by Thomas Mann
And that of right. Gifted but halt is the German-gifted enough to be angry with his paralysis, and to overcome it by hand-overhead illumination. You, my good man, well knew what you needed, and took the right road when you made your journey and salva venia summoned your French beloved to you.”
“Hold thy tongue!”
“Hold thy tongue? We are coming on. We wax warm. At last you drop the polite plural number and say ‘thou,’ as it should be between people who are in league and contract for time and eternity.”
“Will ye hold your tongue still?”
“Still? But we have been still for nigh five years and must after all sometime hold parley and advise over the whole and over the interesting situation wherein you find yourself. This is naturally a thing to keep wry about, but after all not at the length—when the houre-glasse is set, the red sand has begun to run through the fine-fine neck-ah, but only just begun! It is still almost nothing, what lies underneath, by comparison with all there is on top; we give time, plenteous time, abundant time by the eye, the end whereof we do not need to consider, not for a long time yet, nor need to trouble yet awhile even of the point of time where you could begin to take heed to the ending, where it might come to ‘Respice finem? Sithence it is a variable point, left to caprice and temper, and nobody knows where it should begin, and how nigh to the end one should lay it out. This is a good bourd and capital arrangement: the uncertainty and the free choice of the moment when the time is come to heed the eynde, overcasts in mist and jest the view of the appointed limit.”
“Fables, fantasies!”
“Get along, one cannot please you, even against my psychology you are harsh—albeit you yourself on your Mount Zion at home called psychology a nice, neutral middle point and psychologists the most truth-loving people. I fable not a whit when I speak of the given time and the appointed end; I speak entirely to the point. Wheresoever the houre-glasse is set up and time fixed, unthinkable yet measured time and a fixed end, there we are in the field, there we are in clover. Time we sell—let us say XXIV years—can we see to the end of that? Is it a good solid amount? Therewith a man can live at rack and manger like a lord and astonish the world as a great nigromancer with much divel’s work; the lenger it goes on, the more forget all paralysis and in highly illuminated state rise out of himselfe, yet never transcend but remain the same, though raised to his proper stature by the half-bottle of champagne. In drunken bliss he savours all the rapture of an almost unbearable draught, till he may with more or less of right be convinced that a like infusion has not been in a thousand years and in certain abandoned moments may simply hold himself a god. How will such an one come to think about the point of time when it is become time to give heed to the end! Only, the end is ours, at the end he is ours, that has to be agreed on, and not merely silently, how silent so ever it be else, but from man to man and expressly.”
I: “So you would sell me time?”
He: “Time? Simple time? No, my dear fere, that is not devyll’s ware. For that we should not earn the reward, namely that the end belongs to us. What manner of time, that is the heart of the matter! Great time, mad time, quite bedivelled time, in which the fun waxes fast and furious, with heaven-high leaping and springing—and again, of course, a bit miserable, very miserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even emphasize it, with pride, for it is sitting and fit, such is artist—way and artist-nature. That, as is well knowen, is given at all times to excess on both sides and is in quite normal way a bit excessive. Alway the pendulum swings very wide to and fro between high spirits and melancholia, that is usual, is so to speak still according to moderate bourgeois Nuer-remberg way, in comparison with that which we purvey. For we purvey the uttermost in this direction; we purvey towering flights and illuminations, experiences of upliftings and unfetterings, of freedom, certainty, facility, feeling of power and triumph, that our man does not trust his wits—counting in besides the colossal admiration for the made thing, which could soon bring him to renounce every outside, foreign admiration—the thrills of self-veneration, yes, of exquisite horror of himself, in which he appears to himself like an inspired mouthpiece, as a godlike monster. And correspondingly deep, honourably deep, doth he sink in between-time, not only into void and desolation and unfruitful melancholy but also into pains and sicknesse—familiar incidentally, which had alway been there, which belong to his character, yet which are only most honorably enhanced by the illumination and the well-knowen ‘sack of heyre.’ Those are pains which a man gladly pays, with pleasure and pride, for what he has so much enjoyed, pains which he knows from the fairy-tale, the pains which the little seamaid, as from sharp knives, had in her beautiful human legs she got herself instead of her tail. You know Andersen’s Little Seamaid? She would be a sweetheart for you! Just say the word and I will bring her to your couch.”
