The Glass Bees

by Ernst Jünger

  When I was in school and when I served under Monteron, things were slightly different, although we, too, were drilled in methodical conquest. At that time, however, there was still a preoccupation with what is going on in man. I do not, of course, mean psychology. After the man from Manchester had put me out of action, I knew what really mattered, and I began to make up for what I had neglected. By giving me a fresh incentive, he had taught me to think.

  What could they mean, these new apparatuses which now mingled with the swarms of bees? It was always the same: hardly had one grasped a new technical device, when it created, as it were, its own antithesis. The streams of glass bees were joined, like opaque beads in a glass necklace, by multicolored individuals which moved faster as ambulances, fire engines, and police cars may do in a column of automobiles. Still others circled above the traffic. They must have been of a much larger size, but I lacked standards of comparison. I was particularly intrigued by the gray apparatuses that took off from the hives and now closely reconnoitered the terrain. Among them was one which seemed to be carved from a dull horny substance or from smoky quartz. It circled the pavilion clumsily, almost touching the tiger lilies and now and then hovering motionless in the air. When tanks deploy in a terrain, observers fly above them in a similar fashion. Here perhaps was a controlling force or a cell transmitting orders. I kept an especially sharp eye on this Smoky Gray and tried to find out whether changes in the crowd of swarming automatons corresponded to its movements or followed upon them.

  A judgment of the ratio of size was difficult for me since the objects in question were beyond my experience, and there was, moreover, no norm in my consciousness. Measure depends upon previous experience. When I see, no matter at what distance, a rider, an elephant, or a Volkswagen, I know their measurements. But here my senses were confused.

  In such cases we usually fall back on experience and consult test objects. When, therefore, the Smoky Gray was moving about in my field of vision, I tried, at the same time, to catch with my eye a familiar object that would provide a standard by which it could be measured. This was not difficult, since the gray creature had for some time been flying back and forth between me and the nearest water hole. But when I slowly moved my head in order not to lose sight of the quartz thing, I experienced a particularly narcotic effect. As a result, I could not say whether the changes I thought I noticed on the surface of the automaton were actually taking place. I saw changes of color as in optical signals, a fading out followed by a sudden blood-red flash. Black excrescences appeared like the horns of a snail.

  At the same time, when the Smoky Gray suddenly reversed its motion and hovered for a second over the water hole, I did not forget to estimate its size. Had the swarms of automatons left or did I no longer see them now that my attention was riveted on one point? In any case, it was now completely quiet in the garden and there were no shadows, as in dreams.

  “A cut quartz, the size of a duck egg,” I concluded, after having compared the Smoky Gray with the spike of a bulrush it almost touched in passing. I knew these rushes well from my childhood; we had called their spikes “chimney-polishers,” and used to ruin our clothes in the mud when we tried to pick them. We should have waited till frost had set in, but even then it was dangerous to get to the plant, since the ice around the sedge-lined water was brittle and full of duck holes.

  An ideal object for comparison was the fly which adorned a leaf of the sundew plant like a miniature etched in a ruby. This plant, too, was an old friend. On our excursions into the moor we had dug it up and planted it in our terrariums. The botanists list this plant as “carnivorous”—a barbaric exaggeration that has made this graceful little herb famous. When I brought the smoky fellow, which was now flying quite low, back and forth, and almost touching the edge of the water hole, into focus together with the sundew, I saw that, compared to the bees, he was, in fact, of a considerable size.

  An exacting, monotonous observation brings on a danger of visions, as everyone knows who has ever pursued a goal in the snow or in the desert, or has driven on endless highways which run straight as though drawn with a ruler. We start dreaming; images get hold of us. . . .

  “So the sundew is, after all, a carnivorous plant, a cannibal plant.”

  Why should I have thought that? I imagined seeing the red leaves with their fringes of sticky tentacles enormously enlarged. A keeper threw food to them.

  I rubbed my eyes. A vision had deceived me in this garden where the diminutive became large. But at the same moment I heard inside me a shrill signal like that of an alarm clock, like the warning signal of a car approaching with brutal speed. I must have seen something prohibited, something vile.

  It was an evil spot. Greatly alarmed, I jumped to my feet for the first time since I had been sitting here and directed my glasses toward the water hole. The Smoky Gray had again come closer; he no longer flew back and forth but circled around me, his feelers quivering. I paid no attention to him. I was fascinated by the sight toward which he had directed me like a pointer to partridges.

  The sundew was as tiny as before. A fly should be a hearty meal for it. But close to the plant, lying in the water, was something red, and obscene. I brought it into sharp focus. Now I was wide awake: this was no delusion.

  The water hole was encircled by rushes as by a fence, through the gaps of which I saw the muddy, brown puddle. Leaves of aquatic plants formed a mosaic on it. On one of these leaves was the red, obscene object. It stood out in clear relief. I examined it once again; there could be no doubt: it was a human ear.

  An error was impossible: a cut-off ear. And it was equally indisputable that I was in my right mind and that my faculties of judgment were undimmed. I hadn’t drunk any wine or taken a drug; I hadn’t even smoked a cigarette. Partly because of my empty pockets I had lived a very sober life for a long time. And I do not belong to the kind of person, like Caretti, who suddenly see what is not there.

  Now I started scouring the water hole methodically and with increasing horror: it was dotted with ears. I distinguished large ears and small, well-shaped and ugly, and all had been severed with neat precision. Some, like the first one I had detected when pursuing the Smoky Gray, were lying on the leaves of the aquatic plants. Others were partly covered by the leaves; still others gleamed upward indistinctly through the brown marsh water. At this sight, like a wanderer who walks along the seashore and suddenly comes upon the abandoned remains of a cannibal fire, I was suddenly seized by nausea. I realized the provocation, the shameless challenge, that was intended here. It led to a lower level of reality. It seemed to me as if the activities of the automatons, which only a short time before had held me completely spellbound, had now ceased; I was no longer aware of them. For all I knew, everything might have been a mirage.

  At the same moment a chilling breath touched me—the closeness of danger. My knees suddenly felt weak and I sank back into the chair. Could it be that my predecessor had sat here before he disappeared? Could one of these ears have been his? I felt a burning sting close to my hair. Now there was no longer a job at stake: it was a matter of life and death, and I could call myself lucky indeed if I left this garden safe and sane.

  The case had to be thought over carefully.

  XVI

  The moment has now come when I ought to speak of morality. This is one of my weak points: therefore I shall be brief. My unlucky star had destined me to be born when there was much talk about morality and, at the same time, more murders than in any other period. There is undoubtedly, some connection between these two phenomena. I sometimes asked myself whether the connection was a priori, since these babblers are cannibals from the start—or a connection a posteriori, since they inflate themselves with their moralizing to a height which becomes dangerous for others.

  However that may be, I was always happy to meet a person who owed his touch of common sense and good manners to his parents and who didn’t need big principles. I do not claim more for myself, and I am a man who for a
n entire lifetime has been moralized at to the right and left—by teachers and superiors, by policemen and journalists, by Jews and Gentiles, by inhabitants of the Alps, of islands, and the plains, by cutthroats and aristocrats—all of whom looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. I could no longer bear the sight of a white vest. Zapparoni was right: when the going is bad, you hear shouts of triumph all along the line. But he had not allowed for the fact that not only one’s enemy triumphs. All those who have cheerfully fought side by side with you while the going was good, now assume a hostile attitude. They present themselves in white vests. And you stand in the midst of them like a person shipwrecked among penguins. The unlucky star is in the zenith. This experience belongs to the navigation of the new world.

  Actually, the enthusiasm I had felt when I gained an insight into Zapparoni’s garden should have made me suspicious: it did not bode well. I had been off guard, in spite of my experiences. But who doesn’t have these experiences?

  The brutal exhibition of the severed ears had shocked me. But it was inevitable as motif. Wasn’t it necessarily the result of a perfection of technique to whose initial intoxication it had put an end? Had there been at any period in the history of the world as many mutilated bodies, as many severed limbs as in ours? Mankind has waged wars since the world began, but I can’t remember one single example in the entire Iliad where the loss of an arm or a leg is reported. Mythology reserved dismemberment for the subhuman, for monsters like Tantalus or Procrustes.

  You need only stand in front of beggars collected outside a railroad station to see that in our midst other rules prevail. We have made progress since Larrey, that surgeon of the Napoleonic Wars—and not only in surgery. It’s an optical illusion to attribute these injuries to accident. Actually, accidents are the result of injuries that took place long ago in the embryo of our world; and the increase in amputations is one of the indications of the triumph of a dissecting mentality. The loss occurred before it was visibly taken into account. The shot was fired long ago; and when it later appears in the guise of scientific progress—though it be on the moon—a hole is inevitable.

  Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realizes this will do cleaner work one way or the other.

  Technical perfection strives toward the calculable, human perfection toward the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms—around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance—evoke both fear and a Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.

  The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger.

  XVII

  I have said this much in order to indicate that this sequence of pictures and moods in Zapparoni’s garden was more significant than it had seemed to me in my first consternation. The intoxication with which I had witnessed the gradual unfolding Zapparoni’s technical ingenuity was followed by a headache, a hangover, and then by the sight of the cruel mutilations. One provokes the other.

  Zapparoni could not, of course, have intended to convey this realization to me. He had other plans. Nonetheless, any fresh turn in the struggle for power conceals a lesson which leads far beyond the intention of either partner—it indicates a higher interest.

