, just as I said: it was a local dream, which nonetheless contained almost everything when it came into my hallway. “I learned from it that all the errant stuff in our souls is related; insofar as it must be the raw fears themselves that are still possible in us and elsewhere, and sometimes come out. Merely negative enlightenment won’t dispel them, as my figura shows; but perhaps light will dissolve them personally in the half-being that haunts stairways and is usually nocturnal, terrifying. Things on the stairs too, even in my room, are uncanny when they shift in the night and show another side, beneath the space of day; they then become at least a good stage for the ‘parapsychological,’ precisely for what is unformed, larval, from the left side. “All of that comes from the human core, and yet concerns it far more than the skeptic would like or the seer guess. The drifting, gloomy, frightening element concerns it that still lurks there, and is still possible, because real humanity is not yet in the house. It arises from spasms; medial forces form crude grimaces, and my madwoman revealed the life and ac-

The Twice-Disappearing Frame

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tivity in the underbrush psychologically. Funhouses too (driven by the pangs of adolescence), demonic apparitions push it through our outer border—a deadly production, more our own shortcoming than the one between heaven and earth. “My encounter with the madwoman I also posit as ghost story, as a local one; it was as clear and dry as a good drama. When the pale hand always comes only from the other side, it shuffles too many flowers and too much music into the deck; that dulls the terror and makes it enjoyable, operatizes it, to say nothing of mythologizing it. In a Pitaval for ghosts, something I’d very much like to see, that might be different, if only true incidents were reported: coldly, with all the rancid oil of the thing.24 All other horror, it seems to me, is more than half the pleasure of the uneasy listener, and not, as Mr. C. claimed, the dismay of the eventual participant. A motley field: mysteries for unbelievers, metaphysics for minors; still, one easily brushes against it, especially at night—if one only knew just where it lay.” Here they went their ways, some agitated, the others with much on their minds. A heckler quoted Mark Twain and said, Now we all had faces as solemn and mute as the reverse of a headstone. It was Mr. A. who said that, and added: One could therefore see how little horror and such concerned us in which there was nothing but itself. When one of the party came home, he wrote in his notebook, “A haunting is certainly never exact; for it shows that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand isn’t doing.”

The Twice-Disappearing Frame Take me with you: not only children wish it, or say it. Whoever wants to expand, even change, is susceptible to this wish. Even a glass can then quietly tempt us to partake in its clarity, to devote ourselves to the wine therein. Paintings too are glasses, very strangely filled, which our vision drinks in, into which it penetrates, and sometimes perhaps not only as vision. So that the border seems to vanish, which is here the frame. Chinese legends have characters, dying, vanish into paintings, even poems. That is probably the strangest known sort of wish about and in painting and poetry. Such a rich kind of “Take me with you!” story is hardly known among us even in imitation—with a single exception, which follows here.

The Twice-Disappearing Frame

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tivity in the underbrush psychologically. Funhouses too (driven by the pangs of adolescence), demonic apparitions push it through our outer border—a deadly production, more our own shortcoming than the one between heaven and earth. “My encounter with the madwoman I also posit as ghost story, as a local one; it was as clear and dry as a good drama. When the pale hand always comes only from the other side, it shuffles too many flowers and too much music into the deck; that dulls the terror and makes it enjoyable, operatizes it, to say nothing of mythologizing it. In a Pitaval for ghosts, something I’d very much like to see, that might be different, if only true incidents were reported: coldly, with all the rancid oil of the thing.24 All other horror, it seems to me, is more than half the pleasure of the uneasy listener, and not, as Mr. C. claimed, the dismay of the eventual participant. A motley field: mysteries for unbelievers, metaphysics for minors; still, one easily brushes against it, especially at night—if one only knew just where it lay.” Here they went their ways, some agitated, the others with much on their minds. A heckler quoted Mark Twain and said, Now we all had faces as solemn and mute as the reverse of a headstone. It was Mr. A. who said that, and added: One could therefore see how little horror and such concerned us in which there was nothing but itself. When one of the party came home, he wrote in his notebook, “A haunting is certainly never exact; for it shows that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand isn’t doing.”

The Twice-Disappearing Frame Take me with you: not only children wish it, or say it. Whoever wants to expand, even change, is susceptible to this wish. Even a glass can then quietly tempt us to partake in its clarity, to devote ourselves to the wine therein. Paintings too are glasses, very strangely filled, which our vision drinks in, into which it penetrates, and sometimes perhaps not only as vision. So that the border seems to vanish, which is here the frame. Chinese legends have characters, dying, vanish into paintings, even poems. That is probably the strangest known sort of wish about and in painting and poetry. Such a rich kind of “Take me with you!” story is hardly known among us even in imitation—with a single exception, which follows here.

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The Twice-Disappearing Frame

The motif is old, involves a dream come true, and an awakening. Paul Ernst also knew the story, without a real sense for what it meant.25 It has absolutely no Chinese rank, but instead restores the normal, as it were. A young man, it is told, came home from university to speak with his fiancée, whom he no longer especially loved. After the meal Rudolf sat alone in his parents’ parlor, staring into space. Outside his fiancée was calling to him; everyone was already set to leave, what was keeping him? But he had absolutely no desire for an outing, least of all today; the girl, greatly annoyed, slammed the doors shut. Rudolf no longer heard any of this, because for the first time in a long while, since his boyhood, he was intently considering the old painting over the breadboard. There was a rococo garden, with ladies and gallants on the promenade, and in the background, half hidden by trees, a summer palace with high windows all the way down to the ground, and gilded grills. At a crossing in the garden stood a lady all alone; in her hand she held a white sheet, or a white cloth. That was something Rudolf had never understood, even as a boy: was she reading a letter, or was she holding a handkerchief? Was she crying? He now stepped right up to the painting, and as he immersed himself in the colors and shapes, the ladies and gentlemen suddenly walked softly by him. He himself was walking, sensed the fine gravel on the path, and walked toward the woman, who stood motionless and watched him. Then at one stroke he knew, she was reading a letter—his letter; he’d written it long ago, to her. Have you really come, my darling? she cried, and her hand fell to her side. I’ve never stopped waiting for you; you wrote me that you would come, but now everything is good; you are with me. They kissed and wandered further into the woods. Evening came, and they returned to the castle, where a joyous feast had been prepared. The cavaliers and their ladies greeted the returning lord of the manor, and soon the lovers rested in their opulent bedchamber. Birdsong roused them from their dreams; many days passed in this way, many nights beneath the changing moon. Games, feasts, hunts, meaningful talk hastened the time; youthful joy had finally returned to the long deserted rooms. Everything is yours, the beautiful lady said, but one door you may not open, if you, if we, are not to lose everything. One quiet afternoon the lord stood in a passage, by a window, and gazed into the garden, where the leaves had begun to change color; it suddenly seemed that someone was calling, calling him by a name that he dimly remembered but that could not be his name. The voice seemed to

The Twice-Disappearing Frame

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come from a room he had never entered; he opened the door. The apartment was completely empty; out of the wall a voice seemed to issue, out of a painting that hung on the wall. The lord of the manor went nearer and saw a room in the painting that, like the voice, seemed dimly familiar; the furniture observed him as though out of another time. The painting depicted another painting on a wall in the background, yet the voice came from the painted door. He listened to it, ever more astonished: Rudolf stood once more in his parents’ parlor. The door, no longer painted, flew open, and his fiancée shouted, Are you coming, Rudolf? How long am I supposed to wait for you? The coach has already left; should I waste my whole day because of your moods? The young man jumped slightly; then he took the hand of his fiancée, and led her before the old painting. Quiet! Don’t you see that she’s crying? That’s a handkerchief, not a letter. The girl, predictably, didn’t understand this exclamation. The subsequent carriage party with the dreamer must have been curious. So much for the tale, certainly nothing special, but double-doored. Rudolf ’s last utterance is sentimental, yet the quid pro quo—handkerchief for letter—belongs to an already artificial structure. But something more significant belongs to it—namely, a doubly disappearing frame. First the one on the painting of the castle in his parents’ home, then the one on the painting of the parents’ parlor, in the forbidden room. Moreover, this castle, in miniature, is available within itself again, on the painted wall of the forbidden room. Apart from the Chinese motif (entering the painting) Japanese nesting is evident in the reflections of reflections. (Unless one thinks of the “Remarkable Ghost Story” in Hebel’s almanac, where the same almanac is hanging from a cord on the chimney, and the gentleman can almost read the story he’s in the middle of—again with a chimney in it, and the almanac, reflected ad infinitum.26) Nonetheless “Rudolf ’s Engagement Party” lets the Chinese motif of entry predominate, at least at the beginning, in order of course to forsake it more awake than before. Precisely such that the entry is first carried out and then retracted, in that the frame pushing forward both ways turns into a sort of revolving door. Where does it lead? Certainly into a domain of poetic meaning, even if it still hasn’t been discerned where this domain lies. Here, at least, in the twisting story of the painting, it throws the visitor back, the only dreamingly stirred visitor; the everyday has him again—and that, regrettably, is

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The Motif of the Door

what’s most apt in Rudolf ’s story. Unless one takes the wink he got from the lady, the waiting painting, at a face value that doesn’t yet exist as such, that doesn’t yet pay.

The Motif of the Door Who we are, and when we will truly live, no one up to now has ever known. Still darker is how and where we go then; the dying depart, as what? Something decays and crumbles a bit, but that is not the point. One’s good or bad name enters the memory of a few survivors, rests there for a while. But people themselves, as the kernel of this reputation, travel to an unknown destination. Even the nothing that unbelievers inflict is unimaginable, indeed fundamentally more obscure than a something that might endure. When someone walks out the door, one can likewise no longer see him. He also disappears as if he had died, all at once; the train goes around the bend. Yet even with long and dangerous trips there remains the important difference that the living traveler remains on this plane, in fact literally; we can find him again on our map, without any ups or downs. Yet the dying man changes levels; either he goes as mere corpse into an inconceivable nothing where only chemical processes continue, or he rises up, a bird of the soul, to disappear through an open door on high.27 The door through which he departs becomes a mouth that swallows him just as solitarily and emptily as everyone must face death alone; or it becomes the entrance into a something that we don’t know, and where the body has no more walls. This latter is “clearly” nearer, although there can be no sort of practical judgment about it. But the effect that the door evokes everywhere it appears is peculiar, in art or literature: the wall of sleep and the portal of death. It takes very little for such an image to draw one in. One recalls the uncanny impression that a pure film could make with the door motif.28 It showed a pretty girl riding with her sweetheart through the country. The couple sits alone in the mail coach; at the last stop, an old man comes aboard. He looks steadily at the girl, above all at her friend, tired and stern, with a hard face. The carriage rolls through a gate into a village; just under the sign of the inn it halts. The old man follows the lovers and takes

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The Motif of the Door

what’s most apt in Rudolf ’s story. Unless one takes the wink he got from the lady, the waiting painting, at a face value that doesn’t yet exist as such, that doesn’t yet pay.

The Motif of the Door Who we are, and when we will truly live, no one up to now has ever known. Still darker is how and where we go then; the dying depart, as what? Something decays and crumbles a bit, but that is not the point. One’s good or bad name enters the memory of a few survivors, rests there for a while. But people themselves, as the kernel of this reputation, travel to an unknown destination. Even the nothing that unbelievers inflict is unimaginable, indeed fundamentally more obscure than a something that might endure. When someone walks out the door, one can likewise no longer see him. He also disappears as if he had died, all at once; the train goes around the bend. Yet even with long and dangerous trips there remains the important difference that the living traveler remains on this plane, in fact literally; we can find him again on our map, without any ups or downs. Yet the dying man changes levels; either he goes as mere corpse into an inconceivable nothing where only chemical processes continue, or he rises up, a bird of the soul, to disappear through an open door on high.27 The door through which he departs becomes a mouth that swallows him just as solitarily and emptily as everyone must face death alone; or it becomes the entrance into a something that we don’t know, and where the body has no more walls. This latter is “clearly” nearer, although there can be no sort of practical judgment about it. But the effect that the door evokes everywhere it appears is peculiar, in art or literature: the wall of sleep and the portal of death. It takes very little for such an image to draw one in. One recalls the uncanny impression that a pure film could make with the door motif.28 It showed a pretty girl riding with her sweetheart through the country. The couple sits alone in the mail coach; at the last stop, an old man comes aboard. He looks steadily at the girl, above all at her friend, tired and stern, with a hard face. The carriage rolls through a gate into a village; just under the sign of the inn it halts. The old man follows the lovers and takes

The Motif of the Door

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a seat at the same table, and drinks to the man. Whereupon there appears in the lover’s goblet, in the bride-cup from which Lil, the girl, has drunk, an hourglass; the sand runs through the glass—a bad sign. The cup falls from the girl’s hand and shatters. She goes to tell the waitress, and comes back; the table is empty, the hard face is gone, and with him her sweetheart. Just a second ago, the other guests tell her, he went out the door with the old man. Lil rushes to the front of the inn, but no one seems to have seen the two. Over there, a beggar points, they went over there, and the night watchman, too, all the way at the edge of town, says they’ve already gone by. The girl searches beneath the trees, through the dark meadows for her beloved, ever further, up to a wall, a high stone wall, along the wall that seems to have no end, that seems to go in a circle, and nowhere an entrance. Then, across the field, in the moonlight, comes a strange procession: boys, men, and women, young and old, farmers, merchants, knights, clerics, and kings—figures from all of history, misty and pale, slow of tread; and in the middle, Lil’s sweetheart. She screams his name, wants to embrace him and draw him to her. The shade turns his face only slightly to her, infinitely strange, his weary, shuffling steps barely faltering, and along with the others the dead man disappears through the wall. Lil swoons to the ground. Thus the town’s apothecary finds her, having chosen the propitious hour of the full moon to collect magical herbs: leopard’s bane and devil’s bit scabious, Solomon’s seal and centaury. He carries the girl home on his shoulders; he leaves her alone. He wants to brew her some fortifying tea, she slumps at his table, retorts all about, saltpeter, sulfur, mercury, and flasks of poison. Numerous books lie open before her, and Lil’s confused gaze falls on them, falls on the open Bible, and the heavily underlined sentence: “For love is as strong as death.”29 She reads, understands, assesses it literally in its magical equation of force and mass. Lil grabs the poison, opens it, drinks—and in that instant she stands before the wall. With an incredible motion she runs her hand over her forehead, utter distress and complete enlightenment, sleepwalking and waking. The wall is no longer shut, but a glowing gap, a Gothic arch with an endlessly anticipated light behind leading into the depths. What happened in the depths could easily be told if the gate were not brighter than the burial chamber with the many candles, which came next, or in the resurrection, as usual. But the gate, at least, nearly transforms the

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The Motif of the Door

audience into a congregation (tua res agitur); over the trivial special effects operated a deeper stage management that, with its simultaneity of exit and entry, brought the lethal archetype of the portal to awareness.30 Yet just what lies beyond it could hardly have been shown in images, nor even superior means. The world is full of suffering, and the scanty joy in it mute; hardly extensible outward, let alone upward. So that place to where we disappear can also more easily be filled with visions of horror than with gods of happiness. If the unfamiliar can be envisioned only “presentiently” (that is, in terms of some fear or joy here that affected us immoderately, transcendently): then “hell” usually succeeds very abundantly, excitingly and full of variety, while “heaven” remains faint in image and word, quite literally tiresome, indeed dangerously near to the horror of a bourgeois Sunday. Only to the side does one still sometimes find other traits, colorful yet modest reflections that extend this motif of the door slightly, but by those who enter, not by strange, grand, elaborate spectacle. Instructive in this way are Chinese legends, which perhaps deal only with artists and their transition into a work, yet thereby leave out as much as put in their very own Orplid of sound and smell.31 Living a philosophy means learning from it how to die, says Montaigne in a Senecan moment, almost still magically wise; several Chinese motifs of the end also entwine the door into the work with the door into death, remarkably, and hardly by accident, with the greatest didactic seriousness, and hardly artistic there and then. It suffices to outline them as a game that cannot be intensified and finally signifies pure desire, but that is nonetheless remarkable as the possibility of a new flag in the work, not as a desertion from the flag of this world. The story of the old painter belongs here, who showed his friends his final painting: in it was a park, a narrow path winding gently past trees and ponds up to the little red door of a palace. But as the friends turned back toward the artist—that strange red—he was no longer next to them, but within the painting, strolling down the little path toward the fabulous door, standing quietly before it; turned, smiled, opened it, and vanished. Or the other story, an adaptation of the same myth that Balász retold in Seven Legends, the story of the dreamer Han-tse belongs here: the poet who wrote the book of this beloved, the beautiful Li-fan, who had spurned him.32 Into The Valley of the Silver Apple Blossom he wrote the girl, wrote her a lovely lake and a palace of jade, the most exquisite gowns, celebrations, and playmates, and the moon never set in the valley of the silver apple

The Motif of the Door

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blossom. All this his magical verses dreamed; indeed, he could even summon Li-fan herself from the book until daylight again drove her away. So his life was powerfully divided between the sad, aging day and the mysterious creature that came to him and always left him. Until that final morning: his relatives came looking for Han-tse in his hut, for a long time in vain. They did not find him. Yet on the desk lay his book, opened to a new, final chapter: “Han-tse’s Arrival in the Valley of the Silver Apple Blossom.” Thus a poet wrote himself into his own work, “past the wall of eternal ideograms,” aesthetically truly “productive,” in other words past even the door of the work (Mahler’s late music sometimes has that effect in reality). But if the darkness that awaits us is colored somewhat by such legends—at least by our dreams, and their hardly obvious or regular adaptability, indeed habitability—and if precisely the most colorful Chinese flowers grow by the darkness of the final door, as though it were truly our realest door, these are all only profound legends of a “coming to light” (Vorschein) from which a sickener hurls us back, even in religious ages, even from deeper and solider ecstasies than those of artists and poets.33 The homelessness of people on this earth goes on with a few symbols of arrival, without their ever being able to illuminate the door of partial existence, let alone the fatal door of potential nonexistence, with anything but dreams. They have not yet drunk blood, certainly never had any worldlyotherworldly praxis. Still, worldly homelessness with a few symbols of happiness is a good teacher’s college for the real dreams behind the door.34

Half Good So we hardly have ourselves. But first ourselves, and then things: Who can find his way through? The cloth around us may still always protect us; that still goes on. But we warm ourselves pleasantly by the stove—just a little closer and we’re singed. Our hands themselves, we have to keep away.

The Next Tree I know someone who doesn’t like to turn around. When he has to, though, he usually needs a hold, a target outside. It can be a tree, a lantern, or a boulder to the right of the path; up to this point, then, the tree bears the slight injustice, as it were, that something has been interrupted. We use it for our purposes, almost give it up, as though it could bear it better, indeed do it better than we could. We trust the tree that much, though it knows nothing of our purposes. Let alone of such silly ones, and certainly nothing of the more serious ones. The saw too provides no better view of the tree, only better-furnished ones.

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Half Good So we hardly have ourselves. But first ourselves, and then things: Who can find his way through? The cloth around us may still always protect us; that still goes on. But we warm ourselves pleasantly by the stove—just a little closer and we’re singed. Our hands themselves, we have to keep away.

The Next Tree I know someone who doesn’t like to turn around. When he has to, though, he usually needs a hold, a target outside. It can be a tree, a lantern, or a boulder to the right of the path; up to this point, then, the tree bears the slight injustice, as it were, that something has been interrupted. We use it for our purposes, almost give it up, as though it could bear it better, indeed do it better than we could. We trust the tree that much, though it knows nothing of our purposes. Let alone of such silly ones, and certainly nothing of the more serious ones. The saw too provides no better view of the tree, only better-furnished ones.

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Flower and Unflower

Flower and Unflower Some can give up their self in something external without losing themselves there, without leaving themselves at all. Assuming that they’re on a good footing with the thing outside, yesterday like today, like tomorrow especially. When on Monet’s eightieth birthday a photographer came to him from Paris, the artist replied to him: Come back next spring and photograph the flowers in my garden; they look more like me than I do. For others, a familiar old cabinet in the room would have done the same service. Then precisely the unflower—something imperishable—would have belonged in the still life, the stilled life between people and things.

