What makes for error in our interpretation is a certain mistiness of vision due to that sentimentality from which the northern European finds it so difficult to free himself. Now what saves primitive man from emotional anarchy is the fact that he is truly envious and jealous, a lover and a hater; that he means all he says, but means it for just that passing moment or hour, as the case may be, in which these feelings actually represent his attitude, and for no longer. He may have a theory of conduct but he bases no ethical judgments upon his kaleidoscopic emotional reactions. He has thus fairly adequately solved one of the most difficult and baffling problems in the world, of balancing repression with expression of personality and, at the same time, attaining to a true integration. (Primitive Man as Philosopher)

Father Ong goes on to define "the great fiction of the West; the self-possessed man in the self-possessed world, the fiction which seeks to erase all sense of plight, of confusing weakness, from man's consciousness, and which above all will never admit such a sense as a principle of operation". Man so constituted, he notes, cannot afford to give, since giving recognizes the fact of otherness, of a portion of being neither susceptible to his control nor violable to his gaze; this works out alike between man and man, and between man and God. It is precisely this fiction of self-containment that Joyce defines in successively more elaborate images, from Mr Duffy's careful control over every detail of life through the tightly-bounded ethical world of Exiles and Stephen's "All or not at all" to HCE's solipsistic nightmare. What beats against all these people is the evidence of otherness: the ghosts in Dubliners, Richard Rowan's voices on the strand at dawn) Stephen's fear of a "malevolent reality" and his collapse into Dublin itself ("I have much, much to learn"), the voices and tappings that derange Earwicker's slumbers like leaves, twigs, and stones dropped into a pool that craves stagnation. (Dublin's Joyce)

 THE WRITER’S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES

I.  Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II.  Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III.  In your working conditions, avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an étude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV.  Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V.  Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI.  Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII.  Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII.  Fill the lacunae in your inspiration by tidily copying out what you have already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX.  Nulla dies sine linea—but there may well be weeks.

X.  Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI.  Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII.  Stages of composition: idea—style—writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration; style fetters the idea; writing pays off style.

XIII.  The work is the death mask of its conception. (One-Way Street)

“She came, gentle and sweet, bringing peace, at a time when I was the loneliest and most miserable boy in the world. She made all my secrets vanish into her. For she made me feel that everything I had kept secret was kept back just to tell her—we were joined within a secret that was divulged to us by touching where we had never touched before, and by the honesty of passion where we had been dishonest before. After our honesty with each other, what more was there to hide? We had told. Passionate love is a conspiracy to tell each other’s truth to each other—that I am like this and you are like that, and together, in a joining, we make a moment’s truth of what each is. Beyond the moment’s truth, though, lies the hour’s untruth, which keeps yearning to be bared into truth again. She broke my unreality against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against and mended me with all the care in the world, it seemed. For her I betrayed you and for myself I betrayed her; we melted into each other. I tricked you and left you; and after I had left you, all your kin and all your world died away from you and fell away, leaving you broken off and isolate. All of us were shattered from our whole, I roaming through the world with Evella, you sitting by the window trying to piece everything together again in a falling house. (The House of Breath)

“Sometimes, because I am a failure in the world, I blame my failure on you all; say that you got me so mixed up when I was young that I can never clear myself up again inside; or that you made me so false to myself that I am unreal and never can be real. But I must see that the reason I am a failure is that I gave myself away to everybody and so had none of myself left for myself—I mean the part of oneself that is the part he works with, held by himself to work with.

“And yet I collaborated with you in making myself false—for I was so afraid of myself and what it wanted to do, and so ashamed of it. So you and I together stomped the life out of it, every day, mangling it like a beetle.

“But suddenly something beyond all of us, greater than all of us, freed us from each other. We tore at our hearts because we were powerless against this thing that came in between us and wrenched us apart. This was loving somebody. (The House of Breath)

Joyce's Dublin was in fact an eighteenth century parody. The technique he developed, the technique which underlies everything from the first pages of Dubliners to the end of Finnegans Wake, came out of the subject: parody: double-writing. The music-halls parodied the heroic dramas; Joyce parodied the music-halls. Journalism parodied heroic elegance: Joyce parodied journalism. He focussed, that is to say, on what was actually there, and strove so to set it down that it would reveal itself as what it was, in its double nature: a distortion, but a distortion of something real. All his characters are walking clichés, because the Dubliners were; a Leopold Bloom is simultaneously a "case" and a person. All his dialogue is an assemblage of locutions reçues into unexpected patterns: unexpected because he was dealing with human beings, whose natural spontaneity the past could not quite batten down:

- Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.

- It is, Bloom said.

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. . . . Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the ethereal. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirty-five thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like till you hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right, then bear chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks over barrels, through wirefences, obstacle race. U273/264. (Dublin's Joyce)

As far as the ‘patron’, as far as power is concerned (this also gradually became clear to me in church, when we were completely taken up by the music), there is only one remedy against it: to go further than it does. Here is what I mean by this: in every power which claims some right over us we should always try to see all power, absolute power, power as such, the power of God. We should say to ourselves, there is only one, and understand power that is lesser, false, defective, as if it were that which takes hold of us legitimately. Would it not thus become harmless? If we always saw in every form of power, including the harmful and malicious, power itself – I mean that which ultimately has the right to be powerful – wouldn’t we then overcome, intact as it were, the illegitimate and the arbitrary? Isn’t our relationship to all the great unknown forces exactly like this? We experience none of them in their purity. We begin by accepting each with its shortcomings, which are perhaps commensurate with our own. – But isn’t it the case with all scholars, explorers and inventors that the assumption that they were dealing with great forces suddenly led to the greatest of all? I am young, and there is much rebelliousness in me; – I cannot be certain that I act in accordance with my judgement in every case, where impatience and bitterness get the better of me; in my innermost being though, I know that subjection leads further than revolt. Subjection puts to shame any kind of usurpation, and in indescribable ways it contributes to the glorification of righteous power. The rebel strains to escape the attraction of a centre of power, and perhaps he will succeed in leaving this force-field; but once outside it he is in a void and has to look around for a new gravitation that will include him. And this usually has even less legitimacy than the first. So why not see at once, in the gravitation we find ourselves in, the supreme power, undeterred by its weaknesses and its fluctuations? Somewhere the arbitrary will come up against the law of its own accord, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself. Admittedly this belongs to the lengthy, slow processes that stand in utter contradiction with the strange precipitations of our age. But alongside the most rapid movements there will always be slow ones, some indeed of such extreme slowness that we cannot sense their progress at all. But then that is what humanity is here for, is it not, to wait for what extends beyond the individual life. – From that perspective, the slow is often the most rapid of all, that is, it turns out that we only called it slow because is was something we could not measure.

And there exists, it seems to me, something utterly measureless, which people never tire of laying their hands on by means of standards, surveys, and institutions.

And it’s here, in the love which, with their intolerable mixture of contempt, concupiscence and curiosity, they call ‘sensual’, that no doubt the worst effects of that debasement are to be sought which Christianity has seen fit to inflict on the earthly. Here everything is disfigurement and repression, although in fact we proceed from this most profound event and in turn possess in it the mid-point of our ecstasies. It is, if I may say so, harder and harder for me to comprehend how a doctrine which puts us in the wrong in the point where the whole of creation enjoys its most blessed right can with such steadfastness, if not actually prove its validity, nevertheless affirm it in all quarters. (The Letter from a Young Worker)

I have a lover, almost a child still; she works at home, which when there is not much work often means that she finds herself in an awkward situation. She is skilful, she’d easily get a job in a factory, but she fears having a patron. Her conception of freedom is limitless. It will not surprise you that she also thinks of God as a kind of patron, even as the ‘arch-patron’ as she told me, laughing, but with such fright in her eyes. It took a long time before she agreed to come with me one evening to St Eustache where I liked going for the music of the May devotions. Once we got as far as Maux together and had a look at gravestones in the church there. Gradually she noticed that God leaves you in peace in churches, that he demands nothing; you could think he wasn’t there at all, n’est-ce pas, but then in the moment you are about to say something of the sort, said Marthe, that even in a church he doesn’t exist, something holds you back. Perhaps only what over so many centuries people themselves have borne into this high, peculiarly fortified air. Or perhaps it is only that the resonance of the sweet and powerful music can never escape completely: yes, it must have penetrated into the stones long ago, and the stones must be strangely moved, these pillars and vaultings, and though stone is hard and difficult of access, even it is shaken in the end by the perpetual singing and these assaults from the organ, these onslaughts, these storms of hymns, every Sunday, these hurricanes on the great feast-days. The calm after a storm. That’s what truly reigns in these old churches. I said so to Marthe. Windless calm. We listened, she got it at once, she has a wonderfully receptive nature. After that we sometimes went in, here and there, when we heard singing, and stood there, close together. Best of all was when we could see a stained-glass window, one of those old ones with many subjects and compartments, each one crammed with figures, big people and little towers and all sorts of goings-on. Nothing was thought to be unfit or too strange; there are castles and battles and a hunt, and the lovely white hart appears again and again amid the warm red and the burning blue. I was once given very old wine to drink. With these windows it is the same for the eyes, except that the wine was only dark red in my mouth – but here the same thing happens in blue and in violet and in green. Everything can be found in the old churches; there is no fear of anything, unlike in the new ones, where so to speak only good examples are present. Here there is also the bad and the wicked, the terrifying; the crippled, the destitute, what is ugly and unjust – and it is as if somehow it were all loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and, I cannot help it, their unreality makes him more real for me. In these places I can gather my thoughts and feelings about what it is to be human better than in the street, among people who have absolutely nothing recognizable about them. (The Letter from a Young Worker)

To take in an extraordinary town and a more than pleasant landscape with someone in such a frame of mind is a rare privilege; and when I look back on those tender and at the same time passionate spring days, they appear to me as the only holiday I ever had in my life. The time was so laughably brief, to another it would have sufficed only for a few impressions; to me, not used to spending days of such freedom, it appeared vast. Yes, it almost seems wrong to go on calling time what was more nearly a new state of being free, truly felt as a space, a being-surrounded by openness, no passing or transience. I was catching up on my childhood then, if I can put it that way, and a part of my early youth, all that there had never been time to carry out in my life; I looked, I learned, I understood – and from those days also stems the experience that it is so easy for me, so truthful, so – as my friend would have expressed it – unproblematic, to say ‘God’. (The Letter from a Young Worker)

To make the proper use of things, that’s what it comes down to. To take the Here and Now in one’s hand, lovingly, with the heart, full of wonder, as, provisionally, the one thing we have: that is at once, to put it rather casually, the gist of God’s great user’s guide, this is what Saint Francis of Assisi meant to record in his hymn to the sun which as he lay dying he thought more splendid than the cross, whose only purpose in standing there was to point towards the sun. But what goes by the name of the Church had by then swollen into such a clamour of voices that the song of the dying man, drowned out in all quarters, was only caught by a few simple monks and infinitely assented to by the landscape of his lovely valley. How many such attempts there have been to produce a reconciliation between Christian denial and the manifest friendliness and good spirits of the earth. But elsewhere too, at the heart of the Church, even at its actual summit, the Here and Now managed to gain its plenitude and its native abundance. Why is the Church not praised for having been sturdy enough not to collapse under the living weight of certain popes, whose thrones were weighed down with bastards, courtesans and corpses? Did they not have more Christianity in them than the dry renovators of the Gospels – that is, Christianity that is living, irrepressible, transformed? What I mean is that we cannot know what will come of the great teachings, we just have to let them flow unabated and not take fright if they suddenly rush into the natural ravines of life and vanish underground and race along unknowable channels. (The Letter from a Young Worker)

When I say God – it is a great conviction in me, not something I have learnt. The whole of creation, as it seems to me, says this word, without deliberation, though often out of deep thoughtfulness. If this man Christ has enabled us to say it with a clearer voice, more roundly, more unassailably, so much the better, but now let’s leave him out of it once and for all. We should not always be forced to fall back into the toil and sorrow that it cost him to ‘redeem’ us, as they put it. Let us finally come into this redemption. – And in other ways too the Old Testament is full as it is of forefingers pointing to God wherever one opens it, and always if someone is weighed down he falls straight into the middle of God. And once I tried to read the Koran. I didn’t get far, but this much I did understand: there is another mighty forefinger, and if you follow it God stands at the end in the midst of his eternal rising, in an orient which will never be exhausted. Christ must have wanted the same. To point. But the people here have been like those dogs who don’t understand pointing and think they are meant to go for the hand. Instead of leaving Christ’s way of the cross, where the signpost was erected to reach far into the night of sacrifice, instead of moving on from this Via Crucis, Christianity has settled there and claims to dwell in Christ there although there was no room in him, not even for his mother, and not for Mary Magdalene – as with anyone who points the way and is a gesture and not a place to stay. – And for this reason they do not dwell in Christ either, the stubborn at heart who are always re-creating him and live from setting crosses which are crooked or have been blown completely over upright again. They have this press of people on their conscience, this queuing up in an overcrowded place, they are to blame that the journey does not continue in the direction of the arms of the cross. They have made a métier of the Christian purpose, a bourgeois occupation, sur place, a pool that is alternately drained and then filled up again. Everything that they do themselves, according to their own insuppressible natures (so far as they are still living beings), stands in contradiction to this curious disposition of theirs, and so they cloud their own waters and continually have to refresh them. They are so zealous they cannot stop making the Here and Now, which we should take pleasure and have trust in, base and worthless – and so more and more they deliver the earth into the hands of those who are prepared to turn it, the failed, suspect earth which is good for nothing better, to temporal, quick profit. This increasing ransacking of life, is it not a consequence of the devaluation of the Here and Now which has been going on for centuries? What madness, to divert us towards a beyond when we are surrounded by tasks and expectations and futures here. What deceit, to divest us of images of earthly delight in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is high time the impoverished earth called in all the loans that have been made on her felicity to provide for a time that lies beyond the future. (The Letter from a Young Worker)

I cannot imagine that the cross was meant to remain, which after all was only a path, the way of the cross. Certainly it should not be imprinted on us everywhere as if with a branding-iron. It should be dispersed in him himself. For isn’t it like this: he simply wanted to create a taller tree on which we could ripen the better. He, on the cross, is this new tree in God, and we were to be the fruits at the top of it, glad to be in the warm.

Now we should not always be talking about what went on before but, precisely, the After should have begun. This tree, it seems to me, should have become so one with us, or we with it, we on it, that we ought not always to be occupying ourselves with it but simply and calmly with God, to hold us up more purely in whom was after all its intention. (The Letter From a Young Worker)

The day after the reading I found myself by chance at a Christian meeting, and perhaps it was this that really set things off and caused the detonation that has released so much commotion and energy that I am now heading towards you with all my faculties. It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something. I cannot begin. I’m simply jumping over what ought to be the beginning. Nothing is as powerful as silence. Were we not all of us born into talk, it would never have been broken.

Mr V., I am not speaking of the evening when we heard your poems. I am speaking of the other one. I am driven to say: who – yes, I can find no other way of expressing it now – who then is this Christ who meddles with everything. Who knows nothing about us, nothing about our work, nothing about our needs, nothing about our joys as we achieve, go through and summon them up nowadays – and who nevertheless, it seems, always demands to be the first person in our life. Or are these things just words put in his mouth? What does he want of us? He wants to help us, they say. Yes, but among us he comes across as peculiarly at a loss. The conditions he lived in were so very different. Or does it in fact not have much to do with the circumstances – if he came in here, into my room, or visited me out in the factory, would everything immediately be changed, would all be well? Would my heart begin to pound and as it were move up a level and on towards him? My instinct tells me that he cannot come. That it would have no sense. Our world is a different one not just on the outside – it offers him no access. He would not shine through a ready-made coat, it is not true, he would not shine through. It is no coincidence that he went around in a seamless garment, and I believe that the core of light within him, what made him shine so strongly, day and night, has now long been dispersed and distributed differently. But that I think would be the least we could require of him if he was so great, that he somehow come out without remainder, yes, quite without remainder – leaving no trace … (The Letter from a Young Worker)

And as to feelings: all feelings are pure that focus you and raise you up. An impure feeling is one that only comprises one side of your nature and so distorts you. Any thoughts that match up to your childhood are good. Everything that makes more of you than you have hitherto been in your best moments is right. Every heightening is good if it occurs in the quick of your bloodstream, if it is not an intoxication, not a troubling but a joy one can see right to the bottom of. Do you understand what I mean?

And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them. They must grow to be knowledgeable, they must learn to be critical. As soon as they begin to spoil something for you ask them why a thing is ugly, demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous. But do not give in, request arguments, and act with this kind of attentiveness and consistency every single time, and the day will come when instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers – perhaps the canniest of all those at work on the building of your life. (Letters to a Young Poet)

So, dear Mr Kappus, you shouldn’t be dismayed if a sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before; or if a disquiet plays over your hands and over all your doings like light and cloud-shadow. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself. There is so much, my dear Mr Kappus, going on in you now. You must be patient as an invalid and trusting as a convalescent, for you are perhaps both. And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And inasfar as you are your own doctor, this above all is what you must do now.

Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen. Otherwise you will too readily find yourself looking on your past, which is of course not uninvolved with everything that is going on in you now, reproachfully (that is, moralistically). But what now affects you from among the divagations, desires and longings of your boyhood is not what you will recall and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, exposed to so many influences and at the same time removed from any real life-context, that if a vice enters into it we must not be too quick to call it a vice. We should in general be very careful with names; it is so often the name of a crime which destroys a life, not the nameless and personal act itself, which was perhaps completely necessary to that life and could have been absorbed by it without difficulty. And the expenditure of energy only seems so great because you put too much importance on the victory. It is not victory that is the ‘great thing’ you think you have achieved, though the feeling itself is not in error. What is great is that there was already something there that you were able to set in place of that deception, something true and real. Without it, your victory would only have been a moral reaction with no further significance, but as it is it has become a segment of your life. Of your life, dear Mr Kappus, which I am thinking of with so many hopes and wishes. Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the ‘grown-ups’? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.

And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did. (Letters to a Young Poet)

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are periods of tautening that we experience as numbness because we can no longer hear the stirring of our feelings, which have become foreign to us. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because everything familiar and accustomed is taken away from us for a moment; because we are in the middle of a transition where we cannot stand still. And that is why sadness passes: what is new in us, the thing that has supervened, has entered into our heart, penetrated to its innermost chamber and not lingered even there – it is already in our blood. And we never quite know what it was. One might easily suppose that nothing had happened, but we have altered the way a house alters when a guest enters it. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but there are many indications that it is the future that enters into us like this, in order to be transformed within us, long before it actually occurs. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our future comes upon us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and accidental point when it happens to us as if from the outside. The quieter, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the deeper and more unerringly the new will penetrate into us, the better we shall acquire it, the more it will be our fate, and when one day in the future it ‘takes place’ (that is, steps out of us towards others) we shall feel related and close to it in our inmost hearts. And that is necessary. It is necessary – and little by little our development will tend in this direction – that nothing alien should happen to us, but only what has long been part of us. We have already had to adjust our understanding of so many theories of planetary motion, and so too we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate originates in ourselves, in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside. Only because so many people did not absorb their fates while they were inhabited by them, and did not make them a part of themselves, only because of this did they fail to recognize what emerged from them. It was so foreign to them that in their confused panic they assumed it must just have entered into them, for they swore never to have found anything of the sort in themselves before. Just as for a long time people were deceived about the movement of the sun, so we are still deceived about the movement of what is to come. The future is fixed, dear Mr Kappus, but we move around in infinite space.

How could things not be difficult for us? (Letters to a Young Poet)

It is the same everywhere; but that is no reason for anxiety or sadness; if there is no communal feeling between you and other people, try to be near to things – they will not abandon you. The nights are still there and the winds that go through the trees and over the many lands; among things and among animals all is still full of happenings in which you can take part; and the children are still as you were when you were a child, just as sad and happy, and whenever you think of your childhood you live among them again, among the lonely children, and adults are nothing and their dignity has no worth.

And if it frightens and pains you to think of your childhood and of the simplicity and stillness that go together with it, because you can no longer believe in God, who is everywhere present in it, then ask yourself, dear Mr Kappus, whether you have really lost God after all? Is it not rather the case that you have never yet possessed him? For when was it supposed to have been? Do you think a child can hold him, him whom grown men only bear with difficulty and whose weight bows down the old? Do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little pebble, or don’t you think that whoever had him could only be lost by him alone? – But if you acknowledge that he was not present in your childhood, and not before that, if you suspect that Christ was deceived by his longing and Mohammed betrayed by his pride, and if you feel with horror that even now he is not present, at the moment when we are talking about him, what then gives you the right to miss him who never was, as if he had disappeared, and to search for him as if he were lost?

Why don’t you think of him as a coming god, who since eternity has lain ahead of us, the future one, the eventual fruit of a tree of which we are the leaves? What prevents you from casting his birth out into the times of becoming and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful? If he is the complete being, must not slighter things come before him, so that he can pick himself out of fullness and abundance? – Must he not be the last in order to encompass all things in himself, and what significance would we have if the one whom we hanker for had already been?

As the bees collect honey together, so we fetch the sweetness out of everything and build Him. We begin with the very slightest things, with what is barely noticeable (as long as it comes about through love), with our work and the repose that comes after, with a moment of silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do on our own without helpers and accomplices, we begin him whom we shall never know, just as our ancestors could not live to know us. And yet they are in us, these people long since passed away, as a disposition, as a load weighing on our destinies, as a murmur in the blood and as a gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.

Is there anything that can strip you of the hope of dwelling one day in him, the most remote, the most extreme?

Dear Mr Kappus, celebrate Christmas in the piety of the feeling that He perhaps requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working on him, just as before, as a child, you worked on him with bated breath. Be patient and even-tempered and remember that the least we can do is not make his becoming more difficult than the earth makes it for spring when it decides to come. (Letters to a Young Poet)

Only the solitary individual is subject, like a thing, to the fundamental laws, and if someone goes out into the morning as it is breaking, or looks out into the evening full of occurrence, and if he feels what is happening there, every hint of station slips from him as if from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of life itself. (Letters to a Young Poet)

Think, dear Mr Kappus, of the world that you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you like. Whether it is memory of your own childhood or longing for your own future – just be attentive towards what rises up inside you, and place it above everything that you notice round about. What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people. Who says you have such an attitude at all? (Letters to a Young Poet)

There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy … But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.

And when one day you realize that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from? (Letters to a Young Poet)

But everything which one day will perhaps be possible for many, the solitary individual can prepare for and build now with his hands which are more unerring. For this reason, dear Mr Kappus, love your solitude and bear the pain it causes you with melody wrought with lament. For the people who are close to you, you tell me, are far away, and that shows that you are beginning to create a wider space around you. And if what is close is far, then the space around you is wide indeed and already among the stars; take pleasure in your growth, in which no one can accompany you, and be kind-hearted towards those you leave behind, and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand. Look for some kind of simple and loyal way of being together with them which does not necessarily have to alter however much you may change; love in them a form of life different from your own and show understanding for the older ones who fear precisely the solitude in which you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama which always spans between parents and their children; it saps much of the children’s strength and consumes that parental love which works and warms even when it does not comprehend. Ask no advice of them and reckon with no understanding; but believe in a love which is stored up for you like an inheritance, and trust that in this love there is a strength and a benediction out of whose sphere you do not need to issue even if your journey is a long one. (Letters to a Young Poet)

Do not be distracted by surfaces; it is in the depths that all laws obtain. (Letters to a Young Poet)

Sex is difficult, true. But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. (Letters to a Young Poet)

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of forming and creating, as a particularly happy and pure way of living. School yourself for it, but take what comes in complete trust, and as long as it is a product of your will, of some kind of inner necessity, accept it and do not despise it. (Letters to a Young Poet)

Here, surrounded as I am by a mighty stretch of land over which the winds blow in from seas, here I feel that no human being anywhere can respond to those questions and feelings that have a profound life of their own; for even the best of us get the words wrong when we want them to express such intangible and almost unsayable things. But all the same I believe that you need not remain without solution if you hold to things like those now refreshing my eyes. If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge. (Letters to a Young Poet)

And let me at once make this request: read as little as possible in the way of aesthetics and criticism – it will either be partisan views, fossilized and made meaningless in its lifeless rigidity, or it will be neat wordplay, where one opinion will triumph one day and the opposite the next. Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. – With regard to any such disquisition, review or introduction, trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.

These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!*

*patience is all!: The great lesson Rilke learnt from Rodin, as conveyed in a letter to Clara Rilke, his wife, on 5 September 1902: ‘Il faut travailler, rien que travailler. Et il faut avoir patience’ (‘You have to work, just work. And you have to be patient’). (Letters to a Young Poet)

Irony: don’t let yourself be ruled by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative ones try to make use of it as one means among many to get a grasp on life. Used purely, it too is pure, and there is no need to be ashamed of it; and if you feel too familiar with it, if you fear your intimacy is growing too much, then turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless. Seek out the depths of things: irony will never reach down there – and if in so doing you come up against something truly great, inquire whether this way of relating to things originates in a necessary part of your being. For under the influence of serious things irony will either fall away (if it is something incidental) or on the contrary (if it really belongs to you in a native way) it will gain strength and so become a serious tool and take its place among the means with which you will be bound to create your art. (Letters to a Young Poet)

First of all you should know that every letter from you will always be a pleasure, and you only need to be understanding with regard to the replies, which often, maybe, will leave you with empty hands; for at bottom, and particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise, let alone help, another, a great deal must come about, a great deal must come right, a whole constellation of things must concur for it to be possible at all. (Letters to a Young Poet)

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me to offer you advice) let me ask you to give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge. Then approach nature. Then try, like the first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are too familiar and habitual: they are the hardest, for you need great maturity and strength to produce something of your own in a domain where good and sometimes brilliant examples have been handed down to us in abundance. For this reason, flee general subjects and take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life; depict your sadnesses and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty – depict all this with intense, quiet, humble sincerity and make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, the images from your dreams and the things in your memory. If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any of the sounds of the world outside reach your senses – would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that. Attempt to raise the sunken sensations of this distant past; your self will become the stronger for it, your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off. And if from this turn inwards, from this submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other. For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow. (Letters to a Young Poet)

Not till half-an-hour later, when I reached the broad dyke that separates the grass expanse from the pebble bank that slopes to the shoreline, did the blood cease its clamour in my veins. For a long while I stood on the bridge that leads to the former research establishment. Far behind me to the west, scarcely to be discerned, were the gentle slopes of the inhabited land; to the north and south, in flashes of silver, gleamed the muddy bed of a dead arm of the river, through which now, at low tide, only a meagre trickle ran; and ahead lay nothing but destruction. From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with stones, in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas, which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe. To me too, as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the shower heads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways. Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words. All I do know is that I finally walked along the raised embankment from the Chinese Wall bridge past the old pumphouse towards the landing stage, to my left in the fading fields a collection of black Nissen huts, and to my right, across the river, the mainland. As I was sitting on the breakwater waiting for the ferryman, the evening sun emerged from behind the clouds, bathing in its light the far-reaching arc of the seashore. The tide was advancing up the river, the water was shining like tinplate, and from the radio masts high above the marshes came an even, scarcely audible hum. The roofs and towers of Orford showed among the tree tops, seeming so close that I could touch them. There, I thought, I was once at home. And then, through the growing dazzle of the light in my eyes, I suddenly saw, amidst the darkening colours, the sails of the long-vanished windmills turning heavily in the wind. (Rings of Saturn)

[...] Two years after that memorable occasion, Loewy (at far left in the photograph,) now director of the entire trading division, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Ordre du Lion Royal by King Leopold himself, at a ceremony to mark the completion of the Congo railway. Korzeniowski, who travelled onward to see Marguerite Poradowska in Brussels immediately after arriving in Ostend, now saw the capital of the Kingdom of Belgium, with its ever more bombastic buildings, as a sepulchral monument erected over a hecatomb of black bodies, and all the passers-by in the streets seemed to him to bear that dark Congolese secret within them. And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere. At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year. One evening in a bar in Rhode St Genèse I even watched a deformed billiard player who was racked with spastic contortions but who was able, when it was turn and he had taken a moment to steady himself, to play the most difficult cannons with unerring precision. [...]

[...] At length I bought a ticket for the Waterloo Panorama, housed in an immense domed rotunda, where from a raised platform in the middle one can view the battle—a favourite subject with panorama artists—in every direction. It is like being at the centre of events. On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses and cutdown infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-légers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly coloured uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, rags and the like, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one's gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position? [...]

No clear picture emerged. Neither then nor today. Only when I had shut my eyes, I well recall, did I see a cannonball smash through a row of poplars at an angle, sending the green branches flying in tatters. And then I saw Fabrizio, Stendhal's young hero, wandering about the battlefield, pale but with his eyes aglow and an unsaddled colonel getting to his feet and feeling his sergeant: I can feel nothing but the old injury in my right hand.—Before returning to Brussels I warmed up a little in one of the restaurants. At the far end of the room, in the dim light that entered by the Belgian bulls'-eye panes, sat a hunchbacked pensioner. She was wearing a woollen cap, a winter coat made of thick burled material, and fingerless gloves. The waitress brought her a plate with a huge piece of meat. The old woman stared at it for a while, then produced from her handbag a small, sharp knife with a wooden handle and began to cut it up. She would have been born, it occurs to me now, at about the time that the Congo railway was completed. (Rings of Saturn)

THE FIRST PHASE of anyone’s writing always shows them doing something ‘like’ something they have heard or read.

The majority of writers never pass that stage.

In London as late as 1914 the majority of poetasters still resented the idea that poetry was an art, they thought you ought to do it without any analysis, it was still expected to ‘pour forth’.

The usual game of quibbling over half truth, starts just here. The best work probably does pour forth, but it does so AFTER the use of the medium has become ‘second nature’, the writer need no more think about EVERY DETAIL, than Tilden needs to think about the position of every muscle in every stroke of his tennis. The force, the draw, etc., follow the main intention, without damage to the unity of the act. (ABC of Reading)

Artists are the antennae of the race. (ABC of Reading)

The reader will often misjudge a condensed writer by trying to read him too fast.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention. (ABC of Reading)

IT is said that Flaubert taught De Maupassant to write. When De Maupassant returned from a walk Flaubert would ask him to describe someone, say a concierge whom they would both pass in their next walk, and to describe the person so that Flaubert would recognize, say, the concierge and not mistake her for some other concierge and not the one De Maupassant had described. (ABC of Reading)

One definition of beauty is: aptness to purpose.

Whether it is a good definition or not, you can readily see that a good deal of BAD criticism has been written by men who assume that an author is trying to do what he is NOT trying to do.

Incredible as it now seems, the bad critics of Keats’ time found his writing ‘obscure’, which meant that they couldn’t understand WHY Keats wrote.

Most human perceptions date from a long time ago, or are derivable from perceptions that gifted men have had long before we were born. The race discovers, and rediscovers. (ABC of Reading)

Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.

The reader’s first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance. (ABC of Reading)

Language is a means of communication. To charge language with meaning to the utmost possible degree, we have, as stated, the three chief means:

I throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination.

II inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech.

III inducing both of the effects by stimulating the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the receiver’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed.

(phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia) (ABC of Reading)

‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’

Dichten = condensare.

I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’.

The charging of language is done in three principal ways: You receive the language as your race has left it, the words have meanings which have ‘grown into the race’s skin’; the Germans say ‘wie einem der Schnabel gewachsen ist’, as his beak grows. And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. [...]

NEVERTHELESS you still charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this. (ABC of Reading)

IT doesn’t, in our contemporary world, so much matter where you begin the examination of a subject, so long as you keep on until you get round again to your starting-point. As it were, you start on a sphere, or a cube; you must keep on until you have seen it from all sides. Or if you think of your subject as a stool or table, you must keep on until it has three legs and will stand up, or four legs and won’t tip over too easily. (ABC of Reading)

A general statement is valuable only in REFERENCE to the known objects or facts.

Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is ‘true’, it leaves his mouth or pen without any great validity. He doesn’t KNOW what he is saying. That is, he doesn’t know it or mean it in anything like the degree that a man of experience would or does. Thus a very young man can be quite ‘right’ without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn’t know.

One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one WAS right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say seventeen or twenty-three. (ABC of Reading)

ANY general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act. [...]

An abstract or general statement is GOOD if it be ultimately found to correspond with the facts.

BUT no layman can tell at sight whether it is good or bad.

Hence (omitting various intermediate steps) … hence the almost stationary condition of knowledge throughout the middle ages. Abstract arguments didn’t get mankind rapidly forward, or rapidly extend the borders of knowledge. (ABC of Reading)

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: ‘That’s only a sunfish.’

Agassiz: ‘I know that. Write a description of it.’

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

By this method modern science has arisen, not on the narrow edge of mediaeval logic suspended in a vacuum. (ABC of Reading)

In the works of Dickens George Orwell saw a face:

It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is a1ways fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

No face shines through the novels of James Joyce, and this is disturbing. He is cut off from his own creation, as he is cut off from God's, and he has no comment to make about either. He cannot be enlisted in the cause of Irish nationalism, Fascism or Communism, though--like Shakespeare, a man legitimately faceless because he wrote plays and not novels--he has been invoked in the name of every ideology. Perhaps, among novelists, only Flaubert approaches him for self-effacement. But, to the novel-reader brought up in a cosier tradition, such self-effacement looks like hauteur, the nose in the air, the swollen head, the snob, It ought not to look like that, Joyce's aim was the ennoblement of the common man, and this could best be achieved by letting the common man speak for himself. To watch over one's hero, coddle him, discuss him with the reader, offer him praise or pity--is not this perhaps the real posture of superiority, the imitation of God? We are given Leopold Bloom and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker without apology and without the intermediacy of attitudes imposed on the reader. We have to make up our own minds as to whether we like them or approve of their actions (Bloom's masturbation, for instance, or Earwicker's incestuous fantasies); ultimately, liking and approbation do not apply--we become concerned with the harder discipline of love. The priest is the agent of solemn ceremonies, and we are never drawn to look at his face or consider what thoughts and feelings move behind it, Joyce, without blasphemy, saw his function as priestlike the solemnisation of drab days and the sanctification of the ordinary. It is this preoccupation, even obsession, with the ordinary that should endear him to ordinary readers. Nobody in his books is rich or has high connections. There is no dropping of titled names, as there is in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, and we enter no place more exalted than a pub or a public library. Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody. Given time, Joyce will flow through the arteries of our ordinary, non-reading, life, for a great writer influences the world whether the world likes it or not, and the blessing of the ordinary must eventually transfigure it. We see Gerard Manley Hopkins in cornflake advertisements ('gold-toasted, sugar-tossed, lighter-than-air, a crisp, they crunch and crackle') and we hear Joyce's interior monologues in the 'think-tape' of television plays and documentaries, even hear something of his word-play in radio shows. But 'Introibo ad altare Dei' is the first spoken statement in Ulysses, and we are wisest if we get up early and deliberately go to the great comic Mass, rather than merely let its deformed and thinned echoes trickle through to us. It is not a Black Mass, even though Guinness is drunk and bawdy songs punctuate the golden liturgy; it is a solemnisation without solemnity. (Re Joyce)

‘My theory,’ he began, ‘is the following. The mystery novel represents in the twentieth century what the romance of chivalry represented in the time of Cervantes. I will go even further: I think that something similar to Don Quixote could be done with a mystery: a satire of a detective novel – just as the Quixote was a satire of the chivalric romance. Imagine an individual who has spent his life reading mystery novels and has reached such a point in his madness that he believes the world functions the way it does in a novel by Nicholas Blake or Ellery Queen. Then imagine that this poor fellow sets off finally to solve crimes, and to act in real life the way a detective in a mystery novel does. I think such a book could be entertaining, tragic, symbolic, satirical … beautiful.’

‘Then why don’t you do it,’ Mimí asked mockingly.

‘For two reasons: I am not Cervantes … and I am very lazy.’

‘I think the first reason is sufficient’ was Mimí’s comment.

Then, worse luck, she turned to me:

‘This man,’ she said, jabbing her ridiculous cigarette holder in Hunter’s direction, ‘rails against mystery novels because he is not capable of writing one – even though they are the most boring novels on earth.’

‘Give me a cigarette,’ Hunter said to his cousin, and only then replied:

‘When will you learn not to exaggerate? In the first place, I did not “rail” against mystery novels. I simply said that it should be possible to write a kind of contemporary Don Quixote. In the second place, you are mistaken if you think I am totally without talent in that regard. I once had a brilliant idea for a mystery.’

‘Sans blague,’ Mimí limited herself to saying.

‘Oh, but I did, I tell you. Now: a man has a mother, a wife, and a little boy. One night the mother is mysteriously murdered. The police investigations lead nowhere. A while later the wife is murdered: same story. Finally, the little boy is murdered. The man is out of his mind with grief, because he loves them all, especially the boy. Desperate, he decides to investigate the crimes himself. Using the usual inductive, deductive, analytical, synthetical, and on and on, methods of those geniuses of the detective novel, he arrives at the conclusion that the murderer must kill a fourth time, on a certain day, at a certain hour, and in a certain place. His conclusion is that the murderer must now murder him. On the appointed day and hour, the man goes to the place where the fourth murder is to be committed, and awaits the murderer. But the murderer doesn’t come. The man reviews his deductions: he might have miscalculated the place; no, the place is correct. Perhaps he miscalculated the hour; no, the hour is correct. The conclusion is intolerable: the murderer is already there. In other words: he is the murderer, he had committed the crimes in some psychic state. The detective and the murderer are the same person.’

‘Too original for my taste,’ commented Mimí. ‘And how does it end? Didn’t you say there had to be a fourth murder?’

‘But that is obvious,’ Hunter drawled. ‘The man commits suicide. The doubt remains whether he killed himself out of remorse, or whether the murderer “I” kills the detective “I,” as in an ordinary crime. Do you like it?’

‘It’s amusing enough. But it’s one thing to tell it like that, and another to write the novel.’

‘That’s true,’ Hunter admitted tranquilly. (The Tunnel)

The waiting was interminable. I do not know how much time passed on the clock, that nameless and universal time of clocks that is alien to our emotions, to our destinies, to the inception and ruin of love, to a death vigil. But by my own time it was a vast and complex temporal space filled with figures and turnings back, at times a dark and tumultuous river and at times a strange calm like a motionless, eternal sea where María and I stood facing each other with ecstatic happiness; then again it was a river pulling us back as if in a dream to our childhoods, and I saw her galloping her horse wildly, her hair streaming in the wind, her eyes hallucinated, and I saw myself in my small town in the south, in my sickroom, with my face pressed to the windowglass, watching the snow, my eyes, too, hallucinated. And it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like souls in like times, finally to meet at the end of those passageways before a scene I had painted as a kind of key meant for her alone, as a kind of secret sign that I was there ahead of her and that the passageways finally had joined and the hour for our meeting had come.

The hour for our meeting had come! As if the passages had ever joined; as if we had ever really communicated. What a stupid illusion that had been! No, the passageways were still parallel, as they always had been, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see María, a silent and untouchable figure … No, even that wall was not always glass; at times it again became black stone, and then I did not know what was happening on the other side, what had become of her in those unfathomable intervals; what strange events might be taking place. I was even convinced that during those moments her face changed, that her lips curled with scorn and she was perhaps laughing with some other man, and that the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life. And in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naïvely believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world, the unbounded world of those who did not live in tunnels; and perhaps out of curiosity she had approached one of my strange windows, and had glimpsed the spectacle of my unredeemable solitude, or had been intrigued by the mute message, the key, of my painting. And then, while I kept moving through my passageway, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of people who live outside, that curious and absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety, and frivolity. And sometimes it happened that when I passed by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and anxious (why waiting for me? why silent and anxious?); but at other times she did not come in time, or she forgot that poor caged being, and then I, my face pressed against the wall of glass, watched her in the distance laughing or dancing without a care in the world or, which was worse, I did not see her at all, and imagined her in obscene places I could not reach. At those times I felt that my destiny was infinitely more lonely than I had ever imagined. (The Tunnel)

The hours I spent together with the family passed in the same atmosphere of estrangement, I sat through one part of the evening in my parents’ company as if it were a debt, silently turning the pages of a book or magazine, while on the radio monotonous anonymous voices reported inconceivable events. Out of this period a cry breaks out of me. Why have we squandered these days and years, people living under the same roof, without being able to speak to or hear each other. What sort of disease is this that makes us so dreary, that fills us with such distrust and reticence, that we can no longer look one another in the eyes. And yet this period, which at the time seemed completely dead to me, contained expressions of a secret life. At night in my room or on Sundays, pictures, drawings, poems, hidden expressions of someone unknown and renounced came to life. In the depth of this total isolation there was a quiet deliberation as a result of which each month I put aside money for the future. In the late summer of the second year the break-up began with a violent blow. I had gone into the woods to work. The buzzing of the mosquitoes was like a light drone of bells; beetles and spiders rustled in the dry foliage. I settled down at the side of a mountain lake. I fell asleep, wishing that I might never wake again. I dreamed of my way through this forest. There was the old fear of being lost in the forest, of death in the bog, among the ferns in utter stillness. On a narrow path I encountered a man in a hunter’s outfit, a hunting bag and a gun over his shoulder. He went past me and it was as if I had met him once before, a long time ago. Then I wandered along a country road. The road led me through an immeasurably wide and confused life. Again I met the huntsman, he came straight toward me and I had to step aside to let him pass. Hastily he raised his hand in greeting. I came to a lake and let myself drift into the water and out there in the brightness of blurring reflections the huntsman popped up again in front of me, I recognized him and awoke. On a holiday trip many years before as a child I had met him in a wood. There was the resinous tang of freshly felled fir trees, and I twisted between my fingers a small round wooden disk that had fallen from the beginning of a bough of a sawed-off tree trunk. The huntsman appeared and asked me my name. I told him. He said, That’s my name too. He asked me insistently where I lived. I told him the name of the town. He said, I live there too. He asked me what street. I named it and he said, I live on that street too. He asked me for the number of the house, I told him, and he said, So we live in the same house. He moved off and left me behind in unspeakable astonishment. With the warning of this dream in my mind I jumped up. I could not interpret the dream but only felt that a change had come about, that my life was governed by new forces. I saw my footsteps in the sand at the edge of the lake. For a moment the vision of these steps that had led me from my birth onward to this place filled me. In a single instant I saw the dark pattern of their track. I recognized it and forgot it again immediately and in fear at my past I ran up into the undergrowth. Birds fluttered out of the trees, the sky was blood-red from the sinking sun. And the uneasiness that had now begun could no longer be contained, after weeks and months of slow inner changes, after relapses into weakness and discouragement, I took leave of my parents. The wheels of the railway thumped away beneath me with their ceaseless hollow drumbeats and the forces of my flying forward screamed and sang in incantatory chorus. I was on my way to look for a life of my own. (Leavetaking)

The war did not open my eyes. The frustrated struggle for my vocation had put me in a state of derangement. My defeat was not the defeat of the emigrant in face of the difficulties of living in exile, but the defeat of one who does not dare to free himself from his dependence. Emigrating had taught me nothing. Emigrating was for me a confirmation of the not-belonging that I had experienced from my earliest childhood. I had never possessed a native soil. I was left untouched by the fact that the struggle that went on outside affected my existence also. I had never come to any conclusions about the revolutionary conflicts in the world. The effort I had made to find some means of expression for my existence had claimed all my awareness. This period was for me a period of waiting, a period of sleepwalking. (Leavetaking)

My sister’s death was the beginning of my attempts to free myself from my past. There were periods when I raged and stormed about, the suppressed revolt flared up and cursed the old forces that had dominated me and lashed out, but the blows fell wide of their aim and the insults reached no one’s ears. Hatred and violence were no longer of any use, the opportunities had been missed, the enemies were no longer tangible. I did not know where the enemy was concealed. I did not know what had happened to me. I was furious with myself for only in myself were there unprotected flanks to attack, only in myself was the past contained and I was the custodian of the past. Past events rose up in me like a gasping for breath, like the pressure of a straitjacket, the past would hem me around in a slow, black seepage of hours, and then suddenly recede and become nothing and allow a brief glimpse of freedom. Then I saw my parents and was full of sympathy and compassion. They had given us all that they had to give, they had given us food and clothing and a civilized home, they had given us their security and their orderliness and they could not understand why we did not thank them for it. They could never understand why we drifted away from them. In the confused knowledge of having made mistakes they bought themselves off with expensive presents, birthdays and bank holidays were the days fixed for paying out their unconscious guilt. And the presents were always wrong, however much we received we always stood there with dissatisfied faces asking for more. We never got what we wanted to have and we did not know what we wanted to have. Thus we confronted each other, children dissatisfied, parents insulted. And we were unable to explain ourselves to each other. And this obstacle I took over into myself. I took over my parents’ misunderstanding. My parents’ embarrassment became my embarrassment. Their voices live on in me. I chastised and beat myself and drove myself to forced labor. Again and again the swamp fever of inadequacy gripped me. There I was again, a failure at school, sitting locked into my room, and the warm seething life outside was unattainable. There sat my mother next to me and heard me repeat my lessons and I could get nothing right. Schwein is pig, pig comes from to pick—pick, pick, pick, and she took hold of me by the scruff of the neck and pressed my nose into the vocabulary book, pick, pick, pick, so now perhaps you’ll remember it. I remembered it. At times I could be startled out of my dream, still feeling the grip of my mother’s hand on my neck, still feel the slap of my mother’s hand on my cheek, and hear her furious voice, see her index finger next to me travel down the keys of the piano, to point out to me the correct note, the note that I was unable to find, and she did not find it either, her finger missed its mark, the dissonance still shrills in my ears. And I take my mother’s hands and put them aside and my hand strokes her hands and I see my mother sitting under the floor lamp, her hands busy with pieces of clothing, her hands active, a whole lifetime at our torn stockings, shirts, and trousers, her hands, devoted a whole lifetime to caring for us, her hands a whole lifetime holding us, cleaning us, disciplining us, and suddenly these hands lie down tired, suddenly they have served their time, and her face, lit up by the floor lamp, stared in front of her, and her mouth opened and the hard lines of her face relaxed, and the face listened for the incomprehensible, and the face’s listening is so intense that it takes on a look of nameless astonishment. This had always been a part of her, the fear of being stricken dumb, of becoming paralyzed, a fear that she resisted with all her energy, and which made her domineering and angry, and which at times overcame her with sudden fainting attacks. As if struck by a terrible blow she would sink to the ground, where she then lay, a ghastly sight, like a mountain, and as she aged these states came slowly and stiflingly, lay across her chest, encased her joints with lead, deadened the power of her voice. In her diary I found the following entry, Had a dreadful dream. Mamma took me by the hand and proudly introduced me to all the people in a large room. Then we came into a hall, where on a raised dais a bluish-red eagle sat. Everyone shut into the room was led up to it and the eagle slowly forced its talons into his mouth and ripped out his tongue. I too was led there. I woke with a loud scream. My mother once said to me, you’ve always been a stranger to me, I’ll never be able to understand you. To hear this was harder than to suffer her blows. The need to be embraced by her was not yet dead. (Leavetaking)

The coffin, the tombstone, the flowers had been chosen, the musical program to accompany the ceremony had been decided. I followed Gottfried to the funeral parlor. Margit’s body was already hidden in the coffin and the top screwed down over her. The coffin was lifted into the hearse, the hearse drove off to the graveyard with Margit shut into her coffin and with Gottfried and myself sitting next to the driver. Through the glass window of the hearse behind me I could see the white coffin laden with wreaths and bunches of flowers. The vibrations of the moving vehicle made the coffin shake, and inside the coffin my dead sister’s body shook in concert. At the funeral service we sat packed closely together in the narrow chapel pews. When the pastor’s voice had died away and the sound of the word sunshine thrust into me like a knife for the last time, and when the last prayer had evaporated into the rotting scent of the flowers and wreaths and we had all dazedly worked our way out of the pews, my mother got stuck between the hassock and the armrest. My father and Gottfried rushed to her rescue and pulled her out sideways. Outside spots of sunlight were dancing. With strong bending and stretching out of arms, with arched backs and muscle-play beneath jackets, with their tensed thighs thrust forward the black-coated men lowered the white coffin down on ropes into the black hole in the earth. The pastor filled a shovel with sand, it was a little green shovel like the one we had to play with in the sandpit. My mother stood hidden behind a thick black veil supported by my father and Gottfried. From the ranks of the mourners a girl of Margit’s age stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied to her and withdrew into the background, whereupon a second girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied to her and withdrew into the background, whereupon a third girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied and withdrew, whereupon a fourth girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied and withdrew, whereupon a fifth and a sixth girl and more girls and even more girls stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied before her and withdrew, until all the girls from Margit’s class had come forward, shaken hands with my mother, curtsied to her and returned again to their places. On the way back we sat squashed together in one car. I crouched on the floor, Irene half lay over me, my younger brother almost disappeared between my father and my mother, my father’s knees dug into my chest and Gottfried’s knees were thrust into my back. My face was streaming with sweat. Outside the summery streets flew past and there someone stood in the dust, looking after us. This was the beginning of the break-up of our family. (Leavetaking)

In silence Gottfried looked at me and I knew that it was at an end. We went through the warm, dark streets. In the sickroom my parents were sitting hand in hand at the death bed. In the background the Catholic nurse moved about like a large black bird. A candle was burning on the bedside table. Trembling, I stood in front of the immovable, the extinguished. I felt as if I were floating a few inches above the floor. The bandages and the wire frame had been removed from the grazed face. It was a yellowed, squashed, completely strange face. The eyes had sunk deep into their hollows. The dead hands were folded over her chest, they were like the tapering, carved hands of a Gothic sculpture. A black crucifix, huge and incongruous, lay beneath the stiffened fingers. My parents too were like statues submerged in the half dark. My mother lay back completely exhausted in the open car as we slowly drove home. Home. There was no home any longer. The journey into the unknown had begun. Like survivors of a shipwreck in a boat we drove through the gently surging ocean of the city. (Leavetaking)

This period of my existence, full of bottled-up disaster, seems to lie endlessly far back, further back than the earliest days of childhood. I look at that time as if from another life, a stranger before the I from which I have emerged. I see the endless columns, hear the monotonous march beat, the clatter of nailed boots, the jingling of daggers on their belts. Again and again came the flags and the standards, the extinguished anonymous faces, the mouths opened in song, again and again came the drums, and above the city a vast fire seemed to glower. Ceaselessly the march beat throbbed, like a pulse in the city’s intestines, something was being charged and gained ground, seized me, seized all of us, a force that had throbbed for as long as I could remember, and even earlier, at the time of my birth and of the mythical years when the bombardments lay dully muffled along the horizons, when the wounded bled to death in field hospitals. I too was trapped in a merciless development, and even if I was one of those who fled, I too was melted down into this ceaseless marching, it was as if I had stood here from the beginning at the curb and had seen the mass pass by, linked together and grim, my brothers were with them, armed with knotty sticks, with a look of entrancement on their faces, with steel helmets and the emblems of a new and terrible crusade. Even if, in secret, I sought after other truths, the compulsiveness of a feeling of solidarity with this marching got hold of me, the compulsiveness of the crazy idea of a common destiny. The voices of dream were suppressed by the shouted commands of reality. My anxious protests, my tiny attempts at rebellion were nipped in the bud. I could not recognize my position. Recognition only comes later when it’s all over. Later I could understand and assess, but at the time I was blindly drawn along by the current. At that time I thought only of my poetry, my painting, my music. Had I not suddenly been faced with a drastic change I would have been borne along in the torrent of marching columns, into my destruction. This sudden change took place after hearing one of the speeches which in those days spewed out of the loudspeakers and which before my realization possessed an inconceivable power over me, but which afterward seemed like an incoherent screaming from hell. Next to me sat Gottfried, my half brother, and we listened to the hoarse screaming, we were overcome by this screaming, felt only that we were overpowered, we did not grasp its content, indeed there was no content, only emptiness of unprecedented dimension, emptiness filled with screaming. So overpowering was this emptiness that we completely lost ourselves in it, it was as if we were hearing God speaking in oracles. And when the hurricane of jubilant summons to death and self-sacrifice, which at the time seemed like so much cheering for a gold-gleaming future, had run its course, Gottfried said, What a pity you can’t be with us. I felt neither surprise nor fear at these words. And when Gottfried then explained that my father was a Jew, this came to me like the confirmation of something I had long suspected. Disclaimed awareness came to life in me, I began to understand my past, I thought of the gang of persecutors who had jeered at me in the streets and had thrown stones in instinctive obedience to a tradition of persecution of those who were different and had inherited contempt for certain facial features and essential characteristics. I thought of Friederle, who was one day to become a model of the heroic defender of the Fatherland, and at once I was entirely on the side of the underdog and the outcast, though I still did not understand that this was my salvation. I still only grasped my lostness, my uprootedness, I was still far from taking my fate into my own hands, and making the fact of my not belonging a source of power for a new independence. (Leavetaking)

My whole life was a fumbling and searching. I penetrated into music, into the architecture of fugues, into the tortuous labyrinths of symphonies, into the hard structure of jazz, into Oriental chimes, nothing was unfamiliar to me. I understood the wailing of Chinese flutes and the solemnity of medieval songs, I was filled to bursting with music, when I moved it was as if a veil of sound jingled within me, my steps evoked throbbing drumbeats, interior instruments played continuously. At home I lived like someone besieged. My room was like a fortress. I had filled its walls with pictures of masks and demons, and with my own drawings whose shrieking figures frightened off the intruder. I felt the explosive force within me and knew that I had to devote my life to the expression of this explosive force, but at home my attempts were regarded as aberrations of which one did not have to take serious account. (Leavetaking)

There are scenes in a book of which I hardly know the title or author, scenes that are as unforgettable to me as scenes from The Red and the Black, Hunger, Pan, and The Idiot. There is a river in a jungle and from one bough that stretches far out over the river hangs an Indian, ready to throw himself onto the approaching canoe, a moment of extreme suspense. There is a room in a house in a provincial town, I do not know what happened in this room, nor who is in this room, there is only this room with a cupboard, a bed, and closed shutters, perhaps it is Sunday and everyone in the house is sleeping, and someone is eavesdropping here in this muffled room and is planning something and is full of expectation. There is the island on which the shipwrecked of the Pacific have landed, their reed huts rise, clearly outlined between the tall, slender palm trunks. My thought of flight to far-off lands was concentrated in this picture. The curious thing was that, considering the out-of-the-way places and sights, something like recognition arose in me, nothing was so surprising and exotic that it did not find an understanding echo somewhere within me. My reading was not selective. I was attracted or repelled according to hidden laws. Countless books I merely skimmed through, I had scarcely thumbed through their pages before I knew that they were nothing for me, many that were later to be of value to me passed meaningless through my hand. Others captivated me with a single word. The Possessed, The Insulted and Injured, The House of the Dead, The Devil’s Elixir, Black Flags, Inferno—these were the titles that suddenly flared up in front of me and lit up something within me. There was something magical about these titles, they went straight to my heart. Reading them, the fumbling and searching that I had experienced in front of the door with the red and blue panes and upstairs in the loft matured. (Leavetaking)

These long stony passages, in which rows of animal-smelling raincoats hung, while from within behind the doors I heard the litany of the school children from which occasionally one single voice would ring out high and clear, these stony passages, paced by the all-seeing Headmaster under whose annihilating gaze I sank onto my knees, these stony passages, among the flagstones throughout which fossils were interspersed, millions of years old, shaped like comets. From here I was supposed to go on into the corridors of office blocks, to the filing cabinets, the clatter of typewriters, into the rooms where the business affairs of this world were handled. But I had found other things in my search for nourishment for my expanding needs, things that gave me answers to my questions, words of poetry that suddenly stilled my restlessness, pictures that took me up into them, music that touched an answering chord within me. In books I encountered the life that school had kept hidden from me. In books I was shown another reality of life than that into which my parents and teachers wanted to force me. The voices of books demanded my collaboration, the voices of books demanded that I open myself up and reflect upon myself. I hunted through my parents’ library. I was forbidden to read these books, so I had to remove them secretly and carefully even out the gaps, my reading took place at night under the blankets by flashlight, or on the toilet seat, or camouflaged behind schoolbooks. The chaos within me of half-baked longings, of romantic extravagances, of terrors and wild dreams of adventure, was reflected back at me in countless mirrors, I preferred the seamy, the suggestive, the lurid, I sought after sexual descriptions, devoured the stories of courtesans and clairvoyants, of vampires, criminals, and libertines, and like a medium I found my way to the seducers and fantasts and listened raptly to them in my inner confusion and melancholy. But the more I became aware of myself, and the less I shrank back from myself, the stronger became my desire for the voice of the book to speak to me in the plainest terms and conceal nothing from me. Soon I could tell the character of the narration from the first words of a book. I wanted it to excite me straightaway, I wanted to feel its glow and inner conviction at once. Long descriptive passages made me impatient. I wanted to be drawn into the middle of things right from the very start, and to know at once what it was about. I read poems only rarely, for here everything was too highly wrought, too much subject to a formal framework. I distrusted well-rounded and perfected things and I found it tiresome to search for the hidden meaning beneath all the artistry and polish. Often the well-planned work of art left me cold while the raw and only half formed caught hold of me. My logical thinking was underdeveloped. When I tried to counteract this lack by reading scientific or philosophic works, the letters blurred before my eyes, I could not piece them together into living words, I felt no breath in them. What I retained belonged less to the realm of general knowledge than to that of sensations, my knowledge was composed of picturelike experiences, of memories of sounds, voices, noises, movements, gestures, rhythms, of what I had fingered or sniffed, of glimpses into rooms, streets, courtyards, gardens, harbors, workshops, of vibrations in the air, of the play of light and shadow, of the movements of eyes, mouths, and hands. I learned that beneath logic there was another form of consistency, the consistency of inexplicable impulses; here I discovered my own nature, here in what was apparently unorganized, in a world that did not obey the laws of the external order. My thinking allowed no particular goal, but drove me from one to the other, tolerated no superimposed guidelines, often threw me into pitfalls and abysses from which no explanations but only secret, unexpectedly discovered paths could guide me out again. In the course of years the dialogue I sought for in books, in ever more decisive and immediate form, turned ever more deeply toward the personal sphere, and thus it became an ever rarer experience, for only a few could express some part of the things that touched the roots of being. (Leavetaking)

 To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille. (Crowds and Power)

He remembered that in those days he hadn’t yet recovered his voice. He also remembered that in those days he had ceaselessly read and reread Ansky’s notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky. And he accepted the guilt and happiness and some nights he even weighed them against each other and the net result of his unorthodox reckoning was happiness, but a different kind of happiness, a heartrending happiness that for Reiter wasn’t happiness but simply Reiter. (2666)

He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people’s souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules (in uprisings that could be bloody, but didn’t therefore cease to be semblance), it set new rules.

National Socialism was the ultimate realm of semblance. As a general rule, he reflected, love was also semblance. My love for Lotte isn’t semblance. Lotte is my sister and she’s little and she thinks I’m a giant. But love, ordinary love, the love of a man and a woman, with breakfasts and dinners, with jealousy and money and sadness, is playacting, or semblance. Youth is the semblance of strength, love is the semblance of peace. Neither youth nor strength nor love nor peace can be granted to me, he said to himself with a sigh, nor can I accept such a gift. Only Ansky’s wandering isn’t semblance, he thought, only Ansky at fourteen isn’t semblance. Ansky lived his whole life in rabid immaturity because the revolution, the one true revolution, is also immature. (2666)