by Thomas Mann
Even so it had been a strange moment, and his heart had missed a beat, when one morning at nine o’clock the four-hundred-pound armoured door had closed behind them and they swayed away from the ship and plunged into the water, crystal-clear at first, lighted by the sun. But this illumination of the inside of our “drop in the bucket” reached down only some fifty-seven metres. For at that depth light has come to an end; or rather, a new, unknown, irrelevant world here begins, into which Adrian with his guide went down to nearly fourteen times that depth, some thirty-six hundred feet, and there remained for half an hour, almost every moment painfully aware that a pressure of five hundred thousand tons rested upon their shelter.
Gradually, on the way down, the water had taken on a grey colour, that of a darkness mixed with some still undaunted rays of light. Not easily did these become discouraged; it was the will and way of them to make light and they did so to their uttermost, so that the next stage of light’s exhaustion and retreat actually had more colour than the previous one. Through the quartz windows the travellers looked into a blue-blackness hard to describe; perhaps best compared to the dull colour of the horizon on a clear thawing day. After that, indeed long before the hand of the indicator stood at seven hundred and fifty to seven hundred and sixty-five metres, came solid blackness all round, the blackness of interstellar space whither for eternities no weakest sun-ray had penetrated, the eternally still and virgin night, which now had to put up with a powerful artificial light from the upper world, not of cosmic origin, in order to be looked at and looked through.
Adrian spoke of the itch one felt to expose the unexposed, to look at the unlooked-at, the not-to-be and not-expecting-to-be looked-at. There was a feeling of indiscretion, even of guilt, bound up with it, not quite allayed by the feeling that science must be allowed to press just as far forwards as it is given the intelligence of scientists to go. The incredible eccentricities, some grisly, some comic, which nature here achieved, forms and features which seemed to have scarcely any connection with the upper world but rather to belong to another planet: these were the product of seclusion, sequestration, of reliance on being wrapped in eternal darkness. The arrival upon Mars of a human conveyance travelling through space—or rather, let us say, upon that half of Mercury which is eternally turned away from the sun—could excite no greater sensation in the inhabitants—if any—of that “near” planet, than the appearance of the Akercocke diving-bell down here. The mass curiosity with which these inconceivable creatures of the depths had crowded round the cabin had been indescribable—and quite indescribable too was everything that went whisking past the windows in a blur of motion: frantic caricatures of organic life; predatory mouths opening and shutting; obscene jaws, telescope eyes; the paper nautilus; silver-and gold-fish with goggling eyes on top of their heads; heteropods and pteropods, up to two or three yards long. Even those that floated passively in the flood, monsters compact of slime, yet with arms to catch their prey, polyps, acalephs, skyphomedusas—they all seemed to have been seized by spasms of twitching excitement.
It might well be that all these natives of the deep regarded this light-radiating guest as an outsize variation of themselves, for most of them could do what it could; that is to say, give out light by their own power. The visitors, Adrian said, had only to put out their own searchlight, when an extraordinary spectacle unfolded outside. Far and wide the darkness of the sea was illuminated by shooting and circling will-o’-the-wisps, caused by the light with which many of the creatures were equipped, so that in some cases the entire body was phosphorescent, while others had a searchlight, an electric lantern, with which presumably they not only lighted the darkness of their path, but also attracted their prey. They also probably used it in courtship. The ray from some of the larger ones cast such an intense white light that the observers’ eyes were blinded. Others had eyeballs projecting on stalks; probably in order to perceive at the greatest possible distance the faintest gleam of light meant to lure or warn.
The narrator regretted that it was not possible to catch any of these monsters of the deep, at least some of the utterly unknown ones, and bring them to the surface. In order to do so, however, one would have to preserve for them while ascending the same tremendous atmospheric pressure they were used to and adapted to in their environment—the same that rested on our diving-bell—a disturbing thought. In their habitat the creatures counteracted it by an equal pressure of their tissues and cavities; so that if the outside pressure were decreased, they would inevitably burst. Some of them, alas, burst now, on coming into contact with the diving-bell: the watchers saw an unusually large, flesh-coloured wight, rather finely formed, just touch the vessel and fly into a thousand pieces.