The Leyden Jar All the more remarkable that we can use what we don’t even know, as though it were there for us. The engineer Siemens once climbed the pyramid of Cheops; already halfway up he didn’t like the look of his guides. At the top there was little time to enjoy the view, for the Bedouins took out their pistols and robbed him. But he had long ago noticed the electric charge in the desert air, so he very craftily placed his mackintosh under his feet, held up his moistened finger in the air, and just as the sheik stood before him, lowered it to his nose. A spark leaped across from the human Leyden jar. The Bedouins ran away screaming, and even Siemens—once the laborious descent, alone and without magic, was behind him—marveled for a long time at “his” power. He had certainly proven himself as a magician, but how does enlightenment become superstition, the times table a hocus pocus? It laughs at it, and finally looks just like it. The calculated spark jumped just as the conjured one perhaps once did, this time “good,” another time “bad,” for neither concerns the spark.

The First Locomotive There is even a wild legend about George Stephenson’s debut.1 He pulled the first mobile boiler out of the shed. The wheels turned, and the

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Flower and Unflower

Flower and Unflower Some can give up their self in something external without losing themselves there, without leaving themselves at all. Assuming that they’re on a good footing with the thing outside, yesterday like today, like tomorrow especially. When on Monet’s eightieth birthday a photographer came to him from Paris, the artist replied to him: Come back next spring and photograph the flowers in my garden; they look more like me than I do. For others, a familiar old cabinet in the room would have done the same service. Then precisely the unflower—something imperishable—would have belonged in the still life, the stilled life between people and things.

The Leyden Jar All the more remarkable that we can use what we don’t even know, as though it were there for us. The engineer Siemens once climbed the pyramid of Cheops; already halfway up he didn’t like the look of his guides. At the top there was little time to enjoy the view, for the Bedouins took out their pistols and robbed him. But he had long ago noticed the electric charge in the desert air, so he very craftily placed his mackintosh under his feet, held up his moistened finger in the air, and just as the sheik stood before him, lowered it to his nose. A spark leaped across from the human Leyden jar. The Bedouins ran away screaming, and even Siemens—once the laborious descent, alone and without magic, was behind him—marveled for a long time at “his” power. He had certainly proven himself as a magician, but how does enlightenment become superstition, the times table a hocus pocus? It laughs at it, and finally looks just like it. The calculated spark jumped just as the conjured one perhaps once did, this time “good,” another time “bad,” for neither concerns the spark.

The First Locomotive There is even a wild legend about George Stephenson’s debut.1 He pulled the first mobile boiler out of the shed. The wheels turned, and the



Flower and Unflower

Flower and Unflower Some can give up their self in something external without losing themselves there, without leaving themselves at all. Assuming that they’re on a good footing with the thing outside, yesterday like today, like tomorrow especially. When on Monet’s eightieth birthday a photographer came to him from Paris, the artist replied to him: Come back next spring and photograph the flowers in my garden; they look more like me than I do. For others, a familiar old cabinet in the room would have done the same service. Then precisely the unflower—something imperishable—would have belonged in the still life, the stilled life between people and things.

The Leyden Jar All the more remarkable that we can use what we don’t even know, as though it were there for us. The engineer Siemens once climbed the pyramid of Cheops; already halfway up he didn’t like the look of his guides. At the top there was little time to enjoy the view, for the Bedouins took out their pistols and robbed him. But he had long ago noticed the electric charge in the desert air, so he very craftily placed his mackintosh under his feet, held up his moistened finger in the air, and just as the sheik stood before him, lowered it to his nose. A spark leaped across from the human Leyden jar. The Bedouins ran away screaming, and even Siemens—once the laborious descent, alone and without magic, was behind him—marveled for a long time at “his” power. He had certainly proven himself as a magician, but how does enlightenment become superstition, the times table a hocus pocus? It laughs at it, and finally looks just like it. The calculated spark jumped just as the conjured one perhaps once did, this time “good,” another time “bad,” for neither concerns the spark.

The First Locomotive There is even a wild legend about George Stephenson’s debut.1 He pulled the first mobile boiler out of the shed. The wheels turned, and the

The Urban Peasant



inventor followed his creation down the evening street. But after just a few strokes the locomotive sprang forward, ever faster, Stephenson helplessly behind. From the other end of the street there now came a troop of revelers who had been detained by beer; young men and women, the village preacher among them. Toward them the monster now ran, hissing past in a shape that no one on earth had ever seen, coal-black, throwing sparks, with supernatural velocity. Even worse than the way the old books portrayed the devil; nothing was missing, but there was something new. A half mile further the street made a bend right along a wall; into this the locomotive now rammed and exploded with great violence. The next day, it is said, three of the pedestrians fell into a high fever, and the preacher went mad. Only Stephenson understood it all and built a new machine on rails, and with a driver’s seat, so its demonic power was put on the right track, indeed almost organically. Now the locomotive boils as though hot-blooded, pants as though out of breath, a tamed land animal on a grand scale, who can make us forget the golem. The Indians saw horses for the first time with the white man, about which Johannes V. Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it, we would know how a horse looks.2 In the preacher’s madness we see how one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the bang of explosions, the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civilized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish aspect of the first locomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of accidents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).

The Urban Peasant I know someone who is cowardly in a beautiful way. Of course with animals he’s fine; with other people he stands up for himself. But like a peasant, although he was born in the big city, he mistrusts machines, the clang of steel against steel, the fuel explosions by means of which we so gently move from place to place. He likes to say, The danger of being born in

The Urban Peasant



inventor followed his creation down the evening street. But after just a few strokes the locomotive sprang forward, ever faster, Stephenson helplessly behind. From the other end of the street there now came a troop of revelers who had been detained by beer; young men and women, the village preacher among them. Toward them the monster now ran, hissing past in a shape that no one on earth had ever seen, coal-black, throwing sparks, with supernatural velocity. Even worse than the way the old books portrayed the devil; nothing was missing, but there was something new. A half mile further the street made a bend right along a wall; into this the locomotive now rammed and exploded with great violence. The next day, it is said, three of the pedestrians fell into a high fever, and the preacher went mad. Only Stephenson understood it all and built a new machine on rails, and with a driver’s seat, so its demonic power was put on the right track, indeed almost organically. Now the locomotive boils as though hot-blooded, pants as though out of breath, a tamed land animal on a grand scale, who can make us forget the golem. The Indians saw horses for the first time with the white man, about which Johannes V. Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it, we would know how a horse looks.2 In the preacher’s madness we see how one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the bang of explosions, the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civilized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish aspect of the first locomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of accidents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).

The Urban Peasant I know someone who is cowardly in a beautiful way. Of course with animals he’s fine; with other people he stands up for himself. But like a peasant, although he was born in the big city, he mistrusts machines, the clang of steel against steel, the fuel explosions by means of which we so gently move from place to place. He likes to say, The danger of being born in

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The House of Day

Berlin is great, and I’m its victim, am still not equal to the consequences. This man doesn’t even like riding the elevator, and points to the thin cable from which the car hangs: When you see something like that, my aversion doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. Or two ships collided on the Wannsee one night. The newspapers quickly understood, for both captains were drunk. But the doubtful man only shook his head, and said: This only makes the incident especially mystifying. By day, and sober, it’s no mean feat to crash on the Wannsee. But at night, when you can’t see, and drunk! So the accident was for him the successful marksmanship of two ships against each other, or rather the longing to destroy themselves as ships; to them it was no accident—quite the contrary. Only thus would this man conceive the problem: things want to go back to their own lives; when they succeed, it’s all right for them, catastrophic for us. When the cat’s away, the mice will play; when the master is out, the servants remember that they aren’t servants.

The House of Day What is least of all ours might be the outer morning, as fresh as it is. It scatters like tea leaves and is all beautiful surface; everything about it is blank and outward. A presence that from early on seems to be everywhere and thus nowhere—that has no house, and where one can go forever without arriving. There are green shadows, but they say nothing yet. It’s different in the afternoon, of course, and certainly at night, when outside too everything comes lower. Or when the land takes part in the human house, something that once became evident at a friend’s, with a concord between inside and outside that out there too simulated or provided a house, our house. It is a recollection that belongs here first as the apparent or real corrective to a habituation to things without accident, without infinity or aberration. I had supper once with this man. The plates were cleared, the farm girl who was his beloved went into the kitchen. We friends sat silently and smoked our pipes; the tobacco smoke smelled as when one follows behind lumberjacks, so strong and rich with cinnamon; outside the broad Bavarian landscape with cumuli motionless in the sky. A fly buzzed in the parlor; the farm girl clattered the sturdy dishes. A most cheerful circuit went tangibly between inside and outside, appearance and depth, power and surface. Listen, said my friend, how well the house is in



The House of Day

Berlin is great, and I’m its victim, am still not equal to the consequences. This man doesn’t even like riding the elevator, and points to the thin cable from which the car hangs: When you see something like that, my aversion doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. Or two ships collided on the Wannsee one night. The newspapers quickly understood, for both captains were drunk. But the doubtful man only shook his head, and said: This only makes the incident especially mystifying. By day, and sober, it’s no mean feat to crash on the Wannsee. But at night, when you can’t see, and drunk! So the accident was for him the successful marksmanship of two ships against each other, or rather the longing to destroy themselves as ships; to them it was no accident—quite the contrary. Only thus would this man conceive the problem: things want to go back to their own lives; when they succeed, it’s all right for them, catastrophic for us. When the cat’s away, the mice will play; when the master is out, the servants remember that they aren’t servants.

The House of Day What is least of all ours might be the outer morning, as fresh as it is. It scatters like tea leaves and is all beautiful surface; everything about it is blank and outward. A presence that from early on seems to be everywhere and thus nowhere—that has no house, and where one can go forever without arriving. There are green shadows, but they say nothing yet. It’s different in the afternoon, of course, and certainly at night, when outside too everything comes lower. Or when the land takes part in the human house, something that once became evident at a friend’s, with a concord between inside and outside that out there too simulated or provided a house, our house. It is a recollection that belongs here first as the apparent or real corrective to a habituation to things without accident, without infinity or aberration. I had supper once with this man. The plates were cleared, the farm girl who was his beloved went into the kitchen. We friends sat silently and smoked our pipes; the tobacco smoke smelled as when one follows behind lumberjacks, so strong and rich with cinnamon; outside the broad Bavarian landscape with cumuli motionless in the sky. A fly buzzed in the parlor; the farm girl clattered the sturdy dishes. A most cheerful circuit went tangibly between inside and outside, appearance and depth, power and surface. Listen, said my friend, how well the house is in

The House of Day



operation. And we heard the silence, the proper installation, the familiar comradeship with things that every healthy person senses, the aura around them, the world of the Tao. So immediately, and nearly outside the lived moment, so personally at home in it did we enjoy the “land,” and didn’t even need to move away a stretch to see the full measure of it. We were of course under a spell, but it seemed a good one—naturally the human house was part of it, and the day was in the house, filtered, not the house in the day. Yet as we said, the day as morning has no house, or when it does, then the inhuman house that a second recollection might describe, and that was hardly so “well” in operation. The morning has no house if one just walks through it, but of course it can become a terrible house if one stumbles radically into its beginning: into the very break of dawn that still has something about it, not just a blank surface, least of all the macrocosmic breathing room for which Faust at his desk longs. Life then hardly circulates in a healthy cosmic rhythm as it did for Goethe; the Tao of happiness sinks, and nature is no longer a living book, unexplained yet not inexplicable. In this cosmic house, one could not bathe oneself back to health. It did not teach us to know our fellows; nor was it an evening house, with everything meaningfully near. Instead the reverse twilight began that was so uncanny in earlier times, the embryonic confinement of the day just before cock’s crow. This was a decisively inhuman encirclement, and it happened around four in the morning in June on the South Italian coast. Awakened by the early sunrise, I walked out into the open. Not in the air, but in the landscape, was a torpid heat. The sea seemed stifled, almost like gruel, didn’t break; the cliffs, usually so forbidding, seemed soft, like furniture, quite useful. In this space was the mood of a room where someone is hiding, or better (since there was certainly nothing frightening here), where a guest must have moved in without one’s knowing it. A long cloudbank hung over the sea on the Southern horizon, very flat; made the space even lower and almost upholstered. But to the left stood Jupiter, the only star on this milky skin. Jupiter ascending; a powerful eye that through its power seemed especially near. Immediately one felt: with this gaze the landscape stands in agreement; yes, Jupiter himself had provoked this inconceivable meeting as the guest in this space, or as a controlling god among his creatures. The star ruled so powerfully that it even dragged the observer down from his contemplative terrace right into the crowded scene, where there were no more eyes or distances for a standing outside of, let alone a standing before. Numb and frantic, one could merely take in a kind



Montages of a February Evening

of resonance or reverberation; it drew one into the ensemble without even leaving any breathing room for one’s head. The observer became a limb of this nameless organism, feeling as though inside an animal’s body, a cosmic animal with Jupiter as its inner eye.3 Here there was only interior and no obverse, only equipment and entrails, no inhabitants but the cosmic body itself and its inferior stellar eye. One felt sustained, infused, captivated by the fluids of a totem that had hardly been made in our likeness. Only gradually did this mythical state disperse, the day grow brighter, no longer encircling; or, with the sun rising, one could no longer enter its higher-vaulted house over the raised steps of day’s door. The single room, indeed single body, had become floors, finally the shining palace where one could again lose oneself, with ground floor, mountains, and the vaulted sky, and finally the old, cheerful morning itself that lives and radiates into the day. Yet the image persisted of a morning that simply obliterates us and is no friend to us. What attracts us later in the young day, or is external, or beautiful surface, or even splendid expanse, looked absolutely inhuman in its lair. The experience was too unique, too much of an “experience” to say much; since no eye had a place here, there might not even be a proper recollection, and certainly no concept there and then. It was a very dismal, almost headless consciousness, although entirely normal and determined only by the object of perception. In its breathlessness it perhaps sustained the most extreme exclusion of reason, was determined purely atavistically, from places in the world not even colored by any known mythology, let alone illuminated by reason. If we may use categories out of Bachofen, then we must reverse them: here something expansive seemed to have become cavernous, something heavenly become chthonic, full of nearness and embryonic warmth, but without bringing, as the chthonic otherwise often does, anything familiar with it, let alone anything human. The memory of the mixed emotions of disgust and awe remained: disgust for a Moloch with stomach acids instead of fire; fear and awe as before the old animal gods.

Montages of a February Evening Outside the door it’s harsh. No people, frost on the street; the stones are alone with themselves. Fit well into the cold and the whining of the rails. Every other sound is muffled, the trees bare again; even the wood wants

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Montages of a February Evening

of resonance or reverberation; it drew one into the ensemble without even leaving any breathing room for one’s head. The observer became a limb of this nameless organism, feeling as though inside an animal’s body, a cosmic animal with Jupiter as its inner eye.3 Here there was only interior and no obverse, only equipment and entrails, no inhabitants but the cosmic body itself and its inferior stellar eye. One felt sustained, infused, captivated by the fluids of a totem that had hardly been made in our likeness. Only gradually did this mythical state disperse, the day grow brighter, no longer encircling; or, with the sun rising, one could no longer enter its higher-vaulted house over the raised steps of day’s door. The single room, indeed single body, had become floors, finally the shining palace where one could again lose oneself, with ground floor, mountains, and the vaulted sky, and finally the old, cheerful morning itself that lives and radiates into the day. Yet the image persisted of a morning that simply obliterates us and is no friend to us. What attracts us later in the young day, or is external, or beautiful surface, or even splendid expanse, looked absolutely inhuman in its lair. The experience was too unique, too much of an “experience” to say much; since no eye had a place here, there might not even be a proper recollection, and certainly no concept there and then. It was a very dismal, almost headless consciousness, although entirely normal and determined only by the object of perception. In its breathlessness it perhaps sustained the most extreme exclusion of reason, was determined purely atavistically, from places in the world not even colored by any known mythology, let alone illuminated by reason. If we may use categories out of Bachofen, then we must reverse them: here something expansive seemed to have become cavernous, something heavenly become chthonic, full of nearness and embryonic warmth, but without bringing, as the chthonic otherwise often does, anything familiar with it, let alone anything human. The memory of the mixed emotions of disgust and awe remained: disgust for a Moloch with stomach acids instead of fire; fear and awe as before the old animal gods.

Montages of a February Evening Outside the door it’s harsh. No people, frost on the street; the stones are alone with themselves. Fit well into the cold and the whining of the rails. Every other sound is muffled, the trees bare again; even the wood wants

Montages of a February Evening



to disappear. The newer the streets, the better they know how to seem twice as cold. One’s breath fogs out here like a completely foreign flag. Overnight the North wind has moved the city there, whence the wind came. Removed it like Aladdin’s palace, but the front door suddenly opens onto Greenland. No more transition, no fog, no overcast sky, no merely passing North, or the average to which heat usually raises it, but hard, and at home, its very self. Insistently something is advancing that needs no breath, and would remain after the last breath went out. Yet the light doesn’t seem to fit at all. A few weeks before March, and it hasn’t gone along back to the North. Therefore only stranger, for the sun shines coldly. The desolate streets channel the icy wind, and it fits them. Only into the mountains, the high, utterly unfabricated mountains, does the sun send warmth, bring images of the South into the pure air. Here in the city, however, these images are estranged; they reveal their South as merely an association, which is dispensable. Italian nonetheless the sun, the clouds in the spring night, their pale pink with gold, floating extraordinarily, and free without struggle: in a landscape beyond any springtime, in the high-pressure zone over the city’s Greenland. A little later, a Hesperidean moon, even; with the evening star very near, it moves into a sky that knows something of the most Southern turquoise. Delicately the woman in the moon begins to emerge, the girl in the moon; over a rococo garden, by gentle evening breezes, this sickle could shine on the song of Susanna. Or she was above the old gardens of Baghdad, the dancing girl who governed love, palms, fountains, poetry with her silvery torch (notturna face for Mozart’s Susanna), who indeed rose from the poetry itself into the sky. Here, however, the Orient rhymes precisely with the jingling North, and then with the stars that belong completely to the North. Ice cold remains the polar night, in the old way; its marvelous jaws eat up the clouds and the woman in the moon. Does the moon even rhyme? It rhymes with a situation to which nothing is still accustomed, that shifts its objects. What was familiar, separates; a proclaimed landscape appears, the habitual juxtaposition drops out in the aforementioned night in Berlin . Conversely, very distant elements reveal themselves in this stark outlook as assembled, as by the exquisitely strange syzygies of a poem by Rimbaud. The spring clouds are none at all, the girl in the moon, who once was the horned Astarte, abandons the spring night, zephyr, love, and how much more the rural family of the nineteenth

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An Odd Flâneur

century, where she lived with stable connotations; the moon of Baghdad stands as such, with an unknown goal, over a city endured like the Arctic. The light above is no longer a comfort, not even a thrilling or melancholy contrast drifting along the heavenly paths; this kind of attribution too has disappeared. A transformed vision notices new ensembles in nature, and not only for vision is the city transported on such nights: Nature in person wanders out of the appointments of the Romantic century, even the mythological centuries. There remains beauty, but it upsets us; if it has nothing clearly before it, then the collapse of the old spheres, the montage of once impenetrable zones behind it. Ice violins on high evoke a new sound; the clouds are corals from the ocean floor; death has the brightness of green turquoise; the girl in the moon, who allies herself with the frost, shows the ambiguity that, personified as zephyr, she had only with Susanna. Nights like this tear us out of the habit of giving every element of nature its ready place instead of its carriage. The dislocation of such an evening is montage, separating what is near, bringing together what is furthest, as intensified in paintings like Max Ernst’s or de Chirico’s. This shattering in things is certainly objectively there, even if the more or less accurate sense for it has only awakened now, brought about by the social earthquake. As we said, artists and poets were the first to register direct connections between things so distant. The gentle cloud of this February night remains quite objectively in the harsh cirrus ice, and the girl in the moon, complete with affectionately gazing evening star, not only belongs to the warm love song of Susanna in the Arabian garden, but at the same time understands how to put on Old Death as coolly, cheerfully, and deftly as a new dress. Existence is full of figures, but not organized figures, with each and every one in its fixed place. Instead an echo of allegorical meaning will still resound everywhere, instructively relaying back and forth, ambiguously reflective, before a form will stand there: as good woman who is a good woman; as our day, when (in both senses, a past as well as an entourage) it has the ambiguous, meaningful twilight behind it.