I: “If you could just keep quiet, prating jackanapes that you are!”
He: “How now! Need you always make a rude answer? Always you expect me to be still. But silence is not my motto, I do not belong to the Schweigestill family. And Mother Else, anyhow, has prattled in all proper discretion no end to you about her odd occasional guests. Neither am I come hither for the sake of silence to a pagan foreign land; but rather for express confirmation between us two and a firm contract upon payment against completion. I tell you, we have been silent more than four years—and now everything is taking the finest, most exquisite, most promising course, and the bell is now half cast. Shall I tell you how it stands and what is afoot?”
I: “It well appeareth I must listen.”
He: “Wouldst like to besides, and art well content that thou canst hear. I trow forsooth you are on edge to hear and would grumble and growl an I kept it back, and that of right too. It is such a snug, familiar world wherein we are together, thou and I—we are right at home therein, pure Kaisersaschern, good old German air, from anno MD or thereabouts, shortly before Dr. Martinus came, who stood on such stout and sturdy footing with me and threw the roll, no, I mean the ink-pot at me, long before the thirty years’ frolic. Bethink thee what lively movement of the people was with you in Germany’s midst, on the Rhine and all over, how full of agitation and unrest, anxiety, presentiments; what press of pilgrims to the Sacred Blood at Niklashausen in the Tauberthal, what children’s crusades, bleeding of the Host, famine, Peasants’ League, war, the pest at Cologne, meteors, comets, and great omens, nuns with the stigmata, miraculous crosses on men’s garments, and that amazing standard of the maiden’s shift with the Cross, whereunder to march against the Turk! Good time, divellishly German time! Don’t you feel all warm and snug at the memory? There the right planets come together in the sign of the Scorpion, as Master Diirer has eruditely drawn in the medical broadsheet, there came the tender little ones, the swarms of animated corkscrews, the loving guests from the West Indies into the German lands, the flagellants-ah, now you listen! As though I spake of the marching guild of penitents, the Flagellants, who flailed for their own and all other sins. But I mean those flagellates, the invisible tiny ones, the kind that have scourges, like our pale Venus, the spirochasta pallida, that is the true sort. But th’art right, it sounds so comfortingly like the depths of Middle Ages and the flagellum hareticorum fascinariorum. Yea, verily, as fascinarii they may well shew themselves, our devotees, in the better cases, as in yours. They are moreover quite civilized and domesticated long since, and in old countries where they have been so many hundred years at home, they do not play such merry pranks and coarse preposterous jokes as erstwhile, with running sore and plague and worm-eaten nose. Baptist Spengler the painter does not look as though he, his body wrapped up in hair, would have to shake the warning rattle withersoever he went.”
I: “Is he like that—Spengler?”
He: “Why not? I suppose you think you are the only one in like case? I know thou haddest thine liefer quite by thyself and art vexed at any comparison. My dear fellow, a man always has a great many companions. Spengler, of course, is an Esmeral
dus. It is not without reason that he blinks, so sly and shamefast, and not for nothing does Inez Rodde call him a sneak. So it is: Leo Zink, the Faunus ficarius, has always heretofore escaped; but it got the clean, clever Spengler early on. Yet be calm, withhold your jealousy. It is a banal, tedious case, productive of nothing at all. He is no python, in whom we bring sensational deeds to pass. A little brighter, more given to the intellectual he may be become since the reception and would peradventure list not so much on reading the Goncourt journals or Abbe Galiani if he had not the relation with the higher world, nor had the privy memorandum. Psychology, my dear friend. Disease, indeed I mean repulsive, individual, private disease, makes a certain critical contrast to the world, to life’s mean, puts a man in a mood rebellious and ironic against the bourgeois order, makes its man take refuge with the free spirit, with books, in cogitation. But more it is not with Spengler. The space that is still allotted him for reading, quoting, drinking red wine, and idling about, it isn’t we who have sold it to him, it is anything rather than genialized time. A man of the world, just singed by our flame, weary, mildly interesting, no more. He rots away, liver, kidneys, stomach, heart, bowels; some day his voice will be a croak, or he will be deaf, after a few years he will ingloriously shuffle off this coyle, with a cynical quip on his lips—what then? It forceth but little, there was never any illumination, enhancing or enthusiasm, for it was not of the brain, not cerebral, you understand—our little ones in that case made no force of the upper and noble, it had obviously no fascination for them, it did not come to a metastasis into the metaphysical, metavenereal, meta-infectivus… “
I (with venom): “How long must I needs sit and freeze and listen to your intolerable gibberish?”