Thus Adrian told his tale, as we smoked our cigars; quite as though he had himself been present and had all these things shown to him. He carried out the jest so well, with only half a smile, that I could but stare amazed even while I laughed and marvelled at his tale. FIis smile also probably expressed a teasing amusement at a certain resistance on my side, which must have been obvious to him, for he well knew my lack of interest, even amounting to distaste, for the tricks and mysteries of the natural, for “nature” altogether, and my allegiance to the sphere of the human and articulate. Obviously this knowledge of his was in large part what led him to go on with his reports or, as he put it, his experiences of the monstrously extra-human; plunging, carrying me along with him, “in den Ozean der Welten alle.”
The transition was made easy for him by his previous descriptions. The alien, fantastic nature of the deep-sea life, which seemed no longer to belong to the same planet with us, was a point of departure. Another was the Klopstock phrase “The Drop to the Bucket”: how well its admiring humility described our own quite secondary position in the cosmos! This on account of our utter insignificance to any larger view; the almost undiscoverable situation not only of the earth but of our whole planetary system, the sun with its seven satellites, within the vortex of the Milky Way, to which it belongs—”our” Milky Way, to say nothing of the millions of other ones. The word “our” lends a certain intimacy to the vastness to which it refers; it takes the feeling of “home” and almost comically magnifies it into breathtakingly extended space, wherein then we are to consider ourselves as established if humble citizens. And here the tendency of nature to the spherical seems to be carried through: this was a third point to which Adrian linked his discourse on the cosmos; arriving at it partly through the strange experience of the sojourn in the hollow ball, the Akercocke diving-bell in which he purported to have spent some hours. In a hollow ball, so he was instructed, we all and sundry passed our days; for in the galactic system wherein we occupied an infinitesimal point somewhere at one side, the situation was as follows: It was shaped more or less like a flat watch; round, and much less thick than its circumference: an aggregation not literally immeasurable but still truly vast, a whirling disk of concentrated hosts of stars and star systems, star clusters, double stars, which described elliptical orbits about each other; of gas clouds, nebulas, planetary nebulas, stellar nebulas, and so on. But this disk was only comparable to the flat round surface which results when one cuts an orange in half; for it was enclosed all round by a vapour of other stars, which again could not strictly speaking be called immeasurable, but as raised to a very high power of vastness and in whose spaces, mostly empty spaces, the given objects were so distributed that the whole structure formed a ball. Somewhere deep within this absurdly sparsely settled ball, belonging, in a very minor category, scarcely worth mention and not even easy to find, to the disk or condensed swarm of worlds, was the fixed star about which, along with its greater and smaller companions, sported the earth and its little moon. “The sun”—a body little deserving of the definite article—a gas ball registering six thousand degrees of heat on its surface, and a mere million and a half kilometres in diameter, was as far distant from the centre of the galactic inner plane as that was thick through—in other words, thirty thousa
nd light-years.
My general information permitted me to associate a concept, however imprecise, with the words “light-year.” It was, of course, a spatial concept and the word meant the span that light puts behind it in the course of a whole earth-year, at a speed peculiar to it, of which I had a vague idea but Adrian had in his head the exact figure of 186,000 miles per second. So a light-year amounted to a round and net figure of six trillion miles, and the eccentricity of our solar system amounted to thirty thousand times as much, while the whole diameter of the galactic hollow ball came to two hundred thousand light-years.
