The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  Charmed is Aeneas, and letting his eyes rove in quick admiration,

  Scans the whole region about him, notes all and lets nothing escape him,

  Asks for and hears with delight the record of earlier heroes,

  Told by Evander the king, the founder of Rome's early stronghold:

  'Native-born satyrs and nymphs once ranged about this very woodland,

  Likewise a genus of men who emerged from the hard grain of oak-trees;

  Art they had none, neither wont, they knew naught of yoking the oxen,

  Knew not to harvest or till, nor how to lay by of their plenty,

  Living from fruit of the trees, from the rude, ruddy fare of the huntsman.

  First from the heights of Olympus came Saturn who, hurried and headlong,

  Fleeing the weapons of Jove, his own realms abandoned in forfeit,

  Gathered this unruly folk, dispersed over mountain, and hill-top,

  Bound them together with laws and chose for this place the name Latium:

  (Being the latent land which had sheltered and kept him in safety.) Under his reign came to pass the fabulous age we call golden—

  Such the perfection of peace in which he governed his people—

  Till in a gradual decline there followed an age of dishonor,

  Baser and wanting in light, an epoch of greed and of warfare.

  Then the Ausonian hosts, the Sicanian hordes followed after,

  Frequently lost to the land was the name it was given by Saturn.

  New kings arose and then Thybris, a giant of turbulent power,

  Thenceforth his name we Italians gave to our river, the Tiber,

  Letting its true name of Albula fade in the dawn of tradition.

  I was an exile from home, a wanderer over the waters,

  Cast on these shores by the order of fate and by almighty fortune,

  Forced to this land by the ominous words of my mother, Carmentis,

  One of the nymphs; divinely enjoined by command of Apollo.'

  Scarce was his speaking done when he walked further on to an altar,

  Showing Aeneas the gate which the Romans have called Carmentalis,

  Set up of old as a shrine to honor Carmentis the wood-nymph,

  Destiny's seeress was she, the first to foretell the true greatness

  Due to the Aenean line, the glory of proud Pallenteum.

  Next he made pause at the grove where Romulus, wise and intrepid,

  Made his Asylum known beneath cold Lupercal, the wolf-hill,

  Named for Lycean Pan in accord with Arcadian custom;

  Also the sacred grove, Argilentum, he showed to Aeneas,

  Treacherous Argus he named, who died here of drinking the Lethe;

  Thence to the rock of Tarpeia and on to the Capitol, golden,

  Shining today where of yore lay a thorny, impassable thicket.

  Yet, even now, a reverent awe moves the hearts of the peasants,

  Bidding them pause and reflect as they pass by the rock and the forest.

  'Deep in this grove,' he cried, 'its trees rising dense to the summit,

  Lives, it is said, a god, but one whose divine name we know not:

  Simple Arcadians think they have often beheld the dark Aegis

  Shake in the right hand of Jove as he summons the clouds and the lightning.

  Look now beyond to those forts, their ramparts and towers dismantled,

  Relics of bygone days, memorials left by our fathers,

  Janus the builder of one and Saturn who raised up the other,

  This one Janiculum called and that with the name of Saturnia.'

  Talking together in this way they came to the cot of Evander,

  Cattle were lowing about, the very same field where they pastured

  Bears now the Forum of Rome and houses the brilliant Carinae.

  Reaching his humble door, 'Take heed,' he said, 'of the threshold

  Hercules crossed in his pride: the god made his home in this dwelling.

  Opulence dare to despise, Illustrious Guest, let thy spirit

  Follow the path of the god, our poverty never disdaining.'

  Thereupon said he no more, but ushered the noble Aeneas

  Under the roof of his hut and offered a couch for his slumber,

  Freshly bestrewed it with leaves and decked it with Libyan bear-skin.

  Night came apace, enwrapping the world in her shadowy pinions."

