Bright light splattered from the frosted chandelier, dispelling the dusk.
“Well then. High time . . .” thought a somewhat relieved Mr. Pembroke, as yet unaware of what had happened. He looked up: his eyes were dazzled by an utterly new and incomprehensible world. The familiar hall with the familiar walls, corners, moldings—it had all disappeared, as if swept by some mysterious means out of sight. True, all around him, as far as the eye could see, were the same light and dark squares of parquet, but strangely: their lines had grown grotesquely long, while their unnaturally expanded surfaces ran into a horizon that had become suddenly square. The table had melted away. The chandelier had shot up to the zenith. And the walls . . . What had become of the walls? Pawn Pembroke, who still considered himself a celebrated chess master and felt like one, was at a loss. Must be a dream: staring down at him from all sides, their moldings, crenellations, and embossments shimmering white and black, were monstrous, obelisk-like edifices ranged—who knew why, how, or by whom—around the gigantic black and white parquet of a hall that had lost its walls.
“Can I really have fallen asleep? During a match?” wondered the pawn, attempting to become the chess master once more: to wake up. In vain. The phantoms would not fade. And strangely—time seemed to move past them. The seconds changed, but inside the seconds nothing changed: the white and black obelisks on their white and black squares stood immobile—indestructible—silent. Even the black shadows they cast did not stir.
Staring at the petrified forest of specters more and more fixedly, ex-Pembroke, now with a sort of foreboding, gradually began to discern in their shapes something known, even familiar to his thinking, though presented from a most peculiar angle. Hazy recollections whispered to him. Another minute, second, split second of the tense beating of his thought, now embracing, now again rejecting the forgotten, yet kindred—and suddenly Mr. Pembroke understood. An inhuman horror overcame him—from his tiny chiseled wooden head to his round green-felt-shod foot. And then, just as abruptly, the reaction set in: a sense of increasing woodenness, a strange lightness and smallness.
Little by little the ability to think logically was returning: “If this has indeed happened,” reasoned the creature, now unable to name itself, “then I am under attack from White’s knight on f3. My position is clear. And if f3 is indeed occupied by White’s knight, then . . .” And this creature, which only moments ago had been Pembroke—accustomed to his independent and respected position in society as a master of the art of chess—now, scarcely daring to raise its eyes beyond the bounds of its tiny two-by-two-inch square, looked away—past d3, e3—to its left, at white f3: there, in a yellow blaze of suns, earlier mistaken for the mere lampions of a chandelier, stood, empty eye sockets gaping, the pale horse.* Its straight mane bristled, its wicked nostrils flared, exposing bared teeth. Only now did the pawn-player apprehend the full extent of its playedness. What had once been Pembroke well knew the ruthless logic of the chessboard.
“Nf3 : ‘I’. So be it. The match at the cost of a pawn. What’s touched is moved. Too late.”
But the pawnish part of Pembroke—the part that had already turned to wood and knew only the tiny, two-by-two-inch meaning of its one square—protested with all the beats of the wooden heart suddenly stirring in its carved lacquered breast: don’t you dare touch me, stay away from my d4! I want to play, not be played! Stop the game!
Whether the obelisks and squares understood that wooden language is not known: the squares and obelisks remained silent. Time was running out.
