by Peter Handke
“In like manner,” the people took Communion. In like manner, “I, Sorger,” turned server, stumbled over the edge of the carpet. Resolutely the adult knelt. In like manner he was greeted by strangers; passed a merry funeral party on the morning-bright street; watched the rather military costumed parade of a South Slavic ethnic group, to which his forebears had belonged (the tiniest tots, barely able to walk, stumbled along in national garb), and in the park watched the inexorably passing joggers (time and again, the patter of feet and violent panting behind him), who, unlike the swarms of people just walking about, never took on the features of acquaintances. Among the joggers, he actually recognized the exhausted face of a man with whom he had made friends during his student years in Europe. For a moment his eyes followed the sweat-darkened back of one who had become a stranger; while the other, staring at him as he ran past, had only said: “Like Valentin Sorger!” They would never meet again.
Sorger had his last vision of the other continent in a museum. Still fortified by the works before which he had gradually pulled himself erect as one does in the presence of stern (and brazenly vital) models, he stood at the top of the monumental inner stairway, and in a single mighty impulse of the heart took in the great lobby, black with people crowded head to head; while at the same time he looked through the enormous glass doors, down the whole length of granite-gray Eighty-second Street, at the far end of which (the street was intersected by several heavily traveled avenues) he discovered a gray-blue shimmer of the narrow arm of the sea that bounds Manhattan and is known as the East River, and above it a whitish flock of birds flying back and forth and becoming transparent at each change of direction.
Again snow began to fall; children spun about beneath the flakes and stuck their tongues out in the snow; the pretzel stands smoked; and then came another dusk. In this populous, civilized, lively area, where it was no distance at all from the marble interior steps in the foreground to the arm of the sea on the horizon, automobiles drove ahead and turned, pedestrians stood and walked, joggers idled and sprinted in all directions—all together a loving order, merging with the evening, to which Sorger longed to attach himself, since his gaze, sharpened by his past history, was now capable of penetrating to the depths of space and of participating in the peaceful beauty of this present and in the dark paradise of this evening.
“O slow world!”
But why was his yearning—which had just been rising from his innermost self to the outermost world, striving to hold his individual self and the universe together once and for all—immediately followed by a pale, soundless lightning flash, in which what he had longed for so passionately receded from him almost imperceptibly, leaving behind it the emptiness of an earth-spanning streak of death, which weakened him and made him abruptly stagger back into himself? Cleansed of all self-interest till nothing remained but presence of mind, desirous only of completing the world (“I want you and I want to be part of you!”)—he was struck by the consciousness of an incurable deficiency, which was neither grounded in himself nor attributable to the present epoch of the earthly planet, which he loved in any case. He no longer wished himself in any other epoch—but that part of the world which, even with the purest, most fervent passion, he attained and staked out was still far too little.
Hadn’t he once felt rich? He sat down on the stairs, the edges of which were full of resting people, and very slowly tied and untied his shoelaces. Already attendants were clapping their hands and the people were taking short steps toward the exit.
For a moment it seemed to you, Sorger, that the history of mankind would soon be ended, harmoniously and without horror. Yes, there was such a thing as grace. (Or was there?) Unimaginative, bloodthirsty misery was releasing you, and you felt your eyelids anointed by an eternally wild need for redemption. A deep sigh passed through you, and through the whole crowd as well, and you looked up with new strength and sought the gaze of other eyes as heavy as yours. You felt sorrow and then bitter pain at the thought that you would soon have to leave this area of peace, and you wanted to be among the last to leave; but the beautiful thing about your pain was that through it the earth was transfigured (as in prehistoric times heat and pressure had turned limestone to the marble that gleamed at your feet).
In the night plane to Europe it was as though you, my dear Sorger, were taking your “first real journey,” the journey on which, so it is said, a man learns “what his own style is.” Behind and in front of you, babies were screaming miserably, and when they finally calmed down, they stared like dark-eyed prophets. You no longer knew who you were. Where was your dream of greatness? You were no one. In the first gray of dawn you saw the blackened wing of the plane. The passengers’ bleak, weary faces were smeared with marmalade. Already the stewardesses were putting on their city shoes. The blank movie screen, shimmering in the sunrise only a moment ago, darkened. Roaring, the plane burst through the clouds.
Vanishing face!
The stones at my feet bring you closer:
Immersing myself in them,
I weigh us down with them.
The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire
This evening I promise you a tale which, I hope, will remind you of everything and nothing.
GOETHE, Das Märchen
for Hermann Lenz and Hanne Lenz with thanks for January 1979
The Detour
On my return to Europe, I needed my daily ration of written matter and read and reread a good deal.
The inhabitants of the remote village in Stifter’s Rock Crystal are set in their ways. When a stone falls out of a wall, the same stone is put back; new houses are built like the old ones, damaged roofs are mended with old shingles. Such setness seems justified by the striking example of the animals, “which never change their color.”
