For

on the most transported horizons beauty shone forth

streaming out into mankind,

removed from perception, removed from the question,

effortless

only to be glimpsed

the unity of the world established by beauty,

founded on the beautiful balance of ultra-distance,

which saturated all points of space, sating them with distance,

and—sheerly demonic—not only resolved the most incongruous things

into equal rank and meaning,

but also—still more demonic—filled the remoteness

of every point in space with the remoteness of time,

bringing the quivering scales of time everywhere to a standstill,

repeating its Saturnian suspension,

not the annulment of time, far more its enduring now,

the immediacy of beauty, as if by gazing upon it

man, although set erect and growing upright, were permitted to sink back

into his drowsy, recumbent listening,

stretched out anew between the depths above and the depths below,

newly at one with his listening-looking, which he sent forth

as if the depths allowed a new participation,

one free from knowledge and questioning,

one which might be foregone as it was in the dawn of time or in its night,

as if one might forego the choice between good and evil,

fleeing the human duty of perception,

fleeing into a new and hence false innocence, letting

the abandoned and the duty-bound, evil and redemption,

the cruel and the kind, life and death,

the comprehensible and the incomprehensible

be brought into a single indiscriminate unity,

bound in the cestus of beauty,

streaming out blithely into the beauty-embracing glance.

Wherefore beauty was a bewitchment, enchanting and enchanted beauty

demonically absorbing everything, gathering all into its Saturnian poise;

wherefore beauty was a reversion to the pre-divine

lingering in man as a memory of something that existed before his prescience,

a memory of the tentative time of the creation, prior to the gods,

a memory of the amorphous, dusk-enshrouded semi-creation,

lacking the pledge, lacking development, lacking renewal;

nevertheless recollection and as such pious, albeit

with a piety impervious to the pledge, to development, to renewal,

the demonic piety of the transported being who looked on beauty,

on the threshold of ecstasy

but without the will to go beyond it,

turned back to the pre-creation,

to the fore-show of the divine which resembles divinity,

to beauty;

for so all-embracing was the night spread out before him, so very remote, so filled with the silver dust of echo ringing back from the last reaches of the world, that the night and all that was buried within it became inseparable, whether a song, a yelping laugh, a hint of the animal voice, a rustling of the wind, one could not tell which. And this ingenuousness, this antagonism to knowledge with which beauty—as if to protect its frailty and tenderness—veiled itself, yes must veil itself, because the world-unity founded by it was much more evanescent, less resistant, more vulnerable than that of perception, one which furthermore and in contrast to the latter could be injured at any point by knowledge, this impercipience was radiated to him from the whole cycle of the visible world along with beauty, gentle and at the same time demonic in its allure, in its arrogant seduction to equivalence, demonically whispered to him from the outermost borders and penetrating to the innermost, a shimmering oceanic whisper streaming into him with the drenching light of the moon, balanced like the floating tides of the universe which interchange the visible and invisible in their whispering might, binding the multiplicity of things into the entity of the self, binding the multiplicity of thoughts into the unity of the world, both, however, denatured in becoming beauty: knowledge of beauty was lack of knowledge, perception of beauty was lack of perception, the one without vantage of thinking, the other without the full measure of reality, and in the rigidity of beauty’s equilibrium—rigid the floating balance between thinking and reality, rigid the reciprocity of question and answer, of askable and answerable from which the world was born—the flood-scales of inner and outer worlds were brought to a standstill, becoming in this rigid balance the symbol of the symbol. Thus the night arched about him, the dark-gleaming space balanced in harmonious beauty and spread out Saturnically over all time, therefore surely remaining in time and not extending beyond the realm of earth, stretched from boundary to boundary while constituting at every point of itself the innermost and outermost of limits; thus arched the night about and within him, and beauty, the symbol of the symbol, was floated to him from the night, balanced over the world, bringing with it all the strangeness of inner and outer remoteness and withal curiously familiar, veiled in impercipience and yet curiously unveiled, because now it revealed itself to him suddenly as under a second magical illumination, the symbol of his own image, as clearly as though he himself had created it, the symbolization of the self in the universe, the symbolization of the universe in the self, the interlocked dual symbol of all earthly existence: illuminating the night, illuminating the world, beauty spread to the borders of unbounded space and, immersed with space in time, carried on with time through the ages, it became the ever-enduring now, giving boundaries to boundless time, the perfect symbol of earthly life limited by time and space, revealing the woe of limitation and the beauty of life on earth;

thus in mournful sorrow,

thus beauty was revealed to man,

revealed in its self-containment which was

that of the symbol and of equilibrium,

the self gazing at beauty and the beauty-filled world

enchantedly facing each other,

each a-float in the place allotted to it,

both limited, both self-contained, both in equilibrium

and therefore balanced in their apposition in the space common to both:

thus was revealed to man

the self-containment of earthly beauty,

the floating expanse and the magical beauty

of self-contained space, borne on and benumbed by time,

incapable of renewal by the question,

incapable of expansion by knowledge,

the constant completeness of space held in balance

by the influence of beauty within it, yet without renewal or expansion;

thus space in its completeness and self-containment

revealed itself in every one of its parts, at every point,

as if each of these were its innermost core,

revealing itself in every single figure, in every thing, in every human work

as the symbol of its own spatial finitude

at the innermost limit of which every created thing annuls itself,

the symbol annulling and subliming space, beauty annulling and subliming space

by the unity maintained between its inner and outer boundaries,

by the infinitude of the self-containing boundaries,

infinity—but bounded, the sorrow of man;

thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary,

and this boundary, the inner like the outer,

the boundary of the remotest horizon or that of a single point,

was spanned between the finite and the infinite,

utterly remote while still of earth and within earthly time,

yea, bounding time itself and causing it to linger,

space lingering at its own border with time, but not annulling time,

this being but a symbol, an earthly symbol of time’s annulment,

a mere symbol of death’s abolishment, not the abolishment itself,

the boundary of human life that never reached beyond itself,

wherefore it was also the boundary of inhumanity—

thus it was revealed to man as an event of beauty,

revealing beauty for what it was, as the infinite in the realm of the finite,

as an earthly sham-infinity,

and hence a game,

the game of earthly men amidst their earthliness, playing at eternity,

the symbolic game on the periphery of earthly life,

beauty the essence of the play,

the game that man played with his own symbol in order that

symbolically—since otherwise it was impossible—he might escape his fear of loneliness,

repeating the beautiful self-deception again and again,

the flight into beauty, the game of flight;

thus there was revealed to man the rigidity of the beautified world,

its incapacity for all growth, the limitation of its perfection,

this world which survived only by repetition and

which, even for this sham-perfection, had always to be striven for anew,

it was revealed as the play of art in its service of beauty,

as art’s despair, its despairing attempt

to build up the imperishable from things that perish,

from words, from sounds, from stones, from colors,

so that space, being formed,

might outlast time

as a memorial bearing beauty to the coming generations, art

building space into every production,

building the immortal in space but not in men —

wherefore it lacked growth,

wherefore it was bound to the perfection of mere repetition without growth,

bound to an unattainable perfection and becoming more desperate as it came nearer to perfection,

constrained to return constantly into its own beginning which was its end,

and hence pitiless,

pitiless toward human sorrow which meant no more to art

than passing existence, no more than a word, a stone, a sound, or a color

to be used for exploring and revealing beauty

in unending repetition;

and thus beauty revealed itself to man as cruelty,

as the growing cruelty of the unbridled game

which promised the pleasure of infinity through the symbol,

the voluptuous, knowledge-disdaining pleasure

of an earthly sham-infinity,

hence thoughtlessly able to inflict sorrow and death,

as happened in the realm of beauty at the remote periphery,

accessible only to the glance, only to time,

but no longer available for humanity and the human task;