An Odd Flâneur I knew someone who knew how to get along without himself. Not that he had no noticeable self, even, preferably, a rather ghostly seeming self. A



An Odd Flâneur

century, where she lived with stable connotations; the moon of Baghdad stands as such, with an unknown goal, over a city endured like the Arctic. The light above is no longer a comfort, not even a thrilling or melancholy contrast drifting along the heavenly paths; this kind of attribution too has disappeared. A transformed vision notices new ensembles in nature, and not only for vision is the city transported on such nights: Nature in person wanders out of the appointments of the Romantic century, even the mythological centuries. There remains beauty, but it upsets us; if it has nothing clearly before it, then the collapse of the old spheres, the montage of once impenetrable zones behind it. Ice violins on high evoke a new sound; the clouds are corals from the ocean floor; death has the brightness of green turquoise; the girl in the moon, who allies herself with the frost, shows the ambiguity that, personified as zephyr, she had only with Susanna. Nights like this tear us out of the habit of giving every element of nature its ready place instead of its carriage. The dislocation of such an evening is montage, separating what is near, bringing together what is furthest, as intensified in paintings like Max Ernst’s or de Chirico’s. This shattering in things is certainly objectively there, even if the more or less accurate sense for it has only awakened now, brought about by the social earthquake. As we said, artists and poets were the first to register direct connections between things so distant. The gentle cloud of this February night remains quite objectively in the harsh cirrus ice, and the girl in the moon, complete with affectionately gazing evening star, not only belongs to the warm love song of Susanna in the Arabian garden, but at the same time understands how to put on Old Death as coolly, cheerfully, and deftly as a new dress. Existence is full of figures, but not organized figures, with each and every one in its fixed place. Instead an echo of allegorical meaning will still resound everywhere, instructively relaying back and forth, ambiguously reflective, before a form will stand there: as good woman who is a good woman; as our day, when (in both senses, a past as well as an entourage) it has the ambiguous, meaningful twilight behind it.

An Odd Flâneur I knew someone who knew how to get along without himself. Not that he had no noticeable self, even, preferably, a rather ghostly seeming self. A

An Odd Flâneur



streak of vanity too was not lacking, but even that came to life only outside of him, so to speak. As in the pleasure that came to this Mr. Kähler whenever he was suitably dressed, proper to the situation where he presently found himself among people and things. The I-Thou relationship entered all his I-It relationships too, full of questions about a person’s proper behavior with respect to every kind of externality. In an again completely selfoblivious effort, intended precisely with the utmost objectivity, adequately to encounter the respective Not-I. Already beginning in the question, May I sit as casually across from my wine glass as I doubtlessly may from my beer mug? Or by the bedside of a sick woman, very restless, almost desperately laying the proffered cigarette aside, and later, on his departure, outside, Please ask your wife to excuse me, but I really don’t know how one should smoke a cigarette in a sickroom. Or: Would you rather yield to a car, even with its top down, when it’s empty or when it’s full? Or, in Kähler’s style: Two officers meet in public, both decorated with high honors, one’s barely perceptibly higher than the other’s. Question: which of them may bring up the subject of decorations? In this way every relationship to other people was like that to things— and that, precisely, with both on the same level—embroidered with good manners, correct manners, indeed manners finally made true, proper. Thus initiating an interaction, friendly while at the same time, in spite of its outmoded form, thoroughly democratic, without any below-and-above, above-and-below in this direct visual encounter, one on a fraternal level with everything. Eccentric, absolutely; the also comical oddity of daily practicing this association of a new courtesy and a proper understanding for his counterpart is obvious; ultimately Kähler himself even outdid it. When I ran into him again in the first months of the War in , and saw this otherwise so tolerant, not exactly patriotic man nearly decorated with the Order of Merit, he answered my cold stare, after his features were overcome by growing sorrow: If you don’t understand me, who will? Don’t you see that this miserable war offered me a unique chance to learn the proper treatment of grenades? I’ve learned it, and it has nothing to do with service to the Fatherland. There was nothing for me but shame, as it were, at such a truly Kählerish reunion with, or in, such folly. Nonetheless here too something remained: what comradely relations this absurd man sought, had, with the most alien things!

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Eating Olives Precisely

In any case, in life it is not always unpleasant to run into such a fellow, or better, a nonfellow. Kähler died on one of his frequent trips, incidentally among suspicious acquaintances, now vanished. His flâneur’s ars amandi with everything laid out before perception had already ceased before that. He left no writings behind; where would he have found and not stolen the words? and really, what else but good, quiet, attentive manners in his dealings with all things? The hand here is not just, as I’ve said, the housewife of the body, but the signpost to the right word, only after which will things meet our extended index hand, word hand. Not much more could be done with Kähler, but every attempted interpretation could include a trace of such extended table manners, bedside manners, and their courteous attention.

Eating Olives Precisely A fine palate and a fine mind often go together. The more elegant a sense for the little things, for the right things, the more literally is it prefigured in the sense of taste. Through taste, the feeling for nuance has been superbly advanced. Coarseness has no place in it, though perhaps such absurdity in refinement that it can admire while it mocks itself. This from an old Chinese story about eating olives, pleasant to hear, grotesquely pointed in all its attention to detail, a caricature of refinement insofar as it remains completely irrelevant and yet itself when, in the greatest finesse, it tastes itself. A dash of it belongs to every feeling for the incidental whose palate is the least happy when it finds earthworms. This is supposed to have happened occasionally long ago, far away. It was an olive feast, yet a very unusual one, as we will presently hear, and among unusual people. In old Nanking, twice a year, the young literati would gather and consume, very calmly and tastefully, three olives each— only a few, in other words, but with a very particular manner of preparation. The most choice fruits were each sewn into a thrush, the thrush into a quail, the quail into a duck, the duck into a goose, the goose into a turkey, the turkey into a piglet, the piglet into a sheep, the sheep into a calf, the calf into an ox. Then the whole thing was gently turned and roasted on a spit over a slow fire. Thereafter the ox was thrown away, the calf, the sheep, the piglet, the turkey, the goose, the duck, the quail; the olive was



Eating Olives Precisely

In any case, in life it is not always unpleasant to run into such a fellow, or better, a nonfellow. Kähler died on one of his frequent trips, incidentally among suspicious acquaintances, now vanished. His flâneur’s ars amandi with everything laid out before perception had already ceased before that. He left no writings behind; where would he have found and not stolen the words? and really, what else but good, quiet, attentive manners in his dealings with all things? The hand here is not just, as I’ve said, the housewife of the body, but the signpost to the right word, only after which will things meet our extended index hand, word hand. Not much more could be done with Kähler, but every attempted interpretation could include a trace of such extended table manners, bedside manners, and their courteous attention.

Eating Olives Precisely A fine palate and a fine mind often go together. The more elegant a sense for the little things, for the right things, the more literally is it prefigured in the sense of taste. Through taste, the feeling for nuance has been superbly advanced. Coarseness has no place in it, though perhaps such absurdity in refinement that it can admire while it mocks itself. This from an old Chinese story about eating olives, pleasant to hear, grotesquely pointed in all its attention to detail, a caricature of refinement insofar as it remains completely irrelevant and yet itself when, in the greatest finesse, it tastes itself. A dash of it belongs to every feeling for the incidental whose palate is the least happy when it finds earthworms. This is supposed to have happened occasionally long ago, far away. It was an olive feast, yet a very unusual one, as we will presently hear, and among unusual people. In old Nanking, twice a year, the young literati would gather and consume, very calmly and tastefully, three olives each— only a few, in other words, but with a very particular manner of preparation. The most choice fruits were each sewn into a thrush, the thrush into a quail, the quail into a duck, the duck into a goose, the goose into a turkey, the turkey into a piglet, the piglet into a sheep, the sheep into a calf, the calf into an ox. Then the whole thing was gently turned and roasted on a spit over a slow fire. Thereafter the ox was thrown away, the calf, the sheep, the piglet, the turkey, the goose, the duck, the quail; the olive was

Making a Point

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removed from the thrush and brought to the table with the other two, prepared just as fastidiously. But in the middle of their subsequent intake one of the literati became painfully quiet, though not just withdrawn into himself; he chewed his meal very slowly, all tip of the tongue and palate, with his eyes to the ceiling, and said finally: I would hate to admit I’m mistaken: it seems to me that the turkey for this olive was not quite young. And his friends around the table praised the not only erudite but unfailing tip of his tongue, although it had broken the silence; praised the tongue as exceptional because it had discerned the aroma of a juice from the middle (not, say, the smaller but nearer quail, nor the mighty, all-enclosing ox). So much for the old Chinese tale, micrologically quite instructive for something more, where not just olives or playgrounds are in question. There is so much that’s more important, at least just as important in the world, that’s spoiled by untasted, undetected turkeys, even by sharks.

Making a Point One hadn’t gotten to the point where everything had been talked to death. Rather, in an age before newspapers, if not also before oratorical overkill, this lovely rebuff took place in Sparta before the council of elders. A delegation from Mycenae had appeared; their orator talked and talked, broadly, vaguely, concluded only with effort. The eldest of the gerusia replied: Your speech was too long. When you were in the middle, we’d forgotten the beginning; when you were done, we’d forgotten the beginning and the middle. Don’t know what you want; send a new legation. This legation, only two men strong, actually appeared a few days later; their speaker: Crop failures, famine, need grain. Sat down. The eldest of the gerusia: Understood; speech was short, request granted. Would have been enough to show an empty sack. Whereby the ceremonies ended, laconic down to the recommendation of an empty sack as nonverbal sign, perfectly taciturn. Perhaps there’s a mistrust of all speech here, not just of the bush they’re all beating around; also against the impertinence and thoughtlessness of calling a thing something, giving it a name it doesn’t have, not even more or less, if it has a name at all. The Mycenaean was in any case satisfied to be answered so

Making a Point

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removed from the thrush and brought to the table with the other two, prepared just as fastidiously. But in the middle of their subsequent intake one of the literati became painfully quiet, though not just withdrawn into himself; he chewed his meal very slowly, all tip of the tongue and palate, with his eyes to the ceiling, and said finally: I would hate to admit I’m mistaken: it seems to me that the turkey for this olive was not quite young. And his friends around the table praised the not only erudite but unfailing tip of his tongue, although it had broken the silence; praised the tongue as exceptional because it had discerned the aroma of a juice from the middle (not, say, the smaller but nearer quail, nor the mighty, all-enclosing ox). So much for the old Chinese tale, micrologically quite instructive for something more, where not just olives or playgrounds are in question. There is so much that’s more important, at least just as important in the world, that’s spoiled by untasted, undetected turkeys, even by sharks.

Making a Point One hadn’t gotten to the point where everything had been talked to death. Rather, in an age before newspapers, if not also before oratorical overkill, this lovely rebuff took place in Sparta before the council of elders. A delegation from Mycenae had appeared; their orator talked and talked, broadly, vaguely, concluded only with effort. The eldest of the gerusia replied: Your speech was too long. When you were in the middle, we’d forgotten the beginning; when you were done, we’d forgotten the beginning and the middle. Don’t know what you want; send a new legation. This legation, only two men strong, actually appeared a few days later; their speaker: Crop failures, famine, need grain. Sat down. The eldest of the gerusia: Understood; speech was short, request granted. Would have been enough to show an empty sack. Whereby the ceremonies ended, laconic down to the recommendation of an empty sack as nonverbal sign, perfectly taciturn. Perhaps there’s a mistrust of all speech here, not just of the bush they’re all beating around; also against the impertinence and thoughtlessness of calling a thing something, giving it a name it doesn’t have, not even more or less, if it has a name at all. The Mycenaean was in any case satisfied to be answered so

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The Reverse of Things

objectively, as it were; withdrew. Since then the empty sack that extravagant speakers especially bring with them has only become full of words again; indeed the talkers themselves are only the empty sacks of themselves. Better attention to one’s own chatter, a more eloquent reserve where one has nothing to say, offer a simple remedy here. There are certain Mycenaeans who, as they say in Berlin, are one single declaration [Anjabe], for they never cease declaring themselves [geben immer so an]; only laconically can one know what one has.4

The Reverse of Things If we say a cloth is rough, that remains among us, as it were. Only against our skin is the cloth rough; “for itself ” it might be otherwise, say, coarsely woven. But if we see a rose as red, then the color is there and then where we see it, as it were; our perception then seems to have become a property. As one no longer bound to our skin, it has the same objective appearance as the coarse weave; it seems red even independently of our vision. Whether the thing whose property this is is really called rose, truly also exists as the essence rose: this seems, to respectful consideration, more doubtful again. Whether the rose knows that it is a rose: this question is not just a later philosophical joke; rather, it is already familiar to children, precisely because they are objective and want to take every word at face value. Quite simply, seen quite childishly: what are objects up to without us? How does the room look after we leave it? The fire in the stove burns even when we’re not around. Therefore, we say, it must have been burning in the meantime, since the room is now warm. Yet that is not certain, and what the fire was doing before, what the furniture was doing during our absence, is obscure. No proposition about it can be proven, and none, even the most fantastical, can be refuted. Precisely: the mice dance on the table, and what did the table do—what was it—in the meantime? That on our return everything stands as it was, “as though nothing had happened,” can be the most uncanny thing of all. If the servant girls tell of ghosts who throw the logs at each other that are piled up in the shed: what still thrills children the most is that the next morning the wood is lying there as before. Or: though all the sails are reefed, the dead men on Hauff’s ghost ship sail backward; if the sails are nonetheless reefed

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The Reverse of Things

objectively, as it were; withdrew. Since then the empty sack that extravagant speakers especially bring with them has only become full of words again; indeed the talkers themselves are only the empty sacks of themselves. Better attention to one’s own chatter, a more eloquent reserve where one has nothing to say, offer a simple remedy here. There are certain Mycenaeans who, as they say in Berlin, are one single declaration [Anjabe], for they never cease declaring themselves [geben immer so an]; only laconically can one know what one has.4

The Reverse of Things If we say a cloth is rough, that remains among us, as it were. Only against our skin is the cloth rough; “for itself ” it might be otherwise, say, coarsely woven. But if we see a rose as red, then the color is there and then where we see it, as it were; our perception then seems to have become a property. As one no longer bound to our skin, it has the same objective appearance as the coarse weave; it seems red even independently of our vision. Whether the thing whose property this is is really called rose, truly also exists as the essence rose: this seems, to respectful consideration, more doubtful again. Whether the rose knows that it is a rose: this question is not just a later philosophical joke; rather, it is already familiar to children, precisely because they are objective and want to take every word at face value. Quite simply, seen quite childishly: what are objects up to without us? How does the room look after we leave it? The fire in the stove burns even when we’re not around. Therefore, we say, it must have been burning in the meantime, since the room is now warm. Yet that is not certain, and what the fire was doing before, what the furniture was doing during our absence, is obscure. No proposition about it can be proven, and none, even the most fantastical, can be refuted. Precisely: the mice dance on the table, and what did the table do—what was it—in the meantime? That on our return everything stands as it was, “as though nothing had happened,” can be the most uncanny thing of all. If the servant girls tell of ghosts who throw the logs at each other that are piled up in the shed: what still thrills children the most is that the next morning the wood is lying there as before. Or: though all the sails are reefed, the dead men on Hauff’s ghost ship sail backward; if the sails are nonetheless reefed

The Reverse of Things

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“the same way” the next morning, that increases our horror at night, instead of refuting it as a dream or whatever else. For many it is an uncanny feeling from early on, seeing things only when we see them. The clock strikes six, and schoolboys open their textbooks. Now a train is leaving Ulm. Perhaps a slave girl is dancing in a harem in Timbuktu. But where there’s no clock, does everything pretend to exist? The stars twinkle above the polar ice; do they really twinkle, and as stars? Does one believe of the dark side of the moon that it has its night, and its rocks? of Venus, that here potential forests lie beneath the enormous clouds of water? even though one doesn’t see them and has only the analogy of the present excerpt, which one sees while one sees it? Is it even credible that the table is necessarily always a table, and does its best to be one—only according to its visible obverse, which it turns to our view as soon as we look at it? The world as mere representation (with totally different continents from those of observable fact, which at the same time unceasingly crowd us) is a very natural, entirely prescientific horror; Bishop Berkeley is nowadays its primitive stage. Something else makes things suspect even while they stand before our gaze. At the theater, if the candles in the last act of Wallenstein are burning on the table, say, and Wallenstein undersigns the treaty with Wrangel: then the candles and the table are truly candles and table—they’re not play-acting. They weren’t the same ones, but they were candles and table no differently when Wallenstein in fact signed himself over to the actual general. Yet the people presently around the candles and desk—the present actors—are play-acting; why, then, does no fissure open? Why does the audience, illusion here, illusion there, sense no different levels of sincerity? Do inanimate objects play-act? On stage does their pretense, far from creating a fissure, have a homogeneous space? In any case, no mask can help against the healthy, childlike question, not even at the great world theater: Don’t utensils, outside of their use, belong nonetheless to an oblique world from which they never come to us? Fruit, roses, forests belong, by their material and by the course of their lives, to human beings, but the candle of stearin, even of wax, the beautiful cabinet of wood, even of steel, the stone house, the heat from the stove and even the electric bulb belong to another world, one only interspersed into this one. The sea, to which we entrust our very different purposes, and which even serves them, crashes terribly in the night, which is not night to it; the ray by which light falls onto the desk can find its way in

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Greeting and Appearance

the night where we can see nothing, and makes the way light only when it travels it, has almost traveled it. Life has settled among and on top of things, as on top of objects that need neither oxygen nor food, are dead without decaying, always at hand without being immortal; on the backs of these things, as though they were the most familiar scene, culture was established. That is why the childish impression of Wallenstein’s candle and table can easily be connected with an entirely different phantasm, with a legend outside the theater, from the wide world itself that we inhabit: with the legend of Sindbad the sailor, and a motif of his unlucky star. Here the hidden face of things, a still “irrational” life of their own, revealed itself, even threateningly, as the X that it is beyond the masks of utility. The allegory is powerful: after Sindbad suffered a shipwreck, he and a few companions saved themselves onto a small, fertile island full of fruit trees, coconut palms, birds, game, and in the woods a spring. But as the survivors lit a fire toward evening in order to roast their catch, the ground sank and the trees splintered; the island was the body of a huge kraken. For centuries the monster had rested on the ocean’s surface; now a fire burned on its back, and it dove under, “so that every sailor drowned in the churning vortex.” Many such possibilities—and still others perhaps less supernatural, yet just as explosive—lie in the riddle of how the room looks after one leaves it. In front it’s bright, or brightly lit, but no one yet knows wherein the dark side of things consists that we alone see, let alone their underside, and what it all floats in. We know only the front or right side of their technical subservience, their benign incorporation; no one knows whether their (often preserved) idyll, temptation, natural beauty is what it promises, or pretends to hold.

Greeting and Appearance How goes it, we ask; all right? Very strange, that we greet others like this—that we simply assume it’s going well. The answer forestalls that we should ever hear any different. Yet we know it’s usually not going so well, not for us. We would find it hard to take if everyone else were content, just not us. So there is also absolutely no kindness in our anticipatory wish. What, then? In spite of

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Greeting and Appearance

the night where we can see nothing, and makes the way light only when it travels it, has almost traveled it. Life has settled among and on top of things, as on top of objects that need neither oxygen nor food, are dead without decaying, always at hand without being immortal; on the backs of these things, as though they were the most familiar scene, culture was established. That is why the childish impression of Wallenstein’s candle and table can easily be connected with an entirely different phantasm, with a legend outside the theater, from the wide world itself that we inhabit: with the legend of Sindbad the sailor, and a motif of his unlucky star. Here the hidden face of things, a still “irrational” life of their own, revealed itself, even threateningly, as the X that it is beyond the masks of utility. The allegory is powerful: after Sindbad suffered a shipwreck, he and a few companions saved themselves onto a small, fertile island full of fruit trees, coconut palms, birds, game, and in the woods a spring. But as the survivors lit a fire toward evening in order to roast their catch, the ground sank and the trees splintered; the island was the body of a huge kraken. For centuries the monster had rested on the ocean’s surface; now a fire burned on its back, and it dove under, “so that every sailor drowned in the churning vortex.” Many such possibilities—and still others perhaps less supernatural, yet just as explosive—lie in the riddle of how the room looks after one leaves it. In front it’s bright, or brightly lit, but no one yet knows wherein the dark side of things consists that we alone see, let alone their underside, and what it all floats in. We know only the front or right side of their technical subservience, their benign incorporation; no one knows whether their (often preserved) idyll, temptation, natural beauty is what it promises, or pretends to hold.

