Mount Analogue

by Rene Daumal

  “While still young,” he said, “I had known almost every pleasure and discomfort, all the happiness and all the suffering that can befall man as a social animal. Useless to give you the details: the repertory of possible events in human destinies is rather limited, and they are nearly always the same stories. I will tell you only that one day I found myself alone, all alone, fully convinced that I had completed one cycle of existence. I had traveled widely, studied the most esoteric sciences, learned more than ten trades. Life treated me a little the way an organism treats a foreign body: it was obviously trying either to enclose me or to expel me, and I myself thirsted for ‘something else.’ I thought I found this something else in religion. I entered a monastery. A curious monastery. What, where—it doesn’t matter; you should know, however, that it belonged to an order that was, to say the least, heretical.

  “There was, in particular, a very curious custom in the rule of the order. Every morning our Superior handed each man—there were about thirty of us—a piece of paper that had been folded twice. One of these pieces bore the inscription: TU HODIE, and the Superior alone knew who had received it. I really believe that on certain days all the pieces were blank, but since no one knew, the result—you will see—was the same. ‘It’s you today’—this meant that the brother so designated, unbeknownst to the others, would play the roll of Tempter for the day. I have witnessed, among certain small African tribes and other peoples some ghastly practices—human sacrifices, cannibal rites. But I have never encountered in any religious or magical sect a custom as cruel as this institution of the daily Tempter. Imagine thirty men, living a communal life, already half-crazed by the perpetual terror of sin, looking at one another with the obsessive thought that one of them, without knowing whom, is specially charged with testing their faith, their humility, and their charity. There you have a diabolical caricature of a great idea—the idea that in my fellow man as in myself, there is both a person to hate and a person to love.

  “One thing proves to me the diabolical nature of this custom: not one of the monks had ever refused to play the role of Tempter. Not one, when the tu hodie was handed to him, had the slightest doubt that he was capable and worthy of playing such a part. The tempter was himself a victim of a monstrous temptation. As for me, I accepted this role of agent provocateur several times, obeying the order, and it is the most shameful memory of my life. I accepted until one day I understood the trap I had fallen into. Up to that moment I had always unmasked the Satan on duty. These unfortunates were so naïve! Always the same tricks, which they thought were so subtle, poor devils! All their cleverness consisted of playing on a few fundamental falsehoods, such as ‘following the rules to the letter is good only for idiots who cannot grasp their spirit,’ or ‘alas, with my health I cannot attempt such exertions.’

  “Once, however, the devil for the day managed to catch me. This time he was a cheerful strapping rough-hewn fellow, with a child’s blue eyes. During our rest period, he moved over to me and said, ‘I see that you’ve recognized me. There’s no fooling you, you are really too observant. Besides, you don’t need this game to know that temptation is all around us, or rather within us. But look at the unfathomable spinelessness of man: all the means he’s been given to stay alert he uses, in the end, to ornament his sleep. We wear a hair shirt the way we would wear a monocle, we chant matins the way other people play golf. Ah, if only today’s scientists, instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life easier, would put their ingenuity into fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor! There are plenty of machine guns, but of course that would be overdoing it …’

  “He spoke so well that on that very evening, with my brain on fire, I obtained from my Superior the authorization to occupy my leisure hours with inventions and fabrications of this kind. I immediately set to work inventing mind-boggling devices: a pen for overly fluent writers that spotted or splattered every five or ten minutes; a tiny portable phonograph, equipped with a listening device like those on hearing aids that conduct the sound through the bones and which would shout at you at the least likely moments, for example: ‘Just who do you think you are?’ There was a pneumatic cushion, which I called ‘the soft pillow of doubt,’ which deflated unexpectedly beneath the sleeper’s head; a mirror whose curvature was carefully designed in such a way—that one gave me trouble!—that every human face was reflected in it as a pig’s head; and many others. I was thus fully employed—to the extent that I no longer even recognized the daily tempters. They had fun encouraging me. Then one morning I received the tu hodie. The first brother I encountered was the big strapping fellow with the innocent blue eyes. He greeted me with a cruel smile that was like cold water in my face. I saw at once the childishness of my inventions and the baseness of the role I was expected to play. Breaking all the rules, I went to find the Superior and told him that I could no longer agree ‘to play the devil.’ He spoke to me with a gentle severity, perhaps sincere, perhaps professional. ‘My son,’ he concluded, I see that you possess an incurable need to understand which prevents you from staying in this house. We shall pray to God that He wishes to call you to Him by other paths. …’

  “That evening I took the train for Paris. I had entered the monastery under the name of Brother Petrus. I left it with the sobriquet Father Sogol. I have kept this nickname. My religious companions had called me this because of a turn of mind they had noticed in me, which at the slightest prompting made me take exactly the opposite position to all proposed assertions, always invert cause and effect, principal and consequence, substance and chance. ‘Sogol’ is a rather childish and pretentious anagram, but I needed a name that sounded good; and it reminded me of a rule of thought that had served me well. Thanks to my scientific and technical knowledge, I soon found jobs in various laboratories and industrial enterprises. Gradually I readapted to the life of the ‘century,’ but only externally, it’s true. Deep down I can’t manage to become attached to this monkey-cage frenzy which people so dramatically call life.”