He: “Gibberish? Have to listen? That’s a funny chord to strike. In mine opinion you* listen very attentively and are but impatient to know more, yea and all. You have just asked eagerly after your friend Spengler in Munich, and if I had not cut you off, you would avidly have asked me all this whole time about hell’s fiery pit. Don’t, I beg of you, pretend you’re put on. I also have my self-respect, and know that I am no unbidden guest. To be short, the meta-spirochaetose, that is the meningeal process, and I assure you, it is just as though certain of the little ones had a passion for the upper storey, a special preference for the head region, the meninges, the dura mater, the tentorium, and the pia, which protect the tender parenchyma inside and from the moment of the first general contagion swarmed passionately hither.”
I: “It is with you as you say. The rampallion seems to have studied medicinam?
He: “No more than you theology, that is in bits and as a specialist. Will you gainsay that you studied the best of the arts and sciences also only as specialist and amateur? Your interest had to do with me. I am obliged to you. But wherefore should I, Esmeralda’s friend and cohabitant, in which quality you behold me before you, not have a special interest in the medical field concerned, which borders on it, and be at home in it as a specialist? Indeed, I constantly and with the greatest attention follow the latest results of research in this field. Item, some doctores assert and swear by Peter and Paul there must be brain specialists among the little ones, amateurs in the cerebral sphere, in short a virus nerveux. But these experts are in the aforementioned box. It is arsie-versie in the matter, for ‘tis the brain which gapes at their visitation and looks forward expectantly, as you to mine, that it invites them to itself, draws them unto it, as though it could not bear at all to wait for them. Do you still remember? The philosopher, De anima: ‘the acts of the person acting are performed on him the previously disposed to suffer it.’ There you have it: on the disposition, the readiness, the invitation, all depends. That some men be more qualified to the practising of witchcraft, then other, and we know well how to discern them, of that already are aware the worthy authors of the Malleus.”
I: “Slanderer, I have no connection with you. I did not invite you.”
He: “La, la, sweet innocence! The far-travelled client of my little ones was I suppose not forewarned? And your doctors too you chose with sure instinct.”
I: “I looked them out in the directory. Whom should I have asked? And who could have told me that they would leave me in the lash? What did you do with my two physicians?”
He: “Put them away, put them away. Oh, of course we put the blunderers away in your interest. And at the right moment iwis, not too soon and not too late, when they had got the thing in train with their quackery and quicksilvery, and if we had left them they might have botched the beautiful case. We allowed them the provocation, then basta and away with them! So soon as they with their specific treatment had properly limited the first, cutaneously emphasized general infiltration, and thus given a powerful impetus to the metastasis upwards, their business was accomplished, they had to be removed. The fools, to wit, do not know, and if they know they cannot change it, that by the general treatment the upper, the metavenereal processes are powerfully accelerated. Indeed, by not treating the fresh stages it is often enough forwarded; in short, the way they do it is wrong. In no case could we let the provocation by quackery and quickery go on. The regression of the general penetration was to be left to itself, that the progression up there should go on pretty slowly, in order that years, decades, of nigromantic time should be saved for you, a whole houre-glasseful of divel-time, genius-time. Narrow and small and finely circumscribed it is today, four years after you got it, the place up there in you; but it is there, the hearth, the workroom of the little ones, who on the liquor way, the water way as it were, got there, the place of incipient illumination.”
