But so small and insignificant that experience is compared to the rapture of the mystics, so sad my own quest for meaning, forever interrupted, compared to their lifelong devotion, so pathetic my rituals in front of the television screen, compared to those that once took place in the world. Oh, I can hardly bear to speak of it, the difference between the stirring emotions that run through me when a Norwegian skier wins the world championship, and those that run through a person kneeling before the holy itself, whose soul is elevated by that experience.
Oh, for crying out loud, what do I even know of the divine? What gives me the right to even use the term? I, a secularized man of the West, forty years old, as naïve as he is unschooled, one of the world’s multitude of unspiritual and unremarkable individuals? Did I not seat myself, two days after seeing the cruise ship, at a Venetian sidewalk café and drop my fork on the ground, prompting the waiter to bring me a clean one, which I declined – no, it’s all right, I’ve got one here, look – oblivious to the context of my fork having been on the ground, for which reason it was to the waiter’s mind dirty and unusable? Indeed I did, and in the company of Espen and Anne to boot, who smiled overbearingly before Espen hesitantly suggested that the waiter might have wanted to give me a clean fork because mine had been on the ground and was dirty. How could such a clumsy creature even contemplate letting a phrase such as “the divine” pass his lips? A man who moreover did not believe there to be a God, nor that Jesus was the son of that God; why in all the world should he poke about in such matters?
What was I even looking for?
Meaning. Most likely it was that simple. In my day-to-day life I was filled by a sense of loathing, quite bearable, never threatening or destructive in any way, most of all a kind of shadow that blanketed my existence, the logical conclusion of which was what might be described as a passive yearning for death, so on a plane, for instance, I could find myself thinking I wouldn’t care if it crashed, though I could never dream of ever actively doing anything that would put my life at risk. In this state of loathing, meaning could detonate inside me. It would be as if I were suddenly brought to the threshold of something radically significant into which I was then absorbed, only to be expelled again. As if the meaning I was looking for was there all the time, and what kept me from it was me and my way of seeing things.
Was that it? Was there something out there, something objectively true and real, a constancy of life and the living, there always, to which I only seldom, hardly ever, had access? Or was it just something inside me?
I could have kneeled, put my hands together and directed trembling prayers and lamentations to God, Our Father, but I was living in the wrong age, for when I looked up toward the sky all I saw was a vast and empty space. And when I looked around me I saw a society we had fully and completely organized to lull us all to sleep, to make us think about something else, to entertain us. The quick and easy, the soft and comfy, that was what we wanted, and it was what we got. The only remaining space where life was taken seriously was art. In art I looked only for such fullness of being. Beauty and fullness of being. On occasion I found it, and when I did it consumed me, yet the experience led to nothing, was perhaps nothing but the projections of an overtense soul, little lightning flashes in the darkness of the mind.
* * *
I see a cruise ship thick with people gliding past, high above the rooftops of an ancient, sinking city, and a shiver goes down my spine. So what? Is that all?
* * *
James Joyce, brought up in Catholicism, familiar with the great Fathers of the Church, typically for him called such moments epiphanies, a word originally used to denote the revelation of the divine nature of Christ to the three wise men that starry night in Bethlehem, but which for him stood for the worldly revelations of life in the streets around him. In his sketchy, unfinished novel Stephen Hero, he defines epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation.” Joyce takes as his point of departure here Thomas Aquinas’s definition of beauty, or what is required for beauty in any object, yet shifts the focus from the properties of the object itself to our own perceptions of them. This is a three-stage operation: first, the object must be lifted away from everything else, and then we perceive it as a thing (Aquinas’s “integrity”); then it must be analyzed, considered in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, the mind recognizing then that it is indeed a thing (Aquinas’s “wholeness”); finally, and this is the moment of epiphany, we recognize that the object is one integral thing, that it is that thing (Aquinas’s “radiance”).
Joyce calls this the soul of the object, its whatness.
The starting point for this reflection, which Stephen details in a conversation with his friend Cranly, is a little intermezzo he witnesses one evening in Eccles Street, where a young lady was standing on the steps of a house and a young man was leaning on the rusty railings below:
The Young Lady – (drawling discreetly) … O, yes … I was … at the … ch … pel
The Young Gentleman – (inaudibly) … I … (again inaudibly) … I …
The Young Lady – (softly) … O … but you’re … ve … ry … wick … ed.
