by Joseph Roth
Eight hundred metres under the earth, however, one cannot stand upright or stretch out one’s arms. One creeps around like an animal, on all fours, through narrow, gloomy passageways. Water drips from the walls. Water and slime coat the hands and feet. The damp air paralyses the lungs and shortens the breath.
And one can plainly see that we were not made to be without the sky. Yes, when first we descend below the surface of the earth we understand that we cannot really live without the dome of the heavens over our heads.
It is because of this that miners refer to the heavy earthen ceiling that weighs down upon them, eight hundred metres deep, as the sky.
Men are so dependent on the sky that they would call a layer of earth eight hundred metres thick ‘the sky’.
The word alone consoles them over the loss of the actual heavens.
It is the same as when emigrants who leave their old home and seek a new one in far-away lands give the names of their old cities and villages to the new cities and villages they found.
Our true home is the sky, and we are but guests upon this earth.
Under the earth itself, even when we descend eight hundred metres below, we never cease to feel that the heavens are our home, and that is why miners call the black ceiling above their heads the sky. Into this word they place all the blue sweetness of the true sky, as many people who have left their home sing to themselves a tune of their country, and all the sweetness of the homeland lives within this song.
But the men who call the ceiling above their heads the sky must work at it with hammers, picks and drills. They lie flat upon their backs and drill holes in their pitiful sky from which they collect coal. Sometimes this sky over them falls upon them and buries them beneath its black weight. Nevertheless, they still call it ‘sky’.
It is not merciful to them. It is the most unmerciful sky one might imagine. It is a black sky.
The man who took me underground showed me his house. It was a Sunday. The man was old. For thirty years he had been descending into the bowels of the earth every day, eight hundred metres and even deeper. Each Sunday he spent at home, attending to his garden and his children. He had six sons. Five times he had been buried alive by a fall of coal and then rescued. Of all the companions of his youth none was still alive. They had all been crushed and killed by the black and merciless sky.
‘And what are your six sons doing?’ I asked.
‘They are all miners,’ he replied. ‘My grandfather suffocated in the mine, my father also. I suppose I’ll suffocate there, and perhaps also my children. But maybe they’ll live to see the day when larger and safer tunnels are built. In that case, it will no longer pay to produce coal, as the prices are too low. Engineers are expensive. Once the safest tunnels are constructed, mining coal will no longer pay. Then the pits will be closed, and we’ll have nothing to eat.’
‘What leads you,’ I asked him, ‘to figure the lives of your fore-bears, your own and that of your children into the price of the coal that you don’t even sell? Why do you think coal is more important than life?’
‘I’m not saying that,’ answered the man. ‘The coal itself says so. We are prisoners of the coal. If it isn’t sold, we all must die. If, however, it’s sold for a good price, only one or another of us will die, but not all of us. That is why we reckon the price of our lives into the price of the coal, exactly as our masters, our breadgivers do. Just as they reckon, so do we.’
‘Don’t you love life?’ I asked the man.
‘I once came across a book,’ he said, ‘in which I read about and saw pictures of the ships of antiquity that were called triremes. These ships were rowed by slaves, each of whom was chained to his seat and had only one arm free – but it was the one with which he rowed. From time to time an overseer with a whip walked among the ranks of rowing slaves. And when one of them grew tired and didn’t stroke the oar with enough energy he received a lash from the whip.
‘Yet these rowers loved their lives anyway, just as the captain of the ship did or perhaps even more so. And they rowed with every last bit of strength to avoid a cliff, a rock or a storm, although they would have had nothing to lose if they had guided the boat against a rock or a cliff or into the middle of a storm.
‘There was, kind sir, first of all the overseer’s whip, and then the whip of the will to live, and the whip of the fear of death – three whips.
‘Thus the slaves saved the ship and the lives both of their masters and of themselves. They did it because the ship’s life was their own life.
‘I, too-we, too-love life.’
And I took leave of the miner.
MANKIND IN CAGES
The Master of a Thousand Tongues also sent me to factories, to schools, to all locations where unrest might appear, to report on everything that was new and uneasy by investigating the origin of its unnaturalness.
I thus saw houses made out of glass and steel and chromium metal, not out of brick and stone. And I saw how each type of man built himself the house that fitted his own particular nature. In studying this phenomenon I realized that people change much more rapidly than other creatures.
Since the creation of the world birds have built their nests, spiders their webs, hamsters their holes, foxes their lairs and ants their hills, always in the same fashion. But men lived first in caves, then in huts, later in houses, and now they live in cages. In cages of glass and steel.
‘Let the sun shine in!’ they say. A saying that is as foolish as the sayings of which I have already spoken – Religion is the opium of the people and Education is power.
In a cave, in a hut or in a house one is not imprisoned. But in a cage one is imprisoned. It seems that at about the time that we began to rise up into the air like birds and to feel that we had shaken off the chains that bound us to the earth, we were just then punished with the longing to experience the unhappiness that birds sometimes suffer, namely to live in cages.
