These were the moments of resounding deathlessness, the moments of essential life emerged from its twilight, and it was in these moments that the true form of death revealed itself most clearly: rare moments of grace, rare moments of perfect freedom, unknown to most, striven for by many, achieved by few—, but among those who were permitted to retain such moments, to grasp the fugitive evanescence of death’s shape, he who succeeded in giving shape to death by incessant listening and searching would find together with its genuine form his own real shape as well, he was shaping his own death and with it his own shape, and he was immune from the reversion into the humus of shapelessness. Seven-colored and divinely mild the rainbow of childhood arched for him over all his existence, daily seen anew, the shared creation of man and the gods, the creation proceeding from the strength of the word with the knowledge of death: had not this been the hope for which he had been obliged to bear the agony of a hunted life devoid of every peaceful joy? He looked back on this life of abnegation, of an actually still continuing renunciation, on this life that had been without resistance to death though full of resistance to participation and love, he looked back on this life of farewell that lay back of him in the dusk of rivers, in the dusk of poetry, and today he knew more clearly than ever before that he had taken on all this for the sake of that very hope; perhaps he was not to be mocked and execrated because life’s great travail had as yet not led to the fulfillment of hope, because the task he had wanted to discharge had been over-great for his weak forces, because the medium of the poet’s art was perhaps not intended for this after all, however he also realized that this was not the case, that the justification of a task or the lack of its justification was not to be reckoned by its earthly accomplishment, that it was negligible whether his own strength sufficed or not, whether any other man with greater strength were to be born or whether a better solution than the one put forth by poetry were to be found, all this was irrelevant, for the choice had not been his: certainly day after day and countless times during every day he had decided and acted in accord with his free choice, or at least he had thought that the choice was free, but the great line of his life was not of his own choosing nor in accord with his free will, it had been a compulsion, a compulsion on a level with the redemption and the evil of existence, a fate-enjoined yet fate-surpassing compulsion, commanding him to search for his own shape in that of death and thus to win the freedom of his soul; for freedom is a compulsion of the soul whose redemption or damnation is always at stake, and he had heeded the injunction, obedient to the task of his fate.
He shifted upward a little on the pillows to ease his aching chest, very cautiously so that the outstretched landscape of himself which seemed to guarantee him clarity might not fall into disorder and confusion as was the case with those who stand erect; then he felt about him for the manuscript-chest and let his hand finger almost tenderly the surface of its rawhide cover; hot and exciting the feeling of work, the compelling feeling of the discoverer, the great wanderer-sense of creation awoke in him, and were it not that simultaneously there sprang up in him the great fear of the wanderer, the terrible fear of the lost wayfarer who mistakes his path in the impenetrability of night, the same profound fear which accompanies all creation, the hotly happy surge in his breast would have quelled the death-anticipation of the admonishing pains there, would have relieved the lack of breath, would have made him forgetful alike of fever’s heat or chill, and nothing would have prevented him from immediately sitting down to work, prepared to begin anew, mindful of the task he had to fulfill to the drawing of his last breath, the task which could bring him fulfillment only with his last breath. No, nothing would have restrained him from work, nothing would have been allowed to restrain him, and yet everything did so, and did it so thoroughly that the finishing of the Aeneid had been at a standstill for months past and nothing remained but flight after flight. And neither the disease nor the pains, long since familiar, long since weathered or outwitted, were to be blamed for that, but rather the inescapable, inexplicable unrest, this alarming sense of being lost with no way out, this sharply-felt foreboding of an ever-threatening, ever-present engulfing calamity, its essence indiscernible, its source undiscoverable, especially as one was ignorant of whether the threat lurked within or without; lying quietly and breathing cautiously he listened into the darkness: the tapers on the candelabrum expired one after the other, only the small, patient light of the oil-lamp next to the couch survived, often swaying to and fro on the faintly ringing chain at the merest breath of a breeze, mirrored on the wall in a butterfly-soft, cobwebby, undulating shadow, and while outside the tumult of the street gradually subsided and the indeterminable noise dissolved into every sort of neighing, grunting, squawking, the drone of the festival receding into a clearer or deeper hum which was dispersed through the kaleidoscopic noise-picture, the even tread of the withdrawing troops became audible as a sort of ground bass, indicating that a section of the guard was retiring to quarters; then it became still, but soon the stillness was animated by a curious vibrancy, curious because the stillness itself was vibrant, as suddenly from afar, from every side—did it come from the fields just outside the city, or from those in Andes?—the chirping of crickets became audible, the myriadfold sound of those myriad creatures, humming endlessly in the hush that was spread over the infinite. Quietly and gradually the ruddy reflection from the illumination of the street-festival paled also, the ceiling of the room grew black except for the bright spot directly above the lamp, which, as it shifted softly, seemed the light’s painting of a pendulum, and the stars before the window stood in blackness. What was this unrest, the source of which he was seeking? why was there unrest now when the ebb of the low-despairing clamor should have betokened a general solace for him? No, the evil had remained, and now he perceived it, he was bound to perceive it: it was the evil of man’s imprisoned soul, the soul for which every liberation turns into a new imprisonment, again and again.
He stared toward the window, the night circled in its immense space, the orb turned by Atlas resting on the giant’s shoulders, strewn with sparkling constellations, the enormous cavern of night from which there was no release; he listened to the rustlings of night, and to him in his utter wakefulness, to him whom fever had brought so low that he burned and froze beneath his covers, there came in sharpened coexistence the pictures, the odors, the sounds, of the present together with those of every lived or livable moment in the twofold remembering toward past and future, so swollen by inevitable, inexplicable weirdness, so uncapturably fugitive, so hidden in mystery despite all their nakedness that he, whipped on and halting at once, was thrust back into the chaotic maze of separate voices—, the shapelessness he had thought to outrun took hold on him again, not as the indiscriminateness of the herd-beginning, but directly, indeed almost palpably, as the chaos of severance, and as a dissolution which by no hearkening or grasping could ever be conformed to unity; the demonic chaos of all separated voices, all separated perceptions, all isolated things, regardless of whether they belonged to the present, the past, or the future, this chaos now assailed him, he was given over to it, yes, this is what it had been since the roaring, indiscriminate noise of the streets had begun to change to a maze of separate voices. This was what it was. Oh, everyone was surrounded by a maze of voices, everyone wandered round in the maze his whole life long, wandering and wandering, yet bound to the spot in the dense forest of voices, entangled in the night-growth, tangled in among the forest roots, which took hold beyond all time and space, oh, everyone was threatened by the anarchic voices and their grasping arms, by voice-twigs and voice-branches which, twining about each other, entwined him, which in branching out from each other shot up erect and crooked into one another again, demonic in their independence, demonic in their separateness, voices of the second, voices of the year, voices of the aeon, which had spread out into a lattice-work of the world, crisscrossed, incomprehensible and impenetrable in their roaring muteness, humid with the groans of pain and harsh with the joyous savagery of a whole world. Oh, no one escaped the primordial roar, no one was spared it, for each one, whether he knew it or not, was nothing other than one of the voices, belonging to them with their insoluble, indivisible, impenetrable threat—, how could anyone sustain hope! the lost one was past saving, imprisoned in the maze, in which no breach or clearing could be discerned, and had he wished to stretch his hope beyond this, to send it over and beyond—there into the inextensible eternity where the unity, the order, the omniscience of the voice-totality was to be divined, to the promise of their great harmony, voice-locked, voice-releasing, to the last reverberating harmonic echo from the furthest spaces of universal unity, universal order, universal perception, to the last echo-solution of the universal task—such hope of a mortal, insolent and abhorrent to the gods, would have burst against the walls of deafness, dying away in the voice-maze, in the maze of perception, in the mazes of time, dying away to an expiring breath; for the voice-source of time’s inception was unreachable, it lay beneath the depths of all roots, lying beneath all voices, beneath all muteness, impassable the root-springs of the forests, the root-springs in which the starry map of unity of order and of speech was stored, unbeholdable that symbol of all symbols, for infinite and more than infinite was the variety of their outspreading courses in the unsurpassable immensity of space, infinite was the number of identities, infinite the number of paths and their intersectings and also the multi-compartments of speech and memory as well as the profusion of their trends, and the infinitude of their private abysses were only very weak, very sparse reflections woven into the earthly meagerness of that which was not to be comprehended by thinking, of that which stored in its breath all starry spaces and would itself be preserved in even the tiniest point of the spheres, breathing itself in and out, streaming in and out, the reflection of a symbolization sheerly unutterable, sheerly unrememberable, sheerly unpredictable, the salvation of knowledge that by its effulgence outreached every lapse of time and transformed each split-second to timelessness: crossroad of all paths, compassed by no one, the immovable, transported journey’s end! even the first, the very first step that would be taken in any direction of the road-mazes, were it ever so fleet, would require a lifetime and more than a lifetime for its consummation, it would require an endless life to retain a single scanty moment of recollection, an endless life to gaze but for a second into the profundities that language holds in its depths! by giving ear unto these depths he had hoped to be permitted to listen to death, he had hoped to lay hold on a knowledge, even if it were only the divining gleam of an intuition of that perception-boundary which already was beyond earthly understanding, but even this hope had proved presumptuous in the face of the incomprehensibility that pulsed up from the echo-walls of the abyss, a glint that was