László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the International Man Booker Prize 2015, the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango, and the 1993 Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. For more about Krasznahorkai, visit his extensive website: http://www.krasznahorkai.hu/
PRAISE FOR LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI
“Throughout Krasznahorkai’s work, what strikes the reader above all are the extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way; epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and musical” Man International Booker Prize judges’ citation
“The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing” WG Sebald
“Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer” Theo Tait, Guardian
“Krasznahorkai is the kind of writer who at least once on every page finds a way of expressing something one has always sensed but never known, let alone been able to describe” Nicole Krauss
“László Krasznahorkai writes prose of breathtaking energy and beauty. He manages to combine our most earthly concerns with large cosmic questions. His tones and textures are filled with both risk and certainty. He has elevated the novel form and is to be ranked among the great European novelists” Colm Tóibín
“The contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville” Susan Sontag
“Krasznahorkai’s subject is a total disenchantment with the world, and yet the manner in which he presents this disenchantment is hypnotically enchanting. He is one of the great inventors of new forms in contemporary literature” New York Review of Books
“László Krasznahorkhai offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable. They are haunting, pleasantly weird and, ultimately, bigger than the worlds they inhabit” International Herald Tribune
“Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. To be always ‘on the threshold of some decisive perception’ is as natural to a Krasznahorkai character as thinking about God is to a Dostoyevsky character; the Krasznahorkai world is a Dostoyevskian one from which God has been removed” New Yorker
“The rolling continuity of Krasznahorkai’s prose slides between viewpoints, tracks back and forth in repetition and re-emphasis, steps aside to remember a different time, resembling the flux of memory, which at any moment may be jolted into the present. After many pages of being suspended in the unending, the approach to a full stop can bring a sense of dread, which Krasznahorkai most often justifies in his final phrase or two: the prose lifts us up: then we drop” Times Literary Supplement
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Tuskar Rock Press,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London wc1x 9hd
First published in this translation in 2017 by New Directions Books, New York
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Copyright © 2013 by László Krasznahorkai
Translation copyright © 2017 by John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet and Georges Szirtes
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 427 4
Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet, and Georges Szirtes
HE
I. SPEAKS
Wandering-Standing
(Ottilie Mulzet)
On Velocity
(George Szirtes)
He Wants to Forget
(John Batki)
How Lovely
(JB)
At the Latest, in Turin
(JB)
The World Goes On
(JB)
Universal Theseus
(JB)
One Hundred People All Told
(JB)
Not on the Heraclitean Path
(JB)
II. NARRATES
Nine Dragon Crossing
(JB)
One Time on 381
(JB)
György Fehér’s Henrik Molnár
(JB)
Bankers
(OM)
A Drop of Water
(JB)
Downhill on a Forest Road
(GS)
The Bill
(GS)
That Gagarin
(OM)
Obstacle Theory
(JB)
Journey in a Place without Blessings
(OM)
The Swan of Istanbul
(JB)
III. BIDS FAREWELL
I Don’t Need Anything from Here
(OM)
I have to leave this place, because this is not where anyone can be, or where it would be worthwhile to remain, because this is the place—with its intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly weight—from where I must escape, to take my suitcase, before everything else the suitcase, two suitcases will be precisely enough, to stuff everything into two suitcases, then click the lock shut so I can dash to the shoemakers, and resoling—I have resoled, and resoled again, boots are needed, a good pair of boots—in any event one good pair of boots and two suitcases are enough, and with these things we can set off already, inasmuch as we can determine—because this is the first step—exactly where we are right now; well, so a kind of ability is required, practical knowledge is required so we can decide where we are exactly—not just some kind of sense of direction, or some mysterious thing residing in the depths of the heart—so that in relation to this knowledge, we can then choose the right direction; we need a sense, as if we were grasping some particular sort of orientation device in our hands, a device to help us state: at this point in time, we are here and here in this point in space, located, as it happens, at an intersection that is particularly intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly, an intersection from which one must leave, because this is not where a person can be, or can remain, a person—in this swampy, disconcertingly dark point in space—can’t do anything else besides say: leave, and leave right now, leave at once without even thinking about it, and don’t look back, just follow the route determined in advance, with one’s gaze fixed firmly ahead, one’s gaze fixed, of course, on the right direction, the choice of which doesn’t seem so agonizingly difficult, unless, of course, it becomes clear that this practical knowledge, this particular sense—as it manages to identify the coordinates of the points extending through sadness and mortality—suddenly states: under “ordinary circumstances” what normally happens is that we say that from here, we have to go in this or that direction, in other words, we say this direction is the right direction, or the complete opposite direction is the correct direction: but there are certain instances, so-called “unordinary circumstances,” when this sense, this practical knowledge, justifiably highly valued, announces that the direction we have chosen is good, it tells us: go right ahead, that’ll be it, this way, fine—and that same sense also simultaneously tells us that the opposite direction is good too, well, and that’s when the state known as wandering-standing sets in, because here is this person, with two heavy suitcases in his hands and a pair of excellently resoled boots, and he can go to the right, and he wouldn’t be making a mistake, and he can go to the left, and in that he certainly wouldn’t be making any kind of mistake either, so that both of these directions, diametrically opposed to each other, are judged as perfectly fine by this practical sense within us, and there is every good reason for this, because that practical knowledge, indicating two diametrically opposed directions, operates by now within a framework adjudicated by desire, namely that “go to the right” is just as good as “go to the left,” because both of these directions, in terms of our desires, point to the most distant place, the place farthest away from here; the point to be reached in any given direction, then, is no longer decided by practical knowledge, sense, or ability, but by desire, and desire alone—the yearning of a person not only to be transported to the greatest distance from his present position, but to the place of greatest promise, where he may be tranquil, for surely that is the main thing, tranquility, this is what this person seeks in the desired distance, some tranquility from the unspeakably oppressive, painful, insane disquiet that seizes him whenever he happens to think of his current situation, when he happens to think of his starting point, that infinitely foreign land where he is now, and from where he must leave, because everything here is intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly, but from where, in the very first moment, he can hardly bear to move from the shock when he realizes—and he really is consternated—as he realizes that his hands and feet are essentially bound fast, namely it’s because of his faultless practical sense that his hands and feet are bound fast, because that practical sense points in two opposite directions simultaneously, telling him: just leave already, that’s the right way, but how can anyone leave in two opposite directions at once, that is the question, and so the question remains, he stands as if he were anchored here like a ramshackle boat, he stands hunched beneath the weight of the heavy suitcases, he stands, he doesn’t move, and like that, standing, he motionlessly starts off into the untamed world, in a direction—it doesn’t matter which, it could be any direction—and he doesn’t budge even an inch, already he has gone very far, and his wanderings in the untamed world have begun, because while in reality he is motionless, his hunched form, almost like a statue, engraves itself into an inability to be left behind here; he appears on every route: he is seen in the north by day, he is known in America and he is known in Asia, he’s recognized in Europe and he’s recognized in Africa, he traverses the mountains, and he traverses the river valleys, he goes and he goes and he doesn’t leave off wandering for even a single night, he rests only now and then for one hour, but even then he sleeps like an animal, like a soldier, he doesn’t ask anything, and he doesn’t stare after anyone for a long time; people inquire of him: so what are you doing, you crazy person, where are you going with that obsessed look in your eyes? sit down and have a rest, close your eyes and stay here for the night; but this person doesn’t sit down and he doesn’t rest, he doesn’t close his eyes, he doesn’t stay there for the night, because he doesn’t stay for long, because he says—if he says anything at all—he must be on his way, and it’s obviously a waste of time to ask him where to, he will never betray to anyone where he is headed on this forced march, because he himself doesn’t even know what he possibly knew at one point earlier, when, still standing with these two heavy suitcases in his hands, he set off for the untamed world; he set off, but his journey, as a matter of fact, wasn’t a journey, along the way it couldn’t even have been a journey, he seemed instead like a kind of pitiful phantom of whom no one was afraid, no one tried to frighten children with him, his name wasn’t murmured in the temples so that he would steer clear of the cities, so if he turned up here or there everyone just brushed him off: oh, it’s him again, because he turned up again and again in America and in Asia, he turned up again and again in Europe and Africa, and people began to get the impression that he really was just circling around, circling all around the globe like the second hand of a watch, and if in the beginning there was something noteworthy about his presence here or there, as there might even be in the aspect of a pitiful phantom, when he turned up for the second time, or the third time, or the fourth time, they just waved him off, and really, nobody was interested, so that there were fewer and fewer occasions when people tried to ask him something or offer him a place to stay, fewer and fewer occasions when food was placed in front of him, just as with the passage of time no one was really happy to have him in the house, because who knows—they noted amongst themselves—what’s really going on here, although it was obvious that they had just lost interest already, they had definitively lost interest, because he, unlike the hand of a watch, didn’t indicate anything, he didn’t signify anything, and what bothered the world most—if anything at all could be said to bother this world—it was first and foremost that this person was worthless, he just went and he had no value in the world at all, so that the time came when he moved about in this world and in point of fact nobody noticed him, he disappeared, on a material level he practically evaporated, as far as the world was concerned he became nothing; namely: they forgot about him, which of course doesn’t mean he was absent from reality, because he remained there as well, as he went indefatigably between America and Asia, Africa and Europe, it’s just that the connection between him and the world was broken, and he became, in this manner, forgotten, invisible, and with this he remained once and for all completely solitary, and from that point on he began to notice, at the individual stations of his wandering, that there were other figures, exact replicas of himself: from time to time he found himself face-to-face with such figures exactly replicating him, as if he were looking into a mirror; at first he was startled and quickly left that city or that region, but then from time to time he already would forget the glance of these strange figures and begin to examine them, he began to seek the differences between his own physiognomy and theirs, and as time went on and fate brought him together ever more with these exact replicas, it became ever more clear that their suitcases were the same, the hunched back was the same, everything, how they held themselves beneath the weight, how they dragged themselves onward along this or that road, everything was the same, namely it wasn’t just a likeness, but an exact replica, and the boots were the same too, with the exact same expert resoling, he noticed that too as he entered once into some larger hall to drink some water, the resoling on their boots was just as good as his, and the blood in his veins ran cold, he saw that the entire hall was completely filled with people who were exactly the same as him, he quickly drank up and hurriedly left that city and that land, and from then on he didn’t even set foot in any place where he hypothesized, or felt, that he might encounter such wanderers; from that point on accordingly he began to avoid them, so he remained definitively alone, and his wanderings lost their own fanatic contingency; but he went on indefatigably, and then an entire new phase of his wanderings commenced, because he was convinced that it was only through his decision to confine himself to a labyrinth that he could avoid, inasmuch as possible, all of these exact replicas, so that it was only from this point on that those dreams began, that is to say that he slept in completely accidental places, and at completely accidental hours, briefly and lightly, and during some of these infrequent periods of brief and light sleep, he began to dream as never before: namely he dreamt the exact same dream, in hairsbreadth detail, over and over again, he dreamt that his wanderings had come to an end—and he now sees before him some kind of huge clock, or wheel, or some kind of rotating workshop, after waking he is never able to identify it with certainty, and in any event he is in front of something like this, or some sort of grouping of these things—he steps into the clock, or the wheel, or the workshop, he stands in the middle, and in that unspeakable fatigue in which he has spent his entire life, he crumples onto the ground as if he’d been shot, he topples over like a tower collapsing into itself, falling onto his side, he lies down so that he can finally sleep like an animal exhausted onto death, and the dream continually repeats itself, whenever he turns his head down in some corner, or gets some kind of bunk to lie down on, he sees that dream, with hairsbreadth accuracy, again and again—he, though, should have seen something completely different, if he had raised his glance, if he had just once—in the course of his wanderings seemingly lasting hundreds and hundreds of years—just raised his head, eternally hanging down, just once, he should have seen that he was still standing there, with two suitcases in his hands, the expertly resoled boots on his feet, and there he is rooted to that shoe-sized piece of earth upon which he stands, so that there is no hope whatsoever anymore that he can possibly move from there, for he must stand there until the end of time, his hands and feet bound in two simultaneously correct directions, he must stand there until the very end of time, because that place is his home, that place is exactly where he was born, and that is where he will have to die one day, there at home, where everything is cold and sad.
I want to leave the Earth behind, so I dash past the bridge over the stream by the meadow, past the reindeer-feeding trough in the dark of the forest, turning at Monowitz at the corner of Schuhkammer and Kleiderkammer, into the street, in my desire to move faster than the Earth in whatever direction this thought has taken me, for everything has converged to such a point of departure, leaving everything behind, leaving behind the Earth, and I set off, rushing instinctively, doing the right thing by rushing, because it isn’t East or South or North I am heading or in some other direction in relation to these, but West, which is right, if only because the Earth spins from left to right, that is to say from a Western to an Eastern direction, that is right, that’s how things are, that’s how it felt right, was right, from the first half-fraction of the instant in which I started, since everything moves most definitely from West to East: the building, the morning kitchen, the table with its cup, the cup with its steaming emerald-colored tea and the scent spiraling upward, and all the blades of grass in the meadow that are pearled with morning dew, and the empty reindeer-feeder in the dark of the forest, all of these—each and every one—moves according to its nature from West to East, that’s to say toward me, I who wanted to move faster than the Earth, and rushed through the door over the meadow and the dark of the forest, and had to move precisely in a Western direction, while everything else, the whole of creation, the whole lot, each billionth of a billionth component of this overwhelmingly vast world, was continuously spinning at unimaginable speed from West to East; or rather I, who wanted to move faster, therefore fixed my own speed in the opposite, wholly unexpected, direction, one beyond the realm of physics, that’s to say having chosen to do so with evidently instinctive freedom, I had therefore to run counter to it, counter to this terrifying world and everything in it that comprises the street corner, the meadow and forest, or rather, no, as I painfully realized in the second half of the instant, no alas, of course not in that direction, opposing its movement being precisely the worst choice, my instincts had led me to turn in precisely the wrong direction at the corner, over the field, and past the dark of the forest, when I should have chosen to move in the same direction, from West to East as Earth did in its, O! Entirety, and so, in the blink of an eye, I immediately turned around on my axis wondering how my instincts could have led me to move so firmly in the direction opposite the Earth’s movement since, if I did this now, its speed would be the same as mine, its and mine the same, they would have a positive relation to each other, combining with each other to greater effect, would, in effect, be doing the same thing, the Earth turning from West to East, I moving from West to East, the majestic immovability of the starting point presumably an absolute value, although it would be practically impossible to see how the smaller part belonged to the Greater Whole, and how the Greater Movement would allow space for this little counter-movement, the one independent of the other, the two linked only in one way, in that the Greater Movement, permitting this small counter-direction to function within it, and what a short circuit that would be, I concluded, as I was already turning, but then why was I thinking this, instinctively thinking, moreover, since if we are talking about one single relationship, then that could be no other than that of one thing comprehending the other, so that one contained the other, so that one was part of the other, its subservient part, its subsidiary, its little brother or its little sister, carried by the Greater, whichever way it moved, and the Earth was quite certainly, and indeed correctly, moving in the one direction it could move, that is from West to East, and I was a part of it, inside it, I who had desired to be faster than the Earth to whose movement mine was demonstrably related in the most strictly logical way, since the velocity—that is to say of the Earth—contained my velocity, my sprinting, the fact being, one way or the other, that whatever else the Earth did, its velocity certainly comprised mine, after all, whatever Grand Perspective was employed it didn’t matter whether I ran counter to its direction of movement—that is to say registering as a minus quantity—or in the same direction, that is constituting a plus, it was just that, to me personally, it was a matter of supreme importance since what I precisely wanted was to move faster than the Earth, in other words it was the plus, the positive value, I needed, that’s to say what mattered was to have the Little Independent Micro-totality moving as part of the Great Free Macro-totality—the fact is I was simply running within the Great Inwardness of the Laws of Physics, but this time in absolutely the right direction, that is to say from West to East, according with the movement of the Earth, since it is precisely in this fashion, in precisely this manner, of course, I’d have to run in order to be faster than the Earth, running with it so to speak, from a western direction to an eastern direction, and—suddenly the thought hit me like a bolt of lightning—I was already faster, since my velocity now comprehended that of the Earth, that is to say it included it without my having to do much more than move a muscle, and this way, by running over the Earth’s surface from West to East, I had made the task so much simpler, I could breathe ever more easily, since the air was fresh out here, I was enjoying the night or the dawn of freedom, or something between the two, I was locked into that interval between night and dawn, feeling perfectly calm, because thinking that I now chose the correct direction, I was moving faster than the Earth, since the Earth is thought, as I thought right at the beginning, and now I wanted to move faster than thought, to leave it behind, and that had suddenly become my aim, so that was what I did when I turned at Monowitz on the corner of Schuhkammer and Kleiderkammer, across the meadow with its pearly grass, past the bridge over the stream, beyond the dark of the forest, passing the empty reindeer-feeding trough, so it was right that I should have set out in the wrong direction at first, on instinct, and then corrected myself and on a dime turned and moved in the right direction, from West to East, a small micro-totality within the Greater Macro-totality, in which case I had only to add my speed to its speed, which I did, running as fast as I could, my feet pounding on under the enormous sky that was changing from night to dawn, and there was nothing in my head but the sense that everything was as it should be, that I was simply contributing my share of velocity to the Earth’s, my velocity to its velocity, when suddenly a new thought struck me that, fine, this was all very well, but how did my speed relate to that of the Earth, how much faster was I, and was that an interesting question in the first place? that is to say I broached the question of how much faster was I than the Earth? and no, it’s not interesting, I said to myself, my feet pounding all the while, since all that was interesting was that I should move faster than thought, that is to say, I should outrun the Earth, but then the little brother within me started making calculations in my head, arguing that there, on the one hand, there was the Earth’s velocity, that majestically challenging, vast, eternal per secundum, and there, on the other, were my best efforts at running at whatever per secundum the occasion offered, and then, it seemed to me, any relative value would do for me to run ahead of the Earth, that I needn’t run particularly fast since it would make very little difference if I did slow down a bit, so I immediately slowed, and it was clear as clear could be that there were innumerable ways of being faster than Earth, it being enough for me to continue in a West to East direction, and enough simply just to run, putting aside the magnetic drag of the various latitudes that would cumulatively increase, and there was an infinite number of velocities to choose from, infinite values were therefore available for my own running-speed and what is more, I thought, further decreasing my velocity all the while, the fact is it would be enough if . . . if I moved at all, just put one foot in front of the other, the essential thing being to move in a West to East direction, enough simply not to stay still, since there were billions on billions of possible velocities, in which case I was free, entirely free—or so I observed as my steps instinctively slowed—perfectly free to choose just how fast I moved since any movement in the right direction would result in moving faster than the Earth and therefore faster than thought, since the Earth is itself thought, and that was the way I was thinking, even before I started the whole process a little while ago, that was the way I was thinking when I dashed past the bridge over the stream by the meadow, past the reindeer-feeding trough in the dark of the forest, and turned at Monowitz at the corner of Schuhkammer and Kleiderkammer. Providing I made no mistakes, I told myself, providing I kept going in the right direction, providing I simply moved, just carried on walking through the fresh dawn air, I would achieve what I had set out to do, and be faster than the Earth—it was just the darkness of the forest that would recede into the distance, just the meadow, the street tcorner, just the scent of that emerald-colored mist vanishing into time forever, into infinity, beyond recall.
We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not-too-illustrious children of a not-too-illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing in it—after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history—will finally attain the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion. This age wants to forget it has gambled away everything on its own, without outside help, and that it can’t blame alien powers, or fate, or some remote baleful influence; we did this ourselves: we have made away with gods and with ideals. We want to forget, for we cannot even muster the dignity to accept our bitter defeat: for infernal smoke and infernal alcohol have gnawed away whatever character we had, in fact smoke and cheap spirits are all that remains of the erstwhile metaphysical traveler’s yearning for angelic realms—the noxious smoke left by longing, and the nauseating spirits left over from the maddening potion of fanatical obsession.
No, history has not ended, and nothing has ended; we can no longer delude ourselves by thinking that anything has ended with us. We merely continue something, maintaining it somehow; something continues, something survives.
We still produce works of art, but no longer even talk about how, it is that far from uplifting. We take as our premise all that until now denoted the nature of la condition humaine, and dutifully, in fact without a clue, obeying strict discipline, but in fact foundering in a slough of despond, we sink back once more into the muddy waters of the imaginable totality of human existence. We no longer even make the mistake of the wild young ones, by claiming that our judgment is the last judgment or declaring that this is where the road ends. We cannot claim that, since nothing makes sense anymore, for us works of art no longer contain narrative or time, nor can we claim that others might ever be able to find a way toward making sense of things. We declare that it has proved useless to disregard our disillusionment and set out toward some nobler goal, toward some higher power, our attempts keep failing ignominiously. In vain would we talk about nature, nature doesn’t want this; it is no use to talk about the divine, the divine doesn’t want this, and anyway, no matter how much we want to, we are unable to talk about anything other than ourselves, because we are only capable of talking about history, about the human condition, about that never-changing quality whose essence carries such titillating relevance only for us; otherwise, from the viewpoint of that “divine otherwise,” this essence of ours is, actually, possibly of no consequence whatsoever, for ever and aye.
How lovely it would be, a world that we could end by organizing a series of lectures—anywhere in this departing world—and give it the general subtitle, “Lecture Series on Area Theory,” where one after another, as in a circus arena, lecturers from all parts of the world would talk about “area theory”: a physicist, followed by an art historian, a poet, a geographer, a biologist, a musicologist, an architect, a philosopher, an anarchist, a mathematician, an astronomer, and so on, and where in front of a permanent, never varying audience, that physicist, that art historian, that poet, that geographer, that biologist, that musicologist, that architect, that philosopher, that anarchist, that mathematician, that astronomer, and so on, would relate his thoughts about area from his own respective point of view, keeping in mind the overall title for the lecture series, “There Is No Area,” pointing out the peculiar relation between this title and the subject, so that the artist or the scientist would speak about this, approaching it from his respective perspective of poetry, music, mathematics, architecture, fine art, geography, biology, the language of poetics and physics, philosophy, anarchy, telling us what he thinks, and what he recommends we should think about area—and all this under the aegis of a summary statement denying that this subject, area, exists at all. The contradiction, however, is only apparent; this lecture series could just as well bear (bitterly) the title “All Is Area” as objectively as its actual title “There Is No Area.” For the lecturers would speak about the significance—for them and for us—of a being from whose point of view, when looking at the universe, area does exist; they would lecture about the importance of the question, namely: can the undeniably limited nature of the human viewpoint possibly lead us to the weighty, if unprovable assertion—and according to another viewpoint besides the human it is conceivable—that there is no area, that this is how matters stand, yet, nevertheless, for us, regardless of where we look, we see ruined and intact nothing but area, area upon area everywhere; given that we have reached a point where, trapped in the bewitchingly confined space of the human viewpoint, as we near the incidental termination of an excruciating spiritual journey, we must arrive at the conclusion: beyond this bewitching confinement we in fact insist on nothing else, nothing else, not even on existence of any kind, we no longer insist even on existence, only on the promise that for once in some area, amidst the most profound beauty and decay, we may glimpse something, anything that refers to us.
Well over a hundred years ago, in 1889, on a day like today in Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the gate of the house at number 6, Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to go for a walk, possibly to pick up his mail at the post office. Not far away, or by then all too far away from him, a hackney cab driver is having a difficult time with his—as they say—intractable horse. When after some goading the horse still refuses to budge, the driver—Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore?—loses patience and starts to beat the animal with his whip. Nietzsche arrives at the crowd that has presumably gathered, and with this the cruel performance of the cab driver, doubtless frothing at the mouth with rage by now, ends; for the gentleman of gigantic stature with the bushy mustache—to the barely disguised amusement of the bystanders—unexpectedly leaps in front of the driver and sobbing, flings his arms around the horse’s neck. Eventually Nietzsche’s landlord takes him home, where for two days he lies motionless and mute on a sofa, until he utters the obligatory last words (“Mutter, ich bin dumm”), after which he lives on, a harmless madman, for ten more years, in the care of his mother and sister. We do not know what happened to the horse.
This story of highly doubtful authenticity—nonetheless granted credibility via the natural arbitrariness expected in such cases—serving as a model of the drama of the intellect casts an especially keen light upon the endgame of the spirit. The demonic star of living philosophy, the dazzling opponent of so-called “universal human truths,” the inimitable champion, the nearly breathless naysayer to pity, forgiveness, goodness, and compassion—hugging the neck of a beaten horse? To resort to an unforgivably vulgar but inevitable turn of phrase: why not hug the cab driver’s neck?
With all respect to Doctor Mobius, for whom this was a simple case of the onset of paralysis progressiva caused by syphilis, what we late heirs witness here is the flash of recognizing a tragic error: after a lengthy and tormenting struggle, Nietzsche’s very being said nay to a chain of thought in his own philosophy that was to be particularly infernal in its consequences. According to Thomas Mann the error was that “this gentle prophet of a life of untrammeled passion considered life and morality to be antagonists. The truth is,” Mann adds, “that they belong together. Ethics is the mainstay of life and the moral man is a true citizen of life’s realm.” Mann’s claim—the absoluteness of this noble declaration—is so beautiful, that it is tempting to take some time and sail away with it, yet we resist, our ship is steered by Nietzsche in Turin, and this calls for not only different waters but a different set of nerves, one might even say, to seize a handy turn of phrase, nerves made of steel cable. And we shall need them indeed, since to our shock and dismay, we will arrive at the same harbor where Thomas Mann’s dictum leads; we shall need these nerves of steel because even though the harbor is the same, our feelings there will be quite different from what Mann promises.
Nietzsche’s drama in Turin suggests that living in accordance with the spirit of moral law is no rank of honor, for I cannot choose its opposite. I may live my life in defiance of it, but this does not mean I am free of its mysterious and truly unnamable power that binds me to it with indissoluble ties. For if that is what I do, live in defiance of it, I can certainly find my way within a societal existence evolved by humankind and therefore not unsurprisingly pitiful, a life in which—as Nietzsche stated—“living and being unjust are one and the same,” but I cannot find my way out of the insoluble dilemma that time and again situates me in the midst of a longing to discover the meaning of my existence. For just as I am part of this human world, I am also part of what, for some unknown reason, I keep calling a greater whole, a greater whole that has—to use an expression with a tip of the hat to the categorical Kant—planted within me this and precisely this imperative: along with the melancholy empowerment of freedom is the freedom to break the law.
By now we are gliding among the buoys that mark the harbor, navigating somewhat blindly, for the lighthouse keepers are asleep and cannot guide our maneuvers—and so we drop our anchor into a murk that instantly swallows up our question about whether this greater whole reflects the higher meaning of the law. And so here we wait, knowing nothing, and we merely look on while, from a thousand directions, our fellow humans are slowly nearing us; we send no messages, only look on, and maintain a silence full of compassion. We believe that this compassion inside us is appropriate as such, and that it would be appropriate, too, in those who are approaching, even if it is not so today, it will be so tomorrow . . . or in ten . . . or in thirty years.
At the latest, in Turin.
It had been fairly securely bound but then it got loose, and all we know about this is that the same thing unleashed it that had secured it before, and that is all, it would be the height of folly to state, to represent, to categorically designate the power, that is to say specifically this unleashing of power, that immeasurably vast, baffling system that is truly immeasurable, truly baffling, in other words: the for us forever incomprehensible workings of the ineluctable modality of chance, in which we have sought and found laws, yet in fact over the heroic centuries of the past we have never got to know it, just as we can be certain that we shall not get to know it in times to come, for all we have ever been able, are able, and will ever be able to know are the consequences of ineluctable chance, those terrifying moments when the whip cracks, it cracks and comes down on our backs just as the whip cracks over this fortuitous universe we call the world, and unleashes what had been securely bound, that is when—namely now—it is once again unleashed upon the world, the thing that we humans forever and repeatedly insist on calling the new, the unprecedented, even though it surely cannot be called new or unprecedented, after all it has been here ever since the creation of the world, or to put it more accurately, it arrived simultaneously with us, or still more accurately, by way of us, and always like this, so that we were and are only able to recognize its arrival after the fact, retrospectively; it is already here by the time we realize that it has arrived again, always finding us unprepared, even though we ought to be aware that it is coming, that it is secured only temporarily, we ought to hear its chains scraping, loosening, the hiss of knots coming undone in the until then tight cordage, deep down inside us we ought to KNOW that it is about to break loose, and that is how it should have been this time too, we should have known that this is how it would be, that it was bound to come, but we only awoke to the realization, if we awoke at all, that it was here already, and that we were in trouble, we ascertained that we were helpless, by which we only meant that we always were so, for we are forever helpless—when it is here—helpless and defenseless, and to think about this precisely during the first hours after the attack proved so uncomfortable that instead we began to worry about finding out what had happened, how it had happened, who they were and why they did it, to worry about the collapse of the Twin Towers and the caving in of the Pentagon, how this had happened, how they collapsed and caved in, and who the perpetrators were, and how they did it, whereas what we first of all should have been, and by now certainly must be, worrying about and realizing at long last: what has actually happened cannot be comprehended, which by the way is no wonder, since the arrival of the one, of what had till now been fairly well contained but had now somehow broken loose, without exception always signals that we have entered a new era, it signals the end of the old, and the beginning of the new, and nobody had “consulted us” about this, no, we hadn’t even noticed when all this had been happening, the words “turning point” and “dawn of a new era” were hardly out of our mouths when precisely this critical, time-bound nature of a turning point and a dawn was rendered ludicrous as we realized that all of a sudden we were living in a new world, had entered a radically new era, and we understood none of it, because everything we had was obsolete, including our conditioned reflexes, our attempts to understand the nature of a process, how “all of this” had “consequently” proceeded from there to here, everything was as obsolete as our conviction to rely on experience, on sober rationality, to lean on them as we investigated causes and evidence that this had truly happened to us, the nonexistent or for us inaccessible causes and evidence, now that we found ourselves indeed in a brand-new era, in other words here we stand, every last one of us as of old, blinking and peering around in the same old way, our aggressiveness betraying old uncertainties, a fatuous aggressiveness at a time when we haven’t even begun to be afraid yet, still insisting on the lie, that no, no way was this a radical change in our world, no way was this the end of one world epoch and the beginning of a new, every last one of us obsolete, myself possibly one of the most obsolete of all, now feeling a long-absent sense of community with others, very obsolete, indeed speechless in the deepest possible sense of the word, because on September 11 I flashed on the fact, like a twinge of physical pain, that, good god, my language, the one I could use to speak out now, was so old, so godforsaken ancient, the way I strung it out, quibbling, twisting and turning, pushing and pulling it to move ahead, pestering it, advancing by stringing one ancient word after another, how useless, how helpless and crude this language is, this language of mine, and how splendid it had been formerly, how dazzling and supple and apt and deeply moving, but by now it has utterly lost all of its meaning, power, spaciousness, and precision, all gone, and then for days I pondered this, would I ever be able, would I ever be capable of suddenly learning some other language without which it would be completely hopeless; I knew at once, watching the flaming, tumbling Towers, and then envisioning them again and again, and I knew that without a brand-new language it was impossible to understand this brand-new era in which, along with everyone else, I suddenly found myself; I brooded and pondered, tormented myself for days on end, after which I had to admit that no, I had no chance of suddenly learning a new language, I was, along with the others, too much a prisoner of the old, and there was no recourse, I concluded, but to abandon all hope of ever understanding what was going on down here, so I sat in profound gloom, staring out the window, as again and again those giant Twin Towers kept falling and falling and falling, I sat there staring, and using these old words I began to describe what I saw, together with the others, in this new world, I began to write down what I felt, that I was unable to comprehend, and the old sun began to set in the old world, darkness began to fall in the old way in my old room as I sat by the window, when suddenly some horrendous fear began to slowly creep over me, I don’t know where it came from, I merely felt it growing, this fear that for a while did not reveal what it was, only that it existed and was growing, and I just sat there utterly helpless, watching this fear growing in me, and I waited, maybe after a while I would guess the nature of this fear, but that wasn’t what happened, not at all, this fear, while continually growing, did not reveal anything about itself, it refused to reveal its contents, so that understandably it began to make me anxious about what to do next, I could not keep on sitting here forever with this fear that concealed its contents, but I still sat there, numb, by the window, as outside those two Towers kept falling and falling and falling, when suddenly my ears registered a grating noise, as if cumbersome chains were clattering in the distance, and my ears registered a slight scraping sound, as if securely knotted ropes were slowly slipping loose—all I could hear was this grating clatter and this scary scraping, and once more I thought of my ancient language, and of the utter silence into which I had tumbled, I sat there staring at the outside and as complete darkness filled the room only one thing was completely certain: it had broken loose, it was closing in, it was already here.
I do not know who you are, gentlemen.
I couldn’t quite make out the name of your organization.
And frankly, I must confess I am not entirely clear about what kind of lecture you expect me to give here.
After all, you must be aware that I am not a lecturer.
I have given much thought to the matter, I racked my brains trying to find out what this was all about, just as I am trying right now, in front of you, but it’s best if I admit that I haven’t succeeded: I just don’t know what you expect of me, and I have a lingering bad feeling that perhaps you yourselves aren’t quite clear about it.
It had also occurred to me that possibly you are mistaking me for someone else. You had intended to invite a certain person, but he wasn’t available, and only because of that did you select me, because I am the one who most reminds you of that person.
You are not saying anything.
Fine, it’s all the same to me.
Mr. President, gentlemen—I shall speak about melancholy.
And I will begin by going way back.
During one of the later decades of the twentieth century, deep in the deepest hellhole of that decade, on a bitter freezing night in late November, a ghostly tractor-trailer advanced on the main street toward the market square of a small town in the lowlands of southeast Hungary. At a glance it appeared to be about thirty meters long, and its height . . . its height, compared to its length and width, seemed to be far too great, and these gigantic dimensions naturally went with an enormous weight, all of it resting on two sets of eight double wheels. The sides were made of blue corrugated tin upon which an unskilled hand had daubed enigmatic figures in yellow paint, and although this entire ramshackle contraption should have been comparable to a freight train car, it did not resemble or recall any such thing in the least, not just because of its gargantuan dimensions and weight and wheels, nor because those crudely daubed figures and their alarming undecipherability instantly removed from this vehicle any resemblance to a train car, but chiefly because it had no doors, nothing that might suggest a door, as if the original plan had been to commission a subterranean workshop to build such and such a transport vehicle made out of blue corrugated tin with two sets of eight twin wheels but without any doors, there was no need for any doors, not even in the rear, that’s right, no doors, not a single one, thank you, because if you undertake to do this, gentlemen, it will be your masterpiece as tinsmiths, that’s what the commission must have sounded like, this will be your makeshift masterpiece, that must have been the sum of the sketchy instructions given to the subterranean workmen, you are building this conveyance not just for anyone to open and close, it will suffice if I, who ordered the work, open and close it when I want to, and if I do so then it will be from the inside, with a single gesture, by me.
It must have been somewhat like that, because at a glance, your first impression was most definitely that any amount of speculation about underground workshops, mysterious tinsmiths, and a customer whose identity was a complete enigma would be fully justified, since in addition to all that, one had to think of the inconceivable slowness of dragging it with a rickety tractor-trailer straining against the icy wind and the excruciatingly prolonged nocturnal journey this extraordinary contraption must have completed before it braked to a halt at the marketplace.