To apply a concept denoting the revelation of the divinity of Christ to such a mundane occurrence as this is blasphemy, the distance between the two domains being as great as it is, yet there is surely an equally great distance between the occurrence and the scholarly aesthetic into which Joyce lifts it up, making fun of the gap between reality and its academic interpretation, at the same time as he is without doubt circling in on something important concerning his own aesthetic. What he is describing is the mundane, everyday world as we know it, and what he wants to probe into are the things going on around him here and now, for everything is local, to everyone, for all time. But in Joyce’s epiphanies there is nothing else, this is what characterizes them, they are an expression of themselves only, and the author’s task is to view them in exactly that way, in their own right. The examples he cites of epiphanies are certain modes of expression that crop up in conversation, certain ways of gesticulating, certain thoughts that pass through the mind, in other words, fully and completely attached to the human sphere, more particularly to our social existence, life the way we live it in relation to ourselves and to one another. There is something almost anti-essentialist about his aesthetic, so unconcerned with the authentic and indeed the transcendental, seeking all meaning and significance in the river of movement and language that flows through our lives each day. The language in which he captures this is itself a river, and like all rivers it has a surface, that part of it that first catches our eye, and below the surface its depth, words beneath the words, sentences beneath the sentences, movements beneath the movements, characters beneath the characters. Everything in Ulysses is moreover always something else, not because the world is relative, but because the language through which we see it is. The transcendency of Ulysses lies in the language, it opens up a chasm in the now, which is thereby no longer epiphanic – neither isolated, whole, nor particular – and if Joyce’s portrayal of the world is true in its relativity and in its massive intertextuality, it is then cerebral and at root scholarly in its determination toward systematics and cohesion, hurtling away from physical reality and the realistic novel, much as the medieval Church Fathers detached themselves from the Bible and the concrete, action-oriented, physical reality found in it, and arced into the hugely abstract, bodiless canopy of speculation and reflection they stretched out over their lives. In that one may lose oneself, as one may lose oneself in Ulysses and the other great works of modernism, with all the intellectual enjoyment and aesthetic pleasure they have to offer, for their turning toward form and language makes them all the more works in their own right, something in themselves, at the same time as they have so plainly lost something too, for as Henry James once suggested, in art, the emotions are the meaning.
To those who consider art from that perspective, form means nothing in itself, possessing meaning only a
s the bearer of something else, and modernism, which is to say most of what has taken place in art from the beginning of the last century to the present day, has abandoned that dimension. The work of those who do not consider art in that way is tinged with the Romantic. Hermann Broch, for instance, in his Death of Virgil, one of the most hardcore modernist novels of the nineteenth century, whose opening, in which the dying Virgil is lying in a boat on its way into a Roman harbor, contains one of the finest sentences of prose written in Europe during the last two hundred years:
Steel-blue and light, ruffled by a soft, scarcely perceptible crosswind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against an Imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left, and here, as the sunny, yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity, where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft – by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast – here the water had become mirror-smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever a sound of life, a hammering or a summons, was blown over from the shore.
A singular joy comes over me every time I read this. It is sublime. But why? What is it about this passage in particular that can give rise to such strong emotions? What the sentence describes, a boat entering a harbor one late afternoon, is trivial and recognizably commonplace, at least to anyone who grew up near the sea, at the same time as it takes place in Ancient Greece, to us a lost and unreachable world. Is that why? The interplay of the general, true of any harbor, and the specific, true only of this harbor, long since lost. Yes, this does give me joy, awakening personal memories of the smells, the sounds, the light, and not least the gusting wind as the sun moves slowly across the sky, the way it can fill a person with its thriftless extravagance, but it is not sublime. The sublime comes not from familiarity, but from the opposite. The sublime in this passage is the movement from the sea toward the land, “here, as the sunny, yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity.”
