Without Lifting A Finger

It seems unpardonable to me today that I had blocked off the investigation of my most distant past for so many years, not on principle, to be sure, but still of my own accord, and that now it is too late for me to seek out Adler, who had lived in London until his death in the summer of 1988, and talk to him about that extra-territorial place where at the time, as I think I have mentioned before, said Austerlitz, some sixty thousand people were crammed together in an area little more than a square kilometer in size—

Whenever we came home afterwards, I had to read aloud from your favorite book about the changing seasons, said Vera, even though you knew it by heart from the first line to the last, and she added that I never tired of the winter pictures in particular, scenes showing hares, deer, and partridges transfixed with astonishment as they stared at the ground covered with newly fallen snow, and Vera said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde si schovaly zásoby? Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?

Then I sat on a bench in the sun until nearly midday, looking out over the buildings of the Lesser Quarter and the river Vltava at the panorama of the city, which seemed to be veined with the curving cracks and rifts of past time, like the varnish on a painting. A little later, said Austerlitz, I discovered another such pattern created by no discernible law in the entwined roots of a chestnut tree clinging to a steep slope, through which, Vera had told me, said Austerlitz, I liked to climb as a child. And the dark green yews growing under the taller trees were familiar to me too, as familiar as the cool air which enveloped me at the bottom of the ravine and the countless windflowers covering the woodland floor, faded now in April, and I understood why, on one of my visits to a Gloucestershire country house with Hilary years ago, my voice failed me when, in the park which was laid out very much like the Schönborn gardens, we unexpectedly came upon a north-facing slope covered by the fin

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Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered. I myself, added Austerlitz, in spite of all the accounts of it I have read, remember only the picture of the final defeat of the Allies in the battle of the Three Emperors. Every attempt to understand the course of events inevitably turns into that one scene where the hosts of Russian and Austrian soldiers are fleeing on foot and horseback on to the frozen Satschen ponds. I see cannonballs suspended for an eternity in the air, I see others crashing into the ice, I see the unfortunate victims flinging up their arms as they slide from the toppling floes, and I see them, strangely, not with my own eyes but with those of shortsighted Marshal Davout, who has made a forced march with his regiments from Vienna and, glasses tied firmly behind his head with two laces,

I only recently remembered this white pall over the manse, said Austerlitz, when I was reading the reminiscences of his childhood and youth by a Russian writer who describes a similar mania for powder in his grandmother, a lady who, although she spent most of her time lying on a sofa nourishing herself almost exclusively on wine gums and almond milk, enjoyed an iron constitution and always slept with her window wide open, so that once, after a night of stormy weather, she woke up in the morning under a blanket of snow without coming to the slightest harm.

Considerably alarmed by what I feared was the progressive decline of my eyesight, I remembered reading once that until well into the nineteenth century a few drops of liquid distilled from belladonna, a plant of the nightshade family, used to be applied to the pupils of operatic divas before they went on stage, and those of young women about to be introduced to a suitor, with the result that their eyes shone with a rapt and almost supernatural radiance, but they themselves could see almost nothing.

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The building of this singular architectural monstrosity, on which Austerlitz was planning to write a study at the time, began in the 1880s at the urging of the bourgeoisie of Brussels, over-hastily and before the details of the grandiose scheme submitted by a certain Joseph Poelaert had been properly worked out, as a result of which, said Austerlitz, this huge pile of over seven hundred thousand cubic meters contains corridors and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing the innermost secret of all sanctioned authority.

The child had her first schoolday toward the end of winter, in midterm. This had not been planned by the adult, it just happened. The school also happened to be a special sort of school—intended, that is, only for children of the one “people” deserving of the name, the people of which, long before its dispersion to the four corners of the earth, it was said that, even “without prophets,” “without sacrifices,” “without idols”—and even “without names”—it would still be a “people”; and whom, in the words of a later biblical scholar, those wishing to know “the tradition,” the “oldest and strictest law in the world” would be obliged to consult. It was the only actual “people” to which the adult had ever wished to belong.

Besides, it was plain that some of the children, even the smallest, were not right for one another. There may have been no “wicked” ones, but certainly all were not “innocent” (at the most, there were some who had started at an early age to wash their hands in innocence). All knew what was wrong and did wrong, not only in passion but also with premeditation, yet even then without consciousness of wrongdoing—with the result that their actions were often more sinister than those of the most sordid scoundrels, and just as revolting. It couldn’t be denied that among the children—regardless of sex—there were some who from the start were quite at their ease playing the executioner in word and deed, with the adults looking on; they performed their act of destruction with cool expertness and when it was done walked calmly away as from an official function. And it was equally unquestionable that none of the children liked being scolded, made fun of, or beaten—in other words, victimized.

He was later to come into contact with far worse prophets of childlessness, singly and in pairs. For the most part they were sharp-sighted, and thanks to their own terrifying freedom from guilt, they were able to say in technical language what was wrong with the child-parent relationship; some of them actually made a profession of their insight. In love with their own childhood and its continuance, they proved on closer acquaintance to be grownup monsters. After every encounter with them, it took the man a long time to purge his mind and soul of their analytical certainties, which cut into him like cankers. He cursed those mean, self-righteous prophets as the scum of modern times, and swore to hate them and combat them forever. The ancient dramatist supplied him with the appropriate curse for them: “Children are the soul of all men. He who has not learned this suffers less, but his well-being is of the wrong kind.” (Something else again, it goes without saying, is the good-hearted, lov

Yes, I wanted to tell a story (and I enjoyed studying dissertations). For often, in reading and writing, I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth—the insight that came before the story—is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences. Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never. For a time I thought of treating particular aspects—the mountain and me, the pictures and me—and setting them down side by side as unconnected fragments. But then I rejected such fragmentary treatment because it would have resulted not from a possibly unsuccessful striving for unity but from a deliberate method, known in advance to be safe. Then, in Grillparzer’s The Poor Minstrel, I read: “I trembled with a longing for unity.” A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me. For I knew that unity is possible. Every single moment of my life hangs together with every other—without intermed

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The mountain comes into sight before you even get to Le Tholonet. It is bare and monochrome, more radiance than color. The outlines of clouds can sometimes be mistaken for high mountains: here it is the other way around.

There is a painting by Cézanne which has been referred to as The Great Pine. (He himself never gave his paintings titles, and seldom signed one.) It shows a tall, solitary pine by the Arc River southeast of Aix. This was the river of his childhood. After bathing, he and his childhood friends would sit in its shade; later, at the age of twenty, he asked Emile Zola, who had been one of these friends, in a letter: “Do you remember the pine on the bank of the Arc?” He even wrote a poem to the tree. In it the mistral blows through the bare branches; and the picture, too, suggests the wind, particularly in the way the lone tree slants. That tree, more than just about anything else, might be titled: “Out in the Open.” It transforms the ground from which it rises into a plateau, while the branches, twisted in all directions, and the infinitely varied green of its coat make the empty space around it vibrate. The Great Pine is depicted in other paintings, but never is it so solitary. In one of t

Like primeval man, he moved on to partake elsewhere of the daylight that was beginning anew on every object. The eyeball of a man coming toward him, a shimmering metal box, and the pale moon seemed joined into a triangle. Too much light.