Report to Grego (50 page)

The silkworm is the most ambitious of worms. Nothing but belly and mouth, it drags itself along, eating, soiling, eating again, a filthy pipe with two holes. Then suddenly all the food turns to silk. Man is the same. Heaven and earth sparkle, ideas sparkle with the precious silks in which he has clothed them; whereupon a huge foot suddenly comes and tramples the wonder-working worm.

Gone forever were the credulity and unsophisticated well-being of childhood. Now I knew that the heavens were a black chaos full of silence and indifference; I had seen what becomes of beauty and youth when they sink into the grave, and my soul no longer deigned to accept the consolation offered by agreeable, cowardly hopes.

Gradually, with unsure steps, I was nearing the abyss. But my sight was still untrained, and I dared not look it straight in the eye. My soul was still seething and unsettled. At times it stood up and challenged the destiny of man with juvenile bravura; at other times it shrank back and was overwhelmed by romantic melancholy.

Much later, very much later, I was able to stand with firm knees at the edge of the precipice and look down into the abyss fearlessly, and also with no trace of insolence.

W
hat divine, untroubled nights of work and study in that tiny room far from home! Sometimes there were shouts and laughter in the street below, and love songs at midnight; sometimes just white peaceful snow on the rooftops. The lamp burning late into the night, a fire in the hearth, I bent over my books and relived the intellectual feats of mankind.

It was with such preoccupations, preoccupations belonging at the same time so eminently to youth and also so eminently to age, that my years in Paris were spent. My landlady began to suspect something and grow uneasy. She cast sidewise glances of disapproval
at me and greeted me halfheartedly. One day she could restrain herself no longer.

“Once and for all, monsieur,” she shouted, “how long is this state of affairs going to continue?”

“What state of affairs?”

“What state of affairs! Why, you come home early every evening, you never receive visitors, either men or women, you keep your light on past midnight. I suppose you think that's normal?”

“But I attend classes all day long at the university; at night I study and write. Isn't that permitted?”

“No, it is not. I've had complaints from the other tenants. You are hiding something. Such decorum, such isolation and silence—without a woman, good gracious, without a friend! You must be sick. Yes, you must be sick, or else, with all due respects, you're cooking up something. I'm sorry, but this simply cannot continue.”

At first I was on the verge of anger, but I quickly realized that my landlady was right. When a person is orderly and quiet in a society which is unruly, immoral, and boisterous, when he welcomes neither men nor women into his room, he infringes the rules. He is not, and cannot be, tolerated. I have observed this all through my life. Since my life was always extremely simple, people considered it dangerously complicated. No matter what I said or did, they attached a different meaning to it, always trying to divine what was hidden and undivulged.

Later on, even my best friend could not believe such simplicity at first, and he found it insufferable when he finally did believe it. One night I was sitting in the yard gazing at the stars. For me the star-filled sky had always been the most heart-rending, the most disquieting, of sights. It gave me no joy whatsoever, nothing but fright; I could not look at it without panic invading my heart. My friend came out into the yard. “What are you doing there?” he asked me, astonished. “Ah, so you're not talking. Why not?” Coming closer, he leaned over me and saw the large tears that were flowing from my eyes. He burst into guffaws. “Liar! Hypocrite!” he shouted. “I suppose you'll tell me now that you're crying because looking at the stars is so moving. But you can't fool me, you Jesuit! You must be thinking of one of those tail-wagging females who keep fluttering around you.”

And on another occasion as well, after this, when I came to know Panait Istrati in Russia and we were returning together to Greece, Panait stared at me during the entire journey. He kept examining me, but had no idea what conclusion to draw. In Athens he asked a journalist, who replied, “What can I say? He just isn't natural.” “What does he do?” asked poor Panait, full of apprehension. “That's just it: nothing. He doesn't even smoke.”

Such was my life in Paris during my three-year sojourn—peaceful and ardent, without a single external adventure, without student love affairs or student inebriation, without political or intellectual conspiracies. At the end even my landlady had grown accustomed to me. Believing that she had cracked my secret, she at last forgave the purity and decorum of my life, which formerly had been so incomprehensible to her.

