The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  And so it was that in 1904, just as every year around the end of August or the beginning of September, Freud and his younger brother decide to take a holiday on the Mediterranean. This time, however, their vacation is shorter, so they do not make their traditional journey to Italy, but instead go to Trieste, from where they intend to set out for a few days on the island of Corfu. An acquaintance met unexpectedly in Trieste vigorously dissuades them from this plan. It is very hot on the islands at this time of year, he argues; an excursion to Athens would be much more agreeable. The connection by ship is particularly convenient, as it will leave the travelers three days to explore the city.

  This apparently sensible and attractive proposition casts both brothers—oddly enough—into a fairly dismal mood. They wander aimlessly around town and discuss the plan for a trip to Athens without enthusiasm, finding nothing but obstacles. But when the hour comes for Lloyd’s offices to open, they present themselves at a window and purchase tickets, as if forgetting for a moment all about their recent objections.

  “In the afternoon of the day we arrived, when I found myself on the Acropolis and took in the landscape with a glance, a strange thought suddenly came to me: So all of this really exists, just as they taught us in school.” It is not a very original remark, but it expresses quite accurately what all feel to whom it is granted to stand for the first stand before the Colosseum, the statue of the Venus of Milo, or the portrait of Mona Lisa. And it is into the depths of this experience, or emotion, that Freud sinks his analytical plumb line, to show that it is not as simple and commonplace as it might appear.

  In the view of the creator of psychoanalysis, what happens here is a special case of two contradictory attitudes co-existing in the same psyche and the two diametrically opposed responses to reality which result from them. Of course it is not some kind of pathological split in the self, but a disturbing fissure that appears in the personality, blurring the simple relation of perceiving subject to object. Let us examine this phenomenon more closely.

  The characteristic response flowing from the first attitude is surprise that the Acropolis one sees really exists, as if one doubted its real existence before; on the other hand, the response characteristic of the second attitude is “surprise at this surprise,” for the reality of the Acropolis has never been an object of doubt.

  To illustrate the first attitude, Freud says that with a measure of exaggeration one can compare it to the reaction of a person walking along Loch Ness in Scotland who suddenly sees the body of the infamous monster stretched out on the bankside and is thereupon forced to admit: but it really exists, this sea monster we never believed in. The second attitude—which approaches a naive realism, we might add—accepts without reservations the testimony of the senses, and is entirely open to delight or terror unclouded by any reflection.

  The most natural interpretation of those two “competing” emotions would be that there is a fundamental difference between what we experience directly and what we know from reading or hearsay, and that it’s precisely the confluence of knowing and seeing that causes this contradiction in feeling and the disturbance in one’s sense of reality. But Freud rejects this explanation as too banal and not really clarifying anything.

  He attempts to trace back why, in Trieste, he had pushed away so attractive a prospect as a trip to Athens and why on the Acropolis the pleasure flowing from immediate contact with an architectural masterpiece had been darkened by the shadow of skepticism. “According to the testimony of my senses I am now on the Acropolis, I just cannot believe it,” or the same feeling, expressed more categorically: “What I am seeing now is not real.”

  Skepticism—that’s the word. Not just a word, but in Freud’s view something much more—a psychic mechanism deeply rooted in human beings. We know this psychic mechanism well from everyday life. How often do we not push away a misfortune that befalls us with the cry: “No, that’s impossible”? We try to eliminate that part of reality, to cast it beyond our sphere of consciousness. And the author gives a fine literary example—a fragment of the long poem Ay de mi Alhama2, in which this defensive reaction is clearly expressed. King Boabdil receives the news of the fall of Alhama. He knows very well that it means the end of his reign. But because he does not wish to know this, he treats the calamitous message as if it hadn’t reached him, as if rejecting it might alter the course of events.

  Cartas le fueron venidas,

  de que Alhama era ganada

  Las cartas echó en el fuego

  y al mensagero mataba.

  It is easy to understand the king’s behavior and his frame of mind. He is simply trying to overcome his own impotence, to feel his power unlimited as before, so he throws the letter announcing the defeat in the fire and orders the emissaries killed. He can’t change fate, so he destroys the instruments of information.

  This defense is easy to explain; one can find a whole array of examples less extreme, far-fetched, or literary, and much closer to common experience. Freud’s attention is drawn to the other side of the workings of what he claims is the same psychic mechanism: the dark, illogical side, contrary to the instinct for self-preservation. And he tries to show that a person who encounters sudden good fortune—an important prize, a triumph of fate, the hand of a secretly loved girl—will respond in the same way he does when he suffers misfortune—that is, by rejecting reality. This response is a good illustration of a common phrase that exists in nearly all European languages: “too good to be true.” If a defense against bad fortune is a natural thing, why—Freud asks—do we respond with skepticism and disbelief to something that brings joy and is a stroke of luck? He calls this paradoxical predicament “defeat by reason of success” and says that people may fall ill not only as a result of failing to see their life’s wishes fulfilled, but also at the moment when ardent desires are satisfied.

