The Dilemma of Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who took seriously the idea that his field, as a social science, should be able to offer a comprehensive theory of human culture, providing broad and verifiable explanations of individual behavior and social life. He understood that human culture is a consequence of the human search for meaning, and that basic functions of culture include defining what our human situation in reality is and what meaningful and dignified living consists of—what we are, and what the right way of doing things is. But in The Denial of Death and subsequent works, he offered a startling new approach to understanding how culture actually fulfills these functions, and what society requires of individuals if they would contribute to cultural meaning and stability. And in providing this new approach to cultural anthropology, he explicitly relied—in an act of philosophical scholarship both rare and courageous in his social scientific tradition—on Kierkegaard’s anthropology of human existence as “a union of opposites,” as a synthesis of the fiinite and the infinite.

Stated with stark brevity, Becker’s central and most original thesis as presented in The Denial of Death is as follows. As animals to whom self-consciousness has been given, we humans are aware that we will die, and this awareness produces in us a basic anxiety, indeed a fundamental terror, about our vulnerability, the violent ways of nature, and the inevitability of death.Therefore, we devise all sorts of strategies for suppressing awareness of our mortality. This denial of death, says Becker, is one of the basic functions of culture. How does culture manage this? First, by explaining human existence to be part of an enduringly meaningful universe, thus giving each of us a sense that our individual lives are signif i cant and valuable; and second, crucially, by controlling our basic anxiety through the devising of “death-denying hero systems,” or “immortality projects,” that enable us to believe and feel that, through our participation in them, our lives transcend mortal perishing. In the summarizing words of Sam Keen, from his foreword to the 1997 edition of The Denial of Death: “We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrifficing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market.” Through participating in “culturally standardized hero systems” that assure us that our selves or our tasks are of imperishable value, we feel immortal, and render our terror of death unconscious.31

Unfortunately, Becker explains, our projects of immortalizing heroism tend to inflate one specific worldview, or group, or institution—this religion, this nation, this type of government—into the only vehicle of human connection with imperishable meaning. Thus, when human beings encounter alternate belief systems or worldviews, they are experienced as threats—first because each argues for an ultimate truth at least somewhat different from one’s own, and second because the very fact of a plurality of belief systems or worldviews indirectly reveals that one’s own “project” is merely a local and arbitrary construct, a “vital lie” of culture and character, built for protection against the terrifying realities of mortality.32 Because of this we are led, according to Becker, to try to defuse the threat that “otherness” poses to our own immortalizing hero systems, and we pursue this in various ways. We may attempt to convert others to our own beliefs. We may seek to accommodate other points of view, by looking for and finding aspects of them that seem compatible with our own. A cruder, but common, strategy is to denigrate others who do not share our belief systems, belittling and dehumanizing the “others.” Then, as a most thorough solution, we can wage war, attempting to vanquish or even annihilate those whose differences threaten to expose the artificial character of our own “system” for transcending death. Through humiliating, damaging, and defeating the enemy; through mass deportations; through ethnic cleansing and genocide, we can at once eliminate threats to our heroic self-esteem and prove that it is we who are living and fighting in the service of everlasting truth. This, Becker argues, must be understood as the principal source of human violence and war: the inability to tolerate people significantly different from ourselves because to do so would betray the arbitrariness and falsehood of our own death-denying immortality systems, take away our psychological protection against our basic terror, and force us to face our true situation as self-conscious creatures who know that we have to die.33

In The Denial of Death, Becker developed this thesis and its implications for psychoanalysis, addressing ideas of Freud and other humanistic psychologists, especially the (in his view) underappreciated Otto Rank. The critical power and sweep of its central arguments were quickly and widely acknowledged; the book became a best-seller and won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Becker had obviously uncovered one of the hidden main-springs of psychological and cultural life, and shaped a powerful new tool both for ideological critique and for analyzing and redefining psychological “health.”

Where does Kierkegaard fits into this analysis? In chapter 5, titled “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker enthusiastically presents elements of Kierkegaard’s “psychological expositions” in order to deepen and clarify his own arguments, asserting an essential congruence between Kierkegaard’s understanding of human nature and that offered in The Denial of Death. Throughout the chapter he pays tribute to Kierkegaard’s genius, calling him a “master analyst of the human situation,” a psychologist of “uncanny brilliance” engaged in an “unbelievably subtle” existential analysis that has given us “some of the best empirical analyses of the human condition ever fashioned by man’s mind.” Present-day psychiatry, he claims, “lags far behind” Kierkegaard in its theories of human existence. One reason for this is that Kierkegaard’s analysis exploits to the utmost “the basic insight of psychology for all times”: that a human being is a “union of opposites, of self-consciousness and of physical body”; that this conjoining of self-consciousness with a body subject to death and decay constitutes a paradox; and that “this paradox is the really constant thing about man in all periods of history and society.” Kierkegaard understands, says Becker, that being a “spiritual,” that is, self-conscious, animal— a godlike being, who nevertheless decays and dies—produces in us a fundamental anxiety, or dread, induced by our powerlessness to overcome the ambiguity of our ontological situation. Most impressively, Becker says, in Kierkegaard’s two great works of psychological exposition, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, he has analyzed in “a broad and incredibly rich portrait of types of human failure” variants of the two elementary ways that we flee from the truth about our situation and its attendant anxiety. These are: (1) our denial of the responsibilities of self-conscious freedom, through immersion in bodily experience or in the givens of society, and (2) our denial of our “animal limitations,” through soaring into fantasies of unlimited possibility, including the fantasy of preservation from death and destruction.34 Kierkegaard’s analysis of the many variants of these two basic types of flight from ontological anxiety, Becker states, enables us to understand how widespread is human denial of the human condition. Kierkegaard shows us how the fatalist, the determinist, the social conformist, the happy consumer, the hedonist, the dreamer or fantasist, the worshiper of technology—even the schizophrenic and the clinical depressive—can all be understood as living “vital lies” of denial with regard to human existence in its given structure as an uneasy conjunction of body and spirit (or, as Kierkegaard puts it, “of  finitude and infinitude”). Each of these types tries to escape the anxiety of the human ontological situation by fleeing either creatureliness (body) or self-conscious freedom (spirit). The dreamer and the technology worshiper defy their creaturely dependence on accidents, evil, and decay. The conformist and the happy consumer dissolve their freedoms into the “social hero-systems” into which they were born. The determinist and the fatalist deny, respectively, the fact and the meaning of freedom. The hedonist, through living for the immediacy of sensations, simultaneously flees spiritual responsibility and tries to take control over the meaning of existence.35 Each can be seen to be trying to escape the anxiety of being that union of opposites, a “spiritual animal”— either by blotting out self-conscious freedom or by denying creatureliness.