The sunny, yet deathly loneliness of the sea – I have never thought about the sea like this, and yet I must have felt it because when I read those words something inside me, faintly, as if from some remote distance, recognizes what they are saying to me. It is a recognition of something whose more exact nature has eluded me. And a recognition of the vast and to us unknown quantity that is death. The transition from there toward the peaceful stir of human activity is what the sentence describes, and what it detaches, because besides applying there, in Broch’s imaginary scene at the harbor in Brindisi some time in the last century BC, as well as in the physical reality the sentence evokes, it also applies to the place in which I am seated at this moment, on June 2, 2010, at one minute past four in the afternoon, in the study of this sixth-floor apartment on the Triangeln Square in Malmö, the stir of human activity all around me, which is to say the traffic going past on the roads outside, the people on the street below, their occasional shouts and cries, the blaring horns of this year’s high-school graduates on their parade, their music systems thumping and pounding as they make another tour of the city, the elderly black saxophonist sitting leaned up against a pillar, playing the same piece over and over again. This stir of human activity, which is the social world, is what we approach in the opening scene of The Death of Virgil, sailing toward it in anticipation of entering into and becoming a part of it, and as long as we see it in this way, as something gradually emerging before us, so far only in the form of sounds and smells, we see it for what it is, which is to say a haven. During the time Broch was writing about, people were few in number, towns and cultures were separated by great distances, and crossing the divides between them was a slow and perilous business. Everything has changed now, and the stir of human activity, our haven from an indifferent and mortal universe, is no longer local and constrained, but exists wherever we care to look, no longer is something we leave and approach, but something that’s all around us, all the time, regardless of where we are or what we are doing. This does not mean that the circumstances of life have changed from that time, only our perception of them. This is why Broch’s opening passage has such a powerful effect, since it directs attention toward a fundamental circumstance we increasingly tend to ignore. That it does so in such a simple way, by relating it to a physical landscape in the world, to a particular moment, an early evening outside the harbor in Brindisi, the elements of which, the steel-blue sea blushed by the sun, the rose-colored tinge of the sky, the white-sprayed coast, the glittering houses there, bringing forth similar recollections from the depths of the reader’s memory, means that the moment and its potential for creating awareness become something experienced. An experience is what is seen, colored by emotion. Reason ignores emotion, addressing only the mind, but to the mind the fact of endless numbers of people having lived and died before us, and the fact that we who are alive now will also soon be dead, is a banal insight, something we have known since we were five years old. Only by experience, by feeling the gaping void in even the most trivial of surroundings, do we grasp it. Only then does it become an insight. This insight is to all intents and purposes inarticulable, so vast is its content. Since it is so fundamental, so completely central to our lives, Broch could naturally have produced reams on the subject, discussing numerous aspects of death in nature and the havens we make to safeguard ourselves from it, but he wrote this when he was at the height of his career, keenly aware that what the text says in words and what those words awaken in the reader are two different things. He wrote about the sea with only the merest intimation of death, and about the peaceful stir of human activity toward which a boat slowly came drifting, so simply as to allow us to see each element for what it is, and with such meticulous concretion as to allow the image to pass into the reader’s imagination, there to unfold and be fleshed out in the wealth of human mood and emotion.
Day passes toward night, soon we are in our final hour, which is the time of Broch’s novel. In the boat immediately after Caesar’s lies Virgil, poet of the Aeneid, the mark of death on his brow. He is acutely conscious, sensitive to everything, knowing it will all soon be gone. Day passes toward night, everything blazes up before him one last time. In Nordic mythology the realm of death is Hel, a word deriving from hylja, meaning to hide or cover up, an apt name indeed, since the realm of the dead is beyond our sight, and yet, I think to myself now, it can also mean the opposite, that the world of the living hides from the dead. Only a few weeks before we went to Venice we were in Norway, in Vestland, and besides seeing my mother and having John christened, we drove out one day to visit my cousin Jon Olav, he had bought a summer retreat not far from the place he grew up, a small farm to be more exact, on a ridge above the Flekkefjorden, with some land, a bit of woodland, and a small stretch of coast. We drove there in the morning, one of many gorgeous days that summer, the sky was bright blue, the fellsides lush green, a blaze of dazzling sunlight flooding the landscape. The water in the fjords and rivers glittered, the peaks shimmered with snow, the leaves of the trees winking and fluttering in occasional breaths of wind. Mom drove first with Linda and Heidi in her car, while I followed behind with Vanja and John in the backseat. There was hardly any traffic. The car I was driving was one we had borrowed from my mother’s sister Kjellaug, Jon Olav’s mother. An old Toyota. After the new driving-school and rental cars I’d been driving it felt like a vehicle from another age, the mechanical twentieth century. It was as if I were seated just above the surface of the road, everything rattled and shook, even the slightest acceleration could be felt. The other cars I had driven were dark and s
leek, like something out of a computer game, as if the traffic surrounding us were just a projection on a screen, speed, whether 100, 110, or 130 kilometers an hour, merely numbers on a display. This was something else entirely, and I was enjoying it. We came around a bend in the road and there was a river, cool and green, rapids hurtling over the rock, an effervescence of white. We came through a tunnel, and there was a fjord beneath us, its blue expanse with farms dotted about the shore on one side, steep, treeless fells on the other like slabs of iron in the haze. There were no people anywhere to be seen, only old and sagging structures, the occasional flashy home from the 1980s, agricultural machinery lying around, fields and enclosures, forest, fjords, fells. And Vanja’s voice from the backseat:
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 73