thus beauty revealed itself to man as the law that lacked perception,

beauty in its abandonment proclaiming itself as a law

unto itself,

self-contained, inextensible, incapable of development or renewal,

pleasure the rule of the game,

self-gratifying, voluptuous, unchaste, unchangeable,

the beauty-saturated, beauty-saturating game in which

beauty was at play with itself,

passing the time but not annulling it,

playing out fate but not controlling it,

the game that could be repeated endlessly, continued endlessly,

yet one that had been destined from the beginning to be broken off,

because only humanity is divine;

and thus the intoxication of beauty revealed itself to man

as the game forlorn from the outset, forlorn

in spite of the eternal balance in which it was established,

in spite of the necessity which compelled it to be resumed again and again,

forlorn, because the unavoidable repetition brought with it

the unavoidable loss,

forlorn, because the intoxication of repetition and that of the game

were inevitably reciprocal in their affects,

both caught in the twilight,

both subject to lapse,

both without growth though assuredly waxing in cruelty—

whereas the true growth,

the increasing knowledge of perceptive mankind,

undeterred by lapse and freed from repetition, unfolded itself in time,

unfolded time to timelessness, so that

time, as it consumed all lapse by force of growing reality,

might break through and pass beyond boundary after boundary,

the innermost like the outermost, leaving behind symbol after symbol,

and even though it left the final symbolic nature of beauty undisturbed,

untouched the necessity of its consummate harmony,

yet the earthly quality of this game had nonetheless to be uncovered,

the inadequacy of the earthly symbol be revealed,

the sadness and despair of beauty laid bare,

beauty stripped of intoxication and sobered,

its perception forfeited and itself lost in impercipience,

and with it, the sobered self,

its poverty—,

and he, to whom the symbolic nature of the self, of beauty, of the game, of time’s passing, had come as an illumination, streaming to him by unavoidable necessity from the innermost and outermost limits of the world, from the innermost and outermost spaces bound by the night, so that he bore the whole occurrence within himself, buried in himself even though he was confined in it, held within the bounds of necessity, held into the limited space of his own ego, within the spatial boundaries of the world and within the symbol of its boundlessness, held within the scope of the game, within the compass of an overdistant nearness, the compass of beauty, the compass of the symbol, which was questionable at every point and yet which warded off and transfixed every question, held in the constriction of every kind of rigidity, he himself rigid, stifled by the rigidity, he sensed, he grasped, that none of these spaces reached beyond the transparent cover which was spanned between the realms above and those below, that all of them lay in the interrealm of the still-unachieved infinity, that their borders were those of the infinite while yet belonging to the realm of earth: the still-earthly, the realm of beauty, the terrestrial, still terrestrial, infinity! it was within this sphere that he was held, confined within it; he was confined in the space of the earthly breath, but expelled from the space of the spheres, from that of the true breath. And sensible of the confinement, aware that in it lay the cause of all rigidity, the cause for all holding of the breath, he felt on all sides a force at work to shatter this constriction, feeling the necessity, the inevitability, of such a shattering in the depths of his being, in the depths of his soul, in the depths where he breathed or did not breathe; he felt this bursting and he knew what it was, sensing and realizing how it had been made ready in him and in the world, how it dwelt in him even though it surrounded him; he was aware of it as something physical, lying in wait to gag and choke him, robbing him of breath as it robbed the visible-invisible world, but nonetheless aware that it was a demonic temptation weaving within and about him, surging high within him and breaking over him, bodily-disembodied, the temptation to destroy until all was destroyed, to shatter until all was shattered, the temptation to self-surrender and self-derision, to self-destruction, choking him, shaking him through and through, but still promising deliverance; thus it was that he felt something in him, lurking, ready to spring and burst him asunder, the proximity of an inscrutable feeling so ancient that it was beyond recollection, thus he realized it and thus he wished it to come about, in a sheerly atavistic opposition to the numbness, to its further development, to the restriction of the limited space, to existence and its still-existing incongruities, but furthermore to the residual sorrow behind all play and all beauty, oh, it was the temptation of an immense, primitive lust, it was an immense, itching lust, the itch to burst everything, to shatter the world, to explode his own ego, shaken as he was by the lust of a still greater, still earlier knowledge, oh it was such an intensification of feeling, of experiencing and of knowing that it became enlightenment, an enlightenment that came to be perception, yes even self-perception, flooding up to him from the deepest repository of the prescience in which he was held, a last comprehension streaming to him, and in a flash he perceived that the bursting of the beautiful was caused by nothing but naked laughter and that laughter was the predestined explosion of worldly beauty, of which it had been an attribute from the first, inherent in beauty forever, shimmering out as a smile at the unreal borders of utter-distance, but bawling out noisily on that curving horizon which marked the turning point of beauty’s duration, breaking out as the booming, thundering demolishment of time by laughter, as the laughing, demonic force of complete destruction, laughter being the necessary counterpart of world-beauty, the desperate substitute for the lost confidence in wisdom, the end of the intercepted flight into beauty, the end of beauty’s interrupted game; oh sorrow for sorrow, making game with the game, pleasure in the very expulsion of pleasure, a doubling of sorrow, a doubling of the game, a doubling of pleasure, this was laughter, a constant flight from the haven of refuge, beyond the game, beyond the world, beyond perception, the bursting of world-sorrow, the eternal tickle in the masculine gorge, the cleaving of beauty-fixed space to a gape in the unspeakable muteness of which even the nothing became lost, enraged by the muteness, enraged by the laughter, divine even this:

for

the prerogative of gods and men was laughter,

springing first from that god who recognized himself,

springing dumbly-aware from his intuition,

from the intuition of his own destructibility,

from his intuition of the destructibility of the creation

in which, as a created and creative part, he prevailed

a god, growing by virtue of worldly wisdom toward self-perception and beyond it, back

to intuition,

whence arose laughter;

oh divine birth and human birth, oh death of the gods and of men,

oh their common beginning and ending, eternally implicated with each other,

oh, laughter stemmed from the knowledge that the gods are not divine,

from the knowledge common to gods and men

originating in that unquiet and disquietingly transparent

zone of communion

which was spanned demonically between this world and the one beyond,

in order that in its beclouded zone of demons

gods and men could and might encounter each other,

and though it were Zeus who struck up laughter in the circle of the male gods,

it was the human being who aroused the laughter of the gods,

just as

the laughter of men was aroused by the behavior of animals

in the endless cycle of drolly serious recognition,

just as

the god found himself again in man and man found himself again in the animal,

in order that the animal might be raised through man to the god,

the god, however, returning to men through the animal,

god and man united in sorrow though overcome by laughter, because

this was the farcical game of that first sudden confusing of all spheres,

the game in the fatal rules of which

they had been caught,

the farce of the first sudden disclosure of native nearness,

the great farce of intermingling the spheres,

a vagary of the gods, a beauty-destroying, order-annulling game,

the divine in creation and the creature frightfully commingled,

and both cheerfully surrendered to chance,

the abomination and scorn of the knowing mother-goddess,

the sport and hazard of the gods who, delivered from perception and disdaining it,

were flooded by laughter,

because this joke of abruptly uniting the spheres,

perpetrated without the faintest trace of perception or questioning or any kind of effort,

executed itself as self-abandonment, as a jovial, frivolous

surrender

to chance and to time,

to the unpredictable surmise, to the surmised unpredictable,

to the delightful immediacy of a guess,

unconcerned that it be so,

even as to death;