In a cave, a hut or a house of stone and brick a man is sheltered, but in a cage he is imprisoned.
The modern man, that is to say the man in whom the Antichrist has begun to work, says: ‘Let the sun shine in!’ – as if he were no longer capable of leaving his house to savour the sun whenever he wished.
Cages are made out of glass and metal bars because imprisoned animals cannot enjoy sun and air whenever they need it.
If man willingly builds himself a cage, he must feel like he is truly a prisoner. And even though he has the key to his modern cage he is still a prisoner.
But who is it that holds him captive and causes him to shut himself up in a cage apparently of his own free will?
The Antichrist holds him prisoner.
The cave, the hut, the house of brick and stone, they provide shelter and protection against storms, lightning and the fiery sun, enemies and dangers of all types. But the new houses of glass and metal are open, even when the doors and windows are closed. They are open and closed at the same time, as only cages can be.
There is no quiet and no solitude in such a house. In these homes, even silent light is noisy.
There, a fish could begin to shriek and a deaf mute to babble. Meanwhile, the man who has been granted the grace of speech – which is the breath of God – must be silent in these houses if he wishes to say something human to his neighbour.
And just as man is distinguished from an animal by the grace of speech he also has the grace of reticence, privacy and modesty. In these thin houses full of light and air there is no silence but, at best, a dumbness; no privacy but withdrawal and suppression; no modesty but, at most, shame.
When one enters such a building made of glass and stupidity and chromium metal there is one dwelling next to another just as one cage is placed next to another in the so-called aviaries of the zoological gardens.
So those people who have to live in such buildings are like animals and, at the same time, like homeless people. They spend the night in the street. And, still worse, the street spends the night with them. So
it is as if each individual were spending the night with his neighbour.
The tenderness of two lovers in bed is as visible as the caressing of caged birds.
One could say that the sun, which has been let in, has brought everything into the daylight.
Those men whose job it is to build such houses say that they are practical and healthful. And, besides, people belong together. And, further, nothing human should be alien to people.
To these homebuilders, however, everything human is foreign. Solitude, silence and secrecy are just as critical to us as health, sun and fresh air. It is certainly inherent in our nature that we should live in a community with our own kind. However, we can only endure this community if we can also spend time alone. For this is human nature – we wish to be alone and also together with other people. It is written that it is not good for people to remain alone.
But man, the image of God, possesses one of the divine qualities – the ability to be both alone and with others at the same time. Yes, he has nostalgia for solitude, just as he has nostalgia for Heaven, because he was created in the image, that is to say, according to the characteristics, of God.
He cannot live in a community if he cannot satisfy his nostalgia. He disturbs the community instead of helping it.
It is only in the hour of danger – during times of war, for example – that people can stand the constant company of their own kind; and this is only because death is in the neighbourhood and death makes everyone lonely because it carries everyone off individually, even when it takes thousands in a single moment.
In the houses of which I am speaking, however, the people do not live in the face of imminent death. And they yearn for solitude.
But the designers and builders of these houses say: ‘We have to give the poor shelter, not luxury. And solitude is luxury.’
Yet it is exactly when the houses are intended for the poor that one should remember one of the worst curses of poverty – that the poor man is unable to be alone. And it is better that he should occasionally go hungry than that he should never be able to break his bread alone.
Often he would rather be alone under the wide sky at night than with others under a roof. For, although it is not good for man to live alone, it is equally bad if he is forced to be together with others.
This, however, the architects and constructors of the new houses do not know.
So people today live like birds.
They can fly, and still they live in cages.
THE BLESSINGS OF THE EARTH! PETROLEUM, POTASH, POISON
I came to one of the regions where oil wells are found. And I wrote from there to the mighty Master of a Thousand Tongues:
Mighty Master of a Thousand Tongues
I am in one of the most interesting of countries, where the famous oil wells are located. It lies at the base of a mountain range, and its activities are centred in a quite remarkable town. Oil has been found here since the mid nineteenth century. The dark wooden derricks rise from an area about fifty square kilometres in size.
They seem to me less cruel and, in a way, less dangerous to the earth’s surface when I compare them with derricks in other countries – countries that bear upon their face that curse of barrenness that is like a counterpart to the fruitfulness that lies within them. Here in this town, the sun is moderate, and there are still forests that yield only reluctantly to the towers and seem to encompass them peacefully rather than flee from them in hostility. The eye can sweep from the covered wells to the green hills.
But there is dust, white and exceptionally thick. It is as though it were not the accidental product of waste and separated matter but an independent element like water, like fire or earth, and as though it were less like the latter than the wind by which it is swirled around in a thick haze. It lies in the street like flour, powder or chalk and envelops every vehicle and pedestrian, seeming to act according to its own impulse or instinct. It has a quite special relationship with the rays of the burning sun, as though it were its duty to complete the sun’s task. And when it rains the dust transforms to an ash-grey, damp, sticky mass that coagulates in every tiny hollow into a greenish puddle.