  The self-analysis would not be complete if the aging Freud, eighty years old at the time of this essay-letter, did not return in memory to the days of his childhood and youth. He then recalls the poverty of the family home, its suffocating atmosphere filled with prohibitions, his youth with its limited possibilities and horizons.

  No, he never doubted the existence of the Acropolis, but he had no hope he would ever see it with his own eyes. And on the day when this came about he felt like saying to his brother: “Remember our life when we were children? Every day we took the same path to the gymnasium, on Sundays we went to the Prater or drove to some place we knew outside of the city. And now here we are in Athens on the top of the Acropolis! What a long way we’ve come!” “And if small things may be compared to large,” he goes on, “did not Napoleon I turn to his brother on the day of his coronation at Notre Dame and say: What would our father say, if he could be here?”

  It is an expression of joyful pride, but it lasts scarcely a moment and is almost immediately troubled by the consciousness of the breaking of a taboo, the plucking of a forbidden fruit, a deep feeling of guilt. Guilt? Yes, answers Freud.

  Toward whom? Freud’s father was a merchant of small means and limited education; the Acropolis didn’t mean that much to him. However, his sons outgrew him. They grew so far above his ordinary existence that they “deposed” him, and it is precisely to this assault on the fatherly ideal that one can trace the sense of guilt which robs them of the joy they are entitled to feel along with anyone who comes into contact with an artistic masterpiece.

  Here one cannot help thinking of the words of Freud’s great critic: “Does the father complex—which pervades the views of the Freudian school so completely—present evidence to show that Freud achieved any noteworthy liberation of man from the fatalism of the ‘family romance’? This complex, in all its fanatical rigidity and exaggerated susceptibility, is a misunderstood religious function…”

  In this letter-cum-treatise, written at the end of Freud’s life, its author’s deep pessimism is probably more manifest than in his other writings. It is not merely a cognitive pessimism, but a pessimism
bearing on man’s nature, his fundamental inability to achieve happiness.

  I’ve sought to summarize as faithfully as I could the thinking of the man who invented depth psychology, contained in his little epistolary attempt to explain a particular psychic phenomenon. And because that attempt is so well written and so suggestive, I began to wonder whether anything similar had ever happened to me. Much as when we read psychiatric textbooks we discover in ourselves by pure empathy the various disorders they describe.

  First I asked myself how it was with my sense of guilt in the presence of masterpieces. It’s not easy to give an answer; a confession raises the ghosts of subjectivism, makes one think of one’s childhood, failures in life, and the people one misses, the dear departed to whom it was not given to share the joy that flows from the experience of beautiful things.

  And so yes: standing on the Acropolis I summoned the souls of my fallen friends, I mourned their fate; no longer even their cruel deaths, but the fact that the inexhaustible splendor of the world had been taken away from them filled me with compassion. I strewed poppy seeds on forgotten graves.

  If I did not, however, fall into the skepticism described by Freud, the wavering of faith in the real existence of what I saw, it was for a couple of crucial reasons. If I had been chosen—I thought—and that without any particular merit, chosen in the play of blind fate, then I had to give that choice meaning, deprive it of the accidental and the arbitrary. What does that mean? It means to be equal to the choice and make it my own. To imagine that I was a delegate or an ambassador of all those who didn’t make it. And as befits a delegate or ambassador, to forget myself and exert my whole sensibility and understanding so that the Acropolis, the cathedrals, the Mona Lisa would be repeated in me—to the extent, of course, of my limited mind and heart. And to pass on to others what I had grasped of them.

  The fact that I always felt uncertain in the face of masterpieces seemed natural to me. It is the good right of masterpieces that they should upset our arrogant certainty and question our importance. They took away a part of my reality, commanded silence, a halt to mouse-like scampering around unimportant and stupid things. They didn’t permit me—as Thomas More says—“to concern myself too much with that domineering thing called ‘I’.” If it is proper to call all this a transaction, it was the most profitable of transactions conceivable. In return for humility and quietude, they gave me the “honey and light” that I could never create myself.

  One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it meanspiritedly avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values. Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the desolate little soul.

  There exists a false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which you inherit mechanically, without effort, and that’s why those who object to inherited wealth and unearned privileges are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little “I” whines and balks at it.

  I always wished I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And that they will judge us. Someone very rightly said that not only do we read Homer, look at frescoes of Giotto, listen to Mozart, but Homer, Giotto, and Mozart spy and eavesdrop on us and ascertain our vanity and stupidity. Poor utopians, history’s debutants, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity, and cool radiance.

  ACROPOLIS

  THERE IS NO building in the world that has so enduringly occupied my imagination. Photographs, drawings, descriptions were a watery sustenance, devoid of smell, color, and background. I knew the topography, measurements, and outlines of the main temples quite well, but the whole group was invariably set on a flat plane, had the color of plaster, did not breathe with light, and the sky above it was made of paper.

  I couldn’t imagine a single bush to stick onto the mountain, which—this I feared most—would turn out to be a wretched little hillock; I couldn’t imagine a chink of rock or even a shadow cast by columns. Everything was made of diluted milk and such linear correctness that my eye and the particle of touch in the eye ran over the image without gravity or traction, as if over glass.

