Ottomar.--Church.--Organ.
The next morning there was an alarm in the palace about a matter which
Dr. Fenk learned a week later in a letter from--Ottomar.
Never have I begun a section or a Sunday so sadly as to-day; my
declining body and the following letter to Fenk hang on me like a
mourning hat-band. I could wish I did not understand the letter.--Ah
in that case never would there have entered into my life a
never-to-be-forgotten November hour, which, after so many others have
passed away from me, still stands before me and gazes upon me
forevermore. Gloomy hour! thou stretchest out thy shadow over whole
years! Thou so picturest thyself before me, that I cannot see the
phosphorescing nimbus of the earth glimmer and smoke behind thee!
The eighty years of man look in thy shadow like the movement of the
second-hand--ah take not so much away from me!... Ottomar had this same
hour _after_ his burial and describes it to the Doctor thus:
"I have since that been buried alive. I have talked with death and he
has assured me, there is nothing else than he. When I was out of my
coffin, he laid in the whole earth in my place and my little mite of
joy on the top of it.... Ah, good Fenk! how am I altered! since that
moment all hours have stretched on before me like empty graves, that
are to catch me or my friends! I heard who it was that pressed my hand
once more in the coffin.... Come right soon, dear man!
"Hast thou forgotten how I always dreaded a living burial? In the midst
of going to sleep I often started up, because it occurred to me I might
sink into a swoon and so be buried and then the lid of the coffin would
hold down my upward-struggling arms. On journeys I always threatened,
when I fell sick, that if they laid me away within eight days I would
appear to them and haunt them as a ghost. This fear was my fortune;
else had my coffin killed me.
"Weeks ago my old malady returned upon me: the burning fever. I
hastened with it to my chamber and my first word to my housekeeper--as
I could not have thee--was, _so soon_ as I was lifeless to inter me,
because the air of the vault more easily awakens one, but not to fasten
either coffin or tomb--besides, the solitary church in the park stands
always open. I also told him in any case to let my dog who never leaves
me, go with me. That very night the fever came to its crisis; but my
memory breaks off at the blood-letting. All I further remember is that
I shuddered a little as I saw the blood curl round my arm and that I
thought: 'That is the human blood, which we hold so sacred, which
cements the card-house and frame-work of our personality, and in which
the invisible wheels of life and our impulses move.' This blood
sprinkled after that over all the fancies of my feverish nights; the
immersed universe came up out of it blood-red and all human beings
together seemed to me to shed a stream of blood upon a long shore,
which leaped out over the earth down into a roaring deep--thoughts,
odious thoughts passed along grinning before me, such as no healthy man
knows, none can represent, none can endure and which bark only at souls
prostrate with sickness. Were there no Creator, I must needs have
quaked before the hidden chords of agony which are stretched in man and
at which a malignant being might storm. But no! thou all gracious
Being! Thou holdest thy hand upon our capacity for anguish and
dissolvest the earthly heart over which these chords are stretched,
when they tremble too violently!...
"The conflict of my nature passed over at last into a trance, out of
which so many awake only to die under the ground. In that state I was
carried to the solitary church. The Prince and my dog were with me
there; but the former, only, went away again. I lay, it may have been
half the night, before life thrilled through me. My first thought
almost rent my soul asunder. By chance the dog stepped on my face;
suddenly there came in upon me a sense of suffocation as if a giant
hand bent my breast, and a coffin lid seemed to stand like an upheaved
wheel above me.... The very description is painful, because the
possibility of recovery distresses me.... I rose out of the hexagonal
brooding-cell of the next life; death lay stretched far out before me
with his thousand limbs, heads and bones. I seemed to myself to be
standing in a chaotic abyss and far above me the earth moved on with
its living men. Life and death alike disgusted me. Upon what lay near
me, even on my mother, I looked coldly and rigidly as the eye of death,
when he looks a life to atoms. A round iron grating in the church wall
cut out of the whole heaven nothing but the glimmering, broken disk of
the moon, which hung down like a heavenly coffin-lamp upon the
coffin which is called the earth. The deserted church, that former
market-place of a buzzing throng, stood there, dead and undermined with
dead men--the tall church windows stretched their long shadows,