scarcely more than a glimmer, now scarcely more than the memory of a glimmer, scarcely more than the echo of a memory, a fleeting breath so invisible that not even music would have been able to grasp it, to say nothing of being able to express this invisibility as a foretaste of impalpable infinity; no, nothing terrestrial was able to sunder the impenetrable thicket, no, no earthly means was sufficient to solve the eternal task, to disclose and announce the law, striking out toward that knowledge beyond knowledge, no, this was reserved for supernatural powers and transcendental means, a potency of expression that left all earthly expression far behind it, a language which would have to stand outside the maze of voices, beyond all earthly linguistics, a speech which would be more than music, a speech which would help the eyes to perceive, heartbreakingly and quick as a heart-beat, the unity of all existence, verily it must be a language still unfound and glowing in the supernal that could undertake this task, and the effort to approach such a language with paltry verses was rash, a fruitless effort and a blasphemous presumption! ah, it had been granted to him to perceive the eternal task, the task of the soul’s salvation, it had been granted him to set-to with a spade, and he had not noticed that he had lavished his whole life on it, wasted his life, frittered away the years, squandered time, not just because he had failed and had shown himself inadequate, inadequate to lay bare even a single rootlet, but because the mere decision to attempt the spade-work would exhaust an endless life, all the more since death overtook every soul and was overtaken by nothing, not even by the aid of an overheard language or a pre-heard memory; all-conquering was death, all-conquering the maze that was not to be cleared by anything, and mercilessly confined the lost one, helpless the lost one, himself but a helpless voice in the thicket of separateness. How then could anyone still sustain hope? did not the human event, however and wherever it happened, unhesitatingly disclose itself as a consequence of creaturely fear, from the twilight prison of which one could neither break out nor escape, as it was the anguish of the creature lost in a maze? He became more deeply aware of this anguish, he understood better than ever the unsilenced wish of the lost soul for the death-sublimating annulment of time, he understood better than ever the unquenchable hope of the creaturely masses, he understood what they were aiming at, they down below there, voices and more voices they also, with their wildly despairing clamor, he understood them, when, inviolable and unteachable, clinging to their individual and collective ardor, they screamed out of themselves and to themselves that somewhere in the thicket there must exist an excellent one, a mighty one, an extraordinary voice, the voice of a leader to whom they need only attach themselves so that in his reflected glory, in the reflection of the jubilation, the intoxication, the power of the imperial divinity they might with a gasping, wild, bullish, thundering assault still be able to clear an earthly path for themselves out of the entanglement of their existence, and, aware of this, he saw, he understood, he knew better than ever before, that his own aspirations were different only in form and presumptuousness from those of the frenzied herd’s honest though brutal will-to-violation, not however in their objective, meaning, or content; that he had only disguised the simple, creaturely fear that clutched him with the selfsame force, falsified it in a yearning for the omniscient unity of law, falsified it in a vain and therefore doubly sanctimonious listening and fore-listening, that he had simply pushed off to the end of his earthly life the hope for a path-finding, extraordinary, guiding voice, that this most earthly mob-hope was his also, that he had made himself believe it would resound one day from the beyond and would then be supernatural, phantom of his presumption, which was given over to the terrestrial and forfeited to the vanity of all things earthly; oh, now he realized better than before the futility of their herdlike impulse to escape, the futility of their dogging fear, of their attempt at flight, which broke into an uproar with hope and lapsed into silence with disappointment and compelled them to run off again and again into the stark, unshadowed nothingness, lost in time, fixed in time, time unabolished; and he realized that the same lot was assigned to him, quite as inevitably, quite as inescapably,—the fall into the nothingness which does not abolish death, but which in itself is that very death. Oh, erratic and squandered his life, for from the outset the path he had taken had led nowhere, impeded by awareness of its wrong direction, impeded by knowing itself astray, erring and groping in the maze from the outset, a life of false renunciation and false farewell, impeded by the fear of the inevitable disappointment which, even as hope, had been pushed to the limit of life and earthly experience. Had this limit now been reached, so that nothing was left but disappointment? so that nothing was left but icy horror, this crippling and breathtaking horror of death which was perhaps unacknowledged but positive, and possibly even stronger than the dread of disappointment? nothing was left but