a joke of the inscrutable, a joke so huge that

with the sportive destruction of the last remnants of lawfulness,

with the ludicrous collapse of order, of the boundaries and bridges,

with the breakdown of the fixed spaces and their beauty,

with the collapsing sphere of the beautiful,

there followed the final and ever-valid reversion,

the reversion

into a boundless realm without knowledge, without name, without speech, without connection, without dimension,

the partitions tumbling down,

the intuitions of the gods thrown in with that of men,

breaking down their common creation but also

laying bare the nature of the ageless pre-creation,

reversed by this disruption to immediate proximity,

the vision of the pre-creation laid bare in an impression

so remote that it was no longer memory,

an impression inaccessible even to the divination of the god,

laying bare an amorphousness in which

the real and the unreal,

the living and the lifeless,

the significant and the atrocious

were coupled into a sameness beyond conception,

laying bare that unconjectured nowhere, in which

the stars float at the bottom of the waters

and where no thing could lie so far from another

as not to disclose itself as interlocked with it,

waggishly turned inside-out and outside-in,

thrown together by chance and branching out from each other by chance,

waggish

these indiscriminate chance-creations of time’s passing,

herds of gods, of men, of animals, of plants, herds of stars

containing each other,

the nowhere of laughter exposed,

the very world-inversion exposed in a laugh,

as if that pledge of creation had never existed,

the pledge by which gods and men had mutually bound themselves,

duty-bound to perception and to an order which creates reality,

bound to helpfulness—the duty to duty:

oh, this was the laughter of betrayal,

the laughter of unburdened, carefree faithlessness,

this was the unkindness and irresponsibility of the pre-creation,

aye, that it was,

the unkind inheritance, the bursting seed of withheld laughter,

inherent in the creation of all worlds from the outset, ineradicable,

already shining out from the smiling, serene reticence

by which, in premature loveliness, it offered to charm,

shining out in the premature-pitiless knowledge by which

even horror, dissipated by beauty, was transfixed

at a pity-lost, pity-frozen distance,

and beyond that, beyond all distance whatsoever, where the innermost and outermost unite,

shining out in the dimensionless un-space of the ironic and terrible surface,

the surface of beauty, to which it would topple

when the borders of time were reached, showing forth its innermost and underlying nature,

the inborn nature of beauty, born out of beauty again and again,

its unformed lack of creativeness, impervious to form,

born out of, tumbling out of, hurled out of beauty,

laughter:

the language of the pre-creation—,

for nothing had changed, oh nothing: form-fixed and mute, sunk deeply into the dome of heaven, perjury still lowered, redolent of laughter; there in the inviolable song of the stars, impregnating the earth with quietude, impregnated with the earthly quiet, there in the shining continuance of the world, in the realms of the visible and invisible and in the beauty that turns to song, there, trembling from restraint and ready to break out, forcibly tickling and strangling, lurked the sultry laughter akin to beauty, the lowering, tempting desire for destruction was there within and about him, it embraced him yet lurked within him, expressing horror and bringing it to pass, the language of the pre-creation, the language of the void, to bridge which nothing has ever existed, nameless the space in which it functioned, nameless the stars which stood above it, nameless, unrelated, expressionless, the solitude of the space kept for language amidst the spheric confusion, the unavoidable place of dissolution for all beauty; and gazing at beauty while already held into a new space—the space feverish with horror and he also feverish with horror—he perceived that no further entrance to reality presented itself, that there was no return and no renewal, nothing but the laughter that destroyed reality, indeed that the wordly existence laid bare by laughter could hardly claim to be considered as real, question and answer annulled, the duty of perception cancelled, and cancelled the great hope that the pledge of knowledge would not be in vain, not merely because truth was futile but rather because it was superfluous within the range of petrifying beauty, within the range of its collapse, within the range of laughter—, worse and more malign than the herd-sleep was laughter, no one laughs in dreams unless under pain, unless under death from the growing cruelty juggled so jestingly before him by beauty; oh, nothing was so near to evil as the god tumbling down into a false-humanity or the man catapulted toward a false-divinity, both lured toward evil, toward calamity, toward the uncreated state of the animal, both playing with destruction, with a demonic self-destruction from which they were perchance separated only by a hand’s breadth, since anything might be expected in the ceaseless flow of time, both laughing over the uncertainty and the brevity of this time-span surrendered to fate, both prey to a laughter that took pleasure in the lightly abandoned duty and the lightly broken pledge, both tickled and excited by the risk, laughing over the cancellation of the divine as well as the human element in the irrelevancy of all knowledge, laughing over the propagation of evil which is born from the beautiful evil, laughing over the reality of the unreal, jubilant because the pledge of creation has been broken, become maniacal with exultation over the success of their deed, a treacherous undoing and not a deed, the fruit of the broken pledge. Then he understood: the three staggering below had been witnesses to the perjury.

And they had become witnesses against him. That was why it had been necessary for them to come. That was why he had had to await their coming. They had appeared as witnesses and complainants, to accuse him of sharing in their guilt, alleging that he was one of them, an accomplice, a perjurer, and guilty even as they, because, like them, he knew nothing of the pledge which had been broken and continued to be broken, because from the outset he had been oblivious of the pledge and of duty, aye, and it was this that increased his guilt, notwithstanding the necessity by which his life, just as theirs, was fate-ordered to reach this point, the point of relinquishing the creation again: the creation was once more relinquished, gods and men again abandoned to the unborn state of the pre-creation in which life and death are equally doomed to be meaningless, for duty derived only from the pledge, for meaning derived only from the pledge, and nothing retained meaning when, duty being forgotten, the pledge was broken, the pledge given at the obscure beginning, the pledge which must be kept by gods and men although no one knows what it is, no one except the unknown god, for all language stemmed from him, the most hidden of heavenly creatures, only to return to him, the guardian of the pledge of prayer, of duty. It was to await him, the unknown god, that his own glance had been compelled earthward, peering to see the advent of him whose redeeming word, born from and giving birth to duty, should restore language to a communication among men who supported the pledge, hoping thereby to retrieve language from the regions above and below speech, the regions into which man—this too his prerogative—had plunged it, seeking to rescue it from the cloudy state of beauty and the tatterdom of laughter, that it might be led out of the thicket of opacity, in which it had been squandered, and reinstated as the instrument of the pledge. This hope had been a vain one, and the world, sunk back into amorphousness, into meaninglessness, sunk back into an unborn state, encircled by the shadowy mountains of its pre-natal death over which it could not be lifted by the wings of any earthly death, lay spread out before him, the world threaded with beauty and sundered by laughter, its language lost and without human brotherhood, because of the broken pledge of which it too was guilty; instead of the unknown god, instead of him bearing the pledge that led to duty, these three had come hither: the bearers of dereliction.

The one duty, earthly duty, the duty of helpfulness, the duty of awakening; there was no other duty, and even man’s duty toward divinity and the god’s duty toward humanity consisted of nothing other than helpfulness. And he, whom fate had necessarily and inevitably made fellow to the bearers of dereliction, was just as unwilling for duty and helpfulness as they; and probably the apparent modesty of his needs was no more than disdain for the help that came to him from all sides, and which he accepted without gratitude, for he resembled the mob in this respect also, the mob which demands all sorts of favors but repulses all real help in consequence of its own incapacity for helpfulness: one who from the beginning has yielded to perjury, who has grown up and lived in stony caves, who therefore starts out saddled with the perjurer’s fear, such a one from his youth on is far too knowing, far too tricky, far too pleasure-loving and quick-witted to take stock in anything that does not promise immediate gratification of his dawning greed, that does not point to licentious coupling in an all-permitting lawlessness or, if not this, then at least to an advantage measurable in sesterces; it was all one whether these three down there demanded wine, flour, or garlic, or whether others cried out for circus games in order to deaden their fear with these bloody burlesques, with these murderous distorted games which were played on the perilous border where beauty and laughter meet, bringing them in self-betrayal and god-betrayal to the heavenly powers, in a sham penance for their perjury; it was all one whether this was done for pleasure or in placation of the gods, since it was not for an awakening, not for help, for real help that they sued but only for advantage, real advantage; and if Caesar wished to tame these lawless ones to lawfulness again, then circuses, wine and flour were simply the price he had to pay for their obedience. And yet, strangely unaccountable, they even loved him, although in reality they loved no one, although they knew no solidarity save the spurious solidarity of the mob, in which, lacking a common perception, none loves the other, none helps the other, none comprehends the other, none trusts the other, none hears the other’s voice, theirs being the non-solidarity of those who lack a common speech, the speech-robbed non-solidarity of unrelated beings: not only had their tricky fear and cocksure suspicion made perception seem sheer superfluity to them, an empty swindle with words, productive of neither pleasure nor advantage, and which, moreover, could be outdone at any time by the play of still slyer words, not only had love, helpfulness, communication, trust, and language, each dependent upon the other, been dissolved by such means to an empty nothingness, not only, in consequence of all this had a simple calculation come to seem their one remaining and reliable hold, but even that appeared no longer reliable enough, and their fear, despite their passionate preoccupation with counting and reckoning, had not been allayed thereby; they saw through it now as a windy nothing and therefore they felt themselves driven to despair, even though despair expressed itself in a wittily-knowing, voluptuously-witty self-mockery; shaken by laughter, because nothing is able to withstand a fear so deep as theirs, because even what could be counted did not become credible or reliable until one had spat upon the coin, using the appropriate magic formula; though believing every miracle—basically their most human and even their most likable characteristic—they were skeptical of truth, and it was this which made them, who believed themselves such excellent accountants, entirely unaccountable, made each of them, cut off in his fear, simply dense and finally unapproachable. Had he, according to the plans of his youth, approached them as a physician, they would have derided and disdained his help were it ever so gratuitously offered, preferring the ministrations of any herb-witch; that had been their standpoint and conditions had not changed and his recognition of this was one of the reasons why he had finally changed his profession; but convincing as these reasons had once seemed to him, today it became clear that they had been the beginning of his own descent to the mob pattern, that he had never been entitled to abandon medical science, that even the doubtful help which it could offer would have been more honorable than the delusive hope of helpfulness with which he had subsequently decked out his profession as poet, hoping against his inner conviction that the might of beauty, that the magic of song, would finally bridge the abyss of incommunication and would exalt him, the poet, to the rank of perception-bringer in the restored community of men; lifted out of the mob pattern and therefore able to abolish that pattern, Orpheus chose to be the leader of mankind. Ah, not even Orpheus had attained such a goal, not even his immortal greatness had justified such vain and presumptuous dreams of grandeur, such flagrant overestimation of poetry! Certainly many instances of earthly beauty—a song, the twilit sea, the tone of the lyre, the voice of a boy, a verse, a statue, a column, a garden, a single flower—all possess the divine faculty of making man hearken unto the innermost and outermost boundaries of his existence, and therefore it is not to be wondered at that the lofty art of Orpheus was esteemed to have the power of diverting the streams from their beds and changing their courses, of luring the wild beasts of the forest with tender dominance, of arresting the cattle a-browse upon the meadows and moving them to listen, caught in the dream and enchanted, the dream-wish of all art: the world compelled to listen, ready to receive the song and its salvation. However, even had Orpheus achieved his aim, the help lasts no longer than the song, nor does the listening, and on no account might the song resound too long, otherwise the streams would return to their old courses, the wild beasts of the forest would again fall upon and slay the innocent beasts of the field, and man would revert again to his old, habitual cruelty; for not only did no intoxication last long, and this was likewise true of beauty’s spell, but furthermore, the mildness to which men and beasts had yielded was only half of the intoxication of beauty, while the other half, not less strong and for the most part far stronger, was of such surpassing and terrible cruelty—the most cruel of men delights himself with a flower—that beauty, and before all the beauty born of art, failed quickly of its effect if in disregard of the reciprocal balance of its two components it approached man with but one of them. Wherever and however art was practised, it had to follow this rule, indeed the following of it was one of the artist’s essential virtues, and very often, though not always, that of his protagonist: had the virtuous Aeneas remained as soft-hearted as might once have been expected of him, had he, either in the upsurge of his compassion or for the sake of the poem’s beautiful tension, been reluctant to kill his mortal enemy, had he not, with better judgment, decided in that moment to do the terrible deed, he would by no means have become the example of gentleness which had to be emulated, but instead he would have become a tedious and unheroic figure unworthy of portrayal by any poem; whether the hero and his deed were Aeneas or another, the concern of art was how to maintain equilibrium, the great equilibrium at the transported periphery, and its unspeakably floating and fugitive symbol, which never reflected the isolated content of things but only their interconnections, this being the only way in which the symbol fulfilled its function, since it was only through this interconnection that the contradictions of existence fell into a balance, in which alone the various contradictory trends of the human instincts were comprehended—were it otherwise, how could art be created and understood by men!—gentleness and cruelty comprehended in the equilibrium of beauty’s language, comprehended in the symbol of the balance which they maintained between the ego and the universe, in the intoxicating magic of a unity which endured with the song, but no longer. And it could not have been otherwise with Orpheus and his poem, for he was an artist, a poet, an enchanter of those who hearken, singer and hearer enshrouded in the same twilight, he, like they, demonically caught in the spell of beauty, demonic in spite of his divine gifts, the enchanter, but not the savior of man—a privilege never to be his: for the grace-bearing savior was one who has cast off from himself the language of beauty, he has reached beyond its cold surface, beyond the surface of poetry, he has pushed on to simple words which, because they come close to death and to the knowledge of death are able to knock on the imprisoned souls of his fellowmen, to appease their fear and their cruelty, and make them approachable to real help; he has attained the simple language of spontaneous kindness, the language of spontaneous human virtue, the language of awakening. Was it not this very language for which Orpheus had striven when, in search of Eurydice, he made ready for the descent into the realm of the shades? Was he not also in despair, one who perceived the impotence of the artist in his discharge of human duty? Oh, when fate has thrown one into the prison of art, he may nevermore escape it; he remains confined within the unsurpassable boundary on which the transported and beautiful occurrence takes place, and if he is incompetent he becomes a vain dreamer within this enclosure, an ambitious trifler with un-art; if, however, he is a real artist he becomes despairing, for he hears the call beyond the border, and all he may do is to capture it in the poem but not to follow it, paralyzed by the injunction and bound to the spot, a scrivener this side of the border, although he has taken on the vocation of the sybil and, piously like Aeneas, has touched the high altar of the priestess, thus accepting the pledge—

—easy the pathway that leads down to Hades, and the gateway of Pluto stands ever open, but the road back is sorely beset, threatened by the swift turns and the whirlpools of the river Cocytus; only those crowned by their virtue, or of a lineage divine and hence favored by Jupiter, may return from grim Tartarus and its terrors; yet if your courage constrains you to cross the Styx twice in your rashness, listen to all that is needful: sacred to her who reigns in the regions below, deep in the dark valleys, growing amidst the wild forest, in the heart of the densest of thickets, there is a branch that is shimmering and golden, putting forth a wealth of gold leaves; and never shall you succeed in making the downward journey until, in honor of Persephone and in obedience to her will, you have broken a gleaming shoot from that self-renewing, golden tree; hence you must be ever alert to espy this branch, you must search for it always, and if destiny be gracious you shall pluck it with the lightest touch of your naked hand; yet no might is so strong, no weapon of steel so compelling, that it could tear this bough from its stalk if it be not the will of fate, the all-commanding, who has in reserve another duty for you—, that first, in expiation, you take care of the unburied body of your friend whose soul has flown, the body which asks for the grave, his right, and your duty—

—, then, called both from fate and the god, their will being one, the border shall be opened for him whose privilege it is to assume the holy duty of helpfulness; but he who is destined by the double will of fate and the god to be an artist, damned but to know and surmise, damned but to write down and speak out, he is denied the purification in life and in death as well, and even his tomb means no more to him than a beautiful structure, an earthly abode for his body, providing him with neither entrance nor exit, neither entrance for the illimitable descent nor exit for the illimitable return; destiny denies him the golden bough of leadership, the bough of perception, and in consequence he is condemned by Jupiter. Hence he too had been condemned to perjury and to the abandonment of the perjured, and his glance, forced earthward, had been allowed to encounter only the three perjuring accomplices staggering over the pavement, bringing him the sentence of guilt; his glance had not been permitted to pierce deeper, not beneath the surface of the stones, not beneath the surface of the world, neither beneath that of language nor of art; the descent was forbidden him, most forbidden the titanic return from the depths, the return by which the humanity of man is proven; the ascent was forbidden him, the ascent toward the renewal of the creative pledge, and he knew now more clearly what he had always known, that once and for all he was excluded from those to whom was pledged the help of the savior, because the help of the pledge and human help implemented each other, and only through their conjunction could the Titan fulfill his task of establishing community and, beyond that, humanity, which, though born of the earth aimed toward heaven, because only in humanity and true community which reflected the whole of man’s humanness and humanity as a whole did the perception-borne and perception-bearing cycle of question and answer become perfected, excluding those unfit for helpfulness, for duty, and the pledge, excluding them because they had excluded themselves from the titanic task of mastering, realizing, and deifying human life; verily this he knew,

and he also knew that the same thing held true in the realm of art, that art existed—oh, did it still exist, was it allowed to exist?—only insofar as it contained pledge and perception, only insofar as it represented the fate of man and his mastery of existence, insofar as it renewed itself by fresh and hitherto unaccomplished tasks, only insofar as, in achieving them, it summoned the soul to continuous self-mastery, compelling the soul to reveal level after level of her reality as, descending step by step, penetrating deeper and deeper through the inner thickets of her being, she gradually approached the unattainable darkness which she had always surmised and been conscious of, the darkness from which the ego emerged and to which it returned, the dark regions where the ego developed and became extinguished, the entrance and exit of the soul, but likewise the entrance and exit of that which was the soul’s truth, pointed out to her by the path-finding, the goldly-gleaming bough of truth which was neither to be found nor plucked by means of force, since the grace of finding it and the grace of the descent were one and the same, the grace of self-knowledge, which belonged as much to the soul as to art, their common truth; verily, this he knew,

and he knew also that the duty of all art lay in this sort of truth, lay in the self-perceptive finding and proclaiming of truth, the duty which has been laid on the artist, so that the soul, realizing the great equilibrium between the ego and the universe, might recover herself in the universe, perceiving in this self-recognition that the deepening of the ego was an increase of substance in the universe, in the world, especially in humanity, and even though this doubled growth was only a symbolic one, bound from the beginning to the symbolization of the beautiful, to that of the beautiful boundary, even though it were but a symbolic perception, it was precisely by this means that it was enabled to widen the inner and outer boundaries of existence to new reality, even though these boundaries might not be crossed, widening them not merely to a new form but to the new content of reality which they enclosed, in which the deepest secret of reality, the secret of correlation was revealed, the mutual relation existing between the realities of the self and the world, which lent the symbol the precision of rightness and exalted it to be the symbol of truth, the truth-bearing correlation from which arose every creation of reality, pressing on through level after level, penetrating toward, groping toward the unattainable dark realms of beginning and ending, pushing on toward the inscrutable divinity in the universe, in the world, in the soul of one’s fellow-man, pushing on toward that ultimate spark of the divine, that secret, which, ready to be disclosed and to be awakened, could be found everywhere, even in the soul of the most degraded—, this, the disclosure of the divine through the self-perceptive knowledge of the individual soul, this was the task of art, its human duty, its perceptive duty and therefore its reason for being, the proof of which was art’s nearness to death, and its duty, since only in this nearness might art become real, only thus unfolding into a symbol of the human soul; verily this he knew,

but he knew also that the beauty of the symbol, were it ever so precise in its reality, was never its own excuse for being, that whenever such was the case, whenever beauty existed for its own sake, there art was attacked at its very roots, because the created deed then came to be its own opposite, because the thing created was then suddenly substituted for that which creates, the empty form for the true content of reality, the merely beautiful for the perceptive truth, in a constant confusion, in a constant cycle of change and reversion, an inbound cycle in which renewal was no longer possible, in which nothing more could be enlarged, in which there was nothing more to be discovered, neither the divine in the abandoned, nor the abandoned in human divinity, but in which there was only intoxication with empty forms and empty words, whereby art through this lack of discrimination and even of fidelity, was reduced to un-art, and poetry to mere literarity; verily, this he knew, knew it painfully,

and by the same token he knew of the innermost danger of all artists, he knew the utter loneliness of the man destined to be an artist, he knew the inherent loneliness which drove such a one into the still deeper loneliness of art and into the beauty that cannot be articulated, and he knew that for the most part such men were shattered by this immolation, that it made them blind, blind to the world, blind to the divine quality in the world and in the fellow-man, that—intoxicated by their loneliness—they were able to see only their own god-likeness, which they imagined to be unique, and consequently this self-idolatry and its greed for recognition came more and more to be the sole content of their work—, a betrayal of the divine as well as of art, because in this fashion the work of art became a work of un-art, an unchaste covering for artistic vanity, so spurious that even the artist’s self-complacent nakedness which it exposed became a mask; and even though such unchaste self-gratification, such dalliance with beauty, such concern with effects, even though such an un-art might, despite its brief unrenewable grant, its inextensible boundaries, find an easier way to the populace than real art ever found, it was only a specious way, a way out of the loneliness, but not, however, an affiliation with the human community, which was the aim of real art in its aspiration toward humanity, no, it was the affiliation with the mob, it was a participation in its treacherous non-community, which was incapable of the pledge, which neither created nor mastered any reality, and which was unwilling to do so, preferring only to drowse on, forgetting reality, having forfeited it as had un-art and literarity, this was the most profound danger for every artist; oh how painfully, how very painfully he knew this,

and by this token he knew also that the danger of un-art and literarity had always encompassed him, and still encompassed him, and that therefore—although he had never dared face this truth—his poetry could no longer be called art, since, devoid of all renewal and development, it had been nothing but an unchaste production of beauty without real creativity, and from beginning to end, from the Aetna Song to the Aeneid, it had been a mere indulgence of beauty, self-sufficiently limited to the embellishment of things long since conceived, formed, and known, without any real progress in itself, aside from an increasing extravagance and sumptuousness, an un-art which was never able of itself to master existence and exalt it to a veritable symbol. Oh, in his own life, in his own work, he had experienced the seduction of un-art, the seduction of all substitution which puts the thing created in the place of that which creates, the game in the place of communion, the fixed thing in the place of the living, ever-vital principle, beauty in the place of truth: he knew all about this substitution and reversion, knew it all the more as it had been that of his own life’s path, this erring path which had led him from his native fields to the metropolis, from the work of his hands to self-deceptive rhetoric, from a humane and responsible sense of duty to a pretense of compassion, which observed things from above and aroused itself to no real help, borne along in a litter the whole way, the way leading down from a community regulated by law to a chance seclusion; the way, no, the fall into vulgarity and there where vulgarity is at its worst, into literarity! Although he had seldom been aware of it, he had succumbed again and again to intoxication, whether it had been offered to him as beauty, as vanity, as artistic dalliance, or as a game of forgetting; these things had ordered his life and constricted it as though in the wreathing, gliding coils of the serpent, vertiginous, this intoxication of constant revolving and reversion, the seductive intoxication of un-art; and although now, on looking back at this life he might feel ashamed, although now, the limit of time having been reached and the game about to be broken off, he had to admit to himself in cold sobriety that he had pursued a worthless, wretched, literary life, not a whit better than that of a Bavius or a Mavius or others of their sort whom he had despised as mere phrase-makers, and although such an admission might reveal again that all contempt contains some self-contempt, now as this rose up in him so disturbingly, with such shameful stabs of pain that it seemed there could be but one possible or desirable solution, namely self-extinction and death, nevertheless that which had overcome him was something other than shame and more than shame: he who looks back on his life, sobered, and because of this sobriety perceives that every step of his erring path has been necessary and inevitable, yea, even natural, knows that this path of reversion was prescribed for him by the might of destiny and the might of the gods, that therefore he had been bound motionless to the spot, motionless despite all his aspirations to go forward, lost in the thicket of images, of language, of words, of sounds, commanded by fate to be entangled in the ramifications within and without, but denied by fate and the gods the one hope of those who lack a leader, the hope of seeing the golden, shimmering bough amidst the wilderness of these prison walls; he who has perceived these things, he who perceives them is no longer ashamed, he is horrified, for he perceives that everything happened simultaneously for the Olympians and that consequently the will of Jupiter and that of fate had come to be unified in a terrible concurrence, revealed to earthly man as an indivisible union of guilt and punishment. Oh, virtuous alone is he whom fate has destined to discharge the dutiful service by which the human community is established, he alone is chosen by Jupiter to be led out of the thicket by fate, but when the common will of fate and the god does not permit this discharge of duty, then inability or unwillingness to help are held to be one and the same, and both are punished by helplessness: unfit for help, unwilling to help, helpless within the human community, shy of communion and locked in the prison of art, this was the poet, without a leader and, in his defection, unfit for leadership; and should he wish to rebel, should he wish to become a helper, an arouser from the twilight, in order to win back to the pledge and to brotherhood, these aspirations of his were condemned to fail from the start—and the three had been sent to him so that he might realize this with horror and shame: his help would be a sham-help, his truth but a seeming truth, and even were they to be acceptable to mankind they would be misleading and calamitous, far from leading to salvation, far from salvation itself, aye, this would be the outcome: the one lacking perception would bring perception to those unwilling for it, the word-maker would be calling out speech from the mute, the derelict would impose duty on those ignorant of duty, the lame would guide the halt.

He was again abandoned, abandoned to an abandoned world, oh, no hand held him now, there was nothing there to shelter or sustain him; he had been let fall, and he hung brokenly over the window-ledge, clinging lifelessly to the dusty, hot, inanimate bricks, feeling the sharp dust of their overheated, primordial clay under his fingernails, clinging to the primordial earthliness of which they were composed; he heard the stifled laughter in the stone-heated, form-fixed silence of the surrounding night, he heard the taciturnity of consummate perjury, the obdurate hush of a guilty conscience, robbed of speech, of knowledge, of memory, the silence of the pre-creation and its increasingly cruel death, the conditions of which allowed no rebirth or renewal for the created world, for such a death bore no traces of divinity: oh, no other creature was so unconditionally and undivinely mortal as man, for none was so capable of perjury, and the more abject he was the more mortal he became, but most perjuring and most mortal was he whose foot had estranged itself from the earth and touched nothing but pavements, the man who no longer tilled and no longer sowed, for whom nothing took place in accord with the circling of the stars, for whom the forest no longer sang, nor the greening meadows; verily nobody and nothing was so mortal as the mob in the great cities, grovelling, sneaking, swarming through the streets, having staggered so long that it had forgotten how to walk, upheld by no law and upholding none, the re-scattered herd, its former wisdom forfeited, unwilling to have knowledge, submitting like the animal, like something less than the animal, to every chance, and at last to a chance extinction without memory, without hope, without immortality; the same thing had happened to him, to him in conjunction with the re-scattered mob-herd of which he was a part, so had it been laid on him as a necessity of fate, inevitable. He had left the region of fear behind him, but only to see with horror how he had fallen to the level of the mob, fallen to a surface which offers no ingress to any kind of depth—, would this fall go still further, must it go further? from surface to surface, down to the final one, the surface of sheer nothingness? to the surface of final oblivion? The Plutonian doors were always open, the fall was inevitable, the fall from which there was no return, and in the intoxication of falling, man was prone to believe himself propelled upward, believing it until he was there where the timeless event of the heavens revealed itself simultaneously as an encounter in the realm of earth, until on the boundary of time he met the un-deified god, who had caught up with and outrun him and who, wrapped in the fluttering mantle of cosmic laughter, hurtled downward even as he, both of them cast into the same state of sober self-abandonment, surrendered to a horror which, even though it was expressed by a doggedly stubborn laughter, was dimly aware of a still greater horror to come and hoped to laugh it off; this fate-driven journey, this fall proceeded toward a horror, a shame, a denudation still more naked, going on in a fresh access of destructiveness and self-destructiveness, worse than before, in a new isolation which was meant to surpass all former loneliness, all the loneliness of night and the world, deserted by not only all that was human but moreover by all that was substantial; here the empty surface of unmastered existence was suddenly laid bare, and the night in the inaccessible inner and outer spheres, although unchanged and radiant in the full circle of its darkness, had dissolved into a nowhere which was so delivered over to chance that all perception and knowledge had become superfluous, and being useless was allowed to vanish; memory like hope had vanished, vanishing before the might of unmastered chance, for it was that which was revealed in the foregoing experience; inescapable this chance which held sway over the uncreated, enveloped by intoxication and the unremembered abandonment of the pre-creation, threatened by its cold flames, by its amorphousness and pre-natal death, making itself known as naked chance which spelled utter and nameless loneliness, and claimed the right to be supreme—, this was the journey’s end, the now visible end of the fall, the very essence of anonymity.

The nameless loneliness of chance, yes it was that which he saw before him as, ready for the fall and already falling, he stood there at the window. Unconquered and unconquerable in its abandonment, the estranged night lay open to his fevered glances, unchanged, immobile yet strange, brushed by the gently-unyielding breath of the moon, unchanged, immobile, and flooded by the gentle flow of the Milky Way, submerged in the silent song of the stars, submerged in the beauty and the magical unity conjured by beauty, submerged in the dissolving unity of a world become beautiful, submerged in its vast remoteness, benumbed and benumbing, and, like space,—beautiful, rigid, and vast, and demonically enchanted to strangeness—it was carried along through time with space, night, and yet immortal in time, aeonic yet not eternal, estranged from humanity, strange to the human soul, because the quiet unification which took place here, saturated by distance and saturating distance, no longer allowed of participation; the forecourt of reality had changed to the forecourt of unreality. Extinguished was the order of the spheres in the universe; their mute-ringing silver spaces, enclosed and estranged by utter incomprehensibility, became silent, including in their strangeness the utter incomprehensibility of all things human; sun and stars and Milky Way had no longer a name, they were alien to him in their remoteness, in their seclusion, which was without bridge or communication and yet which weighed upon him, subduing and threatening, transparent and hot, the overheated chill of universal space; whatever was about him enclosed him no longer, he stood outside the cave of night even though within it, cut off from his own as well as from all alien destinies, cut off from the fate of the visible-invisible world, cut off from divinity, from humanity, from perception, from beauty, for even the beauty of the visible-invisible world had vanished into namelessness, and even the knowledge of it, the meaning of it, had faded—

— oh Plotia, do I still remember your name? in your tresses dwelt the night, spangled over with stars, presager of longing, promiser of light; and I bowed over their duskiness, drunken with night’s lambent breath, I did not sink into them! Oh lost life, most intimate strangeness, strangest intimacy, you the furthermost nearness, the nearest of all things far, first and ultimate smile of the soul in its earnestness, you, oh you who were and still are everything, close and strange and a near-far smiling, you, fate-bearing blossom, I could not let your life enter into mine because of its overwhelming remoteness, because of its overwhelming strangeness, because of its overwhelming nearness and intimateness, because of the burden of its nocturnal smile, because of fate, your fate which you bear within you and must bear forever, not to be consummated by you, not to be consummated by me, the fate which I dared not take upon myself because the utter impossibility of its consummation would have riven my heart, and I have been witness only to your beauty, not to your life! oh, you, reluctant departer whom I did not call back, you, graced by longing, whose recall was not permitted me, you, who will not return, your step, alas so light in the inscrutable and inaudible, you, the lost shining behind the shadow, where is your homecoming? where are you? you did exist; and you let me have the ring from your finger, placing it on my hand, and there was a time that encircled us darkly, time that rushed on, enshrouding the darkness, enshrouded by it, oh Plotia, I no longer know what it was—

— scarcely a memory now was that which had vanished, that which had been real and more than real, scarcely more than a name was the woman he had loved, scarcely a glimmer, scarcely a shadow, she had sunk away from him into the inscrutability of chance, and nothing remained but an astonished remembrance of something having existed, of beauty’s dying music, the remembrance of a whilom wonder and a once inexplicably powerful oblivion that he had pursued with all the amazing perseverance of a narcotic, oh, still bemused even in remembering that it had ever been, in remembering that beauty had resounded, had been able to resound, that, imbedded in the human countenance like a soft breath issuing from eternity and breathing of eternity, it had shone out from the human countenance again and again, distantly intimate, strangely near, nocturnally smiling, glowing and fading, fragile as the white privet—a delicate tissue-veil of death spread over all things human, the veil of humanity, made dense in beauty while having at the same time become more transparent therein, as if oblivion had crept into the soul, as if the soul had lost itself to its earthly immortality in beauty, in the simple oblivion of beauty, as if a last remnant of hope still flickered in human beauty, that long-lost hope which is turned toward the inaudible, unattainable knowledge of death: nothing was left of it save invincible death standing behind the death-sweet shape which would not return; invincible and grandly erect, death reared up in immensity, raised up to the stars, filling the spheres and binding them, and along with death, evoked by its muteness, moved by it, fulfilling it, seeming to be its very essence, there was a sudden upsurge of all that death comprised, death surging up mutely with all that it contained, the death-stricken, the death-bound, the chance-born, the chance-bound, the hordes of human shapes waiting for death, multitudinous the lame ones, manifold the fat-bellies, the jabberers and carpers, multiplied to such a dense horde that the empty stone receptacle of the plaza overflowed with them, pushing them on into all the spheric spaces without, altering the emptiness of the plaza or that of the spaces, a horde so dense that it was like the outburst and outpouring of time itself, a death-herd of concurrent identities, the earthly-human multiplicity, the earthly man in the cyclic multiplicity of his transformations together with his skeleton and skull—his round skull, flat skull, pointed skull, covered in wool, straw or flax, bald or braided,— skull after skull; the skull-bearing human with its multiplicity of faces—the animal face, the plant-face, the stone-face—curiously covered with skin, either smooth or pimpled or wrinkled, full-fleshed or slack, with jaws for chewing and speaking, the face’s cavern stonily beset with teeth; the face-bearing man with his various odors of skin and cavities, with his smile—silly, shrewd, defiant, defenseless—with his smile which even at its meanest is divinely touching and opens his countenance before it is closed again in laughter, lest his eye behold the inhumanity of the shattered creation; the human being blessed with the gift of sight—enlarged, transfixed, clarified, clouded, made vital, through the eye—revealing his destiny in his eye, hidden to himself in his eye; the fate-bearing human being, fate-destined by the very power of his eye to know shame, and yet the only creature who speaks, his human voice shamelessly and moistly articulated by the jaws, the tongue, the lips, the breath-bearing voice, the communion-bearing voice, the voice which issues from him—harsh, unctuous, flattering, threatening, flexible, stiff, gasping, flaccid, squeaking, bellowing—the voice which can be all of these but is always able to transfigure itself into song; the human being, this wonderful, terrible and yet miraculous entity of atomic being, of language, of expression, of perception and imperception, of dull drowsing, of calculations in sesterces, of desires, of enigmas, this creature indivisible yet divided into an infinite number of individual parts, individual abilities, individual spheres, divided into organs and living-zones, into substances, into atoms, multiplied over and over again; all this multiplicity of being, this maze of human particles, not even well composed, this creaturely thicket, as earthly in its reality as earth’s stony ribs, earthly as death’s skeleton, this underbrush of bodies, limbs, eyes, and voices, this thicket of the half-created and the unfinished which issues from chance lust and is forever sprouting out, one from the other, indiscriminately coupled in constantly renewed lust, carelessly commingled, copulated, interwoven, ramified, continuing to branch out and renew itself while constantly withering, so that what was withered, dried-up and faded might fall back to the earth; this human thicket, alive with the elements of the plant and the animal, this thicket of the living consecrated to death, this it was that flooded up with the shape of death, surging up with its booming and its silence, it was death itself filling the spheres, the human chaos of chance, so accidental and so mortal that we scarcely know whether he who happens to appear before us as living has not long since died, or perhaps has never been born, still in the state of the pre-natally dead or unborn—, Plotia, oh Plotia, never yet found, undiscoverable! oh, she remained undiscoverable in the underbrush of death, she had sunk away from him into the reabandonment of the underworld and he had less communion with her than with one who is dead; for he himself was dead, died off into the fore-death of uncreativeness, died off into perjury, into lameness, into crookedness, died off into the reabandonment of a vulgar, urban literarity which includes even death in the illusory path of its false reversion, adulterating death with beauty and beauty with death, trying to attain the unattainable by means of this lewd, corruption-seeking equalization, to substitute it self-deceptively for the inaudible knowledge of death, but also certainly to extend the pleasure of this sort of intermingling to love, indeed by love to push this playfully-lewd game to its actual climax; for he who is unable to love, who is unfit for love’s communion, he must rescue himself from his bridgeless isolation by means of beauty; titillated by cruelty he becomes a seeker of beauty, a devotee of beauty, but never a lover, far rather an observer of beauty in the midst of love, one who desires to create love through beauty, because he confuses what is created with that which creates, but also because he sniffs and follows hard on the intoxication to be found in love, the intoxication of death, the intoxication of beauty, the intoxication of oblivion, because in the drowsy absorption of his dalliance with beauty and his love of death he creates for himself the pleasure of oblivion, eager and willing to forget that love, even though blessedly able to create beauty, never has beauty as its goal, but heads solely toward its own immemorial vocation, that most human of all vocations which always and without exception implies assuming the other’s burden of fate; oh, the dead hold no communion among themselves, they have forgotten one another—

— oh Plotia! unforgotten and unforgettable! you who were swathed in beauty! oh, if love existed, if the discrimination of love could exist in the human thicket, it would portend that together we might descend to the obliterating fountain of nothingness, to the sobering depths of the underworld, that we might descend, we sober and without illusions, going down to the primal base, not through the beautiful ivory portal of dreams which never opens for the return, but through the sober entrance of horn which would permit us to come back, retrieving in our common ascent a new fate from the last fate’s embers, retrieving from the last lovelack a new love, a newly created fate, fate in the making! oh Plotia, childlike yet no longer a child! only the unfolding fate may we take upon ourselves, not fate that is fixed; only as it unfolds does this fate become love’s reality which we seek for in kernel and bud of all that breathes of spring, in every grassblade, in every flower, in all young and growing creatures, but most fervently in the child, assuming the unfolded fate and its readiness to be formed, for the sake of which we bow to all that is still untouched, subsuming what is coming to pass in that which has already come to pass, taking the boy into the formative strength of the man, oh, Plotia, it is this unfolding fate, it is this which would be bestowed upon us if love existed, if its discriminative force, freed of all chance lust, could assure us the real certainty of loving, then fate itself would be love, love in its unfolding and its being, love as the descent into the depths of unremembrance and the ascent once more in complete recollection, as the extinction to nothingness and as the homecoming into an unchanged sameness, were it in the form of grassblade and blossom and child, as unchanged as these always are, and yet changed to love, enhanced by the gleaming shadow of love’s golden bough, the undiscoverable—

— oh, the dead are without communion among themselves, under no bright shadow of a golden bough, they have forgotten one another; and Plotia’s figure, Plotia’s unforgotten-forgotten existence, which had once been his shimmering light behind every shadow, had lost itself in the shades and had become indistinguishable in the shadowy realm, sunken into the hordes of the dead, a particle yet scarcely a part of the collective dead, the mass of whose faces, skulls and figures were nameless and indistinguishable for him, all together having disappeared and evaporated because, from the beginning, they had been as dead for him, nameless because he had never once wanted to be of actual help to the living, aye more—condemned by the gods and fate to such unwillingness, innocent and yet guilty—because he had needed a whole lifetime even for the first attempt at help, for the first untaken step, for the first untaken start of such a step, reluctant to join any living community in service, to say nothing of taking the fate of a single living creature upon himself for this purpose, oh, he had misused his life in the non-community of the dead, he had always lived with the dead only, among whom he reckoned the living, he had considered human beings as lifeless building blocks with which to erect and create a death-fixed beauty, and therefore human beings as a whole had disappeared for him into the realm of the unaccomplished, into the oblivion of the eternally uncreated. For only in the task that the human being assumed because of his humanity was the saving perception also to be found, and in shirking the task he robbed himself even of salvation. Unfit, that is what he was, unfit for real helpfulness, unfit for the loving deed; he had looked on human sorrow and been unmoved by it, he had looked on the horror of events merely as something to be remembered unchastely and without chastity recorded in beauty, and this was the very reason why he had never succeeded in depicting real human beings, people who ate and drank, who loved and could be loved, and this was why he was so little able to depict those who went limping and cursing through the streets, unable to picture them in their bestiality and their great need of help, least able to show forth the miracle of humanity with which such bestiality is graced; people meant nothing to him, he considered them as fabulous beings, mimes of beauty in the garments of beauty, and as such he had depicted them, as kings and heroes of fable, as fable-shepherds, as creatures of dream in whose unreal god-likeness, played out and dreamed out in beauty, he also — resembling the mob even in this — would gladly have participated, in which perhaps he might have participated had they been visions of the real dream instead of mere word-creatures, barely alive in his poetry but dead as soon as they turned the next corner, emerging from the dark thicket of language and disappearing into limbo, into unlovedness, into numbness, into death, into silence, into unreality, just as those three who had vanished, never to be seen again. And out of their vanishing there boomed the evil, world-shattering muteness of derision with which these three had been shaken, boomed maliciously as a second silence through the silence of the plaza and the streets below, boomed through the stillness of the night, a chance laughter full of strangeness, booming, bursting and annulling space though not annulling time, the laughter of consummate perjury, the mute booming of the shattered creation at the mercy of chance.

Nothing remained but the scorn-blinded shame of an extinguished memory, which had turned to the unchastity of a dead sham-memory. Aroused by no earthly flames the fires of heaven had died down into namelessness; the middle was silent, covered by the paving-stones of cities, it had merged with the most distant boundaries, grown cold under the breath of nothingness, and now the simultaneous stream of the creation in which the eternal reposes, it too was benumbed: woe to the sham-reversions of the false path, for they but imitated the vast orbits which have the power to bind past and future into the eternal now of timelessness; woe to this seeming timelessness which was the essence of all intoxication and which, to maintain such diversion, must needs continue to substitute the thing created for that which creates, beauty-thirsty, blood-thirsty, death-thirsty, betraying and perverting the sacrifice for the voluptuous intoxication of pleasure; woe to this unchaste vanity of memory for which the reality had never existed, and which remembered simply for the sake of remembering; woe to this reversion of being, for the pledge could not be renewed, the flame could not be rekindled, for dalliance failed and must fail, no matter how much beauty, blood and death was contributed to it, it remained ineffectual at the turning point of time on which all earthly immortality was shattered; verily, so long as the sacrifice failed to be a real sacrifice, disaster was inevitable, there was no awakening from the sleep of twilight, and the presumptuous one, caught in a vicious circle, remained imprisoned once and for all, the presumptuous one, who regarded himself as justified in neglecting his pledge because he interpreted the enchanting concurrence inside and outside, the ebb and flow of the world’s tides, the tempting view at the beauty-hemmed boundaries of the world, because he interpreted seduction itself as permission for that unreal reversion, which held just as much intoxication as forgetting or remembering, both spelling the loss of reality—woe to the intoxicated one, who presumptuous and obstinate lingered in his perjury and, whether overcome by remembrance or not, forgot that he was human; he had lost the fiery core of being and no longer knew whether he toppled upward or downward, whether he peered forward or backward, his cyclic path was without direction, but his head was screwed stiffly and absurdly onto his neck. The dead are inert, she who was dead could not be aroused, the space of oblivion had closed above her in a gray flood, and it seemed as if the women in Misery Street had known that one who had not realized his life was being carried there into his final disillusion, into his last oblivion. Had their scorn now really justified itself? Was there nothing left for him save the shameful plunge into nothingness and into the regions of the empty surface which stretch out subterraneously beneath the borders of oblivion? Oh, they had judged rightly and he was meant to accept the scornful curses with horrified shame, for the, unchastity of which he had innocently made himself guilty was more debased than the most shameless, passing lust of the mob, since his guilt was the unchastity of a voluntary downfall, since, even though at fate’s bidding, he had been a willing part of a perjured and lost race, a race which reeled over the flagstones of the void, the Titanic deed forgotten, a race as fireless as the animal, as cold as the plant, as inert as the stone, lost in the underbrush, itself mere underbrush, sunk into the indiscrimination of final petrification: he had fallen prey to the threat which encircled the degraded, he degraded along with them, lost with the lost ones, and the threat—fate-empowered by a higher threat, not to be held back by the roaring of any laughter, silent with an absolute silence, tone-benumbing, light-benumbing, in the crystalline darkness of the stonily inevitable, diffused and benumbed along with the night—the threat mounted higher and higher.