Greeting and Appearance How goes it, we ask; all right? Very strange, that we greet others like this—that we simply assume it’s going well. The answer forestalls that we should ever hear any different. Yet we know it’s usually not going so well, not for us. We would find it hard to take if everyone else were content, just not us. So there is also absolutely no kindness in our anticipatory wish. What, then? In spite of

Greeting and Appearance

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what we say, we don’t want to acknowledge another’s cares, greet them away, as it were—because we don’t want to bear them? That would be one explanation, but it doesn’t suffice. For this particular anticipation has parallels precisely among things, even more serious ones. Sometimes something greets us as though from a better world, or shines it forth quietly and outwardly. Not for no reason do lit windows already invite us this way; they seem warm. The set table radiates at evening through strange windows, even one’s own. Nothing is more remarkable than the gaze from outside into one’s own room. How everything is protected there behind the glass: the lamp glows, the armchair resides, the books shine. Or we ride the train past peaceful houses from which placid smoke rises, past villages and small towns where there is still a world before the gates, with brooks, an avenue with sycamores, country homes out of the Biedermeier period behind the gracefully crumbling wall. If one could live over there in the green shadows, everything would be at its goal, inveni portum, spes et fortuna valete.5 Or one arrives toward evening in the little old town, one has a glass of wine, and all around, the market square, formed of colorful and gabled houses: then one hears the wellsprings of happiness surge from balconies and bay windows that glow from within like dreams, the peace that the houses breathe out. “But in that house over there,” says the barkeeper, sits a woman with four children, and the husband ran off the day before yesterday. In the corner house—all the way to the right, the one with the green shutters—lived Wilhelm the tailor; he was known to all the town as a drunk, and one night when he didn’t come home his wife ran to every single tavern, and to the police station; he wasn’t there either. Home again, she hangs her coat in the closet; there hung her husband among the coats, dead since afternoon. See the house with the bay window in back? There’s still a butcher shop there, but the butcher Wilker hasn’t lived there in a long time; he lent all his money to his brother-in-law, that crook. Even now I can’t get my wife to buy meat there. When she was still a girl, she was sent there one morning; a trickle of blood ran down the steps, and behind the counter lay the butcher on his block; he’d cut his own throat.

So spoke the barkeeper, but the bright windows seemed no less warm. The old square was indeed rent by all these horror stories, truer than the square itself, about poor folks and their hard luck; yet the beauty remained, even the idyll. A good deed doesn’t leave the house; a bad deed walks for miles, the barkeeper now says, confusingly. Evil must in fact

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Greeting and Appearance

have walked far; in any case, it had not returned to the green shutters and the cheerful bay window. Small-town façade and small-town reality were different worlds, which could not be superimposed, even photographically, on this “dreamy” square. Here we do not simply want all to be well, in other words; the windows themselves seem to promise it. The idyll is clearly ahead of us with its friendly greeting; its houses ensure a happiness (apart from their beauty) that they do not in fact have. The cheerful greeting between people, back and forth, the hasty forecast of well-being, perhaps comes out of mere convention, which is inert distance; one does not want to be bothered, nor bother others. The demands that we place on the well-being of others too are usually quite modest. But in pretty little yards and peaceful houses there is a first vision of happiness that is not our vision at all, but instead seems to come from the apparent thing itself. And persists like the image of one’s first encounter with others, with landscapes, even long after it’s been corrected. The belief in an idyll remains much longer, above all much higher; its disenchantment doesn’t even affect it. It’s all the same what the barkeeper says; we ourselves already know enough, to no avail, about the misery of small towns. How in a small town every stroke of fate is surrounded by thunderclaps of gossip, every burst pipe becomes a catastrophe that carries away the roofs and increases the suffering by the thousand inquisitive eyes that watch it so maliciously— first gossip, then suicide, then urban legends of misery down through the generations. Yet none of this clings to the houses, and just as little to the mysterious lie of their antiquity, their not only beautiful but good old days. Behind these windows there once lived no less small-town horror (as the epigraph often affirms); and the semicircle of houses adorned the weekly public burning. Even so, sheer idyll predominates. It places itself (and not only aesthetically) before existing as before past reality. The old marketplaces offer an exception to every rule of pessimism; they seem like a forecourt of peace. But why do we believe it so easily, even enchantedly? Whence the peculiar happy ending of the obverse? Such that we want a thing to begin well, to look good—not only to end well. Here is a need for comedy, as it were, for the cheerful façade, not only for the cheerful finale that encloses the whole world. Indeed the cheerful façade is even stranger than the usual happy ending, for the sign that beautiful houses set out is somehow “realer” in appearance than the conciliation of the end or ground into

Greeting and Appearance

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which they are ostensibly built. Then why does this appearance greet us so pleasantly? Indeed it almost lures us, and even peevish types respond to it. What is that sweet taste that things give off on travels, where one sees them on parade? What does the related fraud of antiquity signify—which is not only beautiful, but which itself traveled to us through the centuries, and is thus greeted, or greets us through its patina? Schopenhauer once explained the magic of travel, extremely subjectivistically, as the joy of seeing as such: to see is blessed, to be is awful. In the most beautiful places one doesn’t want simply to see, but to stay; no longer travel, travel on, but live. Here happiness lures us as existent, as existent on the objective front, not only as observed. It is not a blessing to see everything, perhaps even others’ misfortune; what delights us is obviously only the detached façade, which takes on none of that. Psychology, then, mere psychology, can never grasp this phenomenon that could be based at least as much in the objects as in the observer. The latter must certainly be present, even rapturous (the more he is so, the more boundlessly will he respond to appearances, above all to bad, merely emotionally enveiling or decorative appearances); but among things, façade corresponds to rapture all the better, and empathy then functions only as the vehicle to it. Even objectively, the face of the water is a mirror of the heavens above, not the fishy depths below. The sea smiles while the sharks make other faces, and the fish they devour do not believe in God. How and still more why does so much good radiate from certain things? So much pleasant appearance, not only the dazzling one that lures us but also the dangerous one we have not yet discussed. Tout va bien, say certain views, as though this auxiliary construction were also not unknown to things. As though they used this auxiliary construction on their façade, so courteous and abstract, benign at least there, and not false. The carpet finds it easier to be colorful than the painting, the painting easier than the house, the house easier than the life inside; does it then seem, on travels, as though one were seeing an attempt at a carpet, an attempt with the beautiful façade that the traveler sees foremost, after all?6 That would be a deception of the beginning; long live, in any case, its fiery aperitif. But if this also drives mere psychology out of the glamour of travel, the tout va bien still humanizes the world too much. The world is not so well ordered, nor in its being so congruent with thought, let alone with a Couéan conception of the tout va bien, as though the world were a hypochondriac and heaven the “Keep smiling!” that it tells itself.7

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Motifs of Temptation

We have described several emotional experiences of things here in this chapter, purely prescientifically, and perhaps gotten some phenomenology of thing-aspects from it. From the fire, dubious aspects; from the tree, sorrowful; from machines, dark; from my friend’s house, harmonious; from the house by day, terrifying; from the parable of Sindbad, disillusioning. But the appearance of the bay-windowed house, which at first corresponds to nothing but itself, shows the whole mixed light where such different attitudes are possible. The mixed light that the world gives, outside of its X into which technology intervenes; the enigmatic light of natural beauty in the stricter sense. In appearance, in any case, a promise is made that need not be kept, and can often lure us demonically into the void, but that nonetheless, for its part too, sometimes points to a tendency to tout va bien in things. It contains much: all possible elements and assurances of a still confused journey, and façade music too. In the lasting radiance of the bay-windowed house before the likewise immovable chopping block, the world shows its strange weather, the April of the façade; there is a sun in these things that makes tides. The visitor, not without risk, chooses the sun, trusting and hopeful—insists on the appearance that is also the thing’s, after all. In which, finally, some truth does fall on the falsely courteous or thoughtlessly casual greeting between people. From the house on the marketplace, which saw the shameful brother-inlaw and the butcher on his block, but doesn’t believe in them.

Motifs of Temptation We long for it, and then again we don’t. Want something that means nothing to us, but then we’re in the middle of it. To others it seems peculiar; to us, perhaps, empty. Yet morosely we go on; we ourselves seem to be this morose persistence. Finally we turn around, miserably, fallen out precisely with ourselves. This is how things tempt us when we’re used to them; we cannot leave them be. They evoke those foolish desires whose fulfillment gives no pleasure, but whose renunciation hurts. A person tempts us, a party, a night; we know that such things have always been petty before, but a lazy urge still makes us snatch at them, and we plunge again, without ever learning. We aren’t actually weak in the face of these temptations, but impatient and imaginative; it’s just what they live on.

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Motifs of Temptation

We have described several emotional experiences of things here in this chapter, purely prescientifically, and perhaps gotten some phenomenology of thing-aspects from it. From the fire, dubious aspects; from the tree, sorrowful; from machines, dark; from my friend’s house, harmonious; from the house by day, terrifying; from the parable of Sindbad, disillusioning. But the appearance of the bay-windowed house, which at first corresponds to nothing but itself, shows the whole mixed light where such different attitudes are possible. The mixed light that the world gives, outside of its X into which technology intervenes; the enigmatic light of natural beauty in the stricter sense. In appearance, in any case, a promise is made that need not be kept, and can often lure us demonically into the void, but that nonetheless, for its part too, sometimes points to a tendency to tout va bien in things. It contains much: all possible elements and assurances of a still confused journey, and façade music too. In the lasting radiance of the bay-windowed house before the likewise immovable chopping block, the world shows its strange weather, the April of the façade; there is a sun in these things that makes tides. The visitor, not without risk, chooses the sun, trusting and hopeful—insists on the appearance that is also the thing’s, after all. In which, finally, some truth does fall on the falsely courteous or thoughtlessly casual greeting between people. From the house on the marketplace, which saw the shameful brother-inlaw and the butcher on his block, but doesn’t believe in them.

Motifs of Temptation We long for it, and then again we don’t. Want something that means nothing to us, but then we’re in the middle of it. To others it seems peculiar; to us, perhaps, empty. Yet morosely we go on; we ourselves seem to be this morose persistence. Finally we turn around, miserably, fallen out precisely with ourselves. This is how things tempt us when we’re used to them; we cannot leave them be. They evoke those foolish desires whose fulfillment gives no pleasure, but whose renunciation hurts. A person tempts us, a party, a night; we know that such things have always been petty before, but a lazy urge still makes us snatch at them, and we plunge again, without ever learning. We aren’t actually weak in the face of these temptations, but impatient and imaginative; it’s just what they live on.

Motifs of Temptation

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We are particularly tempted by dissimilar beings or unfamiliar things, by somewhere we are not. Here flow and gleam all kinds of figures, mythically conceived; here flows the water, the will o’ the wisp; here, above all, the lovely far distance. The forest with its deep green draws us in, looks at us unfathomably. The Pied Piper of Hamelin calls, and in a deeper myth the sirens sing: all sorts of grand temptations dispersed into our uneasy desires, into the idolatry of the unknown, even into the omnipresent undecidedness of the world. But its seed usually sprouts only as deception; beyond the Pied Piper is only the mountain tomb; beyond the water, especially beyond the sirens’ song, lurk deadly nymphs with eagle talons, and the island is covered with the carcasses of their victims. It’s urgent to let what is permanently experienceable, mythically conceived in the following still run, to let it run aground in a number of simple as well as old motifs. These are above all temptations of things, masked, with different shades of desire and corresponding phases of plunge beyond. Every temptation contains the sirenically conceived imperative to pleasure; only beyond it, after pursuing and experiencing it, does the subject plunge into its opposite. Into the appearance that does not give what it promises, because it’s too beautiful. The glittering of the wide world, the splendor of women, silk, gems, uniforms—in short, all the excitement of pulp fiction would serve even better if grouches hadn’t made this sort of appearance suspicious—for their purposes, which have no life at all. Instead minor cases are recounted here—children’s and popular literature about banquets, harems, martial success, fumitory—to stand in for the temptation of objects in the large. The subject only experiences in temptation what the enticing appearance, the always remarkable appearance, conceals of evil, a special evil, and not at all what it intends, or shines on with its tout va bien radiance, as in a hothouse. It began early for a certain boy. He looked forward to how beautiful the meal would be the next day. The holiday arrives, all the guests sit about the table, the children are dressed in white. The soup course is over, and the great roast appears, an entire haunch of beef on the Tischlein deck dich.8 His father stands, says a few pleasant words, and begins to carve the roast. But as he sticks the fork into it, the meat sputters, a little column of pus shoots out. The animal was sick, and since its haunch was roasted in one piece the cook noticed nothing amiss. Only the table brings everything to light; the boy sees for the first time beneath the crust. When he

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Motifs of Temptation

hears that one should beware of slimy things, he no longer imagines, as he did before, that frogs are meant; rather, he knows where and how it is. Further behind, and yet one can never know that without going back there oneself. Or a youth, goes another story, strolls jauntily down the street.9 Then an old woman says to him: Tarry a bit, my good lad, and follow me; I want to show you something you’ll enjoy. The youth understands, and follows her down many streets up to a splendid house where a lady welcomes him, richly adorned, young and beautiful. She greets the youth as her lover returned from a long journey, and draws him onto the cushions with her. They drink and laugh until the sunlight in the wine rises in their heads; the youth kisses the rapturous woman and presses against her. Yet in the middle of the kiss she leaps up, out of the room, down the long, dark, empty hallway, the youth after her, into rooms along the side from which her voice seems to sound, back into the hallway, into a new room where he chases her around tables and cushions, until she flees to a mattress in the darkest corner and stretches against a pillar on the wall. Still in full stride, the youth trips on the soft rugs, into the hanging lamp over the fair woman—and the rug gives way, and the lover falls stark naked onto the bustling marketplace, past the balconies, into the tanners’ bazaar, who are calling out their prices, buying and selling in the sunshine around noon. And as they see him, drunk and in such a state, they shout and laugh out loud, begin beating his naked body with skins; he still cannot understand what has happened to him, and finally a friend comes along, gives him clothes and has him taken home. Thus ends this pastoral, with a trap door into the completely ludicrous; plunges right out of this tale from the Arabian Nights into screeching reality. It is almost this lover’s good fortune that he guessed nothing about the woman’s motives during all their flirtations, that he experienced joy and plunge one right after the other, not simultaneously and ambivalently, like another fellow whose story we now tell. Here the victim no longer escapes with just a nasty shock; instead the interplay tickles him to the bone. This lad was working as a farm hand, didn’t have it easy. One day a troop of mercenaries drew through the village; they took what they needed and marched off, yelling. The lad after them, caught up to them in a prosperous village, went before the commander: the commander told him he could follow along in the baggage train, where he could put on some weight for

Motifs of Temptation

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the march to France. Before a barn on a hill lay the entire troop, among barrels of schnapps; up there the lad was taken. The peasant clothing off and the colorful mercenary’s scarf on; so the lad boasted and drank, or listened to the coarse battle cries, rumbling about blood and women. But for a while the commander had been watching him, quite peculiarly, and bit down his laughter behind his beard. Now he said something to the mob. Immediately two mercenaries grabbed the lad, and the whole troop behind them, with the pipers in the lead, into the barn. The ceremony must still be performed, said the commander, and from his pocket drew a short rope. The half-drunk lad thought he would be thrashed before his admission, as he had heard, so that his friends could have some fun and he prove his manhood. He pulled off his motley himself, so that one could see that he was not afraid, but could put up with all of war, with all the flesh wounds, as a mercenary should. Now the commander took the rope and tied one end over a roof beam; on a signal, the troop rolled an old barrel with cracked staves out of a corner, and set it under the beam. These men were no mercenaries at all, but bandits, called “cowboys,” with no intention of clashing with an army; instead every one of them had deserted from some regiment. Come here a minute, my lad, said the commander very calmly, laid the other end of the rope around his neck, and bade him climb up on the barrel. That thing could collapse, said the lad, laughing, and climbed up on it, the noose around his neck. Now the commander pulled his end so hard over the beam that his body was already pulled upward. The lad cried out, grinning, and stood on his toes, but the commander pulled the rope harder yet, and the mercenaries laughed. Have I got what it takes? bellowed the lad, and threw up; thereupon the commander gave the barrel a shove, sending splinters flying, and the lad jerked in the air, snatched upward, held on to the rope, swaying. Now, my baggage carrier, laughed the commander, that’s how you get to the heavenly hosts. The lad still tried to laugh along, gasping and red as a side of beef. But no one was listening to the jokes that the lad gasped out, believing that he was just being initiated into the warrior caste; the commander was already out of the barn, and the cowboys after him. Only the groaning of the casks still pierced the roaring silence. Vainly he tried to get his hand inside the noose, pull himself up to the beam; with his teeth he gnawed at the rope, screamed for help. Then he let go, the beam creaked, and the lad was still.

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Motifs of Temptation

Now, assuming that there is life after death, and the young mercenary does awaken, this scalded child should still avoid not so much hellfire as the heavenly light, so promising. The poor lad may not have had a lucky star for military service, but certainly a talent for being tickled to death, to experience what was so to speak equivocal about his friends in the same instant, very differently from the deceived lover with his shock of mere surprise. What the lady alone enjoyed there—the ambient, undivided unity of pleasure and danger—the excited farmhand himself experienced in the ceremony, as someone who had basic problems with the irony of serious mockery, no longer mock seriousness. The lady from before is a step behind the commander, yet both quite aptly occupy the category of droll murderer. Likewise, the sirens of legend did not suddenly tear their victims apart, but probably even more protractedly or ambivalently combined lady and trap door, invitation and mortal danger, music and slaughter. What tempts more fixedly than sex and war is what must be beyond all that beautiful, remote, dead being. Beyond stones, hills, mountains, from which legend has let more mysterious music ring than the sirens’. A story of temptation among so many others of this chthonic sort belongs here. Ibsen relates it as having happened to the Norwegian farmer Lars, also a woodcarver and fiddler.10 One day this man did not come back from the path he wanted to take to the mountain pasture. After weeks passed and simpler means did not work, the pastor had the bell rung at midnight. At the first stroke Lars stood in the church and replied only curtly, or not at all. Only by and by did he admit what everyone knew anyway, that on his way he had been trapped in the mountain by a spell, did not know how it had happened. He told of a room full of incredible carvings, but in all the days he was there no one but a girl showed herself. There he had not stirred the entire time, until the girl brought him a fiddle such as he had never before held in his hands, so artfully worked, and ordered him to play. For a long time he couldn’t bring himself to it, as much as he wanted to; but at his first stroke the fiddle began to sing by itself, and as he played on, the fairies fell in with the music as though they were in the room, and sang along. He himself began to sing as he played, until the stroke of a bell broke right through; the entire room was full of people, and as he looked around he was standing in the church. This story came out very hesitantly, and only many days later; Lars also never again played as before for the Sunday dances, seemed never to shake

Motifs of Temptation

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off the spell, and showed his face ever more seldom among other people. Mostly he whittled, and tried to imitate what he’d seen in that room, or he carved fiddles that were supposed to resemble the subterranean ones. Day and night he sat in a little garret stuffed from top to bottom with unfinished carvings and all kinds of strange things whose purpose and use no one could ever learn. In the end he worked only on a wooden doll with the fairy’s features; but he could never get it right, kept starting helplessly from the beginning, whittled just a few strokes, threw the wood away in order to resume the same ordeal with a new piece. And so Lars descended into ever more solitary reverie. According to one report, he wandered back under the mountain; according to another likelier report, he was found one warm summer night in his garret, hanged. In short: for this man too, the illusion was strong at the beginning and receded terribly; he tried to recreate what had led him astray into the mountain, and he failed, probably not because it was too great for his ability but because here too was a trap door into bottomless disillusion, a snare over the void, because the sought-after music, or womanliness, or wisdom of the mountain’s interior turned to ash on awakening, like Rübezahl’s gold the next day.11 The fatal madness of farmer Lars is related to the plunge into the tanner’s market, the disappointment of the strangled mercenary (apart from the madness of infatuation, which might also be in it) in a very high sphere: in the sphere of melancholy and of chthonic magic, the empty, Christless brooding downward and inward, the hopeless digging after a treasure that does not even exist in the temptations of such external depth. In related tales the victims, spellbound by the prehistory of the mountain, turn eighty after three days; their life slips away after they listen to a glow from a mountain cave, buzzing as though “glorying in its wisdom.” The sage was of course only the fiery-eyed owl, and the wisdom of the cliff was only the impasse of a great, mad, stereotypical death—as the ground of mountains and the temptation of nature.12 But not every temptation leads so hopelessly into the void. Instead the world is on the march in just this mixed light, and the ordeal must first withstand the splendor, or sometimes divide it. Many an illusion is not yet an illusion forever; conversely every kind of fulfillment still has potential illusion in its knapsack. Above all in food, women, war, melancholy, mere temptation is mixed with the brilliance of the real thing, which seethes here, and is not yet out: neither as nothing (as with mere illusion and

