I once worked for a couple of months in Marseilles. It was a special time for me, I owe a lot to it. Chance brought me in touch with a young painter, who remained my friend till his death. He had lung disease and had just come back from Tunis. We spent a lot of time together and, because the end of my job coincided with his return to Paris, we were able to arrange a few days in Avignon. They were unforgettable. Partly because of the town itself, its buildings and the area around it, and also because my friend, during these days of uninterrupted and, somehow, heightened intimacy, opened up to me about many matters, especially about his inner life, with an eloquence that seems to be at times characteristic of people suffering from that disease. Everything he said had a strange prophetic power; through everything that burst out in often almost breathless talks, one saw, as it were, the bottom of the river, the stones on the bottom … I mean by that, more than something that is just ours: Nature itself, its oldest and hardest essence, which we nevertheless touch at so many places and which we probably depend upon at our most urgent moments, since its downward slope determines our inclination. In addition, there was an unexpected and happy love affair, his heart was in an uncommon state of exaltation, for days on end, and thus the sparkling fountain of his life shot up to a considerable height. To view an extraordinary town and a more than pleasing landscape in the company of someone who finds himself in such a situation is a rare privilege; and that is why those tender and at the same time passionate spring days seem to me, when I think back, the only holidays that I have ever known. The time was so ridiculously short, for anyone else it would barely have been enough to gather a few impressions,—to me, unaccustomed as I am to spending free days, it seemed vast. Actually, it seems almost wrong to call it time, since it was rather a new condition of freedom, quite feelably a space, a being-surrounded by the Open, not a passing. I caught up with childhood then, if one may put it that way, and with a part of early youth, all of which I had never had time to achieve in myself; I looked, I learned, I understood—, and these days also gave rise to the discovery that saying “God” is so easy, so genuine, so—as my friend would have expressed it—so unproblematically simple. How could this house, which the popes erected for themselves there, not have seemed to me powerful? I had the impression that it couldn’t contain any inner space at all, that it must be built, through and through, out of solid blocks, as if the exiles’ only purpose was to pile up the weight of the papacy with such abundance that it would tip history’s scales. And in reality this ecclesiastical palace towers up over an antique torso of a Heracles, which was walled into the rocky foundations—“hasn’t it,” said Pierre, “grown up colossally as if out of this seed?”—That this is Christianity, in one of its transformations, would be much more understandable to me than to recognize its strength and its taste in the constantly weaker infusion of that herb tea which people say was prepared from its first, tenderest leaves.
But even the cathedrals aren’t the bodies of that spirit which we are now supposed to believe is the authentically Christian one. I could imagine that beneath some of them the fallen statue of a Greek goddess is resting; so much blossoming, so much reality sprang up in them, even if, as in a fear that arose during their time, they struggled away from that hidden body up into the heavens, which the sound of their huge bells was appointed to keep continually open.
After my return from Avignon I went to church quite often, in the evening and on Sunday,—at first alone … and later …
I am in love with a woman, hardly older than a child, who works at home, so that she is often in a bad situation when there isn’t much work. She is skilled, it would be easy for her to find a job in a factory, but she’s afraid of the boss. Her idea of freedom is boundless. It won’t surprise you that she perceives God too as a kind of boss, actually as the “head boss,” as she said to me, laughing, but with such terror in her eyes. It was a long time before she decided to accompany me one evening to St. Eustache, where I liked to go because of the music of the May services. Once we went together as far as Maux and looked at the tombstones in the church there. Gradually she noticed that God leaves you alone in the churches, that he demands nothing; you might think that he wasn’t there at all,—and yet, Marthe thought, the moment you’re about to say that he isn’t in the church, something holds you back. Perhaps only what people themselves have for so many centuries brought into this high, oddly strengthened air. And perhaps it is only that the vibration of the powerful and sweet music can never completely get outside, it must have long since penetrated into the stones, and they must be remarkably affected stones, these pillars and vaults, and even though a stone is hard and almost inaccessible, in the end it is deeply moved by continual singing and these assaults from the organ, these onslaughts, these storms of song, every Sunday, these hurricanes of the great holidays. A lull. That’s what, strictly speaking, reigns in the old churches. I said it to Marthe. A lull. We listened, she understood it immediately, she has a wonderfully prepared sensibility. After that, we sometimes entered when we heard singing, and stood there, close to each other. It was the most beautiful when we had a stained-glass window in front of us, one of those old picture windows, with many partitions, each one completely filled with shapes, huge people and small towers and all kinds of events. Nothing was too strange for them, you see castles and battles and a hunt, and the beautiful white stag appears again and again in the hot red and in the burning blue. I was once given a very old wine to drink. That’s what it’s like for your eyes, this window, only that the wine was just dark red in my mouth,—but this is the same in blue also and in violet and in green. There is really everything in the old churches, no shrinking from anything, as there is in the newer ones, where only the “good” examples appear. Here you see also what is bad and evil and horrible; what is deformed and suffering, what is ugly, what is unjust—and you could say that all this is somehow loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who doesn’t exist, and the devil, who doesn’t exist; and the human being, who does exist, stands between them, and (I can’t help saying it) their unreality makes him more real to me. What I feel when I hear the expression “a human being,” I can figure it out better in there than on the street among people who have absolutely nothing recognizable about them. But that is hard to say. And what I want to say now is even harder to express. Which is that in regard to the boss, the power, (this too became clear to me in there, very slowly, when we stood completely in the music), there is just one way of struggling against it: to go further than it does itself. What I mean is this: we should strive to see in every power that claims a right over us: all power, the whole of power, power universally, the power of God. We should say to ourselves, there is just one, and understand the weak, the false, the defective kind as if it were the kind that rightfully grips us. Wouldn’t it become harmless in this way? If in every power, even in the evil and malignant, we always saw power itself, I mean that which ultimately has the right to be powerful, wouldn’t we then overcome, intact so to speak, even the unrightful and arbitrary? Isn’t this exactly how we stand in relation to all the unknown great forces? We don’t experience any of them in their purity. We accept each with its faults, which perhaps are adapted to our own faults.—But with all scholars, discoverers, inventors, hasn’t the awareness that they are dealing with great forces led them suddenly to the greatest? I am young, and there is a lot of protest in me; I can’t give any assurance that I act wisely every time impatience and disgust get the better of me,—but in my depths I know that submission leads further than rebellion; it shames that which is usurpation, and it contributes indescribably to the glorification of the rightful power. The rebel pulls himself out from the attraction of one center of power, and he may perhaps succeed in escaping from its field; but beyond it he finds himself in the void and has to look around for another gravitational force to draw him in. And this one is generally even less legitimate than the first. Why not then see in the power we live in, the greatest power of all, unperturbed by
its weaknesses and fluctuations? Somewhere the arbitrary will of itself collide against the law, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself. Of course, that is one of those long and slow processes which are in such complete contradiction with the strange upheavals of our time. But alongside the quickest movements there will always be slow ones, even ones that are of such extreme slowness that we can’t in the least perceive their advance. But humanity is there, isn’t it, to wait for what stretches out beyond the individual.—From its point of view, the slowest is often the quickest, that is to say, it turns out that we called it slow only because it could not be measured.
Now there is, it seems to me, something absolutely immeasurable, which humans are never tired of misappropriating with their criteria, measurements, and institutions. And here, in the love which, with an unbearable mixture of contempt, desire, and curiosity, they call “sensual love,” here we find the worst consequences of that devaluation which Christianity felt obliged to assign to the earthly. Here everything is distortion and repression, even though we come forth from this deepest of events and ourselves possess again in it the center of our delights. I find it, if I may say so, more and more incomprehensible that a doctrine which puts us in the wrong there, where all creation enjoys its most blissful right—that such a doctrine is able, if not anywhere to establish itself as true, nevertheless to hold its ground so permanently over such a wide area.
I think, here again, of the animated conversations I had with my deceased friend, that time, in the meadows of the Barthelasse Island in the spring and later. Even the night before his death (he died the following afternoon a little after five o’clock), he opened for me such pure vistas into a realm of the blindest suffering that my life seemed to begin anew in a thousand places, and when I tried to answer, I had no control over my voice. I didn’t know that there are tears of joy. I cried my first ones, like a beginner, into the hands of this young man who in a few hours would be dead, and felt how the tide of life in Pierre was once again rising and overflowing, as these hot teardrops were added to it. Am I being excessive? I’m speaking of a too-much.
Why, I ask you, Monsieur V., when people want to help us, we who are so often helpless, why do they leave us in the lurch, there at the root of all experience? Anyone who would stand by us there could be confident that we would want nothing further of him. For the help he gave us would grow by itself with our life and would become greater and stronger together with it. And would never end. Why aren’t we placed into our most mysterious part? Why must we sneak around it, and finally enter into like burglars and thieves, into our own beautiful sex, where we get lost and bang into things and stumble, and finally, like criminals caught in the act, rush out again into the twilight of Christianity. Why, even if, because of the inner tension of the soul, guilt or sin had to be invented, why didn’t they fasten it to some other part of our body, why did they let it fall there, and wait till, as it dissolved, it poisoned and muddied our pure source? Why have they made our sex homeless, instead of transferring there the festival of our competence?
All right, I’ll admit that it shouldn’t belong to us, we who are incapable of assuming and administering such inexhaustible bliss. But why don’t we belong to God starting from this place?
A priest would point out to me that there is marriage, although he would not be unaware of the state this institution is in. Nor does it help to move the will-to-propagation into the sunlight of grace—, my sex is not just turned toward the future, it is the mystery of my own life—, and it’s only because, as it seems, it may not occupy the central place there that so many people have pushed it out to their edge and thereby lost their equilibrium. What good is all this? The terrible untruth and uncertainty of our time has its foundation in our not acknowledging the happiness of sex, in this strangely mistaken guiltiness, which continually increases, and cuts us off from all the rest of Nature, even from the child, although, as I learned during that unforgettable night, his, the child’s, innocence doesn’t at all consist in the fact that he, so to speak, doesn’t know sex,—“on the contrary,” said Pierre almost voicelessly, “that inconceivable happiness which, for us, awakens in one place deep within the fruitflesh of a closed embrace is still namelessly scattered everywhere in his whole body.” To describe the peculiar situation of our sensuality, we would have to say: Once we were children everywhere, now we are children just in one place.—But if there were only one single person among us for whom this was certain and who was capable of showing the proof for it, why do we let it happen that one generation after the other wakes up under the rubble of Christian prejudices and moves in a trance through the darkness, in such a narrow space between mere refusals!?
Monsieur V.: I write and write. A whole night almost has gone by on this. I have to come to an end.—Have I said that I have a job in a factory? I work in the office, sometimes I’m also at a machine. Before, I was once able for a short time to take some courses. Well, I just want to say how I feel. You see, I want to be usable to God just the way I am. What I do here, my work, I want to keep doing it toward him, without having my stream interrupted, if I can express it like that, not even in Christ, who was once the water for many. The machine, for example—I can’t explain it to him, he doesn’t grasp it. I know you won’t laugh if I say this so simply, it’s the best way. God, though: I have a feeling I can bring it to him, my machine and its firstborn, or even my whole work, it enters him without any trouble. Just as it was easy once for the shepherds to bring the gods of their life a lamb or a vegetable-basket or the most beautiful bunch of grapes.
You see, Monsieur V., I’ve been able to write this long letter without using the word faith even once. For that seems to me a complicated and difficult business, and none of mine. I don’t want to let myself be made bad for Christ’s sake, but good for God. I don’t want to be considered a priori as a sinner, perhaps I’m not. I have such pure mornings! I could talk with God, I don’t need anyone to help me compose letters to him.
I know your poems only from that reading the other night, I own just a few books, which mostly have to do with my job. A few of them, it’s true, are about art, and history books, just what I could get.—But your poems, you’ll have to accept this, have caused this commotion in me. My friend once said, “Give us teachers who praise the earthly for us.” You are one of these.
Notes
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910; begun in Rome, February 8, 1904; written mostly during 1908/1909; finished in Leipzig, January 27, 1910)
The speaker in these passages is Malte Laurids Brigge, a twenty-eight-year-old Danish writer living in Paris.
[The Bird-feeders]
this page, painted figurehead:
The so-called galleon-figures: carved and painted statues from the bow of a ship. The sailors in Denmark sometimes set up these wooden statues, which have survived from old sailing-ships, in their gardens, where they look quite strange.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
[Ibsen]
this page, and now you were among the alembics:
where the most secret chemistry of life takes place, its transformations and precipitations.
(Ibid.)
this page, You couldn’t wait:
Life, our present life, is hardly capable of being presented on stage, since it has wholly withdrawn into the invisible, the inner, communicating itself to us only through “august rumors.” The dramatist, however, couldn’t wait for it to become showable; he had to inflict violence upon it, this not yet producible life; and for that reason too his work, like a wand too strongly bent back, sprang from his hands and was as though it had never been done.
(Ibid.)
this page, go away from the window:
Ibsen spent his last days beside his window, observing with curiosity the people who passed by and in a way confusing these real people with the characters he might have created.
(Ibid.)
[Costumes]
this page
, Admiral Juel: Niels Juel (1629–1697). In July 1677, having overwhelmingly defeated the Swedish fleet in the Battle of Køge Bay, one of the greatest sea victories in Danish history, he was acclaimed as a national hero and raised to the highest naval rank.
this page, bautta (pronounced ba-oot’-ta): Venetian mask, covering the lower part of the face.
this page, dominos: Venetian cloaks, worn chiefly at masquerades.
this page, Pierrot: Character in French pantomime.
[The Temptation of the Saint]
this page, those strange pictures: The reference is to the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder or of Hieronymus Bosch.