1921
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF A THOUGHT
1
THE THOUGHT was born one quiet July afternoon. Round the Thought circled garden paths. Branches reached up from tree trunks to the sky. Peering out at the world through the thinker’s pupils, the Thought saw: right in front of it, beyond the lattice of branches, a brick wall; and above it—the vaulted semicircular slant of a frontal bone. The Thought’s birth occurred at the moment when the aged thinker, having gotten to his feet, had taken thirteen of the fourteen steps separating bench from bench, his place of musings from the place where his handkerchief lay, neatly folded in four. The thinker considered exercise extremely good for his health and therefore, before allowing himself to freeze on one of the benches in his small garden (palms on knees, brow bent groundward), he would always deposit his handkerchief fourteen paces off, at the far end of the other bench. Well then, having taken thirteen steps, the philosopher was on the point of reaching for his handkerchief, but at just that moment arose the Thought: The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.* His hand, as if it had knocked into the Thought, hung in the air: everything—wall, trees, white splotch of handkerchief, sun, ground, leaves, benches—everything, to the last ray and glint, tumbled out of his pupils: only Thinker and Thought remained, and nothing between them. The stars do not shine in a dusty-bluish sky at midday: but now, by the Thought’s will, they blazed up and glittered like emerald fires on their closed orbits; the brick wall round the deserted garden with its tangle of yellow paths circling and curling back on themselves, with its gate latched and locked, made the presence of any moral law superfluous, but with one blink of his eyes the philosopher burst the garden wall and flung it to the ends of the earth: he tugged at the tangle of paths—and suddenly they unspooled into tracks: wide, narrow, trodden, beaten, and overgrown with blackthorn—from near at hand to far away.
This lasted about ten seconds.
And then the stars were again curtained with the bluish-dusty day. The garden wall fit its bricks back together, while the tracks rolled up into obedient paths and lay down under the sage’s soles.
The white handkerchief, about to balloon into a gigantic translucent milky weave, punched itself down again, crumpled up, and lay where it had before, on a bench whose wooden legs were still trembling slightly from the madly fast dash there—to infinity—and back—to the sage’s small garden.
Whereupon the aged philosopher retrieved his handkerchief without further delay, carefully wiped his nose with it, and returned to his seat.
2
The first days of the Thought’s earthly life were its best: gazing about under the spacious bony dome of the thinker’s cranium, the Thought found itself amidst a vast, marvelously conceived and organized worldview. But when it looked out from under the thinker’s slightly raised eyelids, at the world, the Thought recoiled: it was far better in the worldview than in the world. From there, from the world, a small space crammed with things (from horizon to eye) looked back. Here—in the worldview—a clear expanse opened out, unsullied by a thing: it let itself be contemplated through and through—from beginninglessness to endlessness. In the world (at least here, on the wall, by the thinker’s eyes), seconds crept round a clockface, the Leipzig Universal Calendar lay open on the table, and no one was allotted more than one second at a time. Whereas in the worldview there was coming-from-nowhere, going-to-nowhere eternity.
No wonder then that when, two days after the handkerchief incident, the thinker sat down at his worktable and placed before the Thought, between two lighted candles, a clean sheet of paper, it jumped back: “I won’t be put into letters!” But the old man went about his business. The struggle was brief, albeit hard-fought: the Thought kept slipping out from under his pen, wriggling out of the words and mixing up the letters. The old man kept crossing them out and inserting new ones until finally, having caught the Thought in the split of his pen, he succeeded in pinning it to the sheet of paper. A pitiful black line, the Thought lay before the old man’s tired watering eyes: “Take me back.”
The old man grew pensive. He did not like to give his words away: his pen was already reaching for the Thought, in a moment an inky scoring would have hidden it forever from curious eyes. But just then the wall clock began to strike eleven. The philosopher never allowed himself to sit up past that hour—not even for a second; at the first stroke he put pen aside, blew out one candle and, holding the other in his hand,
slapped off in his slippers to bed. Meanwhile the Thought, enlettered in its line, was left to lie alone on the sheet of paper in the dark and empty room. The left end of the line was turned toward the window; outside the window were the heavens: now the heavens did not contradict the Thought—they were manifestly starry. The right end of the line was turned toward the room: beyond the room was another room, beyond it a porch, beyond the porch a street, beyond the street again a porch, and a room, and another room—a town. Here, too, everything seemed in agreement with the Thought, since this town never attained such moral heights as at eleven o’clock at night when all of its rooms, with shutters and eyelids closed, fell asleep. But though the contradictions had been “removed,” the Thought, before falling asleep on its rough sheet of paper, still tossed for a long time from letter to letter.
3
The typesetter grabbed the Thought and, before it knew what had happened, tore it up into letters; then, gripping it in filthy fingers reeking of tobacco, lead, and sweat, he jammed it into the composing stick. The composing stick was unbearably narrow. Before it could catch its breath, the leaded Thought was clapped on the press, coated with acrid black ink—and abruptly struck with the platen. The press’s screws, turning from left to right—once, and again, and yet again—squeezed the Thought, as if in a vise: here the Thought lost consciousness. When it came to, it found itself again on a sheet of paper, but encased in straight square letters. The sheet, folded in sixteen, had been glued into a book, and the book bound between hard covers. For a long time the Thought was flung about: from a printer’s bundle into a crate on a cart, from the cart onto a warehouse floor, from there to a shop window, from window to counter, from hand to hand, until finally fate, taking pity on the poor Thought, allowed it to stand on the bookshelf of university lecturer Johann Shtump. For a long time no one touched it. The Thought became covered with dust and dreams: instead of the starry heavens there were bookshelves, bowed by the weight of books; instead of a moral law, constructing its actualities out of actions, there were idle letters joined to letters behind the double click of a bookcase key.
Then suddenly everything began to sway: the cobwebs, which someone had torn asunder, fell away; the frightened dust motes scattered in all directions; a paper knife whisked evenly through the pages, slitting the paper tissue. All at once sunbeams burst in on the letters; a pair of squinting eyes, skimming the page—from left to right and top to bottom—was nearing the surprised Thought.
“With luck, they’ll miss me,” it wanted to hope. But the eyes had already found it. A pencil skidded down the right-hand margin. It stopped, poked the page with its graphite tip, evidently preparing to jump: then suddenly, taking the line by its left-hand end (the one from where the stars shone), the pencil began hauling it across the page to a notebook. “The starry heavens,” hidden in the letters, tried to resist, but the pencil, seizing the heavens by a star, by its longest beam, dragged first the stars, then the moral law into the square notebook. In a quandary, the flustered Thought gave in, little suspecting what lay ahead. Having clothed the Thought in sloppy gray letters, Shtump sat for a long time, frowning and jabbing it with intersecting sightlines. Then, having impaled the Thought on those lines, he raised them slowly to the ceiling. Shtump was thinking; and something bad began to happen to the Thought: suddenly the starry heavens, strangely shriveled, were sagging with stars glassy as the eyes of dead men; the stars extended in diagonal and parallel ranks across a foursquare sky—a sky which looked oddly like the ceiling of a conservatory studded with rows of dimly glimmering lights. Meanwhile the moral law, flattened by Shtump’s crown, no longer needed impractical and easily broken stone tablets: it could just as well fit on the didactic tin sign in a public garden: NO PICKING FLOWERS, NO WALKING ON GRASS. One might add: NO LOVING OTHER MEN’S WIVES, NO TRAMPLING ON FEELINGS, NO ROILING HAPPINESS, and two or three more maxims. Incidentally: every ancient “no” was propped on a “but.” Just in case.
“But I’m not that,” the Thought protested. “You’ve mistaken me for . . .”
But Shtump, thrusting his draft dissertation “On Certain Preconditions of Socio-Legal Relations” under the notebook, ordered the Thought to serve as the epigraph on the title page.
There was nothing to be done: the Thought, squeamishly touching the stack of four hundred pages, took its assigned place. It kept thinking: mustn’t fall off, down into the preconditions.
4
Its sufferings had just begun. The Thought now seldom recalled those bygone days when it had lived so freely under the sage’s high and spacious frontal bone: now it had to drag itself from cranium to cranium, to live cooped up under low-slanted brows, seeing only rarely through dim eyes worlds with small horizons, with things firmly entrenched in their inches and meters of space. The Thought knew: the wheels of those horizons would never turn, the things obscuring each other to each other would never open ranks to reveal the vistas beyond. The Thought would huddle in the depths of this or that vacant cranium under a low flat crown. And long for its first.