I: “Do I trap you, blockhead? Do you betray yourself and name to me yourself the place in my brain, the fever hearth, that makes me imagine you, and without which you were not? Be-trayest to me that in excited state I see and hear you, yet you are but a bauling before my eyes!”
He: “The Great God Logick! Little fool, it is topside the other waie: I am not the product of your pia hearth up there, rather the hearth enables you to perceive me, understand, and without it, indeed, you would not see me. Is therefore my existence dependent on your incipient drunkenness? Do I belong in your subjective? I ask you! Only patience, what goes on and progresses there will give you the capacity for a great deal more, will conquer quite other impediments and make you to soar over lameness and halting. Wait till Good Friday, and ‘twill soon be Easter! Wait one, ten, twelve years, until the illumination, the dazzling radiance as all lame scruples and doubts fall away and you will know for what you pay, why you make over body and soul to us. Then shall osmotic growths sine pudore sprout out of the apothecary’s sowing… “
I (start up): “Hold thy foul mouth! I forbid thee to speak of my father!”
He: “Oh, thy father is not so ill placed in my mouth. He was a shrewd one, always wanting to speculate the elements. The mygrim, the point of attack for the knife-pains of the little seamaid—after all, you have them from him… Moreover, I have spoken quite correctly: osmosis, fluid diffusion, the proliferation process—the whole magic intreats of these. You have there the spinal sac with the pulsating column of fluid therein, reaching to the cerebrum, to the meninges, in whose tissues the furtive venereal meningitis is at its soundless stealthy work. But our little ones could not reach into the inside, into the parenchyma, however much they are drawn, however much they longingly draw thither—without fluid diffusion, osmosis, with the cell-fluid of the pia watering it, dissolving the tissue, and paving a way inside for the scourges. Everything comes from osmosis, my friend, in whose teasing manifestations you so early diverted yourself.”
I: “Your baseness makes me to laugh. I wish Schildknapp would come back that I might laugh with him. I would tell him father-stories, I too. Of the tears in my father’s eyes, when he said: ‘And yet they are dead!’ “
He: “Cock’s body! You were right to laugh at his ruthful tears-aside from the fact that whoever has, by nature, dealings with the tempter is always at variance with the feelings
of people, al ways tempted to laugh when they weep, and weep when they laugh. What then does ‘dead’ mean, when the flora grows so rankly, in such diverse colours and shapes? And when they are even heliotropic? What does ‘dead’ mean when the drop displays such a healthy appetite? What is sick, what well, my friend, about that we must not let the philistine have the last word. Whether he does understand life so well remains a question. What has come about by the way of death, of sickness, at that life has many a time clutched with joy and let itself be led by it higher and further. Have you forgotten what you learned in the schools, that God can bring good out of evil and that the occasion to it shall not be marred? Item, a man must have been always ill and mad in order that others no longer need be so. And where mad ness begins to be malady, there is nobody knows at all. If a man taken up in a rapture write in a margent note: Am blissful! Am beside myself! That I call new and great! Seething bliss of in spiration! My cheeks glow like molten iron! I am raging, you will all be raging, when this comes to you! Then God succour your poor sely souls!’ Is that still mad healthiness, normal madness, or has he got it in the meninges! The bourgeois is the last to diagnose; for long in any case nothing further about it strikes him as strange, because forsooth artists are queer birds anyhow. If next day on a rebound he cry: ‘Oh, flat and stale! Oh, a dog’s life, when a man can do nothing! Were there but a war, so that somewhat would happen! If I could croak in good style! May hell pity me, for I am a son of hell!’ Does he really mean that? Is it the literal truth that he says there of hell, or is it only metaphor for a little normal Durer melancolia? In summa, we simply give you that for which the classic poet, the lofty and stately genius, so beautifully thanked his gods:
