Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  IT WAS the necessity for air, the animal necessity to breathe that had driven him to the window, but at the same time it was a necessity not of the body, a longing for the visible, for the visible world, for what could be breathed in from the assurance of the visible universe. Numbed and stifling he stood at the window, held by the mighty and embracing hand, and he knew not how long he stood there; it may have been only a few seconds or as many minutes, and the awareness of time flowed back into him incompletely and in snatches, long passages of time being obliterated by the fear and pain of strangling; the world rebuilt itself, knowledge came to be knowledge only in fragments, and in the same way he became attentive to what had occurred, realizing bit by bit that it had occurred not merely for the sake of the Aeneid, but for something he had yet to find.

  Now the world lay still before him, after all the previously endured pandemonium amazingly still, and it appeared to be late in the night, apparently past its middle; the stars glowed greatly in their great courses, comforting and strong and quietly a-shimmer with reassuring recognition although disquietingly overcast despite the complete absence of clouds, as if a so-to-speak unyielding and impenetrable, cloudily-crystal dome through which the glance could barely pass were stretched midway between the starry spaces and that of the world below; and it almost seemed to him as if the demonic partition into zones to which he had been subjected during his recumbent listening and his listening recumbency had been carried here to the outside world and that here it had become sharper and more extensive than when it had been imposed on himself. The earthly space was so cut off and insulated from the heavenly ones that nothing more could be felt of that longed-for wind blowing between the worlds, and not even the hunger for air was appeased, even this pain was not lessened because the fumes, which earlier had enshrouded the city and which had been sundered but could not be blown away by the evening breeze, had changed to a sort of feverish transparency, thickened under the burden of world-segregation to a dark jelly which floated in the air, unmoving and immovable, hotter than the air and so impossible to breathe that it was almost as oppressive as the stuffiness within the room. Ruthlessly that which could be breathed was separated from that which could not, ruthlessly, impenetrably, the crystal shell was spanned darkly overhead, a hard, opaque partition barring off the fore-court of the spheres, the fore-court of the breath, the fore-court of the universe in which he stood, set upright by the iron hand, supported by it; and whereas formerly, ensconced in the earth’s surface and stretched out over the Saturnian meadows, he had constituted the boundary between the above and below, in immediate contact with both regions and involved with both, now he towered up through them as an individual soul, predestined to her growing, who, lonely and single, knew that if she wished to hearken into the depths above and those below she had to hearken to herself: immediate participation in the greatness of the spheres was not granted to one who stood in the midst of earthly time and earthly-human growth, endowed again with both; only with his glance, only with his knowledge might he penetrate the infinite detachment of the spheres, enabled to grasp and hold them only with his questioning glance, enabled to restore the simultaneous unity of the universe in all of its spheres by his questioning knowledge alone, achieving only in the streaming orbit of the question the vital immediacy of his own soul, her innermost NECESSITY, the task of preception laid on her from the very beginning.

  Time flowed above, time flowed below, the hidden time of night flowing back into his arteries, flowing back into the pathway of the stars, second bound spacelessly to second, the re-given, re-awakened time beyond the bonds of fate, abolishing chance, the unalterable law of time absolved from lapsing, the everlasting now into which he was being held:

  Law and time,

  born from each other,

  annulling, yet always giving birth to each other anew,

  reflecting each other and perceptible in this way alone,

  chain of images and counter-images,

  noosing time, noosing the arch-image,

  neither wholly captured, yet for all that

  becoming more and more timeless

  until, in their last echoing unison,

  in a final symbol,

  the image of death unites with the image of life,

  portraying the reality of the soul,

  her homestead, her timeless now, the law

  made manifest in her, and hence

  her necessity.