No, it was not immeasurable, but it was in this way that it was to be measured. What is one to say to such an assault upon the human understanding? I confess to being so made that nothing but a resigned if also somewhat contemptuous shoulder-shrug remains to me in face of such ungraspable, such stunning statistics. Enthusiasm for size, being overwhelmed by size—that is no doubt a mental pleasure; but it is only possible in connections which a human being can grasp. The Pyramids are large, Mont Blanc and the inside of the dome of St. Peter’s are large, unless one prefer to reserve this attribute of largeness to the mental and moral world, the nobility of the heart and of thought. The data of the cosmic creation are nothing but a deafening bombardment of our intelligence with figures furnished with a comet’s tail of a couple of dozen ciphers, and comporting themselves as though they still had something, anything, to do with measurement and understanding. There is in all this monstrousness nothing that could appeal to the likes of me as goodness, beauty, greatness; and I shall never understand the glory-to-God mental attitude which certain temperaments assume when they contemplate the “works of God,” meaning by the phrase the physics of the universe. And is a construction to be hailed as “the works of God” when one may just as reasonably say: “Well, what then?” instead of “Glory to the Lord”? The first rather than the second seems to me the right answer to two dozen ciphers after a one or even after a seven, which really adds nothing to it; and I can see no sort of reason to fall in the dust and adore the fifth power of a million.
It was also a telling fact that Klopstock in his soaring poesy expressing and arousing a fervid reverence confines himself to the earth—the drop in the bucket—and leaves the quintillions alone. My friend Adrian, the composer of Klopstock’s hymns, does, as I say, dwell on this aspect; but I should do wrong to arouse the impression that he does so with any sort of emotion or emphasis. Adrian’s way of dealing with these insanities was cold, indifferent, coloured by amusement at my unconcealed distaste. But also it displayed a certain initiated familiarity, a persistence, I mean, in the fiction that he had derived his knowledge not simply through reading, but rather by personal transmission, instruction, demonstration, experience, perhaps from his abovementioned mentor, Professor Akercocke, who it appeared had been with him not only down in the darkness of the ocean deeps, but also up among the stars… He behaved in a way as though he had got it from his mentor, and indeed more or less through actual observation, that the physical universe—this word in its widest and furthest connotation—should be called neither finite nor infinite, because both words described something somehow static, whereas the true situation was through and through dynamic in its nature, and the cosmos, at least for a long time, more precisely for nineteen hundred million years, has been in a state of furious expansion—that is, of explosion. Of this we were left in no doubt, due to the red-shift of the light which reaches us from numerous milky-way systems at a known distance from us: the stronger alteration of colour of this light toward the red end of the spectrum is in proportion to the greater distance from us of these nebulae. Obviously they were moving away from us; and with the farthest ones, complexes one hundred and fifty million light-years away, the speed with which they moved was like that which the alpha particles of radioactive substance developed, amounting to twenty-five thousand kilometres a second, a rate of speed compared with which the splintering of a bursting shell was at a snail’s pace. If then all the galaxies were to rush away from each other in the most exaggerated space of time, then the word “explosion” would just be—or rather had not for a long time been—adequate to describe the state of the world-pattern and its way of expansion. It might once have been static, earlier, and been simply a milliard light-years in diameter. As things were now, one could speak indeed of expansion, but not of any constant expansion, “finite” or “infinite.” It seemed that his guide had been able to assure the questioner only of the fact that the sum of the collective existing galaxies was in the order of size of a hundred milliards, cf which only a modest million were accessible to our telescopes.
Thus Adrian, smoking and smiling. I appealed to his conscience and demanded from him an admission that this spooking about with statistics forever escaping into the void could not possibly stir one to a feeling of the majesty of God or give rise to any moral elevation. It all looked very much more like devil’s juggling.
“Admit,” said I to him, “that the horrendous physical creation is in no way religiously productive. What reverence and what civilizing process born of reverence can come from the picture of a vast impropriety like this of the exploding universe? Absolutely none. Piety, reverence, intellectual decency, religious feeling, are only possible about men and through men, and by limitation to the earthly and human. Their fruit should, can, and will be a religiously tinged humanism, conditioned by feeling for the transcendental mystery of man, by the proud consciousness that he is no mere biological being, but with a decisive part of him belongs to an intellectual and spiritual world, that to him the Absolute is given, the ideas of truth, of freedom, of justice; that upon him the duty is laid to approach the consummate. In this pathos, this obligation, this reverence of man for himself, is God; in a hundred milliards of Milky Ways I cannot find him.”