  When I went there a fear grew in me that the confrontation would destroy what I had constructed over many years of patient guesswork. And would I have the courage to admit it (even if only to myself) if the sacred hill and its surviving remnants of temples did not speak to me, if they turned out to be one of many ruins, not the only or at least an exceptional ruin among the many scattered throughout the world? Would I take part in the age-long conspiracy of delight, based less—as we know well—on a continuously renewed emotion than on the power of suggestion, the repetition of a creed?

  The ship reaches the port of Piraeus. The first disappointment: you can’t see Athens. The port buildings obscure the city, which lies a few kilometers inland. But shouldn’t the first sighting be from the sea? I began to fear that photographers’ tricks were carrying the Acropolis out like a ship on a high wave.

  A bus goes into the city. I sat down on the right-hand side. A row of houses, depositories, scruffy warehouses and shops covered in white dust. And suddenly, above a narrow little street, completely unexpectedly, high overhead: there it was!

  I

  One can still make out1 a trident mark in the rock of the Acropolis; they say Poseidon made it when competing with Athena for dominion of the land.

  PAUSANIAS

  AT THE TIME OF the second Median war, the Persians broke through to the Acropolis. The few defenders who had not left the city were murdered, the temples were burned and toppled into heaps of rubble. This time the words of the Delphic oracle were fulfilled. When in 479 B.C. the Athenians returned to their capital after victories at Salamis and Plataia, the Acropolis was—as someone aptly remarked—an empty pedestal.

  The great Persian constructions and the pyramids—whatever we might say of their beauty—are to us anonymous works. The Acropolis, or what remained of it, is associated with the name of Pericles.

  This figure has flourished in our collective consciousness. His political activity lasted thirty-two years, but even so we call the whole fifth century the age of Pericles.

  Many testimonies and contradictory views about him have been preserved. Of the ancient authors, Thucydides and Plutarch are most decidedly “for” Pericles; Aristotle and Plato “against” him. In the Gorgias, Plato does not hesitate to call him a bad politician. A full portrait of Pericles has eluded scholars and novelists. One of the best scholars of the Greek political life of those times, G. d’Aspermont Lynden, compares him to the great English Whigs. And indeed, this Mediterranean statesman reminds one somewhat of a British gentleman, controlled and mild in manner, but executing his plans with iron consistency.

  Something of a loner, which is to say, surrounded by a small circle of friends, a circle that included Phidias—not only a sculptor of genius but a Malraux-like figure at the side of Pericles.

  Many of his personal traits remained in contradiction to the classical portrait of a leader, and he probably did not evoke instinctive sympathy. He took no part in public entertainments; he never laughed. “Il n’allait jamais2 dîner en ville”—one of his biographers says, following an ancient author. Coming from a Frenchman, this means a renunciaton of one of the greatest pleasures life has to offer. This wealthy, profoundly well-educated aristocrat became the leader of a democracy out of a deep sense of patriotism and against his own family’s traditions. He did not trust the people (on the contrary, in his youth he felt revulsion for them); he observed the moods of his city carefully and at decisive moments he threw his authority onto
the scale with the force of his incomparable eloquence and skills of persuasion. Pericles knew that he could not achieve greatness without Athens (a great politician in a small state is a figure from comedy) and he wished like a jealous lover for Athens to owe her felicity and glory only to him.

  His character and private life were above the average; but after all we know that the leader of a popular party should be or at the very least give himself out to be “one of the crowd.” Pericles committed at least two cardinal errors that distanced him from the “man in the street.” He surrounded himself with artists and—worse—philosophers, like Anaxagoras, who took the stars away from the gods and called them shining bodies, or Protagoras of Abdera, an analyst of speech, who taught people how to “make stronger judgments out of weaker ones.” Average Athenians would probably have preferred their leader to be a jocular demagogue than an intellectual and they appear to have felt an instinctive fear before the dialectical trinity: language (rhetoric)—reality—power.

  The ferocity with which the people condemned Pericles’s friends when the occasion offered itself indicates that he was not popular. In 433 B.C. Anaxagoras was driven from Athens, and sixteen years later the same fate met Protagoras, whose treatise on the gods was publicly burned.

  Aspasia. We know this woman was Pericles’s great and enduring love. For her, he divorced a wealthy woman, a citizen of Athens, with whom he had two sons. Now, to the Athenians divorce itself was a normal thing, recognized both in law and custom. On the other hand, public opinion was scandalized by the fact that Pericles stubbornly pushed for legalization of his relationship. Aspasia came from Miletus. Athenian law only very rarely recognized mixed marriages. And Aspasia was too intelligent to boot, she occupied a position too much on the level of men, and comic poets—the people’s voice—portrayed her as a prostitute or the madam of a brothel. Pericles did not respond to these insults, but when Aspasia was accused of impiety, the sixty-five-year-old leader begged the judges at her trial not to condemn her to exile.