  Everything had been brought to pass through necessity, even the traversing of the perceptive path where the inner and outer worlds were dissolved to an unrecognized infinity, detached and divided to complete strangeness. Yet did not this unavoidable, inescapable necessity contain the hope for the restored harmony of existence, for the confirmation of what was occurring and what had already occurred? the images had emerged through necessity and through necessity they pressed on, coming nearer and nearer to reality! Oh, nearness of the arch-image, nearness of the arch-reality in the fore-court of which he was standing—, was the crystal cover of the heaven-secret about to be rent? was the night about to unveil its final symbol to him whose eye must falter when the night’s eye opens? He stared upward to the stars whose two-thousand-years’ revolution was soon to be rounded off, following fate orbit by orbit, bearing fate on from father to son in the generations of time, and he was greeted by the pulsing now of the heavens, extending from the visible into the invisible and filling the complete cycle of re-given consciousness, greeted from the southwestern horizon by the familiar and uncanny image of the Scorpion, the dangerously crooked body laved by the mild stream of the Milky Way, greeted by Andromeda, nestling her head on the winged shoulder of Pegasus, by that never-vanishing presence shining forth in invisible welcome, and from the aeons preceding the creation of the ancestors the constellation of the dragon sent forth its ten-fold illumination, the dragon deprived of its erstwhile throne; he gazed upward into the stony chill where the image of law was circling, cut off from the dark-gleaming breath, cut off from the never-descending but always surmised truth, necessary to itself in a sphere removed from mankind; and seeing its image, sensing its image in the abundance of images which comprise it, he felt perception at work in himself, knowing it was beyond chance, knowing that the power of his perception allowed him to wait without expectation, freed from all impatience, and in knowing this he became ready for the necessary completion in the uncompleted. Thereupon the hand that upheld him became soft and softer, came to be safety. And upon the roofs of the city the light of the easterly moon lay like a cool, greenish dust; earth things drew nearer. For he who has left the first portal of fear behind him, enclosed in the fore-court of a new and greater mystery, enclosed and caught by a new apprehension which places him again in the midst of his own development, in the midst of his own law, absolved from returning, absolved from the Saturnian lapses, absolved from his own impatient hearkening, he is the one again made to stand erect and to grow upright, to find the way back to himself; and his bark glides on but only with oars drawn back, drifting softly and unexpectantly in the time granted to him, as if the landing were just in front of him, as if he were about to be landed on the shores of the chance-delivered and final reality:

  for he who has left the first portal of fear behind him

  has entered the fore-court of reality,

  now that his perception, discovering itself and turned towards itself,

  as if for the first time,

  begins to comprehend

  the necessity inherent in the universe, the necessity of every occurrence,

  as the necessity of his own soul;

  for he to whom this befalls

  is held into the unity of existence,

  into that pure now common to man and the universe,

  the inalienable possession of his own soul,

  by virtue of which she floats, as float she must,

  over the abyss of nothingness, opened and threatening,

  and over the blindness of man; />
  for he is held into the everlasting now of the question,

  into the everlasting now of man’s knowledgeless-knowing,

  into man’s divine prescience,

  knowledgeless in that it asks and must ask,

  knowing in that it precedes the question,

  divine prescience, divinely bestowed before birth on man and man alone

  as his innermost human necessity,

  for the sake of which

  he must put his perception to the test again and again

  and be proven by it again and yet again,

  man trepidant for the answer, perception trepidant for the answer,

  man bound to perception, perception bound to man,

  both held together and trepidant for the answer,

  overcome by the divine reality of fore-knowledge,

  by the magnitude of reality embraced by the knowing question,

  a question never to be answered by the truth of earthly knowledge, and yet

  which can be answered, must be answered here alone in the realm of earth,

  realized on earth

  as the counterplay of a dual world-shaping,

  reality conformed to truth, truth conformed to reality,

  complying with the law of the soul,

  her necessity;