“So you are against the works,” he answered, “and against physical nature, from which man comes and with him his incorporeal part, which in the end does occur in other places in the cosmos. Physical creation, this monstrosity of a world set-up, so annoying to you, is incontestably the premise for the moral, without which it would have no soil, and perhaps one must call the good the flower of evil—une fleur du mal. But your homo Dei is after all—or not after all, I beg pardon, I mean before all—a part of this abominable nature—with a not very generous quantum of potential spirituality. Moreover it is amusing to see how much your humanism, and probably all humanism, inclines to the mediaeval geocentric—as it obviously must. In the popular belief, humanism is friendly to science; but it cannot be, for one cannot consider the subjects of science to be devil’s work without seeing the same in science itself. That is Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were geocentric and anthropocentric. The Church, in which they survived, has set itself to oppose astronomical knowledge in the humanistic spirit; bedevilled and forbidden it to the honour of the human being; out of humanity has insisted on ignorance. You see, your humanism is pure Middle Ages. Its concern is a cosmology proper to Kaisersaschern and its towers: it leads to astrology, to observation of the position of the planets, the constellation and its favourable or unfavourable indications—quite naturally and rightly, for nothing is clearer than the intimate interdependence of the bodies of a cosmic little group so closely bound together as our solar system, and their near neighbourly mutual reference.”
“We have already talked about astrological conjuncture,” I broke in. “It was long ago, we were walking round the Cow Pond, and it was a musical conversation. At that time you defended the constellation.”
“I still defend it today,” he answered. “Astrological times knew a lot. They knew, or divined, things which science in its broadest scope is coming back to. That diseases, plagues, epidemics have to do with the position of the stars was to those times an intuitive certainty. Today we have got so far as to debate whether germs, bacteria, organisms which, we say, can produce an influenza epidemic on earth come from other planets—Mars, Jupiter, or Venus.”
Contagious diseases, plague, black death, were probably not of this planet; as, almost certainly indeed, life itself has not its origin on our globe, but came hither from outside. He, Adrian, had it on the best authority that it came from neighbouring stars which are enveloped in an atmosphere more favourable to it, containing much methane and ammonia, like Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. From them, or from one of them—he left me the choice—life had once, borne by cosmic projectiles or simply by radiation pressure, arrived upon our formerly sterile and innocent planet. My humanistic homo Dei, that crowning achievement of life, was together with his obligations to the spiritual in all probability the product of the marsh-gas fertility of a neighbouring star.
“The flower of evil,” I repeated, nodding.
“And blooming mostly in mischief,” he added.
Thus he taunted me, not only with my kindly view of the world, but also by persisting in the whimsical pretence of a personal, direct, and special knowledge about the affairs of heaven and earth. I did not know, but I might have been able to tell myself, that all this meant something, meant a new work: namely, the cosmic music which he had in his mind, after the episode of the new songs. It was the amazing symphony in one movement, the orchestral fantasy that he was working out during the last months of 1913 and the first of 1914, and which very much against my expressed wish bore the title Marvels of the Universe. I was mistrustful of the flippancy of that name and suggested the title Symphonia cosmologica. But Adrian insisted, laughing, on the other, mock-pathetic, ironic name, which certainly better prepared the knowing for the out-and-out bizarre and unpleasant character of the work, even though often these images of the monstrous and uncanny were grotesque in a solemn, formal, mathematical way. This music has simply nothing in common with the spirit of the Spring Celebration, which after all was in a certain way the preparation for it: I mean with the spirit of humble glorification. If certain musical features of the writing peculiar to Adrian had not indicated the author, one could scarcely believe that the same mind brought forth both. Nature and essence of that nearly thirty-minutes-long orchestral world-portrait is mockery, a mockery which all too well confirms my opinion expressed in conversation, that preoccupation with the immeasurable extra-human affords nothing for piety to feed on: a luciferian sardonic mood, a sneering travesty of praise which seems to apply not only to the frightful clockwork of the world-structure but also to the medium used to describe it: yes, repeatedly with music itself, the cosmos of sound. The piece has contributed not a little to the reproach levelled at the art of my friend, as a virtuosity antipathetic to the artist mind, a blasphemy, a nihilistic sacrilege.