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Motifs of Temptation

plunge), nor already as something. There are clearly different paths, even different ends. Mere temptation rouses the desire one will suffer for, that always demonic craving and curiosity that trusts in the wide road to hell that so quickly shrinks to a narrow gorge. In the path of substance, conversely, the bitter toil of the beginning and the surprising salvation of the end predominate; its signs or its pledges are at first slight and grow only with the laborious progress, as the ripening and emergence of the thing itself. But these distinctions are not so clear that one could spare oneself the path, or the test of the sun that first brings everything to light. Temptation and substance can appear combined even when under way, on the terms of a still undecided world that itself is not so neatly sorted that siren song and Wagner’s, even Bach’s music, or the separate grades of melancholy could readily be distinguished in advance. The judgment of history has been fooled often enough; even Socrates and Christ were regarded as deceivers. A dialectic is above all at work here, struggling, observable only in process, which can bring substance too, very close into the range of temptation, the real into the range of illusion, precisely because neither has yet been fully decided. Neither reality nor illusion; often the one merges into the other in this seething world. The lily’s perfume intoxicates and is still, at the same time, the image of purity; woman, around whom there is always a seething, even a phosphorescence, is, like music, the highest as well as the most undecided thing in the world. The secret of mountains has not yet come to light, let alone to night. Even the most obvious deception at least apes its splendor, or anticipates it with reckless assurance, in a mendacious way that must even so be inherent in the tendency of life, in its mere but nonetheless available possibilities. In itself the deception is pointless; there would not even be a Fata Morgana without palm trees far away in space and time. In this way the deception can even become a sign, against its will but not ours; then we no longer drive helplessly into it, even to the bitter end, but certainly do not fall back completely. Rather, its appearance is there to be defeated, and its reflection concretely to be inherited. This too has been wonderfully anticipated in a legend (a Greek one of the kind Aristotle meant when he said that a lover of wisdom would always be a friend of legends and fairy tales). When Odysseus had himself lashed to the mast, he still evaded the sirens—capitulated to temptation at the outset, in other words. But when Orpheus passed by and the sirens sang, he himself played the lyre. His music forced the sirens to stop and

Appendix: No Man’s Land

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listen. He not only survived temptation but defeated it, and outdid it with white magic. The Argos passed by uncaptivated; indeed, the dispossessed sirens threw themselves into the sea and became boulders. In woman, sea, rock, in the empty temptation of caves and distances, they have of course remained, in the entire, still bottomless, at least undecided, ambiguous secret of nature: of her springtime, which is just as external as it is nearly ours; of her mountain music and her sun, which is as much an unintelligible radiant body around which the earth barely revolves correctly without falling into it, as it—without yet being the human sun—presents the universally reflective symbol of light. Staying pure is thus a different thing from being pure. Young people know that dark, fervent wandering through fields and towns. The painted ladies glow, and the one hidden among them; the fruitless encounter ends, the fleeting glance without past or future, without ravishment, losing itself in passing; behind it beckons the homesickness of the dark, deep dream. It is hardly yet known where the will is driven off the path here, where the will o’ the wisps begin, or where the paved road of the goal— discrete, definite, and clear—leads through all this storm-flashing brilliance. The sky is still high, and the czar far away: the flight from temptation is not always the discovery of the light, and certainly not the same as searching for the light. The complete avoidance of the diffuse phototropism can also be a desertion measured against the existence of the process, against the necessity to gain from our confused impatience, even from the caricatures of illusion, the original. In the words of a Chassidic master, one who keeps the commandments may well enter Paradise, but because he did not know ecstasy or fervor, he will never feel the ecstasy or the fervor of Paradise. Explanation: only one who tempts, who is tempted, can be truly pious; he knows the mystical lights through the world, but also the scars from the illusion withstood on the way there.

Appendix: No Man’s Land Many are oddly familiar with dead matter. With glass, perhaps fragile, but clear; with stones, so firm and silent. A youthful feeling draws us to them, different from the collected feeling of middle age. Like the greed of old men who have become indifferent to life, and for whom the inert

Appendix: No Man’s Land

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listen. He not only survived temptation but defeated it, and outdid it with white magic. The Argos passed by uncaptivated; indeed, the dispossessed sirens threw themselves into the sea and became boulders. In woman, sea, rock, in the empty temptation of caves and distances, they have of course remained, in the entire, still bottomless, at least undecided, ambiguous secret of nature: of her springtime, which is just as external as it is nearly ours; of her mountain music and her sun, which is as much an unintelligible radiant body around which the earth barely revolves correctly without falling into it, as it—without yet being the human sun—presents the universally reflective symbol of light. Staying pure is thus a different thing from being pure. Young people know that dark, fervent wandering through fields and towns. The painted ladies glow, and the one hidden among them; the fruitless encounter ends, the fleeting glance without past or future, without ravishment, losing itself in passing; behind it beckons the homesickness of the dark, deep dream. It is hardly yet known where the will is driven off the path here, where the will o’ the wisps begin, or where the paved road of the goal— discrete, definite, and clear—leads through all this storm-flashing brilliance. The sky is still high, and the czar far away: the flight from temptation is not always the discovery of the light, and certainly not the same as searching for the light. The complete avoidance of the diffuse phototropism can also be a desertion measured against the existence of the process, against the necessity to gain from our confused impatience, even from the caricatures of illusion, the original. In the words of a Chassidic master, one who keeps the commandments may well enter Paradise, but because he did not know ecstasy or fervor, he will never feel the ecstasy or the fervor of Paradise. Explanation: only one who tempts, who is tempted, can be truly pious; he knows the mystical lights through the world, but also the scars from the illusion withstood on the way there.

Appendix: No Man’s Land Many are oddly familiar with dead matter. With glass, perhaps fragile, but clear; with stones, so firm and silent. A youthful feeling draws us to them, different from the collected feeling of middle age. Like the greed of old men who have become indifferent to life, and for whom the inert

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Appendix: No Man’s Land

remains but never opens up. We are not also speaking of devices here, for we animate them, after all, and they seem to acquire something from it. So they are in any case more dogs than cats; they seem faithful, and so are we, no more than that. In contrast, truly alien dead things can withdraw remarkably into themselves. Crystals have faces that will not let us go, radial, in little towers that do not stand near us. Their colors are from a depth where no one sees; light makes them colorful or dazzling, but they still hold something back. Only the blue of old enamel has something of this night by day; otherwise crystals are distant, yet so strikingly near that they have never been felt to be demonic, in contrast to orchids or snakes. Much coarser, but perhaps more embracing, enticing, crushing, is the great landscape outside us, especially where “dead” matter flows in masses, or rises into the sky and draws our gaze upward. Young people often feel themselves strangely dejected before it, not with a feeling of worthlessness before equals or superiors; instead the devaluation strikes everyone, affects the human as such. Before mountains and stars, our entire striving can seem small; everything here is turned away even from the human mystery, and the mystery of our goals. To play human greatness and works off against them seems especially futile, quite truly out of place; for already the appearance of greatness comes from outside, is immediately defeated by the tall mountain, let alone the infinite universe. The struggles of life then appear like those in a drop of water; a comet with prussic acid in its tail suffices to dissolve all the consciousness that glints faintly in its little corner, and it is itself just one of many riddles, as much in that it is, as in what it sees. Every trace of our days on earth is framed by an enormous night, backward as well as forward, individually and above all cosmically. An eighteenyear-old wrote a letter to the cosmos shortly before his suicide—that we can well understand, given the contrasts between this dwarfish life and the gigantic silence around nearly everything but a few plants, animals, and humans. Pan calmly, quietly cast the young man down; his gaze can be Gorgonian. Certainly we refresh our bodies in him too; on the plane between the body and the Alps appears a wonderful healthy feeling, as though they were built for us; expanse cleanses us of the four walls. But all those lovers of nature are setting out into dead matter; it enters them as though they were devalued, rigid with intoxication. The spell of merely human content, the desperate situation, the irresolvable complication: it is what it is, it does not mask itself, one can rebel against it. Yet the eighteen-

A Russian Fairy Tale?

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year-old was really under a very different spell: that of the starry frame, not of the content; an enormous Erlkönig beckoned; all of life became meaningless to him. In particular, the fear here is the reverse of that in the Erlkönig, namely, attraction: storm, fog, old willows draw us, even the desire to become like river, heath, mountain, sea, death, starry sky, no man’s land. Human beings have done everything to keep this monstrosity from swallowing them up. They have flattered it as heathens; as Christians they have placed a child above it. Nonetheless the huge number stuns, even when we see through it: the inflation of the light years that, in gold, will not even buy us a piece of bread; the void that already begins in the thin mountain air, and is alone properly infinite—namely, nothing, over and over. Someone said to his wise friend: Our talk may be fine and profound, but how mute are the stars, and how they remain unmoved by us! How great is the universe and how pitifully the heights of our cathedrals stand before it. What would the earth itself say if it opened a mouth from Lisbon to Moscow, and only a few primal words thundered forth, Orphically? To which his wise friend replied, as a partisan of culture: A slap in the face is an argument? And the earth? The earth would probably talk a lot of nonsense, for it has read neither Kant nor Plato.

A Russian Fairy Tale? This story was simply made up, doesn’t really seem possible. Not even in an age when hearts and the like are transplanted. Yet the fabulous account has a way of sounding ever truer when it doesn’t stay restricted to its Englishmen, to the report by young scientists who wanted to explore Indian caves for the prehistoric plant and animal species that might still live there. So the explorers sailed along the coast, with varying luck. Until another cave entrance caught their eye, quite promising; protected from the waves too. They left their motorboat on the open sea because of the rocks, rowed to shore, and were received truly prehistorically, by the howling of an incredible monster whose sleep had been disturbed. It looked like a Cyclops, had the same saurian eye in its forehead, the last dinosaur itself. He immediately killed a young Englishman, lay down across the cave entrance, devoured his victim as an evening meal. And so on the next day; the end of

A Russian Fairy Tale?



year-old was really under a very different spell: that of the starry frame, not of the content; an enormous Erlkönig beckoned; all of life became meaningless to him. In particular, the fear here is the reverse of that in the Erlkönig, namely, attraction: storm, fog, old willows draw us, even the desire to become like river, heath, mountain, sea, death, starry sky, no man’s land. Human beings have done everything to keep this monstrosity from swallowing them up. They have flattered it as heathens; as Christians they have placed a child above it. Nonetheless the huge number stuns, even when we see through it: the inflation of the light years that, in gold, will not even buy us a piece of bread; the void that already begins in the thin mountain air, and is alone properly infinite—namely, nothing, over and over. Someone said to his wise friend: Our talk may be fine and profound, but how mute are the stars, and how they remain unmoved by us! How great is the universe and how pitifully the heights of our cathedrals stand before it. What would the earth itself say if it opened a mouth from Lisbon to Moscow, and only a few primal words thundered forth, Orphically? To which his wise friend replied, as a partisan of culture: A slap in the face is an argument? And the earth? The earth would probably talk a lot of nonsense, for it has read neither Kant nor Plato.

A Russian Fairy Tale? This story was simply made up, doesn’t really seem possible. Not even in an age when hearts and the like are transplanted. Yet the fabulous account has a way of sounding ever truer when it doesn’t stay restricted to its Englishmen, to the report by young scientists who wanted to explore Indian caves for the prehistoric plant and animal species that might still live there. So the explorers sailed along the coast, with varying luck. Until another cave entrance caught their eye, quite promising; protected from the waves too. They left their motorboat on the open sea because of the rocks, rowed to shore, and were received truly prehistorically, by the howling of an incredible monster whose sleep had been disturbed. It looked like a Cyclops, had the same saurian eye in its forehead, the last dinosaur itself. He immediately killed a young Englishman, lay down across the cave entrance, devoured his victim as an evening meal. And so on the next day; the end of

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A Russian Fairy Tale?

the young scientists was in sight. Then they were helped when the Cyclops, after killing two men at a stroke, put aside the second (who still showed signs of life) and, sated, stretched out before the exit and went to sleep. Along with some little knives and shovels, usually for unearthing and digging out antediluvian remains, the Englishmen kept a bottle of alcohol to quickly preserve their finds. This alcohol they now placed before the digesting beast’s maw, and he gulped it all down. Meanwhile, however, one of the men had trepanned his dying comrade’s skull just before his final breath and removed the brain. Another did the same to the monster, unconscious from the alcohol; they then set the human brain into the empty cavity. The Cyclops had not even stirred from the spot, the exit remained blocked, but after some time there came from his maw the same terrible and yet different howls; instead it almost began to seem that they were trying to form words. English, almost intelligible, and as it got more intelligible it even came out with a distinct Oxford accent. It was now their companion who was speaking here, so horribly transplanted, and they could barely separate themselves from him, even after he showed them the exit. Until he implored them to abandon him, he could feel that the old juices in the gigantic animal’s body were beginning gradually to dismantle its human brain. Only as the words in which their friend implored them became ever more howling, unintelligible, indeed at the same time more menacing, and his eyes ever more those of the former saurian, did the men flee to their boat before the cave, and they reached their ship out in the deeper water just as they saw the familiar beast dive after them between the rocks. From the fleeing ship they could still hear that Cyclopean thing for a long time on the shore, all the more terrible as they still thought they heard voices like their late friend and colleague’s surging up, falling back, reviving. If the young scholars had been solid in more than paleontology, they could perhaps have remembered the more recent fate of much greater humanum in an undefeated, resurgent basis of reaction.13 But their allegorical thinking didn’t extend that far; how should it, with such a fictional incident, and from something so prehistoric? Yet if one weren’t near the coast of India but instead before the time-honored stake where Jan Hus ended up, and in Siberia as a whole, then one would already know better what new wine in old skins can mean.14 When they later consulted their sextant more precisely, and the kopecks had dropped, they saw that they had been along not just the Indian coast.

The Clever Way Out

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The Clever Way Out The weak like to crawl, or flee to the side. The strong make room, yet it’s often not as new as the narrow gap to the side to which another escapes. What’s mousy about it can be disgusting; what’s rabbity can be dubious, pathetic, ignoble. Stuffy holes are plenty, and already familiar; even the feint right or left changes only the direction, not the field. There are bad forms of this method (above all feminine and Jewish); here, however, we have in mind—against the spell of the situation, imminent destruction, things—truly new discoveries, small continents to the side that only the weak can find. Berries of wit (in the older sense) then grow there, which, even picked later, as wit in the newer sense, can seem liberating. Unfortunately wit has the property of being good only in the raw; spoken, it can often be splendid, but when written (that is, cooked) there’s often almost nothing left. It doesn’t allow itself to be prepared in writing, or only à la tartare, as it were, with exotically piquant ingredients and Baroque circumlocutions, something of which Kleist was a master. Yet the landscape of the way can still be described, and its flora depicted well enough that an imaginative person can recall the raw form. With women, we said, the way out is often bad. The wife’s disingenuous question when the soup was too hot (Would you rather I served it cold?) is worthless. Yet with a different woman one begins to take notice, with the wit of the adulteress caught in the act who nonetheless denies it. Who says to her furious husband, her naked lover next to her in bed, If you trust your eyes before you trust me, where is your love for me? This woman knew how to select an illustration of her argument quite originally, quite bafflingly. Her husband will never get around this corner again; even in calmer moments he’ll be unable to follow her. The Jewish way out is more common; even in its lowest form it leads rightly to the side. It isn’t as silly or as inscrutable as feminine wit, but instead frivolous, formalist, shrewd; it can however, by the light of its good sense or the darkness of its faith, bring us into a meaningful aside. Here especially we find (though with backgrounds) colleagues of the clever, more than clever adulteresses and the other inhabitants of their land. A story belongs here, or rather the account by the very man who traveled through Northern Siberia; he told of wolves, of weary horses, breaking through the ice, his whole sled into the lake. And then? ask the entranced listeners, as the man stops talking, can’t get the words out. His

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The Clever Way Out

mouth is full of water, he should have drowned by now—Then? says the traveler, exhaling: God help me, the whole story is a lie. Thus the liar pulled back, but no dreamer has ever awakened more beautifully, either; no lie’s legs were ever prayed back to health and length better than this. Does not God here become the father of liars, indeed of lies, but also of the end of the lie that the labyrinth is true? And now we should hold up to it the other, more reversed story of a way out, of the rabbi who praised God’s works, and how perfectly everything on this earth was disposed, how beautifully and wisely. Then a hunchback came up to him after the end of the sermon and said: Rabbi, you spoke so wonderfully of God’s works, and how beautiful everything is, how profound and wise. But look at me: am I that beautiful and profound and wise? The rabbi did look at the man, and replied: For a hunchback you are beautiful, profound, and wise enough. So the rabbi takes nothing back, for a hunchback is a created form, which is perfect when it is as it is. The rabbi took much back, back into God himself, who created perfection only dimly, in rations, but lets us sense by the hunchback’s indignation what he held back. One shouldn’t press wit all that far, nonetheless: in this joke, and thousands of others, there are philosophies that have never been thought of. In them there is only a small way out, mauschelnd, and too absurd ever to become the king’s highway of a creative thought, but not too insignificant.15 Their peculiar, wittily serious novum distinguishes this kind of way out from the unproductive way out through foolishness, or the purity of foolishness, which is wit only to others, while of course confusing them. This is the way in the story of a monk, for example, a very pious and simple man, only one whose urges gave him great trouble. Flagellation and chastisement did nothing; then one night a woman slipped into his cell on the pretext of confession, a whore known throughout the town, in the transition to a nun, thus perfect for the job. As the brother awoke toward morning from the kind of slumber he had not enjoyed since childhood, so sweet and so rich, with a serenity filled with nothing but pious thoughts, he threw himself to the floor and thanked God for finally showing him a means to be rid of his torment. The teller of this very old anecdote adds that the prior, upon hearing of the matter—and also that the monk had broken his vows out of the purest foolishness, indeed had confused the Gospels—pardoned him and prayed for him: that he might enter Paradise with the asses.

The Clever Way Out

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How different again, how cunningly serious, when feminine and Jewish evasion go together! The Eva of whom the last story tells in this connection was the second, very young wife of a rabbi who had remarried in old age. After many years of happy marriage, the rabbi fell sick for the first time in his life, and said to his young wife: I won’t rise again from this bed, Hannah. Sooner or later the Angel of Death will come and take me to my ancestors. Hannah sobbed, and cried: Don’t say such things, my rabbi, I won’t hear them. I will lock all the doors and windows against the Angel of Death. Or if he does come, I will say, Angel of Death, let my rabbi live, and take me instead. The rabbi took her hand: You will not say that, Hannah; you will not sin against your own young life. But as Hannah would not cease lamenting and swearing, the rabbi said no more, and simply turned toward the wall, as though from great weariness, and shut his eyes. His young wife kept watch over him until evening, when she went into town to shop; and no sooner was she out of the house than the rabbi rose and went into the kitchen, where two geese were being fattened behind a screen. He opened the gate, strewed breadcrumbs from the screen across the floor into the bedroom and up to the bed, and lay back down just at the right moment, as Hannah came through the door and into the dark room to the sleeping invalid. All of a sudden one could hear the strangest sound coming from the kitchen, a tapping as though of quiet, hard, inhuman feet; even the rabbi started. Do you hear? he said to Hannah, Do you hear the Angel of Death, how he comes? Hannah trembled. Now the steps were already at the door, in the room, now right by the bed, where Hannah sat. And as the tapping brushed against her feet, she screamed and pointed to the rabbi: Angel of Death, here he lies! Now the rabbi struck a match, the geese pecked away, and the rabbi spoke: Well, my Hannah, what did you say? Did you say: Angel of Death, take me in his stead, let my rabbi live, the light of my eyes? Hannah looked at the geese, at her husband, and replied: If it had been the right Angel of Death, I would have said it, too. But you can’t expect me to say it to a goose. And this is also a proof, concluded the storyteller to whom we owe this story, very unexpectedly, that Jews should have nothing to do with animals. In another version, Hannah is supposed to have said: Do you want to embarrass me in front of this goose? The crisis wasn’t there for this woman.

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Disappointment with Amusement

If there were no ways out, where would the weak go, who were so witty? Since they are ways out, they go in very different directions, though always into a third term, even where every escape seems blocked. From now on, said a Chinese sage, whose servant one morning wove his braid out of three hairs, and after a time it happened that another hair fell out in the servant’s hand, and then another; he threw himself to the ground before his master, yet the sage said calmly, From now on I’ll wear my hair down. Between the words of Hannah, the Christian harlot, the traveler in Siberia, the rabbi and the hunchback, and finally the Chinese sage, there are certainly few, or still very few, contentual connections. As deed, the daring of the weak is not worth very much, and as idea it’s often frivolous; nor do the weak conceal themselves in the most attractive form, and the bosom of Abraham looks different.16 Yet there is an “Open, Sesame!” and it shows itself too: the search for a way out, as twisted as it may be, is still met in the world, as iron as it is, by something undecided, something porous and sawn through in places. The beautiful appearance, the dark ground: but to the witty man that’s never the end of the matter, and wit as a whole—which is the point here—is not itself witty only in the frivolous sense. “God help me, the whole story is a lie”: not a bad motto for a liar; not a bad motto if better men were to say it. One must be both witty and transcendent, in order to be either.

Disappointment with Amusement One expected something different, and usually more. When it’s less, that’s annoying, but not always; it still offers something when it doesn’t really matter. Or when it’s really harmless, like a joke, which after all can also amuse when it falls flat—when it sets mountains in motion, as it were, only to bear a mouse. As happened, for example, with that scene at the circus, lots of big words, expectations ever rising. The ring was cleared and nothing less was announced than the battle steed Bucephalos. That was also the name of Alexander the Great’s personal horse. The mighty steel cable was already auspicious by which the ringmaster tried to drag the stallion into the ring. Only tried, of course; the stubborn, unseen something on the other end dragged him forward by the cable, outside, from where one could hear

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Disappointment with Amusement

If there were no ways out, where would the weak go, who were so witty? Since they are ways out, they go in very different directions, though always into a third term, even where every escape seems blocked. From now on, said a Chinese sage, whose servant one morning wove his braid out of three hairs, and after a time it happened that another hair fell out in the servant’s hand, and then another; he threw himself to the ground before his master, yet the sage said calmly, From now on I’ll wear my hair down. Between the words of Hannah, the Christian harlot, the traveler in Siberia, the rabbi and the hunchback, and finally the Chinese sage, there are certainly few, or still very few, contentual connections. As deed, the daring of the weak is not worth very much, and as idea it’s often frivolous; nor do the weak conceal themselves in the most attractive form, and the bosom of Abraham looks different.16 Yet there is an “Open, Sesame!” and it shows itself too: the search for a way out, as twisted as it may be, is still met in the world, as iron as it is, by something undecided, something porous and sawn through in places. The beautiful appearance, the dark ground: but to the witty man that’s never the end of the matter, and wit as a whole—which is the point here—is not itself witty only in the frivolous sense. “God help me, the whole story is a lie”: not a bad motto for a liar; not a bad motto if better men were to say it. One must be both witty and transcendent, in order to be either.

Disappointment with Amusement One expected something different, and usually more. When it’s less, that’s annoying, but not always; it still offers something when it doesn’t really matter. Or when it’s really harmless, like a joke, which after all can also amuse when it falls flat—when it sets mountains in motion, as it were, only to bear a mouse. As happened, for example, with that scene at the circus, lots of big words, expectations ever rising. The ring was cleared and nothing less was announced than the battle steed Bucephalos. That was also the name of Alexander the Great’s personal horse. The mighty steel cable was already auspicious by which the ringmaster tried to drag the stallion into the ring. Only tried, of course; the stubborn, unseen something on the other end dragged him forward by the cable, outside, from where one could hear

The Invisible Hand

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only stamping and angry whinnying. One, two, then three particularly brawny men came to the ringmaster’s aid, pulled expertly at the cable, in vain, could only bring the cable to a standstill. Until a fourth came along and grabbed the cable, a very heavy boxer, come to help them from the next number, and now he finally moved the cable from a standstill and pulled it ever more back. A final tug, all together, one could hear the clatter of mighty hoofs outside, triumph—and a wooden horse was visible at the end of the cable, rolled into the ring on its four wheels. The audience now laughed with relief at this great sight gag, laughed wholeheartedly, as we like to say. And not at all so disappointed at such a Bucephalos at the end of the tether. Even objectively, it was rather relieved by the humor, perhaps also because anticipation is not only joyful, but much more often fearful— and look, there was nothing to it! At least not in fairy tales; or even when something less childish comes, does not come out like a wooden horse, nevertheless fairy tales, the circus, all the way up to farce, all mean that the soup is always cooler when you eat it than when it was boiling. Whereas in the life as we still have it, the cooks in charge expect us to eat the soup even hotter.

The Invisible Hand One day, maybe, it will be better outside too, all the way outside. Then hard things will come back to us, or we to them, either way. By themselves they stand askew or confused to us, but one good grip and they fit right into the position that believers mean. A story about it gives us something to think about: what befell Herr Schotten from Mainz more than a hundred years ago. He was a man like others, who did quite well for himself. Dealt in silk, and once a year took a trip, including a small detour. He never failed to spend some days in pious discussion with the rabbi of Michelstadt. The latter was known as a miracle rabbi, and was called Baal Shem, of whom there were many near the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany too. Now as Herr Schotten visited the Baal Shem again before making a business trip to St. Gallen, and the coach stood outside, he said: Rabbi, I have the strangest feeling; I don’t want to go on this trip. Whether I had a bad

The Invisible Hand

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only stamping and angry whinnying. One, two, then three particularly brawny men came to the ringmaster’s aid, pulled expertly at the cable, in vain, could only bring the cable to a standstill. Until a fourth came along and grabbed the cable, a very heavy boxer, come to help them from the next number, and now he finally moved the cable from a standstill and pulled it ever more back. A final tug, all together, one could hear the clatter of mighty hoofs outside, triumph—and a wooden horse was visible at the end of the cable, rolled into the ring on its four wheels. The audience now laughed with relief at this great sight gag, laughed wholeheartedly, as we like to say. And not at all so disappointed at such a Bucephalos at the end of the tether. Even objectively, it was rather relieved by the humor, perhaps also because anticipation is not only joyful, but much more often fearful— and look, there was nothing to it! At least not in fairy tales; or even when something less childish comes, does not come out like a wooden horse, nevertheless fairy tales, the circus, all the way up to farce, all mean that the soup is always cooler when you eat it than when it was boiling. Whereas in the life as we still have it, the cooks in charge expect us to eat the soup even hotter.

The Invisible Hand One day, maybe, it will be better outside too, all the way outside. Then hard things will come back to us, or we to them, either way. By themselves they stand askew or confused to us, but one good grip and they fit right into the position that believers mean. A story about it gives us something to think about: what befell Herr Schotten from Mainz more than a hundred years ago. He was a man like others, who did quite well for himself. Dealt in silk, and once a year took a trip, including a small detour. He never failed to spend some days in pious discussion with the rabbi of Michelstadt. The latter was known as a miracle rabbi, and was called Baal Shem, of whom there were many near the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany too. Now as Herr Schotten visited the Baal Shem again before making a business trip to St. Gallen, and the coach stood outside, he said: Rabbi, I have the strangest feeling; I don’t want to go on this trip. Whether I had a bad

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The Invisible Hand

dream, or I’m tormented by some other premonition, but I feel as though I won’t come back safe and sound. The rabbi looked at Herr Schotten strangely, shook his head, and said nothing. Rabbi, began Herr Schotten again, grant me this favor, and give me a talisman, so that I can travel in peace. The rabbi still said nothing, and did not stir from his spot, looked about with pursed lips, awkwardly and almost nervously; the table had already been cleared, only a burned-out candle still stood on it. Take this if you like, said the rabbi finally; we should thank G-d for whatever he sends us. Herr Schotten carefully wrapped the candle, and the Baal Shem gave him a blessing to take on his trip, which began well. In St. Gallen, Herr Schotten immediately sought out his usual lodgings at the Golden Grape, where he liked to meet his business associates, Herr Bacharach from Coblenz and Herr Goldstikker from Frankfurt. But the entire inn was occupied, and Herr Bacharach had already checked in at the Half Moon; Herr Goldstikker had not even arrived. Herr Schotten went to the Half Moon, where the innkeeper immediately welcomed him with a greeting from Herr Bacharach; the latter had already gone to bed but was expecting Schotten in the morning. The houseboy showed Schotten to his room, up many stairs to the top floor, set the lamp on the table, and bade the gentleman goodnight. The silk merchant was about to go to bed when his ears caught a strange sound: what? Had the houseboy turned the key? Herr Schotten tried the door. It was locked from the outside. He went to the window. It was swollen shut, the panes barred. And now he also noticed the oppressive air in the room, the rank smell, and started in utter terror: this was the smell in his dream— the whole room, just like this, he’d already seen it in his dream. The smell seemed to come from the bed. Herr Schotten turned around, but now he could barely still see the bed in the murky light, the stump of the candle barely still flickered on the table, a few drafts and it burned out. Herr Schotten fumbled on his chest for the Baal Shem’s candle, held it up to the guttering wick; the light shone brightly. Now Herr Schotten stepped forward. Under the bed there was no one; he threw the covers aside, nothing. The mattress: it was set on loose floorboards, across a trench, and in the trench perhaps a dozen fresh corpses; on top, with newly smashed skull, Herr Bacharach from Coblenz. For a long time Herr Schotten sat gasping, and his body trembled. He spoke the prayer of rescue from mortal danger, and the candle of the Baal

The Invisible Hand

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Shem burned brightly. Finally he understood the rabbi, and knew what to do. He dragged his dead friend from the trench, onto the bed, under the covers, as though sleeping; he himself crawled into the grave among the bodies, his head above. Many hours, nothing stirred. Now the key turned quietly in the lock, and men crept past the bed; with three, four blows of the axe they split Herr Bacharach’s skull for the second time, dragged the chest in front of the door, and again locked it from the outside. Definitely the houseboy, perhaps also the innkeeper: Herr Schotten thought he could hear them among the voices. Finally he crawled out of the crypt to the barred window, where, after great effort, he was finally able to pry a pane out of the caulk. There he awaited daybreak outside, peered out carefully to see if someone might show himself on the little alley behind the inn. Market folk appeared first, and Herr Schotten wanted to call to them, but the innkeeper might hear him, and perhaps there were accomplices among the people down there. Then as the clock struck six in the morning sun, Herr Schotten saw Herr Goldstikker from Frankfurt turning the corner toward the house of murder, to visit his friends in the trade. Herr Schotten called only a few words to him in the sacred language, so that no one else would understand him, and his friend turned around. Minutes passed, the room grew light, and the police arrived. Up the stairs, the door was crashed, and Herr Schotten stepped out, so that the innkeeper and houseboy were stopped in their lies. He remained in the city just long enough to give testimony; five weeks later he stood again in the Baal Shem’s chamber—You are surprised to see me, Baal Shem, with gray hairs?—and told of his rescue. But why should I tell you all this? You already knew just what you were doing when you gave me this candle. Otherwise I would be lying next to poor Bacharach, and you would be saying a prayer for the dead. The rabbi took the candle, set it without ceremony back in its stand on the table, and said: I know only that the Lord can save whom he will. The candle helped you, like the sacred tongue, and yet remains a candle; the sacred tongue helped you like the candle, and always remains a miracle. God does not make it easy to know what we should thank him for. As we said: one day, maybe, it will be better outside, all the way outside. The story is bloody, but there’s a light in it; the candle glowed, and burned correctly. The rabbi made absolutely nothing of it, neither of himself nor of the candle. He did not claim to be magical or prophetic, and

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The Invisible Hand

he certainly did not revere the accidental, albeit meaningfully accidental candle as a talisman. This apparently supernatural story is ruled by a peculiarly austere spirit; indeed, the quiet rabbi, next to the superstitious Herr Schotten, is almost a skeptic, and in any case a very inscrutable ironist. The Baal Shem of Michelstadt is enlightened, and it is the particular, decisively Jewish kind of enlightenment that doesn’t doubt, say, that there are ghosts, but does not acknowledge that they should come before people and their undemonic God. So there is in this horror story a remarkable twist that undoes it, or rather a moment that is still alive today, already familiar to every businessman: the invisible hand. The practical intuition that does not massively shift things but only twists them the right way a little, and puts them in place, with this organ’s quiet sense of touch. It lets itself be guided by fortune, by the same fortune that is buried, yet is the believer’s obscure foundation in his world. Here is no technology in some quantifiable sense, but also no old magic, into which technology otherwise often extends. When the rabbi, awkward and quite instructively nervous, reaches into the things of this world in order to break off a talisman, he is hardly trusting in cosmic powers and laws that already inhere in the world. Instead he is testing a strange, almost messianically selective hand so as to bring things out of their dispersion, and briefly make them Edenic, as it were. Then of course the candle must serve us; it always fits the needs of the situation, whatever it may be, in a reversed, fortunate irony of fate—so the candle would have burned in Paradise, not as a thing but as a good.17 So acted the rabbi, and finally Herr Schotten, as he used the candle correctly, and even made of the sacred tongue at the necessary moment a password. He pointed up only this about it: that no vendor would understand it. Here the means are consecrated or defiled, depending—strangely, in this uncertain world. No thing is bad in itself, none already good. It all depends on the grip that guides it, that even sometimes penetrates into the darkness, distortion, and uncertainty of the backgrounds. Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things must only be shifted a little. Because this “a little” is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying, spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap of the lucky glimpse and the invisible hand.

Tales of White Magic

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Tales of White Magic Should one act, or think? One could also ask if the thinker even does anything. He detaches something from what is, in that he writes. He tries to make certain things clearer, in that he shows where they’re going. This is the window that thought must absolutely break through, so that things will truly be changed, people truly set right, or finally set themselves right. No dog, they say, will get up from the hearth for philosophy. But as Hegel observes, that is really not its task. Furthermore, philosophy could exist without this task, but not even the task could exist without philosophy. Thought itself creates the world where something can be transformed, and not just botched. Once this tendency was expressed as the claim to magic; the Faust legend is the last manifestation of that. The sense of such an ultimate office of wisdom often echoes in fairy tales. In them there lives (not only in the pranks of Kasperle, Clever Hans, or the soldier who tricks the devil) an antimythical streak, or the will to lift the enchanted world back into our hinges. Our first selection is German, received from the enlightened hands of Musäus. Then a tale from the Thousand and One Nights, and there too the true material of the excitement, the meaning, the almost theological action, is again evident. The German fairytale in Musäus’s retelling includes many lovely and parallel flourishes that nevertheless obscure the surplus value, the allegory; therefore, for the sake of other lines that flow there, it must pragmatically be altered. There once lived a king, the story goes, in quiet isolation.18 No pauper left his house unfed, yet they were almost the only guests at the castle. Gradually three lovely daughters grew up, who spun and sang and kept house with the maids. Now, one fine autumn morning the king set off on the hunt, took the usual path through the forest. Yet he had barely gone a few paces when a huge bear reared up before him, shattered his hunting spear with one blow, and demanded the oldest daughter; he would come for her the next morning. No sooner had the helpless man stood up again than a mighty falcon swooped down from the treetops, drove his talons into the king’s shoulder, and demanded as ransom the second daughter; he would come for her the next morning. The king was leaving the forest when his foot disturbed a pile of dead twigs beneath the last tree; a snake emerged, hissing, and encircled his body in an instant; the head, tongue flicking, was about to bite, when the spellbound king himself called out the name of

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Tales of White Magic

his youngest daughter, buying his freedom at this great price, and the next morning the snake would come for her. The king raced back to his castle, ordered the drawbridge pulled up, and meticulously sealed every entrance; his daughters he locked up by the spinning wheel, the hearth, the youngest in a chamber in the keep, high up by the battlements, with thick walls. But no sooner did morning break than a grand train of knights thundered up the rise and dismounted before the gate. The bolts were drawn back, the drawbridge came down, three young knights entered the castle, and turned back, the trembling girls in their arms. Before the king and his men could even stir their limbs, the splendid cavalcade had already thundered down the slope and disappeared into the distance, toward the enchanted forest. From that time on the king, utterly broken and tormented, spent nearly every day in penitence and prayer, locked in the castle chapel, taking only slight pleasure in playing with his son Reinald, who had been born to him shortly after the disappearance of the three princesses and had cost his mother her life. The boy was now left to himself and dreamed of what he had heard, and what his father did not order to be kept secret from him. As he grew to manhood, the house grew ever more silent; the young noble was driven to find his stolen sisters and free them. In vain the old king sought to hold him back; he saw his unbreakable will, tried to force on him at least an entourage, horses, squires, porters. Yet the prince sensed that perils of a higher sort had to be faced here, and so he went, free and alone, on a beautiful spring morning, into the enchanted forest. He penetrated deep into the wilderness, tangled vines everywhere blocking his way. Often he had to cut a path with his sword, but finally the terrible woods opened up, and the prince entered a long, still valley, toward a hut in front of which three women sat spinning. The women shouted as they spied the knight: Young man, what misfortune brings you into this forest? Here live three terrible creatures, the bear, the eagle, the snake; at nightfall they return, and you will never see morning if they find you here. Then the prince knew where he was, and told his sisters who he was, and that he had come to break the spell they were under. The women stared at the knight in silent wonder. Then they embraced their brother, kissed him again and again for joy; but their knees trembled at the clear danger. It was the spell that held not only his sisters but—as Reinald learned in the still valley—their husbands as well, such that every second day the bear, eagle, and snake would take human form again as noble and

Tales of White Magic

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grand knights; in this form they had celebrated the wedding, and the wedding night. Yet on the following day they would have to assume animal form again; thus they had met the old king and today would meet Prince Reinald. Dusk had already broken; every footfall in the forest meant certain death. Trembling, the women prepared a hiding place for their brother in the furthest corner of the hut, behind pungent roots and herbs. When darkness fell, the animals returned; the prince heard them howling and screeching. Close by the bear groped with his paws in the shallow root pile, the sisters cajoled and sang; it grew silent in the musty room, and the prince fell asleep. As he awoke and sat up to peer out of his hideaway, he found himself on soft pillows, well rested. The morning sun shone cheerfully into his richly decorated chamber. At the bedside stood a page, who held out magnificent clothes to the prince. Astonished, he went out the door into a great hall, and now saw his sisters surrounded by nobles in waiting, heralds, and foot soldiers in great number, and at their side three knights of royal visage, who embraced Reinald and bade him a brotherly welcome. But how the prince was amazed as he stepped outside and saw the utterly changed landscape: in place of the hut stood a summer castle, at a great distance he saw the mountain fortress of the knight of the white eagle, and somewhat lower the knight of the snake showed him his water castle by the sea. As Reinald saw all this and understood the spell he had suspected ever since his childhood in the forest, he could not rest until he discovered from the knights the secret of their enchantment, and the key that would break it. His pleas to reveal the secret were more ardent and persistent than the fraternal misgivings of the knights. Thus he soon knew which path he must take, and by the setting sun he took his leave in order to set out against the spell. Seven days he wandered through the endless forest, always toward the East, where he would find the key, until on the eighth day the trees cleared and Reinald saw a cliff before him, a portal hewn into the cliff side, and before it a monster with the body of a serpent, eagle’s wings, and the head of a bear. The prince strode toward the mute structure and the ceaselessly watchful chimera, which, as it spied him, roared up to tear him apart from the air. But as Reinald drove his first stroke overhead at the bear’s throat, the sword went right through, as through air, and the chimera hung there motionless; as the prince leapt forward to take his second stroke, the monster