And then one day I was at home with colors. Bushes, trees, clouds, even the asphalt of the road, had a shimmer, which came neither from the season nor from the light of that particular day. The world of nature and the work of man, one with the help of the other, gave me a moment of ecstasy, known to me in the images of half sleep (but without their menacing quality, their augury of terrible things to come), which has been called the Nunc stans, the moment of eternity. The bushes were yellow gorse, the trees were singly standing brown firs, the earth’s vapor made the clouds look bluish; the sky (as Stifter was still able to say so calmly in his stories) was blue. I had stopped on a hilltop on the Route Paul Cézanne, leading eastward from Aix-en-Provence to the village of Le Tholonet.
I have always found it hard to differentiate colors and even more so to name them.
The Goethe of the Color Theory, who sometimes made a show of his knowledge, speaks of two persons, in whom I partly recognize myself. These two, for instance, “wholly confused pink, blue, and violet”; in viewing these colors, they seemed to distinguish only slight nuances of lighter, darker, weaker, or more intense. In black, one of them noticed a tinge of brown, and in gray a tinge of red. They were both extremely sensitive to the gradation of light and dark. Their condition was probably pathological, but Goethe regarded them as borderline cases. Nevertheless, when he conversed with them at random and questioned them about the objects round about, he became utterly bewildered and feared that he was going mad.
Quite apart from mere identification, this note of Goethe’s helped me to perceive the unity between my earliest past and the present: in another moment of the “standing Now,” I see the people of those days—parents, brothers and sisters, and even grandparents—in the company of today’s people, all laughing at my remarks about the colors of things around me. A kind of family game consisted of letting me guess at colors; the confusion, of course, rested not with the others but with me.
But, unlike Goethe’s two cases, my disorder is not hereditary. There is no other example of it in my family. Over the years, however, I have learned that I am not suffering from classical “color blindness” or from any of its variants. I sometimes see colors and see them correctly.
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Not long ago I was standing on the snow-covered summit of the Untersberg. Not far above me, almost within reach, a crow was gliding on the wind. I saw the characteristic bird yellow of the retracted claws, the golden brown of the wings shimmering in the sun, the blue of the sky. These three moved across the sky like the passing of a large, airy surface, in which at the same moment I saw a three-colored flag. It was a flag that stood for nothing, a thing of pure color. But through it I have at last become capable of looking at actual flags (which up until then had only cut off my view), because now their peaceful prototype exists in my imagination.
Twenty years ago I was examined for fitness for military service. Though ordinarily rather shaky about colors, I came off rather well in the color test, which consisted in making the right selection from a jumble of numbered dots of color. When I got home and reported the outcome (“Fit for armed service”), my stepfather spoke up (for ordinary purposes, we had stopped talking to each other) to say he was now proud of me for the first time.
I write this because my oral reports of the incident have always been incomplete and misleadingly ambiguous. In speaking, I have always said the man was “slightly tipsy.” Though accurate in itself, this detail falsified the story. Would it not be closer to reality to say that on that day I viewed the house and garden with a sense of homecoming? My stepfather’s remark struck me at once as revolting. But why is it connected in my memory with the fresh reddish-brown of the garden which the man had just spaded? Hadn’t I, too, been partly proud of the news I brought home?
In any event, the color of the soil was what lingered in my memory. When I now search for the moment, my view of it is no longer that of an adolescent; I find myself, that is, the self I wish to be, timeless and contourless in that reddish-brown, and it is through that reddish-brown that I can clearly understand myself and the soldier I was. (Among Stifter’s earliest memories were the dark spots inside him. Later he realized “that they were woods outside” him. Now, time and again, his stories show me colored spots in unspecified forests.)
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Paul Cézanne’s father, a wealthy banker, ransomed him from military service. He spent the war period painting at L’Estaque, then a fishing village in a bay west of Marseilles, now an industrial suburb.
The place is known to me only from Cézanne’s paintings, but in my mind the mere name L’Estaque gives body to a vision of peace. Regardless of what has become of it, the region remains “a place of refuge,” not only from the war of 1870, not only for the painter Cézanne was then, and not only from a declared war.
In the years that followed, Cézanne often worked there, preferably in intense heat and under a “sun so fierce” that “all objects seemed to be massive shadows, not only in black or white, but also in blue, red, brown, and violet.” Nearly all the paintings done in his “refuge” had been black and white, their mood for the most part wintry; but later the village, with its red roofs against the blue sea, gradually became his “Card Game.”
It was in the letters from L’Estaque that he first appended the word “pictor” to his name, as the classical painters had done. This was the place “which I shall leave as late as possible, because there are some very beautiful views.” The postwar paintings no longer convey moods, nor are particular seasons or times of day discernible. Time and again the forms disclose only the archetypal village on the Clear Blue Sea.
Toward the turn of the century, refineries sprang up around L‘Estaque, and Cézanne stopped painting there; in a few hundred years, he wrote, living would be altogether pointless. Only on geological maps are the region’s colors unimpaired; and a small patch of mignonette-green still bears the name Calcaire de l’Estaque, and no doubt will for a long time to come.
Yes, it was thanks to Paul Cézanne that I was standing amid the colors of the open country between Aix-en-Provence and the village of Le Tholonet, and that I saw even the asphalt highway as color.
I grew up among peasants. Paintings were rare, except in the parish church and in wayside shrines; from the start, I regarded them as mere accessories and for years expected nothing of importance from them. Sometimes I even sympathized with the religious and political proscription of images; what with my halfhearted way of looking at pictures, I would even have welcomed such a proscription for myself. Since endlessly repeated ornament fell in with my need for the infinite, wasn’t that the right thing for me? (I once managed, while looking at a Roman mosaic floor, to think of dying as a beautiful transition, without the usual limitation known as “death.”) And is it not a perfectly colorless and formless void that can most miraculously come to life? (A sentence spoken by a priest in another “remote” village—no layman would be likely to venture such a statement—fits into this context: “An endless soaring of love between the soul and God—that is heaven.”)
I ought to have been more grateful to the painters of pictures, because often enough these supposed accessories had at least taught me to see, and not a few became recurrent images in my thoughts and daydreams. True, I scarcely perceived forms and colors as such. What counted was always the special object. Colors and forms without an object were too little—objects in their everyday familiarity, too much. But I shouldn’t say “special object,” since what I was looking for were, precisely, commonplace things, which, however, the painter had revealed in a special light. Today I can call them “magical.”
The examples that occur to me are all landscapes of a type suggesting the depopulated, silently beautiful, menacing phantasms of half sleep. Strangely enough, they always occur in series, sometimes embodying a whole period in the work of the painter: de Chirico’s metaphysical Piazze; Max Ernst’s devastated, moonlit jungle cities, each one of which is titled The Whole City; Magritte’s Realm of Lights, that repeated house under leafy trees, in darkness, while all the rest of the picture is irradiated by a bluish-white daytime sky; finally, and above all, Edward Hopper’s wooden houses amid the pine woods of Cape Cod, in paintings with titles such as Road and Houses or Road and Trees.
But Hopper’s landscapes are not so much nightmarish as desolately real. One can find them on the spot, in broad daylight; and when a few years ago I went to Cape Cod, a place I had long been drawn to, and tracked down the scenes of his pictures, I felt for the first time in my life that I was in an artist’s country. Today I could still trace the curves, the uphill and downhill stretches in the road across the dunes. The details, often entirely different from those painted by Edward Hopper, are distributed to the left and right as on a canvas. At the center of one such afterimage, a reed protruding from the thick ice of a pond “goes with” the tin can beside it. I went there for reasons of my own, and realized when I came away that in the work of a painter and the landscape forms of New England I had laid the groundwork for a travel guide: far from being deserted, the wooden houses I had seen at night were dream-houses blinking between the pines, and there I found a home for the hero of a tale that remained to be written.
Poets lie, says one of the first philosophers. And indeed, it has long been held that reality means hard times and disastrous happenings; and that the arts are faithful to reality when their central and guiding content is evil or man’s more or less ridiculous despair over evil. But how is it that I can no longer bear to hear, see, or read such thoughts? Why is it that as soon as I myself write a single complaining sentence, a single sentence accusing myself or others—unless there’s a sacred fury in it!—I literally see red: though, on the other hand, I shall never write about the good fortune of having been born or about consolation in a better world to come. Mortality will always be my guiding principle, but never again, I hope, my central theme.
At first Cézanne painted horror pictures, such as his Temptation of St. Anthony. But in the course of time his sole problem became the réalisation of pure earthly innocence: an apple, a rock, a human face. His reality became the form he achieved, the form that does not lament transience or the vicissitudes of history, bu
t transmits an existence in peace. Art is concerned with nothing else. But what gives life its feeling becomes a problem in the transmission.
What was beginning to happen inside me when, still in the era of magical pictures, we, the woman and I, drove through another countryside in the South of France?
As part of that journey I now count the walk I took the night before in the wild hill country where the woman lived. It was one of the last days of the year, and for once the mistral, the ordinarily cold fall wind from the Massif Central, was warm; it blew strong but steady, without the abrupt blasts that produce the effect of hallucination. Though the path had dwindled to next to nothing, I still felt that the house with the woman in it was near. It was she who had first shown me Hopper’s pictures; she was capable of affection for simple things and she knew “who I am.” I sat down in a grassy clearing, the whole of which quivered. The bent treetops were almost motionless. The air was clear, and on the bright western horizon, streaks of cloud kept shooting up into the sky and vanishing. “In my reflection on things seen” (as Cézanne once described his working method), the moonrise that then followed enters into an analogy with a second moon, which, on a similar calm evening, I glimpsed above a nearby horizon and identified as the gleaming yellow arch of a barn door. I sat in the murmuring wind as once in childhood I had sat in the murmur of a certain pine tree (and as later on, in the midst of the city’s roar, I managed to hear only the murmur of the river that flows past it).