So here is where oil is obtained. This city was just a village a couple of decades ago. Now about thirty thousand people live here. A single street – about six kilometres long – connects three towns, and it is impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. Adjacent to the houses there stretches a wooden footpath made of short, sturdy stakes. It is not possible to build a pavement because the oil is carried to the rail station by pipes under the street. The difference between the level of the footpath and the carriageway, but also the little houses, is great, so that the pedestrian is as high as or even above the level of the rooftops and one can look down at an angle into the windows. All the little houses are made of wood. Only once in a while does a large house of brick, whitewashed and stony-faced, interrupt the sad rows of crooked, decaying and broken-down dwellings. They all sprang up overnight at a time when the stream of oil-seekers began to flow into this place. It is as though these planks had not been hastily pieced together by human hands but, rather, that the breath of human greed had accidentally piled up chance materials; not a single one of these temporary homes seems to have been meant to accommodate sleeping people but, rather, for the purpose of preserving and increasing the restlessness of insomnia. The rancid odour of oil, a stinking wonder, was what brought them here.
The incalculable illogicality, even from a geological perspective, of the laws of the underground, heightened the diggers’ excitement to the point of lust, and the constantly acute possibility of being separated by scarcely three hundred metres from a fortune worth countless millions was bound to cause an intoxication stronger than that of possession. And, although they were all exposed to the unpredictability of a lottery or a game of roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that would gradually prepare them for disappointment. Here, at petroleum’s source, each person indulged in the illusion that destiny could be dominated through work, and his passion in the search aggravated the dismal result into a disaster that he could bear no longer.
The small well-owners were only freed from the unbearable alternation between hope and discouragement by the powerful intervention of the large ones and of the ‘corporations’. These could purchase several properties at the same time and wait on the whims of the subterranean element with the relative calm that is one of the manly virtues of wealth. Besides these powerful interests, for whom patience cost nothing and who could quickly sow millions in order to reap an eventual harvest of billions, there came speculators on a smaller scale, whose lower credit was balanced by smaller risk, and these diminished even further the chances of the working-class adventurers. These gradually gave up their dreams. They kept to their shacks.
Many wrote their names over their doors and began to trade – in soap, in bootlaces, in onions, in leather. They withdrew from the stormy and tragic domain of the fortune-seeker to the pathetic modesty of the small shopkeeper. The shacks that had been built to last a couple of months stood for years, and their provisional frailty became stabilized into a characteristic of local colour. They resemble the flimsy constructions of a film studio or the primitive book-cover illustrations of Californian stories or hallucinations. It seems to me, having seen many great industrial areas, that nowhere else does such a sober business undertaking take on such a fantastic physiognomy. Here, capitalism wandered into the territory of expressionism.
And it seems that this place will hold on to its fantastic nature. For the town moves – and not only in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty street wanders towards the oil.
It shoves its little houses ahead, winds into a curve and extends itself zealously in the wake of the capricious oil.
So I can hardly give up the idea that this street will one day be endless, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over hills and into valleys, crooked and straight, temporary a
nd yet permanent, short lived as human happiness and long lived as human desire.
I will admit to you that the appearance of this large town, consisting principally of a single great street, caused me to forget the actual conditions of its social order. For a time, speculation and the passion of money-making seemed to me elemental and almost mysterious. The grotesque faces of greed here, the persistently tense atmosphere, where frightening catastrophes could suddenly occur each day, at any time, awakened my interest more for the destinies that were suited to literary treatment than for those of the everyday. The fact that even here there must be workers and clerks, wage rates and unemployed, was often surpassed by the seemingly fictional quality of the individuals. Fantasy was more alive than conscience.
At any rate, the oil workers are incomparably better off than, for example, coal miners. They are skilled workers even here. The working conditions are relatively favourable. The men work in places that, while not airy, are at least not closed off from air, and the smell of the oil is by no means unpleasant and is even said to be healthful for the lungs.
To the layman, all the instruments that are used for boring appear to be disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man circles continuously around a type of basin, holding an iron rod horizontally in his hand. As simple as his motions and activities look, they are in reality equally difficult. The experts say that the skill of a workman consists of his ability to feel by hand the degree and type of difficulty with which the drill meets, the low or high level of resistance offered by the rock. The worker’s hand must therefore have a highly refined sense of touch and, in part, provide a substitute for the function of the eye, which in well-drilling is completely useless. If the bore hole is accidentally blocked by some object falling into it – for example, a large screw – ingenious and crafty methods are used to extract the blockage with the aid of instruments that grope around in the darkness before they grasp and remove it. Their endeavours remind one of attempts to bring to the light a cork that has fallen into a dark and narrow-necked bottle. Hours, months and money are lost on it.