  Night came apace . . . the reading voice became softer and softer, then it died away completely. Were the verses continuing to be enacted? Were they being enacted somewhere outside of the voice? Or had they also vanished to protect what seemed to be sleep? Perhaps he had actually slept and had not even noticed that the boy had gone in the meantime: with closed eyes as if he were not allowed to make sure, he waited, a listening guest like Aeneas, waiting for the voice to be raised once more, but it remained silent. Nonetheless, the last verses rang on in his ear, they kept on resounding and in so doing were being changed more and more, they altered—or, more correctly—they re-composed themselves to something that was like a material picture, a picture, to be sure, beyond any actual possibility of being depicted, in the same way that the moon-bright space in the window could even now be held as a picture behind closed eye-lids, while yet transmuted in form and light to something like sound; it was an after-sound in the ear, an after-image in the eye, both of them sensed but unsensual, weaving together into a unity that, already far beyond the visible and audible, was only to be grasped by a kind of sensibility in which, strangely a part of this very sensibility while strangely apart from it, the boy's voice as well as his smile were merged. Did Saturn want to take back the names he had given? The landscape of the verses, the landscape of the earth, the landscape of the soul were becoming nameless, and the longer that he, ensconced with closed eyes in the Saturnian fields, tried to feel out and follow up this transcendental-figurative phenomenon, the more profoundly he felt and sensed it within himself, yes, the more he longed for it to be changed back to complete reality, the more he longed for the return of the reading boy, yet the more he wished all the while that this would vanish; for not only had the sorrow-dispelling seduction emanating from the boy captivated him as the advance-knowledge, the fore-echo of ringing finality, but it had also stood in the way of the ultimate voice; it was not only the entering portal but also the closing slab of the unforeseeable view opening up behind it Was not the great whispering, the soft booming, the commanding kindness of that far-near, inconceivably all-inclusive voice, which he had heard without being able to hear it, hidden there also? Deeper than anything earthly, but yet of earth, lay the hidden birth-grave of the voice, the tomb of the beginning, the enclosed source of the birth-giving end; deep below the audible and the visible lay the meeting-place of the voices, the place which contained them all, from which they issued and to which they returned, the place where they were inaudible, the place where they were most inaudibly united and in unison, the place of their complete accord, the accord a voice in itself, the most mighty and the only one which included in itself all voices, all voices with the one exception of its own. To include all life within oneself and yet to be excluded from all life—, was this the voice of death, was it here already? was this it? Or was that which was hidden still greater than this voice? He listened into the inaudible, he listened with all the force and fervor that his will could command, but over the seas of silence, over the veiled landscapes of primal sound, breathed out into the very beginning and very end under the brooding sound-dome of primal perception, there still floated a falling sigh, enclosed in forgetfulness, enclosing forgetfulness, a most delicate dew, breathed up from the colorless-ringing plains of transparency, from their mutely resonant fields, the image of the boy's voice, just barely visible, just barely revealed and revealing, but already veiling itself, an earthly resonance, no longer a word, no longer verse, no longer color or colorlessness, no longer transparency, but only a smile, an image of yore, the ima
ge of a smile. Names? Verses? Was there a poem, had there ever been an Aeneid? In vanishing was it flickering up a last time in the name—Aeneas?— as if this name contained an intimation of the great and good command which was lost forever, but nothing more was to be found; all that had been lived, all that had been created, the whole vast streaming-together of existence with all of its substance was being flooded off, wiped away; he found neither year nor day nor time in, his searching recollections, he found nothing of anything that was known to him, he listened into his memory, although his listening perceived only a glassy confusion, terrestrial still, but already exempt from earth-bound time, exempt from earthly remembrance, a glassily-feverish singing confusion of shapes growing out of a no-time and extending into a no-time, and the more his memory reached toward the Aeneid, the quicker song after song vanished, leaving no trace, dissolved into the ringing intricacy of this glare: was this coming home to the sources of the poem? The memorable content of the poem was disappearing; whatever had been celebrated by the poem, —seafaring and sunny strands, war and the sound of arms, the lot of the gods and the orbits of the starry courses—this and more besides, written down or unwritten, fell quite away, all of it stripped off, the poem had discarded it like a useless garment and was returning back into the unveiled nakedness of its hidden being, into the vibrating invisible from which poetry stems, subsumed again by the pure form, finding itself there like its own echo, like the soul housed in its crystal shell, singing of itself. The superfluous had been discarded but was nevertheless preserved, having become durable in an indestructible form, the purity of which excludes forgetfulness and impresses even the perishable with the stamp of eternity. Poem and speech existed no longer, but the soul common to both was still in existence, surviving in its own crystal reflection; the human soul had died off into the profoundest