  A bell rang.

  “Fine, my good Physics, fine!” cried Father Sogol to his servant/ housekeeper; and he explained to me: “Lunch is ready. Let’s go then.”

  He led me off the path and, gesturing to all the contemporary human knowledge inscribed on the little rectangles before our eyes, he said, in a low voice:

  “Bogus, all this, bogus. There is not a single one of these cards of which I can say: here is a truth, a small, sure, and certain truth. There are only mysteries or mistakes in all this; where the first end, the second begin.”

  We came to a small, totally white room where the table was set.

  “Here, at least, something relatively real, if one can bring these two words together without setting off an explosion,” he went on as we sat down facing each other across one of those country dishes in which all the seasonal vegetables weave their vapors around a piece of boiled animal. “Again my good Physics calls upon all her old Breton shrewdness to put on my table the elements of a meal that contains no barium sulfate, no gelatin, no boric acid, no sulfuric acid, no formaldehyde, or any of the other drugs used in contemporary industrial food production. A good pot-au-feu, after all, is worth more than a mendacious philosophy.”

  We ate in silence. My host did not feel obliged to chat while eating, and I greatly admired him for that. He had no fear of being silent when he had nothing to say, or of reflecting before speaking. In reporting our conversation now, I fear I have given the impression that he never stopped talking. In reality, his stories and his confidences were interspersed with long silences, and quite often I put in a word myself. I told him, in broad outline, about my life, but that is hardly worth repeating here; and as for the silences, how can silence be described in words? Only poetry can do that.

  After the meal, we returned to the “park,” under the large window, and we stretched out on carpets and leather cushions. This was a very simple way of making a low-ceilinged area more spacious. Physics silently brought the co
ffee, and Sogol resumed his remarks:

  “That fills the stomach, but little else. With a bit of money in this prevailing civilization, one manages well enough to obtain the basic physical satisfactions. The rest is bogus. Bogus, ticks and tricks, that’s our whole life, between the diaphragm and the cranium. My Superior was right: I suffer from an incurable need to understand. I do not want to die without understanding why I have lived. And you, have you ever been afraid of death?”

  I rummaged among my memories in silence, among the deepest memories which had not yet been put into words. And I said, with some difficulty:

  “Yes. Around the age of six I heard something about flies that sting people while they sleep. Someone had joked that ‘when you wake up, you’re dead.’ This phrase haunted me. In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death to myself, the ‘most nothing of all.’ In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life, and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any ‘I’—What is it after all, ‘I’? I was not able to grasp it, ‘I’ slipped from my thought like a fish from the hands of a blind man. I couldn’t sleep. For three years, these nights of interrogation in the dark frequently returned. Then, one particular night, a marvelous idea came to me: instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat; I recall that I was subject to irregular heartbeats. I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared. In this state, when I tried to think again about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope …”

  “And then you grew up, went to school, and began to philosophize, didn’t you? We’re all like that. It seems that around the age of adolescence, the inner life of the young human being is suddenly weakened, its natural courage neutered. His thought no longer dares to confront reality or mystery face to face, directly; but endeavors to regard them through the opinions of ‘grown-ups,’ through the books and courses of professors. Yet the small inner voice is not entirely extinguished, and sometimes it cries out when it can, whenever a jolt of existence loosens the gag. It cries out its question, but we immediately stifle it. Well, we already understand each other a little. I can tell you, then, that I am afraid of death. Not of what we imagine about death, for this fear is itself imaginary. Not of my death whose date will be recorded in the civic registers of the state. But of that death I suffer every moment, of the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood keeps asking, as yours does: ‘What am I?’ and which everything within us and around us seems bent on stifling. When this voice does not speak—and it does not speak often!—I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver. I am afraid that one day it will fall silent forever; or that it will wake up too late—as in your story of the flies: when you wake up, you’re dead.

  “And there you have it!” he said, almost violently. “I’ve told you the main thing. All the rest is details. I’ve waited for years to be able to say this to someone.”

  He sat down, and I saw that this man must have a mind of steel to resist the pressure of madness that was boiling up inside him. He was now fairly relaxed, and seemed relieved.

  “My only good moments,” he went on after changing position, “were when I took my hiking boots, my rucksack, and my ice axe to climb the mountains. I’ve never had very long vacations, but I’ve made the most of them. After ten or eleven months spent perfecting vacuum cleaners or synthetic perfumes, after a night on the train and a day’s journey by bus, when I arrive at the first snowfields with my muscles still poisoned by the toxins of the city, I always weep like an idiot, feeling my head empty, my limbs drunk, and my heart open. A few days later, wedged into a crevasse or astride a ridge, I find myself again, I recognize in myself characters I had not seen since the year before. But they were always the same characters after all …

  “Now, in my readings and in my travels I have heard, like you, about men of a superior type, possessing the keys to all our mysteries. Somehow I could not regard this as a simple allegory, this idea of an invisible humanity within visible humanity. Experience has proven, I told myself, that a man can reach truth neither directly nor alone; an intermediary must exist—still human in certain respects yet surpassing humanity in others. Somewhere on our Earth this superior humanity must exist, and it cannot be absolutely inaccessible. And so shouldn’t all my efforts be devoted to discovering it? Even if, in spite of my certainty, I were the victim of a monstrous illusion, I would have nothing to lose in making the effort, for in any case, without this hope, all life is meaningless.

  “But where to look? Where to begin? I had already traveled the world, stuck my nose everywhere, into all sorts of religious sects and mystical cults, but to each one it was always: maybe yes, maybe no. Why should I stake my life on this one rather than that one? You see, I had no touchstone. But the very fact that there are two of us changes everything; the task does not become twice as easy, no: from being impossible it becomes possible. It’s as if, to measure the distance from a star to our planet, you gave me one known point on the surface of the globe: the calculus is impossible. Give me a second point, it becomes possible, because then I can construct the triangle.”

  This abrupt leap into geometry was typical of him. I don’t know if I understood him very well, but there was some force working to convince me.

  “Your article on Mount Analogue was illuminating to me,” he continued. “This place exists. We both know it. Therefore we will discover it. Where? That’s a matter of calculation. I promise you that in a few days I will have determined its geographical position within several degrees. And we are ready to leave immediately, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but how? What route do we take, what mode of transport, how do we pay for it? And how long do we stay?”

  “Those are just details. Besides, I’m sure we will not be alone. Two persons convince a third and that creates a snowball effect—although we’ll have to deal with what people call their ‘common sense,’ poor creatures. It’s the common sense of water to flow … as long as it is not set over a fire to boil or into an ice tray to freeze. So if there’s no fire … we’ll hammer the iron until it gets hot. Let’s set the first meeting on Sunday, here. I have five or six good pals who will surely come. Of course, one of them is in England and two are in Switzerland, but they will be here. We’ve always agreed that we would never attempt major expeditions without one another. And as major expeditions go, this will be a major expedition if there ever was one.”

  “On my side,” I said, “I also have a few people who might be able to join us.”

  “Invite them for four o’clock, but you should come earlier, around two. My calculations will certainly be ready … Well, do you have to leave me already? All right, here’s the way out,” he said, showing me the little window hung with the rappelling rope. “Only Physics uses the stairs. Good-bye!”

  Wrapping myself in the rope, which smelled of grass and the stables, I was down below in a few moments.

  With an odd, floating sensation, I found myself in the street, slipping on banana peels, dodging tomatoes, and brushing against the sweating housewives.

  If on my way back from the Passage des Patriarches to my apartment near Saint-Germain-des-près I had thought of regarding myself as a transparent stranger, I might have been able to discover one of the laws that governs the behavior of “featherless bipeds unfit to conceive the number (pi),” according to the definition Father Sogol gave to the species to which he, you, and I belong. This law might be formulated as follows: resonance to the latest statements we’ve heard. The guides to Mount Analogue, who would later reveal it to me, called it simply the chameleon law. Father Sogol had really convinced me, and while he was speaking to me I was ready to follow him on his crazy expedition. But the closer I came to hom
e, where I would find all my old habits again, I pictured to myself my office mates, my writer friends, and my best pals listening to the story of the astonishing meeting I’d just had. I imagined their sarcasm, their skepticism, their pity. I began to mistrust my naivete, my credulity … so that when I began to tell my wife about my meeting with Sogol, I surprised myself by using expressions such as: “a funny fellow … ,” “a defrocked monk,” “a crazy inventor,” “an extravagant project” … And I was stupefied to hear her say, at the end of my story:

  “Well, he’s right. I’m going to start packing my trunk this evening. After all, there are not just two of you—we’re already three!”

  “So, you’re really taking this seriously?”

  “It’s the first serious idea I’ve encountered in my life!”

  And the power of the chameleon law is such that I reverted to thinking that Father Sogol’s enterprise was, after all, entirely reasonable.

  CHAPTER 2

  In Which Suppositions are Made

  Introduction of guests—An Orator’s trick—Posing the problem—Untenable hypotheses—Absurdity in the extreme—Non-Euclidian navigation in a dish—Distinguished astronomers—How Mount Analogue exists entirely as though it did not exist—Light on the true story of Merlin the Magician—On Method in invention—The Solar entry—Explanation of a geographical anomaly—The Hemisphere of lands—A Delicate calculation—The Redeemer of millionaires—A poetic quitter—An amiable quitter—A Pathetic female quitter—A Philosophical quitter—Precautions

  The following Sunday, at two in the afternoon, I brought my wife to the “laboratory” in the Passage des Patriarches, and after half an hour, we three formed a group for which nothing was now impossible.

  Father Sogol had nearly finished his mysterious calculations, but he was reserving his disclosure until later when all the guests would be there. While waiting, we entertained ourselves by describing to each other the people we had invited.