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Tales of White Magic

slowly began to dissolve into a silhouette, demonized again as he stepped back, disappeared entirely as he stabbed into the fog, and the door in the dark portal sprang open by itself. A winding stairway lay behind it, and Reinald descended into a long passage leading to a vast, candlelit hall. The hall was utterly empty; only a half pillar stood in the middle, and on it a stone tablet inscribed with some mysterious characters. Reinald had not been afraid of the chimera outside, but here was its gaze, and a nameless fear overcame the brave prince in that gaping hall. A spirit lived here, of an intensively creative power of evil; Reinald sensed that the tablet was engraved with a talisman that contained all the magic of the forest. With all his might he grabbed the tablet and hurled it from the pedestal onto the floor, where it landed silently and shattered. Shouting, Reinald fled the hall, stumbling up the stairway to the door, which stood wide open, past which lay the bright sky and the soaring treetops of the deserted forest. But as the prince emerged there, shouts of joy rose from the green depths; not long after, three squadrons broke through the edge of the forest, at their head the knights with Reinald’s sisters. Rejoicing, they rode to the castle of the old king, who folded them in his arms and saw all wrongs forgiven. Prince Reinald, however, took his leave of them all and departed for the Holy Land, where he vanished. Only a pilgrim who had traveled all over claimed to have last seen him as a Knight Templar in furthest Asia, under Prester John. Where he vanished—in fact Reinald had to go even further. First he fell, and animals became human, of material that decays; the world remains, the usual spell remains that no one hears because it’s always there. But alchemically there emerges from chivalry another, an Oriental fairy tale, from its inception a philosophical fairy tale, that not only destroys characters but indicates the sphere of the philosopher’s stone itself. A beautiful lady, it is told, was alone in her garden, planting flowers. Her lord, Prince Bahman, had ridden off on the hunt and would not be back before nightfall.19 Then an old woman came to the door, a hermit and devout. The princess bade her enter and say a prayer with her, as it was the prescribed hour. The woman saw the splendid garden with amazement, admired everything, and said, Certainly, noble lady, this garden lacks only three things: if you had them, it would be complete. She stopped, but as Princess Parizade implored her ever more strongly to name these things,

Tales of White Magic

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the devout woman went on hesitantly: I speak of the golden water, of the talking bird, of the singing tree. Twenty days’ journey from here, in the land of Hind, is where they can be found. Who would seek these three things must ask the first man he encounters on the twentieth day. After the devout woman had gone, the princess fell into a disquiet as never before, and a perplexity. She was greatly startled when she heard the tread of the prince returning from the hunt. But no sooner had she told her beloved her wish than he too began to grieve as though over a loss, and swore that he would win the three wonders. Sleepless he spent the night; at the break of dawn he set off. Tenderly he took leave of his beloved, rode into the dawn toward the land of Hind, accompanied only by his personal slave. They met ever fewer people, and finally they encountered no one in the deserted valleys and steppes, on the dusty caravan routes where the desert began, and the mountain passes up to the snowy peaks, until on the morning of the twentieth day the prince saw a dervish, mutely withdrawn into himself at the side of a mountain path, and he now understand the old woman’s words. He bowed deeply and hailed the saint with a pious salutation, yet the dervish did not answer. The prince called down Allah’s blessings on him, yet the dervish did not even thank him; he beseeched him for a blessing, but the dervish gave no sign that he even heard or saw the prince. The prince was uncertain if he should ask the marabout, who was with Allah, for the way. Then the dervish answered by himself, in a flat voice and as though from a great distance: Turn around; do not ride up the mountain. A confusion of voices will strike your ears that will fill you with terror, or deafen you. Beware of turning your head, and again I say beware! If you nonetheless attain the peak, you will find yourself on the cliff with the talking bird. He will show you the way to the golden water and the singing tree. The way is dangerous, and the black stones are death. If you do not return that day, you will never return.

The dervish fell back into his trance, yet the prince, with no desire to penetrate the meaning of these mysterious words, suddenly sat up, commanded his slave to wait for him one day, and raced away over the shifting debris, up the desolate mountain. It was deathly still, and the further the knight went the more heavily the mountain was strewn with boulders, black and strange in shape. The peak was already visible, and the man’s heart felt no fear. Then there suddenly rose in a flash, roundabout the path and behind him in the deathly

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Tales of White Magic

quiet air, a whistling and hissing as though the air were full of snakes and worms, with a screaming confusion of voices, as the dervish had predicted. The doughty prince rode forward and would not hear the magical cries that called him by name in vanished voices from his childhood, the voices of friends; he remained deaf to the iron chariot that seemed to roll right next to him. Already he sensed the whinnying of the racing horses; the whip cracked next to his face, and angrily the prince whirled about as though he had been struck by the whip. Yet just as he was turning his head to the side he thought of the dervish’s mysterious words—in vain. Night fell, and the prince turned suddenly to black stone. A day or two the slave waited; then he rode back as his master had commanded. The princess heard the news of his certain death as the slave repeated the words of the dervish, and she mourned in deepest sorrow. But soon she began to doubt, out of a love that would not die, and she resolved to go forth herself to search for her beloved. Unaccompanied, she set out on the path her beloved had taken, considering the words of the dervish well, long and precisely. On the twentieth day she too saw the saint; dismounted, bowed deeply before him, who silently raised his hand; and strode without a question up the path to the screaming mountain. But the princess heard no sound in her deep melancholy, her bitter longing for the beloved whom she had sent to his death; sorrow, regret, boundless love let her hear nothing else—only this one thing, at which she herself screamed, that she found by the talking bird. Already she could see the bird in a cage on the highest peak. The princess snatched the struggling animal. Then complete silence fell, and the bird said: O brave lady of noble birth, be of good cheer; no evil shall befall you. I shall obey your commands on my very life; tell me what I should do that I may fulfill your wishes. The princess replied: I want to hear of my lord and husband whether he is alive or dead, and where I can find him. The talking bird answered: Your word is my command; take this flask and go to the other side of the mountain. There fill the flask with the golden water, and you will see the branches of the singing tree over the water. Sooner you cannot find your beloved, for he is neither alive nor dead. The princess followed the bird’s directions and soon stood under trees and bushes before a small, remarkably pretty domed house; there a fountain flowed with drinkable gold, over the dome arched a tree with a luminous crown, and all its branches sang. Princess Parizade filled her flask to the brim from the magical fountain and broke a twig from the tree, so

Tales of White Magic

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that she now possessed all the three wonders of which the old woman had spoken, but she cared for nothing, and longed only to see her beloved. Then the bird spoke again: O great lady, go down the mountain again, sprinkle a little of the golden water on the stones that lie about there, and by its magic they will all return to life, your beloved along with others. Now the princess finally turned back, poured some of the water onto each stone, onto the dark debris all over the path: and as the first drop fell, the men who had been stone arose, the beloved whom she had almost lost stood and embraced her; the valley was full of people come back to life. Some had slept for many centuries, others only a few days. All ages and all history stood on the dreamless mountain, but now they were all equals by Allah’s grace, and heaped praise and honor on the princess’s head. She led the awakened men, triumphing in their new life, down the mountain to the holy dervish, and past him. But as they came to his site, the dervish had disappeared, and only the water in the flask churned. Of the awakened men, everyone now went down the road by which he had come, one this way, another that way, but the prince and princess went their way, arriving at the palace with their treasures on the twentieth morning. They gave the talking bird a home in their garden. The magical brook sang in the pool into which they poured it; it began to jet and spray by itself, and thus the flow of the water remained unbroken and unchanging. The strange twig sent out roots, sprouted new branches and buds, suddenly became like the tree of life in the magical forest garden itself; its singing echoed the bubbling of the fountain, the bird’s tales of the mountain journey of the heroes and the perils they withstood. On the seventh day Princess Parizade remembered the holy woman and had her summoned, led her to the treasures. The good woman stood in utter amazement, threw herself to the ground, and spoke the sura: “The water sent from heaven, with which we awaken our lands, in this measure you will one day go forth, on the day of reckoning, from your graves.”20 The princess bade the good woman spend her last years with them, and they remained united in the manner of their praying. For a long time they heard the splashing of the water, the singing tree, the legends told by the bird, until one day death came to them too, and took them from all earthly consolations to the fullness of Paradise. Should one act or think? was the question. We have heard some fairy tales where white magic was used. That is no longer possible for us, yet we remain



Tales of White Magic

in the old realm of transformations, with other means. In these fairy tales, one thinks in order to act, to thereby alone do the right thing; thought goes before action, action proves thought. Therefore when metaphysical thought above all bears none of the water of life with it, of which the Oriental fairy tale so wonderfully reminds us, then it is useless, for it can’t be used for anything. From this standpoint the Oriental tale, because the princess goes further forward than Prince Reinald, would finally need a remembrance of the origin, or rather the new dream where it still lives despite its ancient language and provenance. The Thousand and One Nights exists or existed in many versions, after all, already mixing the speech of simple camel drivers with the declamation of rhapsodies at the Caliph’s court, and sometimes a significant alchemical tradition. “The Story of the Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister,” as the story we have retold is called, refers unmistakably to this tradition. There are much lighter tendencies in the original, however; the sister princess (for here she is the sister of two brothers, to whom the same thing happens on the mountain) in her colorful dress stuffs cotton in her ears so that she only now and then hears an echo of the deadly voices, and advances unhesitatingly where so many brave knights had foundered before her. Even the dervish must laugh heartily here when he hears of this feminine wile, and truly, in the original of this story, it belongs among all the cheerfully exact, evasive tricks that are played on the foolish devil in so many fairy tales, by means of which the new, slender power of freedom and human understanding might not conquer the principle of evil but nevertheless escape from it to unfamiliar regions inaccessible to the ancient forces. Meanwhile the strange, ironically submissive motif of stopping one’s ears, familiar from the saga of Odysseus, is obviously in a different category from the mere tricks, in themselves meaningless, used by children and soldiers against witches and stupid devils. In fact, in the Oriental fairy tale of rescue, the evil power is not evaded somehow subjectively, with stopped ears, but overcome substantively, Orpheus-like, indeed Orphically. Here, then, right between comic hero and alchemy, sounds a fairy tale in the highest style, turned toward the epopœia of salvation; there is a creatively constitutive, not merely cunning power in the princess’s deafness, in her profound deafness for love, that is more rigorously directed, more radically anamnestic, than the power of the mere will to possess, let alone the empty curiosity that exposes all our creaturely vanity. The adventurers before her, as well as Prince Bahman, knew only this grasping, this curiosity, at most a still noble but almost purely theoretical interest in

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the old woman’s story; the bird, the fountain, the tree, these close relatives of Novalis’s blue flower, they longed only to see, to own. Princess Parizade, however, no longer remembers her initial curiosity, nor any merely abstract or somehow inexpressible desire with its endless uncertainty of purpose, meaning, or content. Her heart is full of the concrete will of a restorative love, and in this integrity the mysterious voices do not frighten her; she is deaf to any of the temptations of mere curiosity, indeed of the terror of the desire to know. Love here becomes the essential instrument of discovery, or in a rabbinic metaphor quite applicable to the princess: “Someone who has wisdom without charity is like a man who has the key to the innermost chamber, but has lost the key to the outer one.” The princess was as far from any merely intellectual curiosity as the dervish; so she was also spared the vain, aimless looking about that lulls and kills as it did Lot’s wife, and that in every myth of fatal enchantment leads to death or petrifaction as the punishment for curiosity and the forgetting of Jerusalem. An element of Eve herself is reversed in the princess, for this fairy tale is fulfilled not only by death as the wages of sin, but also by the antideath of white magic—in short, by the ransom of knowledge, by the water of life as such, against the pillars of salt and stone behind. Nonetheless, even here, after such great signs, two people come to the end within a coherent everyday. As in the quest of Prince Reinald, in the (much more profound!) quest of the princess it is still only the previous form that is regained from the spell. Here is what is ultimately still problematic in the conclusion of both stories, even the positively magical and Oriental story. Bird, tree, and fountain become merely the garden ornaments of a comfortable life, unless the sisters in the original were to recognize themselves as abandoned princesses, unless the talking bird were to lead them back to the sultan, their father. But whether the sura on the water of life or the return to the father appears, all that is only an allegorically simple, elegantly inadequate, impersonally sincere circumlocution of the ultimate meaning posited here. For the three treasures, the talking bird like the golden water like the singing tree, are alchemical symbols of the purest kind. Consequently they would be committed to the creation of a second life, something truly different and wonderful, which is not merely retrieved from stone and restored to a prince but is obliged to overcome precisely the illusion of change and the death at its end, to execute the real sonhood of the highest king, indeed the becoming like Allah and beyond Allah. The original leads only up to the sultanic threshold, in spite of all

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Tales of White Magic

the identifiable mystical meaning; in the original too, the bird brings them only as far as their royal inheritance, which still belongs to this world. The water of life that is the greatest of the three treasures concludes its transformations by turning stones back into the human beings they once had been. It does not transform the regained prince, let alone the stones that were never princes; the mountain as a whole still remains sealed. In its basin it forms geometric shapes from mere “nature,” and makes only itself like itself. Such transparent unknowing consequently grounds what is still problematic, obviously incomplete, in fact significantly unsatisfying about the end of this little story of salvation: with death still in view as though nothing had happened, nothing yet. The fountain might yet leap up differently, the singing tree contain the music of other spheres; the talking bird in the legend means the answer that will make us all whole, and every stone free. The princess found the prince again, anyway, and at the end perhaps the abundance of paradise (which is likewise already there for her, complete); yet the water of life means more. Coda: How much the water of life means something else can be measured wherever it seems to have washed away the here and now. At least with images and visions that are lived as though they were already beyond, and told of what awaits us. In his “Voyage to Hades” Schubert sings, in a pale and solemn voice—as quietly shattered as though he were still at the spot—these words: “Already I see the pale Danaïds, accursed Tantalus.” If we take this case as real—that after death or at the end of time we will truly see the Danaïds—they will then exist not only as though one expected them (“already I see”); rather they and what is related to them, as well as the brighter places in Greek mythology, will be the only thing that remains. Then the sagas of antiquity will also be the most exact guide through the world to come, or for Christian believers, the legends of heaven and hell—in the event that the myths of Valhalla, against all expectations, were not the better cicerone—or the Islamic Paradise. In this case, however, it is not the choice Schubert gives us but he himself that is blasphemous; worse yet, to the point of inconceivability, absurd as blasphemous, for what would in fact be or happen if one really saw Danaïds and accursed Tantalus or demon armies and the heavenly host at the end, as real as trees are here, and realer? The shock would be unspeakable; even believers (and they in particular) would be driven crazy by finding the catechism, and greater yet would be the horror that this was already the end of it. The nowadays massive unbelief in things unseen (or rather the still unseen) is certainly as mad as the massive belief in heavenly flesh and

Wonder

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blood; but in the latter there is still a dissatisfaction with spatial thinghood again—indeed, a sense that the images of the final awakening, in short the true water of life, could not be the Danaïdean sieve or Olympus or a crown if there truly is such an awakening, and if it will be the last. Sheer amazement at the unseen today shows us more profoundly what would happen metaphysically if the living and dead fields were awakened; these lights are of course always momentary or incidental, show the unreified, unenchanted, final homesickness in everything, and have no great site. Bahman the mere prince is not there, not even as prince, anymore than the palace to which the lovers and their partial water of life and superficial garden treasures go back, just go back. The vision of such things, even of divine things, does not yet concern the last thing in us, or no longer does. Yet—a garden of what now and again amazes, even shatters us, and what the princess herself had as it sounded so restless and severe from the old woman’s words: of this, even unbelievers in the traditional end could believe that it was still there within people and stones, questioning everything, solving everything, and unfound.

Wonder “Just think! Now and then I see the blue fly. I know, it all sounds so paltry, I don’t know if you can understand.” “No, no, I understand.” “All right! And now and then I see the grass, and maybe the grass sees me, too; what do I know? I look at a single grass blade; maybe it trembles a little, and it seems to me, that’s something; and I think to myself: here this blade of grass stands and trembles! And there’s a fir I observe, and maybe there’s a twig on it that makes me think. But now and again I meet people on these heights, that happens. . . . ” “Oh, yes,” she said, and stood up. The first drops of rain began to fall. “It’s raining,” I said. “Yes, just think, it’s raining,” she said, too, and was on her way. —Knut Hamsun, Pan

Yes, just think, it’s raining. She who felt that, suddenly wondered at it, was far back, far ahead. She actually noticed very little, and yet she was suddenly before the kernel of all questioning. In our youth, of course, we often feel so empty and pure. We look out the window, go, stop, fall asleep, wake up; everything’s always the same, seems to “be” only within this same dull feeling: how uncanny it all really is, how overwhelmingly strange it is!

Wonder

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blood; but in the latter there is still a dissatisfaction with spatial thinghood again—indeed, a sense that the images of the final awakening, in short the true water of life, could not be the Danaïdean sieve or Olympus or a crown if there truly is such an awakening, and if it will be the last. Sheer amazement at the unseen today shows us more profoundly what would happen metaphysically if the living and dead fields were awakened; these lights are of course always momentary or incidental, show the unreified, unenchanted, final homesickness in everything, and have no great site. Bahman the mere prince is not there, not even as prince, anymore than the palace to which the lovers and their partial water of life and superficial garden treasures go back, just go back. The vision of such things, even of divine things, does not yet concern the last thing in us, or no longer does. Yet—a garden of what now and again amazes, even shatters us, and what the princess herself had as it sounded so restless and severe from the old woman’s words: of this, even unbelievers in the traditional end could believe that it was still there within people and stones, questioning everything, solving everything, and unfound.

Wonder “Just think! Now and then I see the blue fly. I know, it all sounds so paltry, I don’t know if you can understand.” “No, no, I understand.” “All right! And now and then I see the grass, and maybe the grass sees me, too; what do I know? I look at a single grass blade; maybe it trembles a little, and it seems to me, that’s something; and I think to myself: here this blade of grass stands and trembles! And there’s a fir I observe, and maybe there’s a twig on it that makes me think. But now and again I meet people on these heights, that happens. . . . ” “Oh, yes,” she said, and stood up. The first drops of rain began to fall. “It’s raining,” I said. “Yes, just think, it’s raining,” she said, too, and was on her way. —Knut Hamsun, Pan

Yes, just think, it’s raining. She who felt that, suddenly wondered at it, was far back, far ahead. She actually noticed very little, and yet she was suddenly before the kernel of all questioning. In our youth, of course, we often feel so empty and pure. We look out the window, go, stop, fall asleep, wake up; everything’s always the same, seems to “be” only within this same dull feeling: how uncanny it all really is, how overwhelmingly strange it is!



Wonder

Even that formulation is already too much, looks as though it were only being that is not quite canny. If we try to imagine that nothing were, however, that is no less mysterious. There aren’t the right words for it, or we turn our initial wonder around. So above all later, just when one questions more precisely, seemingly, and notices. When one claims to know why a flower blooms, and the truly desperate even visit fortune tellers and speak of elves who bring about (or are) this blooming. Science especially debilitates our questioning, our bottomless wonder; “explains” how this or that came to be, how this becomes that; does its abstract race with post hoc and propter hoc. Theosophical stopgaps resort not only to elves, to archangels, to all sorts of grandly named forces; the rosy dawn of the trembling beginning becomes the cheap gravy of inept fabulation. Yes, even given elves, archangels, hypothetically if unwillingly: are they really anything but another way of being next to, above, this one? Would it not be just as dark if they existed, like the blade of grass or the branch of a fir? Doesn’t the branch still give us so namelessly much to think about, this bit of everything that we cannot name? Does it not, with its “being,” extend just as well into the “nothing” where it would not be, or would not be so, and that makes it doubly strange? Does not the question of simple wonder likewise lead into this nothing where it hopes to find its everything? With a shock at how dark and uncertain the ground of the world is, with the hope that just for this reason everything can still “be” otherwise, be so much our own “being” that no question is still needed, but instead the question is completely posed in this wonder and ultimately becomes happiness, an existence like happiness. Philosophers are somewhat more concerned here than real or occult science; since Plato, wonder has been for them a done deal, or the beginning: But how many of them have kept the direction of the beginning? Almost no one kept up his questioning wonder past the first answer. No one measured the problems that concretely arose against this wonder; no one grasped them as its refractions or transformations. It was especially hard to hear in wonder not only the questions but also the language of an answer, a resonating self-wonder, this seething final state within things. Yet the beginning could never quite be expelled from philosophy; it echoes significantly in the great systems, which separates the metaphysicians from the actuaries of cosmic explanation. It also ties philosophy again and again to youth, makes metaphysics at every point impatient again, conscientious—the wisdom of age in the early, unerring freshness of adolescent, primordial wonder. So we might surely meditate on the few casual

Dead and Usable



words between a girl and a boy, from time to time, as a sort of morning exercise of instinct. Then the many great riddles of the world will not entirely conceal their one inconspicuous mystery.