Kierkegaard has thus provided the anthropological basis, explains Becker, for recognizing how central to the human psyche are both experiences of basic anxiety and psychological defenses against it, and therefore for an appreciation by cultural anthropology of both the origin and ubiquity of death-denying hero systems. In providing this, he continues, Kierkegaard has given us something even more valuable, the “golden fruit of all his tortuous labors”: he has shown what authentic existence—existence without cultural heroism and the vital lies of character—would look like.36Becker approvingly describes, at the end of his chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” this true “health,” this au-thentic existence that would face into its basic anxiety, accept the paradox of its being, and accept the knowledge of death.

The authentic person, Becker states, is the one who opens up to and em-braces his or her true human situation—which means, most important, breaking away from the “programmed cultural heroics” designed to protect against awareness of mortality, and fully acknowledging creatureliness and the fragility of existence. Authenticity, writes Becker, requires letting aware-ness of mortality penetrate consciousness to the point where one’s habit-ual sense of self, as constituted and sustained by all the fragility-and-death-denying emotional character armor built up since childhood, is “destroyed, brought down to nothing.” In this psychological process, a person honestly and courageously accepts the nothingness implicit in all f i nite being, aban-dons all dependence on personal, cultural, and worldly assurances of en-during meaning, assurances equally empty. And in this extremity of honesty and courage, a transformation occurs. By dying to all “f i nite being,” the self begins to be able “to see beyond it,” and learns “to relate itself to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made f i nite creatures.” The self discovers in the dark night of its abandonment of reliance on f i nitude that there is, after all, a legitimate focus of its search for enduring meaning: one can, in hope and courage, aff i rm that “one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator,” to a transcendent ground that guarantees one’s personal signif i cance within “an eternal and inf i nite scheme of things.” But this aff i rmation is faith. Faith is that opening and reaching out to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, whereby one links one’s “secret inner self” to “the very ground of creation.” This, states Becker, is the culmi-nation of Kierkegaard’s anthropological analysis and his ultimate message, with which Becker here concurs: human authenticity, with its full emotional acceptance of mortality, is based upon and impossible without that religious faith through which “the invisible mystery” at the heart of a creature “attains cosmic signif i cance by aff i rming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation.”37

In his approval of Kierkegaard’s account of genuine religious faith and its role in authentic human living, Becker appears here to have fully embraced Kierkegaard’s anthropology, which affirms precisely that human existence is a union of the finite and the infinite, of time and eternity. If a human being is capable of affirming the connection between his or her own “invisible mystery” and “the invisible mystery at the heart of creation,” then human consciousness is necessarily both immanent and transcendent.

Kierkegaard himself is eloquently detailed on the matter. “A human being,” he explains,

is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that [in self-consciousness] relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. . . . [From this may be derived] the formula for faith: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power [God] that established it.38

A self can, Kierkegaard states, through willing to be itself, “rest transparently in God” because human consciousness is the site where eternal being enters time. Each “moment” of conscious experience, of self-presence, is “that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other”; human temporality is that flow of conscious presence “whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.” Therefore, human beings experience anxiety (angst): anxiety proclaims our concern over the possible uses of our freedom in the task of bringing our fragile, sexed, mortal lives into attunement with the eternal ground of our being.39 This is an anthropology that serves as a sharp rebuke, and a therapeutic antidote, to modern immanentist anthropologies, and through his analysis and embrace of Kierkegaard Becker appears to be in a position to usefully exploit it in his own social science. He seems ready to recover a conception of human nature that accounts for our native orientation to transcendent meaning by affirming—along with Jaspers, Scheler, Marcel, Levinas, Lonergan, and Voegelin—that human existence is life in the In-Between of immanence and transcendence.

In fact, though, we find neither the articulation nor the development of such an anthropology either in subsequent chapters of The Denial of Death or in its successor and companion volume, Escape from Evil, Becker’s final work. Kierkegaard’s ontology of human existence is nowhere to be found in their often brilliant discussions of psychology, religion, culture, and the human sources of violence and evil, which instead consistently portray human beings, in typical modernist fashion, as purely immanent animals who just happen to have the productive and ennobling, but also tragic and self-torturing, appurtenance of self-consciousness.

This divergence from Kierkegaard may be seen even in the chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” where some of Becker’s conclusions about the import of Kierkegaard’s analysis clearly deviate from those drawn by the philosopher himself. For instance, at one point Becker states that, in Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety, “the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death.” In another place, he indicates that, for Kierkegaard, the “prison” of inauthentic character is “built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror.”40 Neither of these assertions accurately portrays Kierkegaard’s own understanding.

For Kierkegaard, the basic anxiety of consciousness is not over the fact that one is finite and mortal. It is a response to the fact that one is finite and transcends finitude—that one participates in time as a fragile, sexed, and mortal creature and participates in the eternal, nonfinite being that transcends mortality. Human inauthenticity, the “sickness unto death” with which we are all infected, is not simply the result of shrinking from mortality, but of our despair over the task of accepting and reconciling both dimensions of our nature, the temporal and the eternal. The basic anxiety that belongs to the “sickness unto death” is not simply the terror of annihilation and its indignity, but anxiety that wells up from the recognition that we are responsible both for facing up to our creatureliness and to the claims of the eternal upon us, claims that transcend the transitory domain of physical death.41Becker misconstrues Kierkegaard by overstressing one side of his account of the origins of anxiety: the threat of meaninglessness posed by death. Kierkegaard himself emphasizes that an equal, if not greater, source of anxiety and despair is the threat of mismanaged participation in eternal being.

For Kierkegaard, then, a human being is truly a “union of opposites,” a uniting of animal being with the “immortalizing presence” that makes of that very being a paradox. For Becker, on the contrary, a human being is not really a synthesis of temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, but merely a creature that happens to be “self-conscious”—a creature burdened with a secondary or ancillary capacity to have ideas or thoughts, including thoughts of mortality and timelessness. Despite his justified admiration for and use of Kierkegaard’s analyses of existential failure, which offer profound support for Becker’s insight into the extent to which the denial of death—as one pervasive form of the denial of the human condition—shapes human life and culture, Becker does not really take advantage of Kierkegaard’s anthropological exposition. To do so would require a radical break with the immanentist subject of modern social science, for whom transcendent being can be only a mental invention or projection—and this break Becker is not able or willing to engage in.42 Thus, his embrace of Kierkegaard in The Denial of Death involves Becker in a sort of philosophical confusion, or dilemma, that he is unable to resolve. He recognizes Kierkegaard’s genius as a “master analyst of the human situation” whose insights both reveal the origins and extent of death denial and explain what it means to live a life without such denial. He cannot, however, incorporate either Kierkegaard’s actual anthropology or his explication of the authentic life of faith into his own psychological and cultural critique, because immanentist assumptions about human nature and human knowing prevent the Kierkegaardian insights from taking hold.43

Becker’s dilemma is perfectly represented in his approach to the notion of immortality. He shares with Kierkegaard a passionate, derisive criticism of those who are certain of their personal immortality, as if eternal being were their possession, and who often bolster that sense of certitude and possession through the denigration and victimization of others. The idea of immortality is seen by both thinkers as a perennial source of self-delusion, smug egotism, false heroics, and injustice. For all this, though, the symbol immortality clearly has, for Kierkegaard, an authentic and justifable meaning and function. It is one of the symbols we use to make sense of our experiences of eternal and nonfinite being, to stand for the questions and hopes and images that arise from our mysterious participation in transcendence.44 However, in Becker’s Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, notions of immortality are always linked to inauthentic and self-deluded human yearnings to escape mortality. While Becker acknowledges that human beings subscribe to what he calls “immortality ideologies” because of a love of and longing for fuller life, for him any thoughts of imperishable meaning are always in part a “reflex of the death-anxiety,” so that the notion of immortality is always, for him, both a promise and a lie.45 To be true to his own insights into authentic existence in “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker would have to acknowledge legitimate and salutary—as well as self-delusory and destructive—functions of the symbol immortality. Correspondingly, he would have to incorporate into his work a careful distinction between, on the one hand, the false heroics of inauthentic religious faith, which seeks primarily self-righteous certitude and self-inflation, and, on the other hand, the genuine heroics of authentic faith, which accepts the human condition as it is and stands open to the risks and mysteries of participation in transcendent meaning—the faith exemplifled by Zen masters, Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr [???]. But these distinctions are not developed, and Becker’s cultural anthropology—with its bold embrace of ideas that challenges the narrow conventions of contemporary social science—leaves human beings still only groping for transcendence, rather than struggling with the mystery of its presence.46

Becker’s dilemma is that of a scientist who knows that the data he has isolated are of profound importance, but who can only interpret them in terms of a familiar but faulty theoretical paradigm. The data pertain to the desire to invest human life with imperishable meaning. Relying as he does on the faulty theoretical model of the modern, immanentist subject—who does not participate in eternal reality but merely has ideas about it—Becker interprets this concern as signifying primarily a denial of mortality. However, what our concern with imperishable meaning signifies primarily is awareness of existing in-between finite being and transcendent divine presence. Becker is not wrong to insist that the human fascination with transcending death is an important key to establishing a new and profound cultural anthropology. But it does not unlock for him the anthropological theory our age needs: one that breaks completely with the immanentist model of consciousness and history, and reestablishes at the core of psychological and social science the fundamental insight that human existence participates in the understanding, freedom, and creativity of divine transcendent being. Becker had amassed many of the clues—especially in Kierkegaard’s psychological expositions— that would have allowed him to make this breakthrough. Why were they not sufficient? What would have enabled him to do so?

Our account of differentiating consciousness indicates at least part of the answer. The history and significance of human grappling with transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning is a given presence in consciousness—that our longing for transcendence is not an act of desperation, as Becker proclaims, but rather the natural longing to clarify what we already experience.

A psychology or cultural anthropology (or any other science, or philosophy) that truly addresses the needs of our times requires above all a critical appreciation of the differentiating process, without which science cannot understand what it itself is: the uncovering of one of the realms of meaning—the realm of systematic explanations of things, of their intrinsic properties and uniform interactions—by a human consciousness whose questioning is created and drawn by the ground of being, the divine partner whose presence both permeates the finite world and illuminates that very consciousness with the revelation of divine transcendence.

from the book Transcendence and History The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity by Glenn Hughes

Emily Dickinson and the Unknown God

(...)
And Dickinson, the focus of this chapter, is revealed by her approximately 1,800 poems and poetic fragments to be, despite her unquestionable experiences of joy, loving identifiation with natural creatures, and illuminative transcendence, more typically and generally a poet of doubt, loneliness, longing, inward struggle, fury, alienation, dread, and depression—a master, as Harold Bloom puts it, “of every negative affect.”1 Also, contrary to her popular image, she is among the most cognitively demanding poets America has produced. And finally, she is a brilliant poetic explicator of what it means to live in the anxious openness of the “tension” of the metaxy—that is, in the unrestful, inescapable, and irresolvable tension of existence in-between world and transcendence, time and eternity, ignorance and knowledge, despair and faith, hope and fulfillment.2

Poet of the In-Between

As a prelude to exploring the way Dickinson’s artistic corpus constitutes an unusually faithful, extended testimony to the in-between, or metaxic, condition of human existence, we might briefly consider why a more accurate understanding of the character of Dickinson’s poetry and outlook, and, more important, an appreciation of her greatness as a poet, are not more common.

First, there was the long delay in the initial coming to light of her achievement, due to her life of intense privacy, to the withholding of her poems (no more than ten of which were published during her lifetime)3 and to their first being published—beginning in 1890, four years after her death—in small or incomplete editions, with the poems edited, punctuationally modified, and even linguistically altered, to suit conventional tastes. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the full scope of her accomplishment and her original versions became well known and that she entered the mainstream teaching canon and anthologies. And only the last few decades have shown a careful critical devotion to repairing the changes inflicted by her early editors, to the compiling of folio and variora editions, and to making publicly available her work as she wrote and preserved it.

Second, there is her poetic originality. Although her forms and meters are often familiar or even commonplace—especially the hymnal stanza form that she employs so frequently in her work—her poetic voice is utterly unique, and, once encountered, is instantly recognizable in its peculiarities of diction, concision, and metaphoric invention. Harold Bloom, however prone to hyperbole, does not overstate in remarking that “[l]iterary originality achieves scandalous dimensions in Dickinson. . . .”4

Third, Dickinson’s literary originality, however impressive, is in service of an even greater gift: what Bloom calls her “cognitive originality.” “Cognitive originality” is the capacity for, and the realized expression of, thinking that breaks new ground. It is the discovery or invention of previously unthought interpretations and meanings, the forging of new imaginative and ideational connections. Of Dickinson’s cognitive originality, it is nearly impossible to gain the measure. Again to quote the enthusiastic Bloom, with whom in this matter I once more agree:

Except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante. . . . Dickinson rethought everything for herself. . . . No commonplace survives her appropriation. . . . [Further, she] can think more lucidly and feel more fully than any of her readers, and she is very aware of her superiority. . . . [Indeed, we] confront, at the height of her powers, the best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries.5

Bloom is not alone in this assessment. Dickinson’s most admired biographer, Richard B. Sewall, also asserted that her creative use of the English language matched that of Shakespeare, and he compared the exuberantly “reckless” invention of her writing with that of the author of the Book of Job.6 Why, one might ask, is this extraordinary appraisal not more widely known?

One answer is that few people read beyond the anthologized poems, and those who make the attempt often find it difficult to keep up with Dickinson’s flashes of insight and audacities of expression. She is a poet, as Robert Weisbuch writes, “who will not stop thinking” and who in fact frequently thinks harder and more deeply than we wish her to. Thus it is that, as Clark Griffith writes, in the popularizing anthologies Dickinson’s worst poetry is often “confounded with her best,” her work persistently being misappreciated and “misread for the simple reason that her intelligence is slighted.”7 

And fourth, we must take into account that Dickinson was a woman. Most citizens in the republic of letters have simply not been prepared to accept that it is a woman who, at the height of her powers, confronts us with “the best mind . . . among Western poets” since Shakespeare.

Now, let us point out right away that neither literary power nor intellectual brilliance are invariably employed in serving an accurate explication of the truths of existence. Both literary and cognitive originality may, alas, provide us only with stunningly detailed accounts of “second realities,” to use the term for ideological fantasies that Voegelin borrows from the Austrian novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer.8 But in Emily Dickinson’s case, intellectual, emotional, and imaginative power is indeed matched by a severe honesty and perspicacious openness to reality. Her poems consistently explore and articulate genuine truths about the human situation in the cosmos; about the intricacies of consciousness and the ongoing constitution of “self”; about the facts, surprises, and mysteries of the natural world; about the central importance and yet ultimate impotence of language; and about our human relationship to the mystery of divine transcendence. Thus, it is not surprising to find in Dickinson’s work a recurrent emphasis on the fact that human beings are, first and last, passionate questioners and unsatisfiable yearners for a certainty and fulfillment that remain unavailable to us in this lifetime. In this regard, her poetry repeatedly echoes Voegelin’s analyses of consciousness and existence. For Dickinson, as for Voegelin, to be human is to be “the Question”— the questioning tension toward that divine ground of reality that is the origin, deepest identity, and ultimate concern of each of us—in the enacting of which, as long as we live, “there is no answer,” finally, “other than the [comprehending] Mystery as it becomes luminous in the acts of questioning.”9 We might say that for both writers existence is essentially a desire, a longing—and Dickinson could well be described as “the poet of longing” par excellence. One critic has indeed described her complete oeuvre as “a dramatization of a philosophy of desire.”10 Taking Dickinson’s desire, then, as normative desire, faithful to the truths of existence, let us examine, now, some of the evidence for Dickinson being a preeminent witness to the metaxic, or “in-between,” structure of existence, using Voegelin’s philosophy as our analytic touchstone.

The essential experience of human existence, writes Voegelin, is that of the “in-between,” the metaxy of Plato, which is neither time nor eternity. . . .

[And] let us recall [that in the human] experience of the tensions between the poles of time and eternity, neither does eternal being become an object in time, nor is temporal being transposed into eternity. We remain in the “in-between,” in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.11

[Human existence is thus] a disturbing movement in the In-Between of igno-rance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulf i llment, and ultimately of life and death.12

To reveal the parallel between this description and Dickinson’s poetic vision of existence, let us begin with some verses that indicate her affirmation that eternal reality is no “object in time”—is no external “place” or “thing”— but rather a reality revealed through the experience of divine presence in consciousness, which illuminates the “temporal flow of experience” as the in-between of time and timelessness. She writes:

The Blunder is in estimate
Eternity is there
We say as of a Station
Meanwhile he is so near
He joins me in my Ramble
Divides abode with me
No Friend have I that so persists
As this Eternity  (1690)13

This image of Eternity “dividing his abode” with Dickinson—being present, that is, as the divine partner who dwells with, and indeed co-constitutes, her self—is not an isolated trope in her work. Her sense of the intimate ontological interpenetration of her finite human longing and the divine presence who both establishes and draws forth that longing is concisely conveyed in the following short poem, which in its second stanza suggests how any intellectual analysis of this paradoxical intersection of time and timelessness must, for someone attentive to her lived experience of existence in the metaxy, appear no more than an artificial linguistic container:

He was my host – he was my guest,
I never to this day
If I invited him could tell,
Or he invited me.
So infinite our intercourse
So intimate, indeed,
Analysis as capsule seemed
To keeper of the seed. (1754)

More penetratingly still, from a poem in which the word awe in the first line denotes Jehovah, and in which the word residence in the third line refers both to the divine Beyond and to the human soul:

No man saw awe, nor to his house
Admitted he a man
Though by his awful residence
Has human nature been. 
[…]  (1342)

Thus we know of eternal being, of “Paradise,” only because divine presence condescends to “bisect” our worldly consciousness, inducing our longing for the divine mystery:

Of Paradise’ existence
All we know
Is the uncertain certainty –
But it’s vicinity, infer,
By it’s
Bisecting Messenger – (1421)

Paradise, Eternity, Immortality, Heaven, and God are all terms that serve Dickinson as references to what Voegelin calls the “pole of timelessness” experienced in the in-between of conscious existence. Both writers make clear that although we may identify and name this timeless reality, we never experience it as a “separate” being apart from “the temporal flow of experience” that is consciousness—and to uncritically imagine it after the manner of a spatiotemporal object (that is, as a “place,” or a “thing”) is to delusionally misconstrue it. We know of “eternal being,” of transcendence, as the ground of existence and of nature only by virtue of the fact that human consciousness is experienced and understood as being co-constituted by temporal and eternal reality, as being an ontological “in-between” where time and timelessness interpenetrate in an experiential unity. If logic rebels against this notion of time and eternity intersecting in consciousness as “paradoxical,” still it is confirmed as a fact through proper attention to, and close consideration of the meaning of, the “tension” of conscious existence.

Again and again in Dickinson’s poetry, we encounter her evocations of precisely this experience of consciousness as a worldly “locale” where eternal being both is immediately present (and so promises “immortality”) and where it announces its utter and radical transcendence. So, on the one hand, she avers:

The only news I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.
[…]    (820) And:

The Infinite a sudden
Guest Has been assumed to be –
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?  (1344)

Thus the immediacy of divine presence. On the other hand, as “Immortality” and “The Infinite” are symbols for a divine beyond—a dimension of timeless meaning transcending anything we can experience or know in consciousness— she makes clear in many poems that we can never truly claim to possess or know it from within our situation in the “in-between”:

[…] Immortality contented
Were Anomaly –  (984)

And:

[…] If end I gained
It ends beyond Indefinite disclosed – […]    (484)14 

With the paradox of metaxic consciousness—the ontological simultaneity of the immediacy of divine presence in consciousness together with its nonpossessable, unknowable, radically transcendent character—being constant in Dickinson’s awareness, it is not surprising that longing suffused with doubt is ever-present in her poetry. A glance at her biography shows that the seeds of this outlook were sown early. The time of her youth in Massachusetts was the time of the Second Great Awakening, and the Congregationalist community within which she received her religious formation, with its Calvinist theology, was swept by a series of revivals during the first twenty years of her life. But Dickinson soon responded with skepticism and aversion. When pressed, at age seventeen, she refused to become a professing Christian. She dismissed the doctrines of original sin, hell and damnation, and election. She became the only adult member of her family who remained aloof from church membership and never took communion.15 Her poetry often reveals a smiling contempt for those who presume assurance of salvation and election, who embrace the mysteries of Christian faith as settled facts, and who take God as definitely revealed in Scripture and doctrine. Nevertheless, and crucially, hers was from early years and throughout her life a profoundly religious temperament. Her sensitivity toward, and openness to, the mystery of divine presence dominated her life and work. She could not ignore her experienced participation in transcendence and recognized the longing for deeper and ultimate communion with the divine ground of being as the central human orientation. Thus in her poetry we find her constantly relying, to express her religious insights and intimations, on the language of the only religious tradition she knew—the language of covenant, heaven, immortality, paradise, seal, promise, ordinance, Jesus, Gethsemane, Eden, crucifixion, spirit, grace, and God—but with a difference. She uses them to explore and explain her own clear-eyed quest of what it means to live in the in-between of the tension toward the divine mystery, with all of its doubts, unanswerable questions, strug-gles for faith, and dark nights of the soul.

Richard Wilbur puts the matter of Dickinson’s use of traditional Christian language elegantly:

At some point Emily Dickinson sent her whole Calvinist vocabulary into exile, telling it not to come back until it would subserve her own sense of things. . . . [I]n her poems those great words are not merely being themselves; they have been adopted, for expressive purposes; they have been taken personally, and therefore redefined.16

In other words, Dickinson found in her own consciousness those experiences, insights, and passions for which the great religious language could be used as evocative symbols, and then, in using them as she did in her poems, she personalized and revitalized them, making them transparent for her own spiritual experiences, at whatever cost of destabilizing their commonplace usages within what was to her an unconvincing religious institutional context.

As to that institutional context: we hear Dickinson’s clear rejection of the so-called Christianity of her religious community in a number of poems. In one, it is scorned as childishly naïve:

I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Their’s –
The name They dropped opon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading – too – […]    (353) 

Another seems to link her own skepticism to a broader decline of genuine Christian faith, in a tone reminiscent of Matthew Arnold, or even Nietzsche:

Those – dying then,
Knew where they went –
They went to God’s Right Hand –
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found – […]    (1581)  

A few poems on this subject are more expansive, rehearsing Dickinson’s young efforts to believe, her subsequent feeling of betrayal, and her anger in the wake of her intellectual and emotional dismissal of the platitudinous God of comfortable assurances, the revealed God deemed so readily available to congregants at prayer.17 In “I meant to have but modest needs,” the full drama of betrayal unfolds:

I meant to have but modest needs –
Such as Content – and Heaven –
Within my income – these could lie
And Life and I – keep even –

But since the last – included both –
It would suffice my Prayer
But just for one – to stipulate –
And Grace would grant the Pair –

And so – opon this wise –
I prayed – Great Spirit –
Give to me A Heaven not so large as Your’s,
But large enough – for me –

A Smile suffused Jehovah’s face –
The Cherubim – withdrew –
Grave Saints stole out to look at me –
And showed their dimples – too –

I left the Place – with all my might –
I threw my Prayer away –
The Quiet Ages picked it up –
And Judgment – twinkled – too –

That one so honest – be extant –
To take the Tale for true –
That “Whatsoever Ye shall ask –
Itself be given You” –

But I, grown shrewder – scan the Skies
With a suspicious Air –
As Children – swindled for the first –
All Swindlers – be – infer –  (711)

Noteworthy here are the facts that a human “Life” does require, in its longing, a “Heaven” for its proper counterbalance, to “keep even”; that nothing of the sort is assured, no matter how intense and sincere the longing; that the smiles, dimples, and twinkling of, respectively, God, the saints, and a semianthropmorphized Judgment Day, are not emblems of tender affection but condecending amusement at the petitioner’s naïvete; and that the final emphasis is on a general suspicion of all religious presumption.

Again, however, this suspicion is not a denial of the divine mystery. It is the acknowledgment that the human condition, first and last, is that of being a questioner—a questioner who, as Voegelin puts it, would “deform his humanity” through uncritically accepting answers and “refusing to [continually] ask the questions” concerning fulfillment of our yearnings for communion with the divine mystery that, if we are existentially honest, we cannot ignore, however difficult it may be to hold onto religious faith regarding our ultimate relationship to it.18 Thus Dickinson repeatedly, in her work, begins by affirming the reality of the transcendent pole of the metaxy but then proceeds to explore the actual human relationship to it, which is that of, in her own words, “uncertain certainty” (1421).19 We find a concise example of this trajectory in “I know that He exists”:

I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play –
’Tis a fond Ambush –
Just to make Bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play
Prove piercing earnest –
Should the glee – glaze –
In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun
Look too expensive!
Would not the jest –
Have crawled too far!  (365)

In this poem of encompassing spiritual possibilities, we traverse the entire human pathway that runs between St. Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that it is in the natural capacity of human reason to know that God is real to Macbeth’s horrifying vision of life as a cruel and pointless joke.20 But, of course, the latter possibility is posed in the subjunctive. The final word, for Dickinson, is always recognition of the unknowable—of the basic mystery of human-divine relations, a mystery whose denial would, in Voegelin’s words, conceptually “destroy the In-Between structure of man’s humanity.”21

(...)

The Unknown God

Returning a last time to our question, then—just who or what is Emily Dickinson’s “God”?—let us assay an answer, however incomplete it must be.

Dickinson often had experiences of epiphany, or “theophany,” in which the immediacy of divine presence was as certain to her as the fact of her own being. And because she remained honest to herself, and spiritually discerning, about those experiences, she did not deceive herself about how fleeting the moments of “visitation” were or how desolate she felt when they had passed. In addition, she underwent experiences of dread, alienating depression, and fear for her sanity that she can only have interpreted as being allowed, if not ordained, by the divine author of her existence. And which-ever type of experience she wrote about, one fact is consistently brought to the fore: the ultimate divine source of the experience is magisterially “beyond,” majestically incomprehensible. Never does Dickinson eclipse from her awareness the absolutely transcendent mysteriousness of “God” and the pattern of his intentions for her mind. Dickinson’s God is unrevealed: hidden, silent, unpredictable, and thus, above all things—despite his “visitations”—unknown. 

And here again, as with her evocations of human existence as life in the in-between of world and transcendence, ignorance and knowledge, despair and faith, we find Dickinson attuned to a key element in Voegelin’s philosophy. For in a number of works, Voegelin takes pains to explain how the divine ground of being—which in ancient cultures was experienced and symbolized as a plurality of intracosmic gods—gradually came to be recognized in its transcendent “oneness” through a differentiating process (discussed in chapter one) that produced symbolisms first of henotheism, then monotheism, and finally an explicit mysticism. We encounter such mysticism already in Plato’s notion of divine ultimacy as a “being beyond being” in Republic Book VI (508–9), but in a much more explicit and detailed manner in Jewish and Christian mystical traditions (and in those of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism). The historical differentiating process shows that, in the end, an explicit conceptual apprehension of divine radical transcendence forces upon its discoverers a consciousness of the profound unknowability of the divine essence. Thus Voegelin describes the “millennial Movement” of human-divine encounter as issuing, during the first millennium b.c.e., into an explicit appreciation that, ultimately, the divine ground is an “Unknown God”—an undisclosable primal Mystery known to be such. The “God” who emerges from Dickinson’s poems, it seems to me, conforms precisely to this “Unknown God” identified in Voegelin’s account of the historical process of mystical differentiation—that is, the one ineffable divine reality “behind” all intracosmic, mythic, and “revealed” gods of human history.34 

A more precise parallel can be made, and it is one that speaks directly to Dickinson’s success in recovering difficult truths about life in the metaxy in a cultural and theological atmosphere dominated by the “revealed” God of doctrinal Christianity.

In his account of the Christian epiphany and the Gospel movement, Voegelin argues that the “extraordinary divine irruption in the existence of Jesus,” as recorded in the New Testament, was nothing less than the coming to full clarity of the fact that Yahweh, God, the Creator, is indeed the agnostos theos, the “hidden divinity” or “Unknown God,” of an absolutely radical transcendence. The utter “beyondness” of ultimate divine reality, Voegelin argues, was at first glimpsed and then increasingly recognized in the theophanic experiences of earlier traditions—both Hebrew/Judaic and other—but climactically revealed as such by Christ. What Jesus’ teachings and actions impressed upon those who responded to “the whole fullness of divine reality [theotes]” in him (Col. 2:9), was the radical mysteriousness, and absolute incommensurability with the created world and all finite comprehension, of “the Father” to whom he bore witness. Voegelin concludes: “The revelation of the Unknown God through Christ, in conscious continuity with the millennial process of revelation . . . is so much the center of the gospel movement that it may be called the gospel itself.”35 

However, he continues, the drama of the gospel as the climactic revelation of the Unknown God, who has been the divine partner in metaxic encounter for all peoples of all times, although “alive in the consciousness of the New Testament writers,” has largely been lost to the modern churches. This Voegelin attributes to the process of “doctrinalization,” of formulating in propositions the experienced truths of the Christian epiphany, so as to precisely explain, and institutionally protect, their meanings—a process that was both necessary and inevitable but heavy with unfortunate consequences. The principal problematic outcome, he explains, has been the separation of “doctrinal” or “school theology” from “mystical or experiential theology” and the institutional and pedagogical ascendance of the former to the point of the near-eclipse of the latter. The result is that “Christianity” today has become, by and large, a matter of believers being urged to embrace (without too many questions, please) sets of doctrines or propositions presented as information about God and his creations “revealed” through Scripture and church teaching. For Voegelin, who considers a life of genuine faith to be dependent on personal mystical experiences, it has been a disaster for the modern world that “[t]he Unknown God whose theotes [divine reality] was present in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by the revealed God of Christian doctrine,” that the ultimate unknowability of radically transcendent divinity has been largely forgotten in the mainstream Christian traditions.36 

When Emily Dickinson rejected the “revealed God” of her Congregationalist community, therefore, and bravely explored in her own consciousness— with an “inward eye,” as Barton Levi St. Armand puts it, that “remained steadfastly, obediently open”—just who or what “God” might be, and discovered that “Jehovah” was an unknowable, sometimes terrifying Mystery, a Mystery for which “Jesus” and “Gethsemane” and “Crucifixion” could be approached as symbol-windows opening onto elemental truths of consciousness, she was in her own idiosyncratic and nonscholarly way recovering the truth of the “Unknown God” and thus the essence of the Christian epiphany itself.37 From the point of view of Voegelin’s philosophy, Dickinson was in fact penetrating to the “engendering experiences” of key Christian symbols and expressing those experiences and revivifying those symbols in poems of startling lucidity and originality. For her poems repeatedly remind us that “the truth of reality has its center not in the cosmos at large, not in nature or society . . . but in the presence of the Unknown God in a [person’s] existence to his death and life,”  and that, in the wake of the differentiation of the radical transcendence of the ground of being, true testimony about the divine “can only proceed from the god who is experienced as the Unknown God in the immediate experience of the divine Beyond.”38 In this view, Dickinson suddenly looks less like the post-Christian nonbeliever portrayed by many commentators—or even like a brilliant originator of a unique religious faith, making her, like Willam Blake, a “sect of one”39—and more like a courageous, solitary recoverer of elemental truths at the core of a religious tradition whose institutional forms, as she knew them, repelled her. Though she undoubtedly rejected “Christianity,” she may have been far more Christian than she suspected.