the numbness which was laid on him like a mysterious penalty determined by his stars, punishing a predestined and unrequitable sin, a sin he had not committed and which was presumptuousness even without being committed, an eternally uncommitted sin standing eternally at his back, forever opposing the eternal task of understanding, the penalty for which was constantly imposed on him so that he might not perceive his task and its fulfillment, an invisible chastisement in a still more invisible numbness, the sin of not awakening and its punishment, time-benumbing, speech-benumbing, memory-benumbing, the drowsy listening benumbed into the void on the dreary field of death; and his body, pining away and aged with weariness, lay quite forlorn in this numbness, extending saturnically and drowsily over the zones of himself which became more and more transparent, more and more evanescent, forsaken even by the demons, continuing to be still more desolate, still more immobile, as if they were blank windows opening upon no view: nothing remained but this, nothing else was even to be remembered, for everything which had once signified life’s advantages had failed; the once-pledged, once-timeless memory had become feeble, aging even quicker than he had, lost to him and submerged into what had been barely created, barely lived; and the translucent and glittering pictures of his life’s landscape, once so dazzling, had grown dim, had withered and died away; his verses, which he had twined about them had dried up and fallen away, all this had blown away like faded leaves, no longer remembered but merely known about, season-wafted, season-weary, a forgotten rustling; oh, how much there had been; the far past, the near past had existed in thousandfold diversity, in millionfold identities, yet it had never caught up to him, it had never been allowed to become a whole, the circle of memory was not closed, the past would never catch up with him, it was, even in the living, doomed to be unlived and to remain undone, just as the performance of his endless task had been consigned to the unfinished, halted at the very first step, even as this first step, notwithstanding it had already lasted a whole lifetime, remained still untaken as at the very outset, held in a ghastly unshakable paralysis for which there was neither advance nor retreat, consequently no second step could follow the first untaken one, because the distance between each single living second had grown to an immense, empty space which was not to be bridged; and from this point on nothing whatsoever followed, either quickly or slowly, because nothing was able to continue, the done and the undone, the imagined and the unimagined, the uttered and the unuttered, the written and the unwritten, all unable to continue and—, oh ye gods, the Aeneid!—must this also remain unfinished, unable to be continued, unable to be completed like his whole life! Had this actually been determined by the stars? was this actually to be the fate of the poem?! the fate of the Aeneid, his own fate in its unfulfillment! Was this conceivable, oh was this conceivable?! The heavy portal of fear had sprung open and behind it the cavern of horror reared up, mighty and all-encompassing. Something unknown, fearful, ghastly, assailing him simultaneously from within and without, ripped him up; a sudden, malignant outbreak, superlatively painful, tore him aloft with all the devastating, convulsive, stiflingly desperate force inherent in the first lightning-and-thunderclap of a rising storm; thus chokingly it drove into him, death-dealing, death-threatening, yet the seconds following hard upon each other enriched in flashes the empty space between them with that inconceivable thing called life, and it almost seemed to him as if hope blinked up once again in those flashes while, with the fleetness of a breath or a glance, he was being torn aloft in the clutch of the iron hand; it seemed to him that all this was happening so that the neglected, the lost, the unfinished might still be retrieved if only in this instant of renewed second-wind; overcome as he was by pain, by fear, by torpor, he knew not whether it was hope or no-hope, but he did know that every second of new-lived life was needful and momentous, he knew he had been hounded for the sake of this up-flickering of life, whether it lasted a short or a long time, chased up and away from the couch of torpor; he knew he had to escape the breath-lack of the narrow-walled and shut-in room, that once more he must send his glance outward, turned away from himself, turned away from the zones of his self, turned away from the dreary field of death, that just once more, for a single time, perhaps for the last time, he must come to comprehend the vastness of life, he must, oh he must again behold the stars; and starkly lifted up from the bed, held in the clutching fist that gripped into his whole body and yet grasped him from without, he moved himself with stiff-jointed legs, like a marionette convoyed on wires, uncertainly as though on stilts, back to the window against the frame of which he leaned exhausted, a little bent over because of his weakness but despite this held upright so that, as with elbows drawn back he satisfied his hunger for air with deep regular breaths, his being might disclose itself anew, participating in the breath-stream of the yearned-back spheres.
