Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.
Agnes is stretched out on her back, and images keep passing through her head: that strange, kindly man is visiting them again, the one who knows all about them and yet has not heard of the Eiffel Tower. She
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would give anything to be able to talk with him in private, but he deliberately chose a time when both of them were at home. In vain Agnes tries to think of a ruse to get Paul out of the house. The three of them are sitting around a low table with three cups of coffee and Paul is trying to entertain the visitor. Agnes is only waiting for the guest to start speaking about his reason for coming. Actually, she knows the reason. But only she knows, Paul doesn't. At last the visitor interrupts Paul's conversation and comes to the point: "You, I believe, have guessed where I'm from."
"Yes," says Agnes. She knows that the guest has come from another, distant planet, one with an important status in the universe. And she quickly adds, with a shy smile, "Is life better over there?"
The visitor only shrugs: "Agnes, surely you know where you are living."
Agnes says, "Perhaps death must exist. But was there no other way to arrange things? Is it really necessary for a person to leave a body behind, a body that must be buried in the ground or thrown into a fire? It's all so horrible!"
"That's well known all over, that Earth is horrible," says the visitor. "And another thing," says Agnes. "Perhaps you'll consider this question silly. Those who live in your place, do they have faces?" "No. Faces exist nowhere else but here."
"So then those who live over there, how do they differ from one another?"
"They're all their own creations. Everybody, so to speak, thinks himself up. But it's hard to talk about it. You cannot grasp it. You will, some day. I came to tell you that in the next life you won't return to Earth."
Of course, Agnes knew in advance what the visitor would say to
them, and she is hardly surprised. But Paul is amazed. He looks at the
visitor, looks at Agnes, and she has no choice but to say, "And Paul?"
"Paul won't stay here either," says the visitor. "I've come to tell you
that. We always tell people we have selected. I only want to ask you one
question: do you want to stay together in your next life, or never meet
again?"
Agnes knew the question was coming. That was the reason she
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wanted to be alone with the visitor. She knew that in Paul's presence she would be incapable of saying "I no longer want to be with him." She could not say it in front of him nor he in front of her, even though it is probable that he too would prefer to try living the next life differently, without Agnes. Yet saying aloud to each other's face "We don't want to remain together in the next life" would amount to saying "No love ever existed between us and no love exists between us now." And that's precisely what is so impossible to say aloud, for their entire life together (already over twenty years of life together) has been based on the illusion of love, an illusion that both of them have been anxiously guarding and nurturing. And so whenever she imagined this scene, she knew that when it came to the visitor's question she would capitulate and declare against her wishes, against her desire, "Yes. Of course. I want us to be together in the next life."
But today for the first time she was certain that even in Paul's presence she would find the courage to say what she wanted, what she really wanted, in the depth of her soul; she was certain that she would find this courage even at the price of ruining everything between them. Next to her she heard the sound of loud breathing. Paul had really fallen asleep. As if she were putting the same reel of film back in the projector, she ran through the whole scene once again: she is speaking to the visitor, Paul is watching them with astonishment, and the guest is saying, "In your next life, do you want to stay together or never meet again?"
(It is strange: even though he has all the necessary information about them, terrestrial psychology is incomprehensible to him, the concept of love unfamiliar, so he cannot guess what a difficult situation he would create by his sincere, practical, and well-intended question.)
Agnes gathers all her inner strength and answers in a firm voice: "We prefer never to meet again."
These words are like the click of a door shutting on the illusion of love.
PART TWO
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I
THE thirteenth of September, 1811. It is the third week the young newlywed Bettina nee Brentano has been staying with her husband, the poet Achim von Arnim, at Goethe's in Weimar. Bettina is twenty-six, Arnim thirty, Goethe's wife, Christiane, forty-nine; Goethe is sixty-two and no longer has a single tooth in his head. Arnim loves his young wife, Christiane loves her old gentleman, and Bettina, even after her marriage, continues her flirtation with Goethe. This particular morning Goethe has stayed at home and Christiane accompanies the young couple to an art exhibition (arranged by a family friend, Councillor Mayer) containing some paintings Goethe had praised. Madame Christiane does not understand art, but she remembers what Goethe said about the paintings and she can comfortably pass off his opinions as her own. Arnim hears Christiane's authoritative voice and notices the glasses on Bettina's nose. Every time Bettina, rabbitlike, wrinkles up her nose, those glasses bob up and down. Arnim knows the signs: Bettina is irritated to the point of fury. As if sensing an approaching storm, he slips discreetly into the next room.
The moment he's gone, Bettina interrupts Christiane: no, she doesn't agree at all! Those pictures are really impossible!
Christiane, too, is irritated, for two reasons: first of all, this young patrician, in spite of being married and pregnant, dares to flirt with her husband, and on top of that she contradicts his opinions. What in the world does she want? To lead the parade of Goethe's fans and at the same time to lead the parade of his detractors? Christiane is incensed by each of these ideas, but even more by the fact that one logically cancels out the other. So she announces in a very loud voice that it is impossible to consider such outstanding paintings impossible.
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Whereupon Bettina reacts: it is not only possible to declare them impossible, but it is necessary to add that the pictures are ridiculous! yes, they are ridiculous, and she brings up a series of arguments to support this contention.
Christiane listens and finds that she doesn't in the least understand what the young woman is trying to tell her. The more excited Bettina gets, the more she uses words she has learned from young university graduates of her acquaintance, and Christiane knows she is using them precisely because Christiane will not understand them. She is watching Bettina's glasses bobbing up and down on her nose, and it seems to her that her unintelligible language and her glasses are one and the same. Indeed, it is remarkable that Bettina is wearing glasses at all! After all, everyone knows that Goethe has condemned the wearing of glasses in public as a breach of good taste and an eccentricity! So if Bettina, in spite of that, wears glasses in Weimar it is because she wants to show brazenly and defiantly, that she is part of the young generation, pre cisely the one that is distinguished by Romanticism and glasses. And we know what people are trying to say by their proud and ostentatious identification with the younger generation: that they will still be alive when their elders (in Bettina's case, Christiane and Goethe) have long been ludicrously pushing up daisies.
Bettina keeps on talking; she is getting more and more excited, and Christiane's hand suddenly flies out in the direction of her face. At the last moment she realizes that it isn't proper to slap a guest. She pulls back so her hand merely skims Bettina's forehead. Bettina's glasses fall to the ground and shatter. Throughout the gallery people turn and stare in embarrassment; poor Arnim rushes in from the next room, and because he can't think of anything better, he squats down and starts to collect the pieces, as if he wanted to glue them
back together.
Everyone waits tensely for hours to hear Goethe's verdict. Whose side will he take, once he hears the whole story?
Goethe takes Christiane's side and forbids the young couple to enter his house ever again.
When a wineglass breaks, it signifies good luck. When a mirror breaks, you can expect seven years of misfortune. And when a pair of
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glasses breaks? That means war. Bettina declares in all the salons of Weimar: 'That fat sausage went crazy and bit me!" The remark passes from mouth to mouth, and Weimar is bursting with laughter. That immortal remark, that immortal laughter, still resounds down to our own time.
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2
Immortality. Goethe was not afraid of the word. In his book From My Life, with its famous subtitle, Poetry and Truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, he writes about the curtain in the new Dresden theater that he eagerly scrutinized when he first saw it at the age of nineteen. In the background it showed (I am quoting Goethe) Der Tempel des Ruhmes, the Temple of Fame, surrounded by the great dramatists of all time. In the center, without paying them any attention, "a man in a light cloak was striding directly toward the Temple; he was shown from the back, and there was nothing remarkable about him. It was supposed to be Shakespeare; without predecessors, unconcerned about paragons of the past, he walked alone straight toward immortality."
Of course, the immortality that Goethe talks about has nothing in common with religious faith in an immortal soul. What is involved is the different, quite earthly immortality of those who after their death remain in the memory of posterity. Everyone can achieve immortality to a smaller or greater degree, of shorter or longer duration, and this idea already starts occupying people's minds in early youth. They used to say about the mayor of a certain Moravian village, which I often visited on boyhood outings, that he had an open coffin at home and that in happy moments when he felt well satisfied with himself, he would lie down in it and visualize his funeral. These were the most beautiful moments of his life, these reveries in the coffin: he dwelt on; his immortality.
Naturally, when it comes to immortality people are not equal. We have to distinguish between so-called minor immortality, the memory of a person in the minds of those who knew him (the kind of immortality the village mayor longed for), and great immortality, which means the
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memory of a person in the minds of people who never knew him personally. There are certain paths in life that from the very beginning place a person face to face with such great immortality, uncertain, it is true, even improbable, yet undeniably possible: they are the paths of artists and statesmen.
Of all the European statesmen of our time, the one who has most occupied himself with the thought of immortality has probably been Francois Mitterrand. I remember the unforgettable ceremony that followed his election as President in 1981. The square in front of the Pantheon was filled with an enthusiastic crowd, and he was withdrawing from it: he was walking alone up the broad stairway (exactly as Shakespeare walked to the Temple of Fame on the curtain described by Goethe), holding the stems of three roses. Then he disappeared from the people's sight and remained alone among the tombs of sixty-four illustrious corpses, followed in his thoughtful solitude only by the eyes of the camera, the film crew, and several million Frenchmen, watching their television screens from which thundered Beethoven's Ninth. He placed the roses one by one on three chosen tombs. He was like a surveyor planting the three roses like three markers into the immense building site of eternity, to stake out a triangle in the center of which was to be erected the palace of his immortality.
Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who was President before him, invited a sanitation worker to breakfast in the Elysee Palace. That was the gesture of a sentimental bourgeois who longed for the love of common people and wanted them to believe that he was one of them. Mitterrand was not so naive as to want to resemble sanitation workers (no president can fulfill such a dream!); he wanted to resemble the dead, which was much wiser, for death and immortality are an indissoluble pair of lovers, and the person whose face merges in our mind with the faces of the dead is already immortal while still alive.
I was always fond of the American president Jimmy Carter, but I felt something approaching real love when I saw him on the television screen, jogging with a group of fellow workers, trainers, and bodyguards; his forehead suddenly began to sweat, his face became distorted with pain, fellow joggers rushed to his side clutching and
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supporting him: it was a minor heart attack. Jogging was supposed to be an occasion for showing the nation the President's eternal youth. That's why cameramen had been invited, and it was not their fault that instead of an athlete bursting with health they had to show an ageing man with bad luck.
A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a mouth contorted into a pathetic grimace—the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing that will remain as a parabola of his entire life. He will enter a kind of immortality that we may call ridiculous. Tycho Brahe was a great astronomer, but all we remember about him today is that in the course of a festive dinner at the emperor's court he was ashamed to go to the lavatory, so his bladder burst and he departed among the ridiculous immortals as a martyr to shame and urine. He departed among them just like Christianc Goethe, turned forever into a crazy sausage that bites. No novelist is dearer to me than Robert Musil. He died one morning while lifting weights. When I lift them myself, I keep anxiously checking my pulse and I am afraid of dropping dead, for to die with a weight in my hand like my revered author would make me an epigone so unbelievable, frenetic, and fanatical as immediately to assure me of ridiculous immortality.
3
Let us imagine that in the time of Emperor Rudolf, cameras (such as those that immortalized Jimmy Carter) already existed and that they filmed the feast at the emperor's court during which Tycho Brahe writhed in his chair, turned pale, crossed and uncrossed his legs, and stared at the ceiling with glazed eyes. If on top of everything he had been aware that he was being watched by several million spectators, his torments would have been even greater and the laughter echoing in the corridors of his immortality would sound even louder. People would surely demand that the film about the famous astronomer who was ashamed to urinate be broadcast every New Year's Eve, when everybody feels like laughing and there is seldom anything to laugh about.
This notion arouses in me a question: has the character of immortality changed in the epoch of cameras? I can answer that without hesitation: essentially, no; for the photographic lens had existed long before it was invented; it existed as its own nonmaterialized essence. Even when no lens was aimed at them, people already behaved as if they were being photographed. No crowd of photographers ever scampered around Goethe, but the shadows of photographers projecting from the depths of the future did scamper around him. This happened, for example, in the course of his famous audience with Napoleon. The Emperor, then at the peak of his career, gathered in a conference at Erfurt all the European rulers who were to endorse the division of power between himself and the Emperor of the Russians.
Napoleon was a true Frenchman in that he was not satisfied with sending hundreds of thousands to their death but wanted in addition to be admired by writers. He asked his cultural adviser to name the most significant intellectual figures of contemporary Germany, and he
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learned that the foremost was a certain Mr. Goethe. Goethe! Napoleon tapped his forehead. The author of The Sorrows of Young Werther! During his Egyptian campaign he found out that all his officers were immersed in that book. Because he knew the book himself, he got terribly angry. He berated the officers for reading such sentimental drivel and forbade them ever to lay their hands on another novel. Any novel! Let them read history books, that's far more useful! On the present occasion, however, satisfied that he knew who Goethe was, he decided to invite him. Inde
ed, he was quite happy to do so, because his adviser informed him that Goethe was famous above all as an author of plays. In contrast to novels, Napoleon appreciated the theater. It reminded him of battles. And because he himself was one of the greatest authors of battles as well as their unsurpassed director, he was convinced in his heart of hearts that he was also the greatest tragic poet of all time, greater than Sophocles, greater than Shakespeare.
The cultural adviser was a competent man, yet he often got things mixed up. True, Goethe was greatly interested in the theater, but his fame had less to do with that. In the mind of Napoleon's adviser, Goethe had apparently merged with Friedrich Schiller. Since Schiller was closely associated with Goethe, it was after all not too big a mistake to unite the two friends into one poet; it may even be possible that the adviser had acted quite deliberately, led by the laudable didactic intention of synthesizing German classicism for Napoleon's benefit into the single figure of Friedrich Johann Goethschill.
When Goethe (without any inkling that he was Goethschill) received the invitation, he knew that he had to accept. He was exacdy one year short of sixty. Death was approaching and with death also immortality (for as I said, deathand immortality form an inseparable pair more perfect than Marx and Engels, Romeo and Juliet, Laurel and Hardy), and Goethe had to consider that he was being invited to an audience with an immortal. Even though he was at that time deeply involved with The Theory of Colors, which he regarded as the high point of all his work, he abandoned his desk and left for Erfurt, where, on October 2, 1808, an unforgettable meeting between the immortal commander and the immortal poet took place.
4Surrounded by the resdess shadows of photographers, Goethe climbs the broad staircase. He is accompanied by Napoleon's aide, who leads him up another staircase and down a series of corridors into a large salon. At the far end, Napoleon is sitting at a round table eating his breakfast. All around, bustling men in uniform hand him various reports, to which he gives brief answers as he munches. Only after a few minutes have passed does the aide dare to indicate Goethe, who is standing motionless at a distance. Napoleon glances at him and slides his right hand under his jacket, so that his palm touches the bottom left rib. (In the past, he used to do this because he suffered from stomach pains, but later he developed a liking for the gesture and automatically sought recourse to it when he saw himself surrounded by photographers.) He quickly swallows a morsel (it is not good to be photographed when the face is distorted by chewing, because newspapers maliciously publish just such photographs!), and says loudly, for everyone to hear: "Voila un homme!" There is a man!