projected by the moon, over the latticed pews--in the sacristy stood
erect the black funeral crucifix, the cross of the order of death--the
swords and spears of the knights reminded one of the crumbled limbs
which no longer nerved them or themselves, and the death dance of the
suckling with false flowers had accompanied hither the poor suckling,
whose hand death had broken off, ere it could pluck any more--stone
monks and knights imitated the long silenced prayer on the wall with
their weatherwasted hands--no living thing spoke in the church save the
iron movement of the pendulum of the clock in the tower, and it seemed
to me as if I heard how Time with heavy step strode over the world and
left graves as his foot-prints.... I sat down on a step of the altar;
around me lay the moonlight with fleeting, saddening cloud-shadows; my
spirit stood on high: I addressed the personality which I still was:
'What art thou? what is it that sits here and recollects itself and
suffers torment?--Thou, I, something--whither, then, is it gone, the
colored cloud, which for thirty years has swept by over this _I_ and
which I called childhood, youth, life?' Myself drifted along through
this painted mist--but I could not overtake it,--at a distance from me
it seemed something solid; close upon me drizzling mist-drops or so
called moments--to live them, means to drop from one moment (that
mist-globule of time) into another.... If, now, I had remained dead,
then would all that which I now am have been the object on account
of which I was created for this luminous earth and it for me? That
were the end of the scenes?--and beyond the end----? Joy is perhaps
yonder--here is none, because a past joy is none, and our moments thin
out that present into thousand past ones--virtue, rather, is here; it
is above _time_. Below me all sleeps; but I shall, also; and if I still
make believe thirty years longer that I am living, still they will lay
me here again--this night will return again, but I shall remain in my
coffin: and then?... If now I had three minutes, one for birth, one for
life, one for death, for what purpose then would I have them--this
is what I would say?--But all that stands between the past and the
future, is a moment--we, none of us, have but three.... Great Being of
beings--I began and was about to pray--Thou hast eternity.... but
before the thought of Him who is nothing but present, no human soul can
stand erect, but bows itself down to the earth again. 'Oh ye departed
loves,' I thought, 'you could not be too great for me; appear to me!
lift oft the sense of nothingness from my heart, and show me the
eternal breast which I can love, which can warm me.' Just then I
happened to see my poor dog who was gazing at me; and this creature so
moved me with his still briefer, still duller life, that I was softened
even to tears and yearned for something with which I might increase and
allay them.
"That something I found in the organ over my head. I went up to it as
to a thirst-quenching fountain. And when with its mighty tones I shook
the nightly church and the deaf and dumb dead, and when the dust flew
around me which had hitherto lain upon their mute lips then did all the
transitory beings that I had loved, with their transitory scenes, pass
along before me; thou camest, and Milan, and the Still Land; I related
to them in organ tones what had become a bare narration, I loved them
all once more in their fleeting life, and would fain for love have died
upon their bosoms and pressed my soul into their hands--but my hand
pressed only wooden keys. I struck out fewer and fewer tones, which
circled around me like a magnetic whirlpool--at last I laid the choral
book upon a low tone and continued to press the bellows in order not to
have to endure the mute interval between the tones--there streamed
forth a humming sound, as if it were pursuing the wings of time--it
bore all my memories and hopes, on its waves floated my throbbing
heart.... As far back as I can remember a continued tremulous tone has
always made me sad.
"I left my place of resurrection and looked toward the white pyramid of
the hermitage-mountain, where nothing rose again and where life more
soundly slept; the pyramid stood steeped in the moon-light and a long
cloud-shadow traveled on with me.
"Leaves and trees were bent by the touch of autumn; over the prickly
stubbles of the pastures the flowers danced no longer, it had perished
in the mouths of the cattle; the snail encoffined itself in its house
and bed with spittle; and when in the morning the earth turned round
with full-blooded flecked clouds, toward the faint sun, I felt that I
had no longer my former glad earth, but that I had left it forever in
the sepulchre, and the people whom I found again seemed to me corpses,
which Death had lent the upper world, and which Life set up and shoved
along, in order to act with these figures in Europe, Asia, Africa and
America....
"So I still think. And so long as I live, I shall carry round with me
the mournful impression of this certainty, that I must die. For I have
only known this within eight days; although I formerly gave myself very
great credit for my sensibility at death-beds, theatres and funeral
sermons. The child has no conception of death; every minute of his
sportive existence interposes its dazzling light between him and his
little grave. Busy men and pleasurelings comprehend it quite as little,
and it is incomprehensible with what coldness thousands of people can
say, life is short. It is incomprehensible, that one should not be able
to get the benumbed multitude, whose talk is an articulate snoring, to
lift up their heavy eyelids when one demands of them. Pray look through
thy two or three years of life to the bed wherein thou art to lie--see
thyself with the heavy hanging dead hand, with the mountainous sick
face, with the white marble eye, let thy ear draw over into the present
hour the jangling fancies of the last night--that great night which is
ever stalking on to meet thee, and which every hour comes an hour
nearer, and beneath which thou, the ephemeron, whether thou now
hoverest round in the gleam of the evening sun or in the glow of the
evening twilight, wilt certainly be crushed. But the two eternities
tower up on both sides of our earth, and we creep and grub on in our
deep narrow pass, stupid, blind, deaf, chewing, wriggling, without
seeing any greater path than that which we plough with our chafer-heads
into one ball of dirt.
"But since that there is also an end of my plans; one can complete
nothing here below. Life is so small a thing to me, that it is almost
the least thing I can sacrifice for a fatherland; I am merely moving on
with a greater or lesser retinue of years toward the grave-yard. But
with joy it is all over, as well; my rigid hand, which death has once
touched like an electric eel, too easily rubs the butterfly dust from
its four wings, and I merely let it flutter round me without seizing
it. Only misfortune and occupation are opaque enough to shut out the
future; and you shall be welcome to my house, especially if you come
out from another, where the landlord would rather take in joy.--Oh! ye
poor pale images made out of earthly colors, ye human creatures, I have
now a redoubled love and toleration for ye; for what power but love
raises us up again through the feeling of immortality out of the ashes
of death? Who would make your two December days, which you call eighty
years, still colder and shorter? Ah! we are only trembling shadows! and
yet will one shadow tear another to pieces?
"Now I understand why a man, a king, in his latter days, goes into a
cloister; what would he do at a court or on 'change, when the world of
sense recedes from him and all looks like a great outstretched veil,
while only the upper world, the world to come, hangs with its rays down
into this blackness. Thus does the sky when one beholds from high
mountains, lay aside its blue and become black, because the former is
not its own color, but that of our atmosphere; but the sun is then
stamped upon this night like a burning seal and keeps on blazing.
"I have just looked up to the starry heaven; but it no longer illumines
my soul as once; its suns and planets wither just as this one does into
which I crumble. Whether a minute insert its mite's tooth, or a
millenium its shark's-tooth into a world, is all one, it is crushed in
either case. Not merely the earth is vanity, but all which flies beside
it through the heavens and is distinguished from it only in size. And
thou thyself, fair sun, thou that like a mother, when her child says
good-night, regardest us so tenderly, when the earth carries us away
and draws the curtain of night around our beds, thou too shalt sink at
last into thy night, into thy bed, and shalt need a sun to give thee
rays!
"It is singular, therefore, that one should make higher stars or indeed
planets and their daughter-lands to be the flower-pots, into which
Death is to plant us, somewhat as the American hopes after death to go
to Europe.[77] The European would reciprocate his delusion and hold
America to be the Walhalla of the departed, if our second hemisphere,
instead of being only one thousand miles[78] off, hung at a distance of
sixty thousand, as that of the moon notoriously does. Oh my spirit
craves something different from a warmed-over, newly laid-out earth, a
different satisfaction from what grows on any dung-heap or fire-mound
of the heavens, a longer life than a crumbling planet bears upon it;
but I have no conception of it at all....
"Only come right down to my head from which thou hast taken the lock;
so long as I live shall _that_ side, on which thou hast committed the
Rape of the Lock, in memory of what I was and am to be, remain
undressed, etc."
"Ottomar."
Poetizing geniuses are in youth renegades and persecutors of taste, but
afterward its proselytes and apostles, and age grinds down the
distorting microscopic and macroscopic concave mirror to a flat one
which merely duplicates nature, while painting it. Thus will the
_practical_ and _passive_ geniuses from being enemies of principles and
stormers of virtue, become greater friends of both than faultless
people can ever be. Ottomar will one day surpass those who now may
censure him. For the rest, I shall not in the sequel of this
multo-biography treat him knavishly, but honorably, although he does
not expect it; for before his journey, when I sometimes found myself in
the hot focus of his faults, we fell out a little with each other.
Since then he thinks I heartily hate him; but I think I heartily love
him, only, like a hundred others, I take a peculiar pleasure in
cherishing a secret and suffering love.