To return now seemed impossible: the Thought’s old master, having denied it an inky scoring, had gone to his grave, and his cranium was filled not with thoughts, but worms. If the Thought’s present masters ever glanced up at the heavens, then only ahead of rain: should they take an umbrella? True, the moral law was regularly discussed at didactic length: library shelves buckled under volumes of Ethics. But those who had studied the “theory of right action” had, in fact, no time for actions: right or wrong. As for those who had no time to study . . . But you can’t ask them.
At first the Thought fell into the hands of quote-manglers, those ruffians who mostly work with scissors and glue: they attack someone else’s book, hacking it up with their scissor blades, lopping off letters at random. More painful than the pain was the insult: the quote-manglers took its lettered body and page number, but cared not a whit about the Thought itself. Next came the producers of paragraphs: finding itself in a paragraph in a textbook, the Thought even cheered up a bit: the exchange of spectacles for bright young eyes, often with pupils wide, struck it as advantageous.
The Thought joyfully gave itself up to whole series of student eyes, eyes which skipped from letter to letter and often lingered for hours over the line in which it had been inserted.
But because the textbook had been officially approved by a ministry, the Thought now lived—from examination to examination.
Its days of drudgery had begun. The textbook was soon stained and dog-eared. There wasn’t a moment’s peace. Along with the textbook, the Thought was passed around. Students dragged it everywhere: to park benches, to classroom desks, to eating-house tables. They woke it up at night. They made it hide in crib sheets. In the hot flustered patter of exams, “above” often wound up “below” and vice versa, while the stars got thoroughly mixed up in the moral law, like raisins in dough. “I was confused, Herr Professor. But I know everything, really I do . . .”
The sage’s Thought did not take umbrage: what’s young is green. But all of this, semester after semester, through years and decades, began to oppress and discolor it. Dragged through the weekdays, faded, copied and recopied, mutilated by quote-manglers’ scissors, battered by students’ tongues, shunted into notebooks and the fine print of footnotes, the Thought broke down and began asking to die: its shrunken heavens, having dropped star after star and shed their emerald beams, were now starless and gaping, like a black pit above. And the black pit above longed only: to be in a black pit below.
Time helped. Having counted off one hundred years since the day of the sage’s death, it reminded people that . . . People have a wonderful custom: once every hundred years they remember their sages. But what can one do to honor a dead man: bury him again? It’s not always convenient. They decided to bury one of his thoughts beside him: on the old tombstone pressing down on the sage’s remains, they carved: THE STARRY HEAVENS ABOVE ME AND THE MORAL LAW WITHIN ME.
The Thought lay down and
stretched out to its full epitaphic length, gilded letters deeply graven in the stone, as striking and elegant as on that July afternoon. The sage’s small garden no longer reached up to it with the branches of trees; instead, a grove of crosses encircled it with its crosspieces.
Over Thought and Thinker long speeches rambled: non-thinkers spoke, expressing non-thoughts. Come evening they went away—a rusty key turned in the lock of the old graveyard gate.
And once again they were alone together, as on that sunny July afternoon long ago: Thinker and Thought.
1922
THE FLYELEPHANT
1
OVER THE fly a palm passed and a voice intoned: “You are now an elephant.” No sooner had the second hand twitched forward once or twice on the clockface than this had . . . happened: the fly’s tiny heels were encased in elephantine feet, while its skimpy black proboscis, threadlike and inward-curving, had unfurled into an enormous gray trunk. And yet there was about this miracle an unfinishedness, an amateurism, a dismaying “not it”: the psychologist’s spectacles, had he poked them under the thick skin of this newly elephantized creature, would have noticed at once that the fly’s infinitesimal soul had not heard any “you are now,” that the miracle that had touched its skin had not reached its soul.
Unwitting Street Page 4