  for, tense with questioning, the soul

  is held into her salvation, saved by truth,

  enjoined to perception, to questioning, to shaping,

  stretched between her certitude of knowledge and her capacity for perception,

  in search of reality,

  and summoned in this manner by primal knowledge,

  summoned by the knowing question which suggests

  something chanceless establishing unity in all that exists,

  called hither to the realization of knowledge,

  to the knowledge born of perception,

  to perception of the chance-delivered law,

  the soul is caught constantly setting out,

  ready for departure and departing toward her own essence,

  toward her incarnation and beyond her incarnation,

  her start and goal united in the spheres,

  bringing man into his humanity;

  for man is held into the perceptive ground of his knowing soul,

  into the perceptive ground

  of his doing and searching, his willing and thinking, his dreams,

  he is laid open to the infinite and the chanceless within the real,

  this most comprehensive and forceful

  most relentlessly gentle, most actual image of himself in his own reality,

  to which he will come home, to which he is coming home

  forever,

  held into the now of his own symbol

  in order that it may come to be his constant reality;

  for it is the defiance of its summons

  into which man is held,

  the defiance of the imprisoned one,

  the defiance of his inextinguishable freedom,

  the defiance of his inextinguishable will for knowledge,

  so unyielding,

  that he becomes greater than all earthly shortcomings,

  growing beyond himself,

  the titanic defiance of humanity;

  verily man is held into his task of knowing,

  and nothing is able to dissuade him,

  not even the inevitability of error,

  the bound nature of which vanishes before

  the task beyond all chance;

  for even though man was so imprisoned in his earthly shortcomings—and before all, this one who leaned painfully clutching the window-sill, a sick man grievously struggling for breath—, for even though man was so fated to disappointment, delivered over to every sort of disappointment in great things as in small, his labor in vain, fruitless in the past and hopeless in the future, and even though disappointment might have chased him on from impatience to impatience, from restlessness to restlessness, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, harassed and loving and again harassed, fate-driven from one perception to another, driven away from the erstwhile life of simple creative work toward all the diversity of knowledge, driven on toward poetry and to the further exploration of the oldest and most occult wisdom, impatient for knowledge, impatient for truth, then driven back to poetry as if it could be related to death in a final fulfillment—oh, this too was disappointment, this too the wrong path—, oh, even though this had been such an utterly wrong path, aye, simply a wrong path that was and is, aye, even less than a wrong path with hardly an attempt toward the first step and that gone astray before the start, oh, even though his whole life seemed so utterly shipwrecked and remained so shipwrecked, so clogged by shortcomings from the very beginning, damned to founder for ever and aye, since nothing was fitted to penetrate the thicket, since the mortal never came through it, since fumbling about motionless on the spot, bound to despair and disappointment, he remained in bondage to every frightfulness of error, oh, nevertheless and nevertheless, nothing had occurred without necessity, nothing occurs without necessity, because the necessity of the human soul, the necessity of the human task overruled every circumstance, even the wrong road, even the error;

  for only amidst error, only through error

  in which he was inescapably held,

  did man come to be the seeker

  that he was,

  the seeking human;

  for man needed the realization of futility,

  he must accept its dread, the dread of all error,

  and recognizing it, he must drain it to the dregs,

  he must assimilate it,

  not in self-torment, but rather

  that through such conscious assimilation

  the dread might be expunged,

  only thus might one pass through the horny portal of dread and achieve existence;

  this was the reason why man was held into the space of incertitude,

  held thus, as if no boat were bearing him now,

  even though he floated forward on a floating bark;

  this was why he was held into space after space

  of his own awareness,

  into the spaces of his self-realizing self,

  self-realization—fate of the human soul;

  but he, behind whom the heavy wings of dread’s portal had closed,

  had arrived at the fore-court of reality,

  and the unknown stream on which he was being floated onward,

  this unperceived element became the source of his knowledge,

  being, as it was, the streaming growth of his own soul,

  the uncompleted within himself, and unable to be completed,

  which for all that developed to a whole

  as soon as the self was self-assimilated,

  made indestructible by growing into the streaming oneness of the universe,

  realized by him, seen by him

  in a concurrence which by its everlasting immediacy

  forced all the spaces into which he was held to a single space,