IT WAS the necessity for air, the animal necessity to breathe that had driven him to the window, but at the same time it was a necessity not of the body, a longing for the visible, for the visible world, for what could be breathed in from the assurance of the visible universe. Numbed and stifling he stood at the window, held by the mighty and embracing hand, and he knew not how long he stood there; it may have been only a few seconds or as many minutes, and the awareness of time flowed back into him incompletely and in snatches, long passages of time being obliterated by the fear and pain of strangling; the world rebuilt itself, knowledge came to be knowledge only in fragments, and in the same way he became attentive to what had occurred, realizing bit by bit that it had occurred not merely for the sake of the Aeneid, but for something he had yet to find.
Now the world lay still before him, after all the previously endured pandemonium amazingly still, and it appeared to be late in the night, apparently past its middle; the stars glowed greatly in their great courses, comforting and strong and quietly a-shimmer with reassuring recognition although disquietingly overcast despite the complete absence of clouds, as if a so-to-speak unyielding and impenetrable, cloudily-crystal dome through which the glance could barely pass were stretched midway between the starry spaces and that of the world below; and it almost seemed to him as if the demonic partition into zones to which he had been subjected during his recumbent listening and his listening recumbency had been carried here to the outside world and that here it had become sharper and more extensive than when it had been imposed on himself. The earthly space was so cut off and insulated from the heavenly ones that nothing more could be felt of that longed-for wind blowing between the worlds, and not even the hunger for air was appeased, even this pain was not lessened because the fumes, which earlier had enshrouded the city and which had been sundered but could not be blown away by the evening breeze, had changed to a sort of feverish transparency, thickened under the burden of world-segregation to a dark jelly which floated in the air, unmoving and immovable, hotter than the air and so impossible to breathe that it was almost as oppressive as the stuffiness within the room. Ruthlessly that which could be breathed was separated from that which could not, ruthlessly, impenetrably, the crystal shell was spanned darkly overhead, a hard, opaque partition barring off the fore-court of the spheres, the fore-court of the breath, the fore-court of the universe in which he stood, set upright by the iron hand, supported by it; and whereas formerly, ensconced in the earth’s surface and stretched out over the Saturnian meadows, he had constituted the boundary between the above and below, in immediate contact with both regions and involved with both, now he towered up through them as an individual soul, predestined to her growing, who, lonely and single, knew that if she wished to hearken into the depths above and those below she had to hearken to herself: immediate participation in the greatness of the spheres was not granted to one who stood in the midst of earthly time and earthly-human growth, endowed again with both; only with his glance, only with his knowledge might he penetrate the infinite detachment of the spheres, enabled to grasp and hold them only with his questioning glance, enabled to restore the simultaneous unity of the universe in all of its spheres by his questioning knowledge alone, achieving only in the streaming orbit of the question the vital immediacy of his own soul, her innermost NECESSITY, the task of preception laid on her from the very beginning.
Time flowed above, time flowed below, the hidden time of night flowing back into his arteries, flowing back into the pathway of the stars, second bound spacelessly to second, the re-given, re-awakened time beyond the bonds of fate, abolishing chance, the unalterable law of time absolved from lapsing, the everlasting now into which he was being held:
Law and time,
born from each other,
annulling, yet always giving birth to each other anew,
reflecting each other and perceptible in this way alone,
chain of images and counter-images,
noosing time, noosing the arch-image,
neither wholly captured, yet for all that
becoming more and more timeless
until, in their last echoing unison,
in a final symbol,
the image of death unites with the image of life,
portraying the reality of the soul,
her homestead, her timeless now, the law
made manifest in her, and hence
her necessity.
Everything had been brought to pass through necessity, even the traversing of the perceptive path where the inner and outer worlds were dissolved to an unrecognized infinity, detached and divided to complete strangeness. Yet did not this unavoidable, inescapable necessity contain the hope for the restored harmony of existence, for the confirmation of what was occurring and what had already occurred? the images had emerged through necessity and through necessity they pressed on, coming nearer and nearer to reality! Oh, nearness of the arch-image, nearness of the arch-reality in the fore-court of which he was standing—, was the crystal cover of the heaven-secret about to be rent? was the night about to unveil its final symbol to him whose eye must falter when the night’s eye opens? He stared upward to the stars whose two-thousand-years’ revolution was soon to be rounded off, following fate orbit by orbit, bearing fate on from father to son in the generations of time, and he was greeted by the pulsing now of the heavens, extending from the visible into the invisible and filling the complete cycle of re-given consciousness, greeted from the southwestern horizon by the familiar and uncanny image of the Scorpion, the dangerously crooked body laved by the mild stream of the Milky Way, greeted by Andromeda, nestling her head on the winged shoulder of Pegasus, by that never-vanishing presence shining forth in invisible welcome, and from the aeons preceding the creation of the ancestors the constellation of the dragon sent forth its ten-fold illumination, the dragon deprived of its erstwhile throne; he gazed upward into the stony chill where the image of law was circling, cut off from the dark-gleaming breath, cut off from the never-descending but always surmised truth, necessary to itself in a sphere removed from mankind; and seeing its image, sensing its image in the abundance of images which comprise it, he felt perception at work in himself, knowing it was beyond chance, knowing that the power of his perception allowed him to wait without expectation, freed from all impatience, and in knowing this he became ready for the necessary completion in the uncompleted. Thereupon the hand that upheld him became soft and softer, came to be safety. And upon the roofs of the city the light of the easterly moon lay like a cool, greenish dust; earth things drew nearer. For he who has left the first portal of fear behind him, enclosed in the fore-court of a new and greater mystery, enclosed and caught by a new apprehension which places him again in the midst of his own development, in the midst of his own law, absolved from returning, absolved from the Saturnian lapses, absolved from his own impatient hearkening, he is the one again made to stand erect and to grow upright, to find the way back to himself; and his bark glides on but only with oars drawn back, drifting softly and unexpectantly in the time granted to him, as if the landing were just in front of him, as if he were about to be landed on the shores of the chance-delivered and final reality:
for he who has left the first portal of fear behind him
has entered the fore-court of reality,
now that his perception, discovering itself and turned towards itself,
as if for the first time,
begins to comprehend
the necessity inherent in the universe, the necessity of every occurrence,
as the necessity of his own soul;
for he to whom this befalls
is held into the unity of existence,
into that pure now common to man and the universe,
the inalienable possession of his own soul,
by virtue of which she floats, as float she must,
over the abyss of nothingness, opened and threatening,
and over the blindness of man;
for he is held into the everlasting now of the question,
into the everlasting now of man’s knowledgeless-knowing,
into man’s divine prescience,
knowledgeless in that it asks and must ask,
knowing in that it precedes the question,
divine prescience, divinely bestowed before birth on man and man alone
as his innermost human necessity,
for the sake of which
he must put his perception to the test again and again
and be proven by it again and yet again,
man trepidant for the answer, perception trepidant for the answer,
man bound to perception, perception bound to man,
both held together and trepidant for the answer,
overcome by the divine reality of fore-knowledge,
by the magnitude of reality embraced by the knowing question,
a question never to be answered by the truth of earthly knowledge, and yet
which can be answered, must be answered here alone in the realm of earth,
realized on earth
as the counterplay of a dual world-shaping,
reality conformed to truth, truth conformed to reality,
complying with the law of the soul,
her necessity;
for, tense with questioning, the soul
is held into her salvation, saved by truth,
enjoined to perception, to questioning, to shaping,
stretched between her certitude of knowledge and her capacity for perception,
in search of reality,
and summoned in this manner by primal knowledge,
summoned by the knowing question which suggests
something chanceless establishing unity in all that exists,
called hither to the realization of knowledge,
to the knowledge born of perception,
to perception of the chance-delivered law,
the soul is caught constantly setting out,
ready for departure and departing toward her own essence,
toward her incarnation and beyond her incarnation,
her start and goal united in the spheres,
bringing man into his humanity;
for man is held into the perceptive ground of his knowing soul,
into the perceptive ground
of his doing and searching, his willing and thinking, his dreams,
he is laid open to the infinite and the chanceless within the real,
this most comprehensive and forceful
most relentlessly gentle, most actual image of himself in his own reality,
to which he will come home, to which he is coming home
forever,
held into the now of his own symbol
in order that it may come to be his constant reality;
for it is the defiance of its summons
into which man is held,
the defiance of the imprisoned one,
the defiance of his inextinguishable freedom,
the defiance of his inextinguishable will for knowledge,
so unyielding,
that he becomes greater than all earthly shortcomings,
growing beyond himself,
the titanic defiance of humanity;
verily man is held into his task of knowing,
and nothing is able to dissuade him,
not even the inevitability of error,
the bound nature of which vanishes before
the task beyond all chance;
for even though man was so imprisoned in his earthly shortcomings—and before all, this one who leaned painfully clutching the window-sill, a sick man grievously struggling for breath—, for even though man was so fated to disappointment, delivered over to every sort of disappointment in great things as in small, his labor in vain, fruitless in the past and hopeless in the future, and even though disappointment might have chased him on from impatience to impatience, from restlessness to restlessness, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, harassed and loving and again harassed, fate-driven from one perception to another, driven away from the erstwhile life of simple creative work toward all the diversity of knowledge, driven on toward poetry and to the further exploration of the oldest and most occult wisdom, impatient for knowledge, impatient for truth, then driven back to poetry as if it could be related to death in a final fulfillment—oh, this too was disappointment, this too the wrong path—, oh, even though this had been such an utterly wrong path, aye, simply a wrong path that was and is, aye, even less than a wrong path with hardly an attempt toward the first step and that gone astray before the start, oh, even though his whole life seemed so utterly shipwrecked and remained so shipwrecked, so clogged by shortcomings from the very beginning, damned to founder for ever and aye, since nothing was fitted to penetrate the thicket, since the mortal never came through it, since fumbling about motionless on the spot, bound to despair and disappointment, he remained in bondage to every frightfulness of error, oh, nevertheless and nevertheless, nothing had occurred without necessity, nothing occurs without necessity, because the necessity of the human soul, the necessity of the human task overruled every circumstance, even the wrong road, even the error;
for only amidst error, only through error
in which he was inescapably held,
did man come to be the seeker
that he was,
the seeking human;
for man needed the realization of futility,
he must accept its dread, the dread of all error,
and recognizing it, he must drain it to the dregs,
he must assimilate it,
not in self-torment, but rather
that through such conscious assimilation
the dread might be expunged,
only thus might one pass through the horny portal of dread and achieve existence;
this was the reason why man was held into the space of incertitude,
held thus, as if no boat were bearing him now,
even though he floated forward on a floating bark;
this was why he was held into space after space
of his own awareness,
into the spaces of his self-realizing self,
self-realization—fate of the human soul;
but he, behind whom the heavy wings of dread’s portal had closed,
had arrived at the fore-court of reality,
and the unknown stream on which he was being floated onward,
this unperceived element became the source of his knowledge,
being, as it was, the streaming growth of his own soul,
the uncompleted within himself, and unable to be completed,
which for all that developed to a whole
as soon as the self was self-assimilated,
made indestructible by growing into the streaming oneness of the universe,
realized by him, seen by him
in a concurrence which by its everlasting immediacy
forced all the spaces into which he was held to a single space,
to that unique space of the source, likewise
sheltering the self, only to be sheltered by it,
embraced by the soul while yet embracing it,
at rest in time, conditioning time,
bound by the law of perception and creating perception,
floating along in its streaming growth,
swimming with it as it floats and grows and develops,
the sole source of reality;
oh, so supernally great
were these tides of the self and the universe
flowing out of and into each other,
that floating and being held, liberation and imprisonment,
were merged in this tide to an inseparable common transparency,
oh, so eternally necessary,
oh, so immeasurably transparent,
that in the severed upper spheres,
accessible only to the glance, accessible only to time,
familiar to both,
reflected in both, reflected in the opened human countenance
tilted upward by the gentle-unyielding hand,
encircled by fate,
encircled by stars,
the promised gift of confirmation shone out,
the gift of time, delivered from chance and enduring forever,
opened to perception, the comfort upon earth—,
and, consoling in a universe flooded in moonlight, the spheres joined each other, the spheres of heaven and earth united forever, consoling as the breath that shall return to the breast from over there, announcing as solace that nothing has been in vain, that whatever had been done for the sake of understanding was not done in vain, and could not have been done in vain because of its necessity. Hope lay in the unaccomplished as well as in what was impossible of accomplishment, and pressing close, very timidly, the hope of finishing the Aeneid. Hope-resounding echo of the promise upon earth, reverberating in earthly confidence; and the mortal surrounded by earthly existence was ready to receive it.
Solace and confidence indeed, the solace of confirmation, although the crystal cover of the heaven-secret had not parted, no image had appeared there, least of all the ultimate image; the eye of night remained veiled, his own eye had not faltered, and now as before the zones of immensity were to be joined only in reflection and counter-reflection, now as before the vast separation above and below were to be brought into a unity only by glimpse or surmise, now as before it was only the fore-court of reality in which he stood, it was merely the place of the earthly question in the immediacy of which he was held, debarred from reality in its fullness and unity, and nevertheless—solace and confidence. The moonlight streamed like a cool dust through the heat of night, saturating it without lessening it, without merging with it, a blind-cool reflection of the heaven’s stony gleam painted upon the heated darkness. Oh, human certainty, knowing that nothing has happened in vain, that nothing was happening in vain, although disappointment seems to be all, and no way leads out of the thicket; oh, certainty, knowing that even when the way turns to evil the knowledge gained by experience has grown, remaining as an increment of knowledge in the world, remaining as the cool-bright reflection of that estate beyond chance to which the earthly action of man can penetrate whenever it conforms to the necessity determined by perception and attains in this way a first illumination of earthbound life and its herdlike sleep. Oh, certainty full of trust, not streaming hither from heaven but arising as from earth in the human soul because of the perceptive task laid on it—, then must not the fulfillment of certain trust, if fulfillment be at all possible, be realized here on earth? the necessary is always consummated in the simple way of earth, the streaming round of questions will always find its closure only upon earth, even though the perceptive task may concern itself with uniting the separate spheres of the universe, still there is no genuine task without earthly roots, none possible of solution without an earthly starting point. The world of earth spread out before him had escaped into moonlight, humanity had withdrawn under itself, escaped into sleep, hidden in the sleep-sated houses and fallen below itself, separated from the up-sunken stars, and between the upper and lower zones the stillness of the world was doubly desolate; no voice broke into the breathless silence, nothing could be heard except the soft rise and fall of the crackling bivouac-fires and the heavy bored steps of the guard on patrol along the outer wall coming nearer in his rounds, then dying away again, and if one listened intently it seemed as if here too a soft echo from somewhere was vibrating in unison, an accompanying sound, scarcely an echo, scarcely refracted, only diffused in order to be refracted against the house walls at the edge of the plaza, refracted in a net-work of streets and dwelling-caves, against the stone fields of town after town, refracted on the walls of mountains and seas, refracted on the murky crystal vault of heaven, refracted on starlight, refracted on the inscrutable, breathed hither and diffused by refraction, swinging, swinging to this side, but vanishing at once if one attempted to capture it. But earthly and at hand, yet strangely connected to the spheres, the fire behind the walls continued to crackle faintly, and though often it too ebbed off into something like echo, and into the invisible, it too taking its place in the chain of images and more images, it was like a pledge confirming the human effort, pointing to the earthly source of the titanic will for unity born into the human soul; it was like a demand upon perception to turn toward earth and earthly things in order to find there its strength for renewal, the Promethean element that stems from regions here below and not from those above. Yes, he had to direct his attention to the realm of earth, and he waited attentively, tired of breathing, bent over the window ledge, awaiting that which was necessary and would have to come.
Below him the narrow space between the palace and the outer wall yawned in moat-like blackness, the windows giving on it were unlit and dead, the black bottom of the shaft unfathomably deep, while behind the wall, completely overshadowed by it, visible only by its reflection, one of the bivouac-fires was burning, and when the watch on guard crossed the small flickering region on his path, one could see the shadow of the man gliding indistinctly over the dull, ruddily-lit, stone pavement, a dark breath of shadow that often sprang up jaggedly on the walls of the building opposite, lasting for the flicker of an eyelid, unreal in its strange, unexpected movement. What went on there, though hidden by the walls, was the merest discharge of a military duty, but nonetheless, like every human performance of duty, strangely connected with the basis of perception, with the simple task of perception itself, and therefore not in vain; what happened there preceded itself in the fore-court of reality, near to the realm of consummation. Yet the breach into the ultimate reality would not be made from the sphere of the stars, nor from the spheres in the interstellar spaces; not there would the promised confirmation redeem itself, but rather from the sphere of humanity; the impetus to break through the boundaries would proceed from man; for this was man divinely destined, for this, confidence was bestowed upon him, for his divine necessity; and although the great moment for the attainment of reality might not be fixed in time, undiscoverable in the obscurity of fate, and whether the event took place in a not-to-be-lived future or in the immediate present, if indeed it might not already have come to pass, the command to vigilance was heard, ringing out peremptorily from an occult fate, urgent and admonishing, the command to hold fast to every moment in preparation for the moment of revelation, revelation in the realm of the chanceless, in the realm of law, in the realm of humanity.
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