The Mountain One summer’s day in the year , reports a local almanac, a hunter by the name of Michael Hulzögger went into the forest on the Untersberg. He did not come back; nor was he seen anywhere else. It finally seemed as though he had gone off the trail or fallen down a rock face. After several weeks his brother had a mass said for the missing man, on the Gmain, where there was a pilgrimage church near the mountain. But during the mass the hunter entered the church to thank God for his miraculous return. Of what he had experienced and what he had seen in the mountain he spoke no word, but remained quiet and solemn, and explained that people would hardly learn more from him than what Lazarus Gitschner had already written about it; nor did his grandchildren and great-grandchildren learn much more.21 This Lazarus Gitschner, however, had seen no more than a tunnel under the mountain, the Kaiser Friedrich who used to appear on the Welserberg, a book of prophecies, and whatever else was already part of the legend. Nothing more could be got out of the hunter; indeed, in a great change from his earlier personality, he soon grew entirely mute. Archbishop Firmian of Salzburg had also heard of the hunter’s mysterious disappearance and return, and sent for him. But Hulzögger again remained silent before the prince of the Church. To every question he replied that he could and would say nothing; only confession was permitted. After confession the bishop laid down his robes and remained silent until his death. It came soon for both; it is supposed to have been peaceful.

Dead and Usable If everything were alive, nothing around us would last. It would all wilt like flowers, would decay, going the way of all flesh. There would be no stones to build strong, lasting buildings; no bronze for sculptures; no books

Dead and Usable



words between a girl and a boy, from time to time, as a sort of morning exercise of instinct. Then the many great riddles of the world will not entirely conceal their one inconspicuous mystery.

The Mountain One summer’s day in the year , reports a local almanac, a hunter by the name of Michael Hulzögger went into the forest on the Untersberg. He did not come back; nor was he seen anywhere else. It finally seemed as though he had gone off the trail or fallen down a rock face. After several weeks his brother had a mass said for the missing man, on the Gmain, where there was a pilgrimage church near the mountain. But during the mass the hunter entered the church to thank God for his miraculous return. Of what he had experienced and what he had seen in the mountain he spoke no word, but remained quiet and solemn, and explained that people would hardly learn more from him than what Lazarus Gitschner had already written about it; nor did his grandchildren and great-grandchildren learn much more.21 This Lazarus Gitschner, however, had seen no more than a tunnel under the mountain, the Kaiser Friedrich who used to appear on the Welserberg, a book of prophecies, and whatever else was already part of the legend. Nothing more could be got out of the hunter; indeed, in a great change from his earlier personality, he soon grew entirely mute. Archbishop Firmian of Salzburg had also heard of the hunter’s mysterious disappearance and return, and sent for him. But Hulzögger again remained silent before the prince of the Church. To every question he replied that he could and would say nothing; only confession was permitted. After confession the bishop laid down his robes and remained silent until his death. It came soon for both; it is supposed to have been peaceful.

Dead and Usable If everything were alive, nothing around us would last. It would all wilt like flowers, would decay, going the way of all flesh. There would be no stones to build strong, lasting buildings; no bronze for sculptures; no books

Dead and Usable



words between a girl and a boy, from time to time, as a sort of morning exercise of instinct. Then the many great riddles of the world will not entirely conceal their one inconspicuous mystery.

The Mountain One summer’s day in the year , reports a local almanac, a hunter by the name of Michael Hulzögger went into the forest on the Untersberg. He did not come back; nor was he seen anywhere else. It finally seemed as though he had gone off the trail or fallen down a rock face. After several weeks his brother had a mass said for the missing man, on the Gmain, where there was a pilgrimage church near the mountain. But during the mass the hunter entered the church to thank God for his miraculous return. Of what he had experienced and what he had seen in the mountain he spoke no word, but remained quiet and solemn, and explained that people would hardly learn more from him than what Lazarus Gitschner had already written about it; nor did his grandchildren and great-grandchildren learn much more.21 This Lazarus Gitschner, however, had seen no more than a tunnel under the mountain, the Kaiser Friedrich who used to appear on the Welserberg, a book of prophecies, and whatever else was already part of the legend. Nothing more could be got out of the hunter; indeed, in a great change from his earlier personality, he soon grew entirely mute. Archbishop Firmian of Salzburg had also heard of the hunter’s mysterious disappearance and return, and sent for him. But Hulzögger again remained silent before the prince of the Church. To every question he replied that he could and would say nothing; only confession was permitted. After confession the bishop laid down his robes and remained silent until his death. It came soon for both; it is supposed to have been peaceful.

Dead and Usable If everything were alive, nothing around us would last. It would all wilt like flowers, would decay, going the way of all flesh. There would be no stones to build strong, lasting buildings; no bronze for sculptures; no books



The Pearl

could be printed on paper, to be carried through the centuries. One could object that even wood, this beautiful and so very durable material, nonetheless once belonged to a tree and was therefore alive before it was felled. The same holds for sheep, of which good and particularly durable parchment, especially such colorful and lastingly pleasing woven rugs, are produced, which would not exist without a previous life beneath the pelt. Yet these materials also seem permanent only after the deaths of their bearers, and no longer have any of that earlier life. Anyway, what mostly surrounds us is still so-called dead matter, usually without ever having lived, and grandfather’s staff remains longer than he does, to say nothing of the mountain he climbed. What is really in the stone remains to be seen, will certainly not come forth on its day if we ourselves do not go behind it. There is much gold that glitters and has never been dug up.

The Pearl On the way from the inside out, and back, nothing should be passed over. And the advice—let everything go, and it will all come back to you—is false not only inwardly but actively too. A king, says an Indian legend, lost a very beautiful pearl; he ordered the entire land to be searched for it. Soldiers and Brahmans, all were set on the march together, in vain; the pearl did not return. Until one day the king found it himself—as we said, on the path of unintentionality. The inactive man, in other words, who had perhaps forgotten his desires, and who was no longer driven to fulfill them, saw them fulfilled. So much for this fable that abandons all temporal striving, just as if the outside had already come so far that it gives us what is ours all by itself. And grants it only then when we do nothing for it; which is definitely too good to be true, and too sterile to bear fruit. Similar things have also been claimed not only for action in time but for the spatialization of the outside in and of itself, and its dispersed juxtaposition, as though it were not a dispersion. Thus there is the story of a very wise man for whom the world had so achieved itself, and was out of the cutter of multiplicity, that he now and again had to put on eyeglasses, or else he would see all things as a unity. Then again, this pearl is also never a gift, of course, if only because there would no longer be anything next to it but this unity. At least in the mystical view, which can certainly display the most banal offshoots

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The Pearl

could be printed on paper, to be carried through the centuries. One could object that even wood, this beautiful and so very durable material, nonetheless once belonged to a tree and was therefore alive before it was felled. The same holds for sheep, of which good and particularly durable parchment, especially such colorful and lastingly pleasing woven rugs, are produced, which would not exist without a previous life beneath the pelt. Yet these materials also seem permanent only after the deaths of their bearers, and no longer have any of that earlier life. Anyway, what mostly surrounds us is still so-called dead matter, usually without ever having lived, and grandfather’s staff remains longer than he does, to say nothing of the mountain he climbed. What is really in the stone remains to be seen, will certainly not come forth on its day if we ourselves do not go behind it. There is much gold that glitters and has never been dug up.

The Pearl On the way from the inside out, and back, nothing should be passed over. And the advice—let everything go, and it will all come back to you—is false not only inwardly but actively too. A king, says an Indian legend, lost a very beautiful pearl; he ordered the entire land to be searched for it. Soldiers and Brahmans, all were set on the march together, in vain; the pearl did not return. Until one day the king found it himself—as we said, on the path of unintentionality. The inactive man, in other words, who had perhaps forgotten his desires, and who was no longer driven to fulfill them, saw them fulfilled. So much for this fable that abandons all temporal striving, just as if the outside had already come so far that it gives us what is ours all by itself. And grants it only then when we do nothing for it; which is definitely too good to be true, and too sterile to bear fruit. Similar things have also been claimed not only for action in time but for the spatialization of the outside in and of itself, and its dispersed juxtaposition, as though it were not a dispersion. Thus there is the story of a very wise man for whom the world had so achieved itself, and was out of the cutter of multiplicity, that he now and again had to put on eyeglasses, or else he would see all things as a unity. Then again, this pearl is also never a gift, of course, if only because there would no longer be anything next to it but this unity. At least in the mystical view, which can certainly display the most banal offshoots

The Pearl



in the pensioned longing for quiet, or the return of the eternally same. Yet how mockingly often, and then again how variously, does the desire for an end of striving, of diffusion, of distraction, find itself fulfilled not by the One but by the monotone—in other words, not denied but betrayed. We see it here, too: just as there is no true way without a goal, there is no goal without the power of a way toward it, indeed one preserved in the goal itself. So we should look around here and now, with actively set time in actively reconstructed space; the traces of the so-called Ultimate, indeed even of a hospitable Becoming, are themselves just the imprints of a Going that must still be gone into the New. Only very far beyond will everything that one meets and notices be the Same.

Notes

Situation . Je suis pauvre: “I am poor”; Que voulez vous . . . : “What do you want, sir? Poverty, it’s already halfway to filthiness.” . The royalist opponents of the French Revolution took the Bourbons’ white lily as their symbol. Opponents of the Russian Revolution were thus “Whites.” . Nana is the Second Empire courtesan of Émile Zola’s (–)  novel of the same name. . Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (–) is France’s most famous gastronome. His  Physiology of Taste was translated into English by M.F.K. Fisher. . Bloch uses a German idiom for stinginess: Bei ihnen ist Schmalhans Küchenmeister (“Even their cook is starving”). . Caliph Stork is the hero of Wilhelm Hauff ’s (–) fairy tale of the same name.

Fate . Ferdinand Lassalle (–) was a German socialist politician with an extravagant lifestyle. He challenged a romantic rival to a duel and was killed. . Lucus a non lucendo is a byword for a perhaps deliberately illogical etymology or other explanation. . Wenzel Strapinski is the poor tailor of Gottfried Keller’s (–) novella “Clothes Make the Man.” Others mistake him for a Polish noble because of his waistcoat. . This story appears as “The Master of Prayer” in Martin Buber’s  collection, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman.

175



Notes

. The German woodsman hero of many Karl May (–) adventure novels. . In Austrian folktales the good Kaiser Josef goes incognito among the simple people and then brutally punishes his advisors upon learning that they conceal the people’s sufferings from him. . Florestan is unjustly imprisoned and rescued by his wife, disguised as the young man Fidelio, in Beethoven’s opera of that name. . Bloch’s source, Vom Zufall, could not be located. In any case the story is Arabic, from the Thousand and One Nights, st night. . Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Der Ring des Polykrates” was the subject of a commentary by the poet and philologist Wilhelm von Scholz (–). . The rustling of the rat is an allusion to Goethe’s poem “Hochzeitlied” (Wedding Song). . Karl Ludwig Roth (–) was a Latin philologist and educator. . Meinetwegen has a range of meanings, from “on my behalf ” or “for my sake” to “for all I care” or “Suit yourself!” The child Bloch may be pointedly indifferent to any of the meanings, or he may be playing the meanings against the word’s purely aural qualities. . Little Muck is a dwarf from Nicaea in Hauff ’s fairy tale, with magic slippers and staff; neighborhood boys tease him shamelessly until they learn of his legendary past. . Lustig and Fatme are also title characters in Hauff ’s tales. . Bloch seems to be quoting from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, chapter . . Bloch wrote “The Universe in the Light of Atheism” in , at the age of thirteen. It has not been published. . Likely an allusion to Philippians : – and passim: “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” . Perhaps an allusion to the American ditty “The Raggedy-Ass Marines.” . The source of the doggerel about worker’s trumpets is unknown. The British captain Frederick Marryat’s (–) novels exploit his naval experience. The Susquehanna figures in many of Cooper’s novels. . The Wreck of the Grosvenor is a maritime novel by W. Clark Russell (–). . Ferdinand von Schill (–) was a Prussian officer who led his irregulars in a rebellion against Napoleon in . He was killed in combat. The execution of his officers remained a favorite subject of nationalist political caricature. . From Hauff ’s “The Legend of the False Prince.”

Notes



. The entire sentence is a montage of names from May’s works. NschoTschi is the name of the Apache woman (supposedly “Beautiful Day”) who marries May’s Old Shatterhand in Winnetou, book IV. . From “Eine Renaissance der Sinnlichkeit” (A Renaissance of Sensuality), one of Bloch’s juvenilia. . From “Über die Kraft und ihr Wesen,” (On Energy and Its Nature), another of Bloch’s juvenilia. . Friedrich Gerstäcker (–) is still known for his extensive travel diaries. . Alexander Girardi (–) starred in the premiers of several Strauss operettas and lent his name to the Girardi hat still worn in Austria. He is still famous as a Viennese character and flâneur. . Heinrich von Ofterdingen, novel by Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), –. . Marcion of Sinope (c. –c. ), early Christian writer often counted as a heretic and Gnostic. . Wie wir einst so glücklich waren: the epigraph to Goethe’s First Roman Elegy, an apostrophe to Rome itself, here more likely just a stock phrase. . At preserved Bloch writes “eingekocht”, quite literally as of jam or preserves. . Here Bloch retells an episode from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (–)  novel Zanoni. . Letter of July , . . A reference to Novalis’s “Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs” (“The Novices at Saïs”).

Existence . This was a favorite joke of Franz Kafka’s, and Walter Benjamin retells it in his essay on Kafka. . Des Knaben Wunderhorn (literally “the boy’s magical horn”) is the epochal Romantic anthology of German folk verse. . From the German idiom for hypocrisy, “to preach water yet drink wine.” . A story from Johan Peter Hebel’s (–) Der Rheinische Hausfreund, in which a visitor to a Low German area is told “Kanitverstan” (“I don’t understand”) when he wants to know who owns a certain business, who lives in some great house, and finally whose funeral is passing by; he concludes that all Kanitverstan’s great wealth could not save him from death. . A popular ballad by Friedrich von Hagedorn (–). . Alfred Klabund (–), German poet, novelist, essayist, translator, pacifist. . Krautwickerl: cabbage roll. . Hedwig Courths-Maler (–), in whose romance novels virtuous petit bourgeois women finally marry rich or aristocratic men.



Notes

. The Isar runs through Munich; numerous cafés and inns on its banks are called Isarlust. . Bloch’s retelling of “Wer ist der Sünder” (Who Is the Sinner?), number  in Richard Wilhelm’s (–) anthology Chinesische Volksmärchen (Chinese Fairy Tales). Wilhelm, a Protestant missionary in China, is also famous for his translations of the Tao and the I Ching into German. . Bloch’s retelling of “Der Rossberg-Geist” (The Demon on Horse Mountain), number  in Wilhelm’s anthology. . Bloch is quoting, from memory, James Fenimore Cooper’s  The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground. In the original, Washington’s note reads: “Circumstances of political importance, which involve the lives and fortunes of many, have hitherto kept secret what this paper now reveals. Harvey Birch has for years been a faithful and unrequited servant of his country. Though man does not, may God reward him for his conduct!” . ”The widow’s pitcher”: see  Kings . . Bloch is referring to Tolstoy’s “The Three Hermits: An Old Legend Current in the Volga District.” . ”Saxon” here seems to be pejorative, perhaps because the Saxon dialect has been consistently mocked as awkward for centuries. . ”The Story of the Blind Man, Baba Abdullah,” from the Thousand and One Nights, th night. .  film by Thea von Harbou (–), based on the play by Gerhart Hauptmann (–). . Bloch uses tropisch and triebhaft to correspond to Lichttrieb, “drive to the light” or “(photo)tropism.” . ”Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad,” from the Thousand and One Nights, th night. . Die Gartenlaube, published from –, was Germany’s first successful mass-circulation journal, emphasizing sentimental, moralistic, and nationalistic content. . An allusion to Paul Gerhard’s  poem “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,” set to music by J. S. Bach. Gerhard’s poem is based on Bernard of Clairvaux’s  Salve caput cruentatum. . ”The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream,” from the Thousand and One Nights, st night. . From Mann’s  essay “Goethe und Tolstoi.” . Francis Gayot de Pitaval (–) was a French attorney who, between  and , published popular collections of true crime stories; a “Pitaval” designates such a collection. . Paul Ernst (–), Neoclassical writer, essayist, playwright, and journalist.

Notes



. See note , on Hebel, in this section. . A reference, frequent in Bloch, to the ancient Egyptian image of the departing soul. . The film is Fritz Lang’s  Der müde Tod (The Weary Reaper), released in English as Destiny. It stars Lil Dagover; the characters are not named. . Song of Solomon :. . From Horace’s Epistulae, book , number : Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet (“For it is your business when your neighbor’s house is on fire”). . The mythic land depicted in soprano Lotte Lehmann’s (–)  novel Orplid, mein Land (translated as Eternal Flight). . Béla Balász (–), Hungarian writer best known for the libretto to Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. . The sickener mushroom, or Russula emetica. . Realträume, dreams based on (potential) reality, as opposed to Wunschträume, wishful dreams or delusions.

Things . George Stephenson (–) is credited with the invention of the steam locomotive. . Johannes V. Jensen (–),  winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. . An allusion to the “makanthropos,” or macrocosmic man. . Bloch spells Angabe as it would be pronounced in the Berlin dialect, though Berliner impudence is more important here than Berliner pronunciation. . ”At its goal” is a characteristic phrase for Bloch. The Latin phrase is commonly inscribed above doors and means, “I’ve found a haven; greetings, Hope and Fortune!” . Bloch takes “carpet” as an aesthetic term from Georg Lukács’s  Soul and Form. It appears in Bloch’s  Spirit of Utopia (q.v.). . Emile Coué (–), French psychotherapist whose therapy of autosuggestion (“Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better”) was in vogue in the s. . ”Tischlein deck dich” is both a dumbwaiter table and the incantation from the Grimm’s fairy tale about the table that magically sets itself. . ”The Barber’s Tale of His Second Brother,” from the Thousand and One Nights, st night. . This is one of countless Norwegian tales in which a supernatural being teaches someone the tuning for the Hardanger fiddle, yet not the technique. . Rübezahl is a mountain gnome, familiar from folktales and from Johann Karl August Musäus’s (–) more literary renderings. The treasure he bestows turns to dry leaves the next day.



Notes

. Perhaps only incidentally, Bloch seems to be alluding to Jeremiah :: “Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might. . . . ” . Bloch uses the term Reaktionsbasis, coined by biologist Jakob Uexküll (–) to designate an organism’s “context-dependent behavioral disposition.” The term was adopted by Reichian and Gestalt therapy to describe neurosis. . Bloch is possibly alluding to the discovery in Siberia of the remains of a large number of woolly mammoths, described in Baron George Cuvier’s (– ) Essay on the Theory of the Earth as evidence for the extinction of species by geological “revolutions.” . The untranslatable infinitive mauscheln (from the Yiddish Moishe) designates the accented German spoken by Jewish traders, and their supposed business practices; the term itself obviously has anti-Semitic uses. . Luke :–: “And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.” . Bloch is here alluding to Romans :: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” . ”Die drei Schwestern” (The Three Sisters), from , by Johann Karl August Musäus –). . The story comes from the Thousand and One Nights, st night. . Likely the forty-first sura: “Among His proofs is that you see the land still, then, as soon as we shower it with water, it vibrates with life. Surely, the One who revived it can revive the dead. He is Omnipotent” (:). . The storied Untersberg is near Salzburg. Lazarus Gitschner’s account dates from the sixteenth century.

M E R I D I A N

Crossing Aesthetics

Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . Ernst Bloch, Traces Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy Shosana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis) Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages

Peter Szondi, Celan Studies Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s ‘Statesman’ Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin Jill Robbins, ed. Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas Louis Marin, Of Representation Daniel Payot, The Architect and the Philosopher J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural Maurice Blanchot/Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy Ellen S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: French Nineteenth-Century Lyric and the Political Space Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics Francis Ponge, Soap Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes To Mind Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus Werner Hamacher, pleroma—Reading in Hegel Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names

Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus Maurice Blanchot, Friendship Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion Hans-Jost Frey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hölderlin Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis Jacques Derrida, On the Name David Wills, Prosthesis Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner) Jacques Derrida, Aporias Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence