There, in that sky, it now stood vividly above him and menaced and mocked.

Finally he closed his eyes, because the vision tormented him so.

 

Soon after that, awoken by a gust of wind that rustled through the dry grass, he could barely feel his body, and a pleasant coolness flowed up from his feet, keeping his limbs in a state of sweet languor. Something mild and tired now mingled with his former fear. He still felt the sky staring down on him, vast and silent, but now he recalled how often he had had such an impression in the past, and as though in a state between waking and dreaming he ran through all of those memories, and felt as though all their associations were spinning him into a cocoon.

First of all there was that childhood memory in which the trees had stood as serious and silent as enchanted people. Even then he must have had that feeling that later returned to him again and again. Something of it had even been present in the thoughts he had had at Božena’s, a particular foreboding, something more than those thoughts suggested. And that moment of silence in the garden outside the windows of the cake shop, before the dark veils of sensuality had fallen, that had been like that too. And Beineberg and Reiting had often, within the fragment of a thought, become something alien and unreal; and finally, what about Basini? The idea of what was about to happen to him had utterly torn Törless in two; one moment it was reasonable and ordinary, the next it had assumed that same silence, with images flashing through it, which had gradually seeped into Törless’s perception and now, all of a sudden, demanded to be treated as something real and alive; just as the idea of infinity had done before.

Törless now felt that silence surrounding him on all sides. Like distant, dark forces, it had probably been threatening for ever, but he had instinctively retreated from it, and had only shyly glanced at it from time to time. But now an accident, an event, had sharpened his attention and focused it upon it, and as if responding to a sign it was now crashing in from all sides, bringing with it a terrible confusion that spread further with each new moment.

It came upon Törless like a madness, experiencing objects, processes and people as things with ambiguous meanings. As something fettered by some inventor’s power to a harmless, explanatory word, and as something wholly alien that seemed at every moment to threaten to break its bonds.

Certainly: there is a simple, natural explanation for everything, and Törless knew that too, but to his fearful astonishment it only seemed to rip away an outermost shell without laying bare the interior, which Törless, as though with eyes by now unnatural, saw always glimmering as a second layer behind it.

Törless lay there, entirely wrapped in a cocoon of memories, from which alien thoughts grew like strange blossoms. Those moments that no one forgets, situations in which there is a failure of the associations that normally allow us to reflect our lives whole within our understanding, as though the two things were running along side by side and at the same speed — coming confusingly close to one another.

The memory of the terribly still, sad-coloured silence of certain evenings alternated suddenly with the hot, tremulous unease of a summer afternoon that had once rippled glowing across his soul, as though with the twitching feet of a hissing swarm of glittering lizards.

Then he suddenly remembered a smile of that young prince - a glance - a movement — from the time when they had profoundly broken with one another — with which the prince had suddenly — gently - freed himself from all the connections that Törless had spun around him — and stepped into a new and strange expanse which - as though concentrated into the life of a single indescribable second — had opened up unexpectedly. Then once more there came memories from the wood — between the fields. Then a silent picture in a gloomy room at home, which had later suddenly reminded him of his lost friend. Words from a poem came to mind ...

And there are other things too, governed by that incommensurability of experience and understanding. But it is always the case that what we experience in one moment, whole and unquestioning, becomes incomprehensible and confused when we seek to bind it to our enduring ownership with the chains of thought. And what looks big and inhuman while our words reach it from afar, becomes simple and ceases to be unsettling the moment it enters our life’s field of action.

 

And so all those memories suddenly shared a single secret. As though they all belonged together, they stood clearly before him, within his grasp.

When they had happened, they had been accompanied by an obscure emotion to which he had paid little attention.

That was precisely what he was trying to do now. It struck him that he had once, standing with his father before one of those landscapes, cried out unexpectedly: ‘Oh, how beautiful that is’ - and had been embarrassed by his father’s pleasure. On that occasion he might just as easily have said: ‘How terribly sad it is.’ It was a failure of words that tormented him then, a half-awareness that the words were merely random excuses for what he had felt.

And today he remembered the picture, he remembered the words, and he clearly recalled lying about that feeling even though he did not know why. His eye ran through everything again in his memory. But it returned unassuaged, again and again. A smile of delight at the wealth of ideas that he still clutched as though distractedly, slowly assumed a barely perceptible, painful trait ...

He felt the need to persist in his search for a bridge, a context, a comparison - between himself and that which stood silently before his mind.

But however often he had calmed himself with a thought, that incomprehensible objection remained: you’re lying. It was as though he had to pass through an unstoppable division of soldiers, a stubborn remnant forever leaping out at him, or as though he was wearing his feverish fingers raw trying to undo an endless knot.

And finally he gave up. The room closed in around him, and his memories burgeoned in unnatural distortions.

He had set his eyes on the sky once more. As though by chance he might be able to wrench its secret from it, and guess from it what it was that everywhere confused him. But he grew tired, and the feeling of deep loneliness closed over him. The sky was silent. And Törless felt he was completely alone beneath that mute, motionless arch; he felt like a little living dot beneath that vast, transparent corpse.

But it barely frightened him any more. By now it had seized hold of his last limb, like an old, familiar pain.

He felt as though the light had assumed a milky glow, and was dancing before his eyes like a pale, cold mist.

Slowly and carefully he turned his head and looked around to see if everything had really changed. Then his gaze brushed past the grey, windowless wall behind his head.