  Beyond any doubt, Zapparoni had meant to frighten me. In this he had been highly successful, and I was certain that, in his study, he was enjoying his triumph: I had walked into his trap. Very likely he was sitting there comfortably with his books, now and then following the messages of the Smoky Gray on his television screen. He would see how I reacted. Fortunately I had not talked to myself. I had enough experience for that. But I had been stupid to jump up.

  Formerly, my first—and also best—reaction in a similar case would have been to report what I had seen. Anyone who made such a horrid discovery while walking in the woods would have done the same: you called the nearest police station.

  This I ruled out at once. The years when I showed a taste for such bravura were past. To report Zapparoni to the police amounted to accusing Pontius to Pilate, and it was as plain as daylight that it was I, accused of cutting off ears, who would disappear this very evening behind bolts and bars. It would be a fat morsel for the night editions. No—only a person who had slept away thirty years of civil war could advise me to act thus. Words had changed their meaning; even police were no longer police.

  Incidentally, to come back to the wanderer—even today he would report finding a single ear. But what would he do when he came to a part of the forest where a profusion of ears were lying around like poisonous mushrooms? You can be sure he would sneak away. And perhaps neither his best friend nor his wife would hear about his discovery. In such a situation we are cautious.

  “Leave well enough alone”—this was the principle I had to follow. True, it exposed me to another danger. I would have ignored a crime and neglected my first duty to my neighbor. From there to inhumanity is only one step.

  In any case, my situation was critical, whether I met it by action or inaction. The best thing would be to follow the advice I had once heard in a café in Vienna: “Don’t even begin to ignore”. . . This was the dictate of prudence.

  Even then unpleasant prospects remained. Zapparoni might be unsuccessful or go bankrupt. He would not be the first superman to disappear in this fashion. What I had seen in his garden resembled a rehearsal for total mobilization more than an exhibition of models by an international firm. As such, it might come to a bad end, and if that happened a storm of indignation would break loose; and the indignation of those who today sat in a safe corner would outdo those who had fawned on the powerful Zapparoni. The first would wish to compensate, the others to vindicate themselves. But all these penguins would be unanimous in their view of the depraved Cavalry captain who was involved in the scandal of the cut-off ears. “Nothing seen, nothing heard—the classical case,” said the chairman, and the heads of the jurors nodded over their white vests.

  Since my evil star inevitably guided me toward the defeated, I had been taught a similar lesson more than once—even by people who, for years—even on the eve of the defeat—had been guests at my table. Now in the white vests of lackeys they served the victors at the festive banquet held in their destroyed ancestral home.

  As for me, I preferred to continue wearing my old vest; I was used to it and had become fond of it, although it had been damaged on long marches and on hot days when sparks leaped from our tin hats. The vest showed traces of the mud of the trenches, the dust of the barricades, and there were holes in it as well. These went deeper than the vest and deeper than the skin. Even though it was not a white vest, it was a good, trusty garment; it had survived monarchies and republics. I wished to be buried in this vest, and they could save their comments.

  I always liked to imagine my funeral—another of my weaknesses. I would die poor and inglorious, but I supposed two or three cavalrymen would stand by my grave with Teresa. In the evening they would have a glass of wine. Tommy Gilbert would probably get drunk again. Since only a few drops were sufficient to make him drunk, I used to wonder why he never had any money. The solution of this riddle was that actually he was always slightly tipsy. It was his normal condition. Even in East Prussia he used to have a tumbler of brandy with his breakfast, before we left for the ice-cold riding academy, lit up by smoke-stained lanterns, where the breath of the men and the horses looked like exhalations from silver trumpets. The smallest amount of alcohol was sufficient to make Tommy sentimental. He was then a source of high amusement. Since he knew me well, he would tell about the things we had done together, not only because he loved to tell anecdotes, but also to cheer up Teresa a little; and, indeed, a smile would lighten her face like a ray of sunsh
ine after a cloudy day. I preferred this to the sermon of a clergyman. I had never allowed Teresa to wear dark clothes. It would certainly be a delightful day.

  XVIII

  For the time being I was still far removed from such a pleasant end. I was in a situation where one can only make mistakes. The only question now was to figure out which was the least important one and to get my head somehow out of the noose, so that I could return to Teresa. I could not leave her alone. It was a good thing that I hadn’t moved from the spot. Jumping to my feet did not, after all, imply much; I might have done it because of the gray thing. I turned my glance away from the water hole and buried my head in my hand, as if I were tired.

  The most important thing now was to get out of the park safe and sound, as Caretti had evidently not been able to. They might cut off as many ears as they liked; moral scruples were not going to trouble me. My head was swimming not because of them but because of a physical nausea which contracted my diaphragm.

  I tried to overcome this feeling which I had known since I was a child. Lying below the moral sphere, it did not deserve any praise, just as aversion to a certain food is nothing to be proud of. Some people are allergic to strawberries or lobster or any red foods and cannot even look at them. Others like myself, for instance, cannot bear to see cut-off ears.