Hermann Broch
The Death of Virgil
(translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer)
Steel-blue and light, ruffled by a soft, scarcely perceptible cross-wind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against the 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.
And here, as the sunny yet eathly loneliness of the sea change 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 sound of life, a hammering of a summons, was blown over from the shore.
…gleamed like some magic luminary which converted all that moved about into a compulsorily automatic stream, one could almost think that even the litter swam with it, floated with it automatically, scarcely that it was being carried, and with every step, with every forward glide, the power of that mysterious, calamitous, senselessly-magnificent lure became more definitely felt, became more terrifying, more urgent, more intrusive, near and nearer the heart, growing, growing, growing, till at one stroke it revealed itself in that instant when the litter, shoved, pulled, carried high and swimmingly afloat, suddenly came to the entrance of the street; for here, quite abruptly, wreathed by fire, surrounded by tumult, stripped of every shield for light, of every shield for noise, in an unshielded dazzle of light and noise, gleaming and glittering, the imperial palace came to view, partly residence, partly fortress, arising vulcanically, infernally, glaringly, from the center of a shield-shaped, hunched, almost circular plaza, and this plaza was comprised of a single conglomerate flood of creaturekind, a massed, formed, forming, boiling human-humus, a flood of glossy eyes and glossy glances, all of them rigid in their ardor as though dispossessed of every other purport, directed toward the one and only goal, shining without a shadow, a human stream of fire avid to lick this fiery coast.
a tide of evil, an immense wave of unspeakable, inexpressible, incomprehensible evil [that] seethed in the reservoir of the plaza…
…the people’s profound capacity for evil in all its ramifications, their possibilities for human degradation in becoming a mob, and their reversion therewith to the anti-human, brought to pass by the hollowing out of existence, by turning existence toward a mere thirst for superficialities, its deep roots lost and cut away, so that nothing remained but the dangerous isolated life of self, a sad, sheer exteriority, pregnant with evil, pregnant with death, pregnant with a mysterious, infernal ending.
Oh, memories unforgettable, memories full of wheat-fields, full of forests, full of the crackling, rustling, cool-walled forests, full of the groves of youth, eye-intoxicated at morning, heart-intoxicated at evening, green quivering up and gray quivering down, oh knowledge of coming hither and going hence, pageant of memory! But the conquered, beaten, the conqueror, jubilant, the stony space where all this happens, the burning eye, the burning blindness—, for what undiscoverable existence was still worth while to keep oneself awake? what future was worth this unspeakable effort to remember? what was the hereafter toward which remembrance must go? was there in reality any such hereafter?
…for wave after wave of the great planes through which his keel had already furrowed, wave-planes of memory, wave-planes of sea, they had not become transparent, nothing in them had divulged itself to him, only the enigma remained, and filled with the enigma the past overflowed its shores and reached into the present, so that in the midst of the resinous torch-smoke, in the midst of the brooding city fumes, in the midst of the beastly, dark-breathed body-exudations, in the midst of the square and its strangeness, ineffaccably, unmistakably, he detected the breath of the seas and their immortal vastness
Thus towered the citadel, irresistible and seductive, amid a surf of torches, the sole significant goal of the irresistibly attracted, crowding, snorting herd-mass, the
These were the moments of resounding deathlessness, the moments of essential life emerged from its twilight, and it was in these moments that the true form of death revealed itself most clearly: rare moments of grace, rare moments of perfect freedom, unknown to most
…the mighty all-embracing domain of death in which he, ever aware of the goal and yet seeking it, he a path-seeker in the dome of death, had day-dreamed a whole life away... no vocation measured up to that, as none exists that is not exclusively subserviated to the knowledge of life, none with the exception of that one to which he had finally been driven and which is called poetry, the strangest of all human occupations, the only one dedicated to the knowledge of death.
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.
Law and time,
born from each other,
annulling, yet always giving birth to each other anew,
reflecting each other and perceptible in this way alone,
chain of images and counter-images,
noosing time, noosing the arch-image,
neither wholly captured, yet for all that
becoming more and more timeless
until, in their last echoing unison,
in a final symbol,
the image of death unites with the image of life,
portraying the reality of the soul,
her homestead, her timeless now, the law
made manifest in her, and hence
her necessity.
…oh homecoming, homecoming into the utterly-incomprehensible that will be granted to us when we shall have become prepared to fly to it again; oh, the utterly-incomprehensible that we seek for even in dreams because in dreams fate, our fate, becomes dreamily comprehensible for us; mortal is dream, mortal is fate, both such things of chance that we, bound and dazed even in dream, shudder back from it, dismayed by the impossible; oh mortal is that chance which is not contained in ourselves and in which we are not contained; all that we comprehend of it is death, for death reveals itself to us in the phenomenon of chance, verily only in chance, but we, neither containing ourselves nor contained in ourselves, bearing death within us, are only accompanied by it, it stands at our side, as it were by chance
for he who has left the first portal of fear behind him
has entered the fore-court of reality,
now that his perception, discovering itself and turned towards itself,
as if for the first time,
begins to comprehend
the necessity inherent in the universe, the necessity of every occurrence,
as the necessity of his own soul
for so all-embracing was the night spread out before him, so very remote, so filled with the silver dust of echo ringing back from the last reaches of the world, that the night and all that was buried inside it became inseparable, whether a song, a yelping laugh, a hint of animal voice, a rustling of the wind, one could not tell which.
nothing had occurred without necessity, nothing occurs without necessity, because the necessity of the human soul, the necessity of the human task overruled every circumstance, even the wrong road, even the error; for only amidst error, only through error in which he was inescapably held, did man come to be the seeker that he was, the seeking human; for man needed the realization of futility, he must accept its dread, the dread of all error, and recognizing it, he must drain it to the dregs... that through such conscious assimilation the dread might be expunged, only thus might one pass through the portal of dread and achieve existence;
The rumbling continued and it was emitted from the mingling of the light with the darkness, both of them roused by the incipient tone which now actually began to sound, and that which sounded was more than song, more than the striking of the lyre, more than any tone, more than any voice, since it was all of these together and at once, bursting out of the nothing as well as out of the universe, breaking forth as a communication beyond every understanding, breaking forth as the pure word which it was, exalted above all understanding and significance whatsoever, consummating and initiating, mighty and commanding, fear-inspiring and protecting, gracious and thundering, the word of discrimination, the word of the pledge, the pure word; so it roared thither, roaring over and past him, swelling on and becoming stronger and stronger, becoming so overpowering that nothing could withstand it, the universe disappearing before the word, dissolved and acquitted in the word while still being contained and preserved in it, destroyed and recreated forever, because nothing had been lost, nothing could be lost, because end was joined to beginning, being born and giving birth again and again, the word hovered over the universe, over the nothing, floating beyond the expressible as well as the inexpressible, and he, caught under and amidst the roaring, he floated on with the word, although the more he was enveloped by it, the more he penetrated into the flooding sound and was penetrated by it, the more unattainable, the greater, the graver and more elusive became the word, a floating sea, a floating fire, sea-heavy, sea-light, notwithstanding it was still the word: he could not hold fast to it and he might not hold fast to it; incomprehensible and unutterable for him: it was the word beyond speech."