depths of forgetfulness, but the language of the soul lived on, surviving in the singing clarity of its form; soul and speech, parted from each other yet implicated in and reflecting one another—, did they not receive this reflected light from that inaccessible abyss from which everything issues and to which it comes home? were they not, though each locked off in itself, communally included in that home-voice which bursts through all boundaries, because in vibrating beyond every limitation it gives promise of the goal, of encouragement, of help, and of comfort? Oh, voice of yore in your rising and falling, soft cradle-voice having once sounded, enveiling and unveiling the world, starry voice of the cradle-night, singing the sweet companion song of unity! "I am alone," he said, "no one has died for me, no one dies with me; I looked for support, I have striven to the utmost for it, I have implored it, but it has not been bestowed upon me."—"Not quite here, but yet at hand," came the response so dream-soft from his own breast that it was no longer the voice of the boy but far more that of night and of all nights, the voice of silvery space which is nocturnal solitude, the ever-seen but never-explored dome of the night, along the walls of which he had groped ever so often and which had now come to be only a voice. "Not quite here, but yet at hand," gracious and lordly, seductive and enjoining, night-lit and deep-hidden, the spontaneous sounding of the word and the spontaneous sounding of the soul, the unity of language and humanhood; and it was like taking leave of the ageless, erstwhile youth of all things earthly, and yet saluting the homeland, everlasting in hope, where even the stone had turned into transparency and the grave-slabs had become transparent as though they were composed of crystal and ether together. In this wise he stepped through, he didn't step, he stood suddenly in the midst of a dream-dome that was nothing but the beaming impression of voices, he stood in a bottomless radiance, in a radiance without walls or ceiling, amidst domes of radiant transparency and, seeing into the midst of the invisible, he was unable to see even himself, he too had become transparent. Without having taken a step, indeed without the least attempt to take a step or make any movement whatsoever, he had been moved forward, but still not moved across; it was still the forecourt of reality that surrounded him, he had not yet forsaken terrestrial things, it was still an earthbound dream, and he— a dream within a dream—realized the dreamy nature of what was happening to him: it was a dream on the borders of dream. For although nothing in this steadily increasing clarity of streaming transparency recalled the former clash of realities, and although nothing concrete, nothing human, nothing animal was to be seen, moreover, although even the memory of them was no more to be traced, washed as they were in the radiantly booming, inaudible waves of muteness, he knew himself to be in the hopeless entanglement of clashing voices, now as before, only that now voices, things, creatures, plants, animals and men, one and all, had turned into most inconceivable beings, into an airy structure in which names still shimmered like stars, though by this very act of shimmering the names were cast off; he found himself in a region in which only the quantities, the arrangements and the correlations of earthly things were valid, likewise only the knowledge emanating from them and their erstwhile forms, and it was occurrence and knowledge, perception and exposition in one single, gleaming possession of truth, it was an unimaginable exposure of the creation's multiplicity, empty of content but complete, the integration of everything that had occurred or could occur, differentiated a myriadfold but indistinguishable, the suggestive meaninglessness changed to pure form, to the bare outlines of form which is nothing more than crystalline clarity, an impenetrable, sparkling transparency, in-existent even while existing, being without origin. He was in the realm of the infinite. The pathways of the millenniums revealed themselves as endless sheaves of light, straggling in any and all directions, they were carriers of the eternal and brought the finite into ultimate infinity, the thing done having the same weight as the thing undone, good and evil crossing each other with equal impressiveness and illuminative force, and there was no way out of the seeing-blindness, the hearing-deafness of the dream, no way out of the dream-dome, of the dream-dazzlement, the dream so estranged from discrimination that it opens up no path to the good, an unbounded, shoreless flood. And this silvery, coruscating, radiant dream-stuff—, did it touch the soul? did it touch the god? Oh, were the dream ever so earthly it was beyond the earthly affairs of men, and the dreamer was one who had lost his human birthright, his human productiveness, he was fatherless and motherless from his very inception; he was in the pre-maternal cave of fate itself, from which there was no escape. No one laughs while dreaming, no one laughs where there is no way out, the dream was not to be burst asunder. Oh, who dares to laugh where even mutiny is silenced! There was no possible defiance to oppose to the dream, there was only entanglement and acceptance, entanglement in the happenings of the dream. And involved in the dazzling thicket, caught into the ramifications within the dream and extending beyond it, identified with each single dream-point, with each separate crystal ray of the million-faceted transparency, he also transparent, he also homeless and rootless, a dream-orphan from the very start, he also occurrence and knowledge in one, enacting himself in a dream, aware of his own dreaming, himself a very dream, he spoke; and speaking from a breast that was no longer a breast, from a mouth that had ceased to be a mouth, with a breath that was less than a breath, speaking words that were scarcely words, he said: