The Sleepwalkers (101 page)

he remains unethical in his destiny, an outcast from his epoch, an outcast from Time,

yet nowhere and never is the spirit of the epoch so strong, so truly ethical and historical as in that last and first flare-up which is revolution, that act of self-elimination and self-renewal, the last and greatest ethical achievement of the old disintegrating system and the first achievement of the new, the moment when time is annulled and history radically formed in the pathos of the absolute zero!

Great is the anguish of the man who becomes aware of his isolation and seeks to escape from his own memory; he is obsessed and outcast, flung back into the deepest animal anguish, into the anguish of the creature that suffers violence and inflicts violence, flung back into an overwhelming loneliness in which his flight and his despair and his stupor may become so great that he cannot help thinking of inflicting violence on himself so as to escape the immutable law of events. And in his fear of the voice of judgment that threatens to issue from the darkness, there awakens within him a doubly strong yearning for a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to set things in order and show him the way; a Leader who is nobody’s follower and who will precede him on the un-trodden path of the closed circle and lead him on to ever-higher reaches, to an ever-brighter revelation; the Leader who will build the house anew that the dead may come to life again, and who himself has risen again from the multitude of the dead; the Healer who by his own actions will give a meaning to the incomprehensible events of the age, so that Time can begin anew. That is his yearning. Yet even if the Leader were to come the hoped-for miracle would not happen; his life would be an ordinary life on earth; and just as belief has taken on the disguise of provisional assumption, and assumption that of belief in rational religion, so the healer walks in the most unlikely guise and may even be the casual passer-by now crossing the street—for wherever he walks, whether in the turmoil of city streets or in the light of evening fields, his road is the road to Zion and yet the road we must all take; his journey is a search for the fordable passage between the evil of the irrational and the evil of the super-rational, and his freedom is the anguished freedom of duty, is sacrifice and expiation for the past; even for him the way is the way of trial, determined by austerity, and his isolation is that of a lost child, is that of the lost son
whose bourne fades into the unattainable since he has been abandoned by his father. And despite all that: the mere hope of wisdom from a Leader is wisdom for us, the mere divination of grace is grace, and unavailing as may be our hope that in a Leader’s visible life the Absolute will one day fulfil itself on earth, yet our goal remains accessible, our hope that a Messiah will lead us to it remains imperishable, and the renascence of values is fated to recur. And hemmed in as we may be by the increasing muteness of the abstract, each man a victim of the iciest necessity, flung into nothingness, his ego flung to the winds—it is the breath of the Absolute that sweeps across the world, and from our dim inklings and gropings for truth there will spring up the high-day and holiday assurance with which we shall know that every man has the divine spark in his soul and that our oneness cannot be forfeited; unforfeitable the brotherhood of humble human creatures, from whose deepest anguish there shines unforfeitable and unforfeited the anguish of a divine grace, the oneness of all men, gleaming in all things, beyond all Space and all Time; the oneness in which all light has its source and from which springs the healing of all living things—symbol of a symbol, image of an image, emerging from the destiny that is sinking in darkness, welling up out of madness and dreamlessness like the gift of maternal life wrested from the unknown and rewon as a heritage, the prototype of all imagery rising in the insurrection of the irrational, blotting out the self and transcending its confines, annulling time and distance; in the icy hurricane, in the tempest of collapse all the doors spring open, the foundations of our prison are troubled, and from the profoundest darkness of the world, from our bitterest and profoundest darkness the cry of succour comes to the helpless, there sounds the voice that binds all that has been to all that is to come, that binds our loneliness to all other lonelinesses, and it is not the voice of dread and doom; it falters in the silence of the Logos and yet is borne on by it, raised high over the clamour of the non-existent; it is the voice of man and of the tribes of men, the voice of comfort and hope and immediate love: “Do thyself no harm! for we are all here!”

Vienna, 1928–31.

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