“He must be enrolled in some religious order in his own country,” I heard her say behind my back to one of the neighbors, a woman who likewise observed me morning and night with an uneasy eye. “He wants to, poor devil, yes he wants to, but it isn't allowed.”

“If that's the kind of order he's in, why doesn't he resign?” asked the neighbor with irritation.

“Ah well, it's his one quirk,” my landlady indulgently replied.

When I had packed my valises and was about to depart, she came into my room with her daughter Susan.

“Well, kiss my daughter now that you're leaving,” said the mother, dying to tempt me.

“And not on the forehead,” protested the daughter as she saw me approach. “Not on the forehead.”

“Where, then?”

“Wherever else you like, poor devil!”

“On the mouth, you ninny!” screamed the mother, splitting with laughter.

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

B
efore leaving Paris I went late one afternoon to say goodbye to Notre Dame. I shall always be grateful to this cathedral for moving me so very much when I first saw it. In our churches the dome strikes one as a graceful accord between finite and infinite, between man and God. The temple surges upward as though aspiring to
reach heaven, but then, with pious resignation, it suddenly subordinates its impetus to saintly “measure,” bows submissively, curves inward in the face of unattainable boundlessness and becomes a dome, pulling the Pantocrator down to its vertex.

The Gothic cathedral's rash aspiration struck me as altogether more self-esteeming. Notre Dame surges out of the ground, seemingly mobilizing all the stones of the earth in order to discipline them into terminating in a sharp, daring arrow which dashes into the sky like a lightning rod. Everything in this sacred architecture strives summitwards and becomes an arrow. No longer do we have the rectilinear, square logic of the Greek style, which places human order on top of chaos, perfectly balancing beauty with need and inaugurating a reasonable compact between man and God; instead, we have something vehement and irrational, a divinely inspired frenzy, which suddenly transports men and urges them to undertake an assault against the dangerous blue wilderness in order to pull the great Lightning Flash—God—down to earth.

Perhaps prayer and the human soul should be like this—who knows? Mobilizing our human hopes and fears, we ought to hurl them like arrows toward the unattainable superhuman heights. The human soul is impetus and pride; a cry amidst unbearable, cowardly silence; a lance which stands erect and unbending and does not allow the sky to fall upon our heads.

Gazing at this arrow that mounts fearlessly into the heavens, I felt my soul grow solid, stretch itself out, and become an arrow.

Suddenly I uttered a joyful shout. Was not Nietzsche's cry just the same? Was not it too an arrow darting into the sky, a lightning rod meant to seize God and pull Him down from His throne?

How happy I was to be wandering in this way beneath the high Gothic arches at the hour of sunset, immersed in this Zarathustrian soul composed of stones, iron, lucent multicolored tracery, and the deep reverberations of an invisible, divinely enraptured organ!

In this way, slowly, with my heart full of questions and of frantic despair and hope, I bade farewell to Paris.

I was leaving; my heart had lost its sureness and peace. Who was the ascetic who declared, “You sit still and your heart is quiet, but if you hear so much as a sparrow's song, your heart no longer has its former peace”? And I—I who had heard the shrill cry of a savage hawk?

I was leaving Paris. The wounds on hands, feet, and side—all the wounds of the Crucifixion—had healed, but in their place and hurting me terribly was my soul, surging up within me all bloody and rebellious.

Always, whenever I reach some certainty, my repose and assurance are short-lived. New doubts and anxieties quickly spring from this certainty, and I am obliged to inaugurate a hew struggle to deliver myself from the former certitude and find a new one—until finally that new one matures in its turn and is transformed into uncertainty. . . . How, then, can we define uncertainty? Uncertainty is the mother of a new certainty.

Nietzsche taught me to distrust every optimistic theory. I knew that man's womanish heart has constant need of consolation, a need to which that super-shrewd sophist the mind is constantly ready to minister. I began to feel that every religion which promises to fulfill human desires is simply a refuge for the timid, and unworthy of a true man. I asked myself if Christ's way was the one leading to man's salvation, or whether it was simply a well-organized fairy tale promising paradise and immortality with immense cleverness and skill, so that the faithful would never be able to learn if this paradise was anything more than the reflection of our own thirst. For we can determine this only after we die, and no one has, or ever will, return from the land of the dead to tell us.

We ought, therefore, to choose the most hopeless of world views, and if by chance we are deceiving ourselves and hope does exist, so much the better. At all events, in this way man's soul will not be humiliated, and neither God nor the devil will ever be able to ridicule it by saying that it became intoxicated like a hashish-smoker and fashioned an imaginary paradise out of naïveté and cowardice—in order to cover the abyss. The faith most devoid of hope seemed to me not the truest, perhaps, but surely the most valorous. I considered metaphysical hope an alluring bait which true men do not condescend to nibble. I wanted whatever was most difficult, in other words most worthy of man, of the man who does not whine, entreat, or go about begging. Yes, that was what I wanted. Three cheers for Nietzsche, the murderer of God. He it was who gave me the courage to say, That is what I want!

The Church of Christ in the state to which the clergy had brought it suddenly seemed to me an enclosure where thousands
of panic-stricken sheep bleat away night and day, leaning one against the other and stretching out their necks to lick the hand and knife that are slaughtering them. Some tremble from fear they will be skewered for all eternity in raging flames, while others cannot wait to be slaughtered so that they may graze everlastingly in immortal springtime grass.

But the true man is not a sheep. Neither is he a sheepdog, a wolf, or a shepherd. He is a king who carries his kingdom with him and advances. Knowing where he is going, he reaches the brim of the abyss, removes the cardboard crown from his head, and discards it. Then he strips himself of his kingdom, and, completely naked like a diver, joins his hands together, also his feet, throws himself headfirst into chaos, and vanishes. Would I, I wondered, ever be able to confront the abyss with this tranquil, untrembling glance?

I wonder if such a cry has ever been heard on earth, a cry proud enough to scorn hope. Even Nietzsche gave way to terror for an instant. Eternal Recurrence struck him as an interminable martyrdom, and out of his fright he fashioned a great hope, a future savior, the Superman. But the Superman is just another paradise, another mirage to deceive poor unfortunate man and enable him to endure life and death.

M
Y BODY
was so fatigued, my soul in such a state of hypertension, that I closed my eyes in the railway car and did not so much as raise my lids to see the countries I was traversing. The bow had been so greatly overdrawn that I already heard the creaking of the cord stretched from one temple to the other inside me; it had reached the breaking point.

My temples ringing, the veins in my neck pounding, I felt the strength pouring out of my brain, loins, ankles—and perishing. I kept thinking to myself, So this is what death is like—calm, exceedingly compassionate; like entering a warm bath and slitting your veins. A woman, infant in arms, opened the door to enter the compartment where I was stretched out full length all alone. Seeing me, she immediately closed the door and fled in terror. My head must already have become a skull, I reflected; that's why the woman was frightened. Still, it's good that death did not strike me in the mind, as it did you, my master.

When we reached Vienna, I amassed all my strength in order to get off the train and buy a newspaper at the kiosk across the platform. But I slipped, struck an iron post, and collapsed unconscious to the ground.

After that I remember nothing. When I opened my eyes, I found myself in a large ward with rows of beds. It was night; a small blue light was burning above me. My head was bound in cotton and gauze. A white shadow with two great white wings, one at each temple, flitted weightlessly between the beds. It came up to me, placed its cool, gentle hand on my pulse, and smiled.

“Go to sleep,” it said softly.

I closed my eyes; sleep descended upon me again, a strange, dense sleep. I felt submerged in tepid molten lead, my hands and feet so heavy that I could not budge them, as though my soul's wings had stuck together.

A dense sleep was what my entire sojourn in the sickbed seemed to me. For many days I refused to open my mouth and eat. I had melted away, was unable to lift myself up or move. Each day I felt myself sinking continually further and further—at first to the waist, then to the breast, then to the throat—into a tepid, soft mire which smelled of rotted leaves. I sensed it must be death.