For if Voegelin is correct, the very heart of the Christian epiphany is that human existence is life in the unresolved tension of the metaxy, with the divine source of reality understood both as immediately present in consciousness— the “site and sensorium of divine presence”—and as the divine Creator so transcendently “other” that one can only speak of “Hiddenness,” “Silence,” and “the Nameless.”40 Dickinson’s poems convey with power and precision exactly this unresolved tension, as well as this dual appreciation of 1) divine presence in the mind, and 2) the divine’s radical inaccessibility, as they again and again point to, on the one hand, “the divine reality which enters the metaxy in the [questing] movement of existence” in the human mind, and on the other, “the invisible God, experienced as real [utterly] beyond the metaxy of existence.”41 

Bearing this analysis in mind, we may consider, finally, a poem in which Dickinson encapsulates our human condition: our situation of longing, doubting, and hoping in the “in-between” of time and eternity, ignorance and knowledge, and faced with the challenge of sustaining authentic faith in light of awareness that the drama of our existence unfolds within, and in conscious relation to, an unfathomable Mystery:

This World is not conclusion.
A Species stands beyond –
Invisible, as Music –
But positive, as Sound –
It beckons, and it baffles –
Philosophy, dont know –
And through a Riddle, at the last –
Sagacity, must go –
To guess it, puzzles scholars –
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown – 
and laughs, and rallies –
Blushes, if any see –
Plucks at a twig of Evidence –
And asks a Vane, the way –
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –  (373)

Here we find the key Dickinsonian themes addressed above: clear affirmation of the reality of transcendent being; the impotencies of analytical intelligence in grasping the mystery of transcendence and the soul’s ultimate destiny; recognition that the core of human consciousness is a longing for communion with that mystery; and the difficulties of genuine faith in an Unknown God contrasted with smug religiosity, a contrast caustically conveyed by her depiction of pulpit oratory and fervid congregational hymn-singing as narcotics employed to ward off awareness of the tension of metaxic existence. The last word, aptly for Dickinson, lies with “the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul”— the spiritual tension experienced by her principally in the negative modalities of doubt, anxiety, and an alienated and solitary seeking.

from the book A more beautiful question  the spiritual in poetry and art Glenn Hughes
From chapter  Emily Dickinson and the Unknown God

The Flying Machine

In the year A.D. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.

Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, ‘Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!’

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor, ‘the air is sweet this morning.’

‘No, no, a miracle!’ said the servant, bowing quickly.

‘And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle.’

‘No, no, Your Excellency.’

‘Let me guess then – the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles.’

‘Excellency, a man is flying!’

‘What?’ The Emperor stopped his fan.

‘I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, colored like the sun and the grass.’

‘It is early,’ said the Emperor, ‘and you have just wakened from a dream.’

‘It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too.’

‘Sit down with me here,’ said the Emperor. ‘Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight.’

They drank tea.

‘Please,’ said the servant at last, ‘or he will be gone.’

The Emperor rose thoughtfully. ‘Now you may show me what you have seen.’

They walked into a garden, across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.

‘There!’ said the servant.

The Emperor looked into the sky.

And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons.

The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning, ‘I fly, I fly!’

The servant waved to him. ‘Yes, yes!’

The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number. He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.

‘Tell me,’ he said to his servant, ‘has anyone else seen this flying man?’

‘I am the only one, Excellency,’ said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.

The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, ‘Call him down to me.’

‘Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor wishes to see you!’ called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth.

The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.

The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.

‘What have you done?’ demanded the Emperor.

‘I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency,’ replied the man.

‘What have you done?’ said the Emperor again.

‘I have just told you!’ cried the flier.

‘You have told me nothing at all.’ The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.

‘Is it not beautiful, Excellency?’

‘Yes, too beautiful.’

‘It is the only one in the world!’ smiled the man. ‘And I am the inventor.’

‘The only one in the world?’

‘I swear it!’

‘Who else knows of this?’

‘No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the sun. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew! But my wife does not know of it.’

‘Well for her, then,’ said the Emperor. ‘Come along.’

They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.

The Emperor clapped his hands. ‘Ho, guards!’

The guards came running.

‘Hold this man.’

The guards seized the flier.

‘Call the executioner,’ said the Emperor.

‘What’s this!’ cried the flier, bewildered. ‘What have I done?’ He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper apparatus rustled.

‘Here is the man who has made a certain machine,’ said the Emperor, ‘and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do.’

The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask.

‘One moment,’ said the Emperor. He turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted this key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going.

The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, birds sang in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to the tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.

‘Is it not beautiful?’ said the Emperor. ‘If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done.’

‘But, oh, Emperor!’ pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. ‘I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels! That is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!’

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor sadly, ‘I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?’

‘Then spare me!’

‘But there are times,’ said the Emperor, more sadly still, ‘when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man.’

‘What man?’

‘Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear.’

‘Why? Why?’

‘Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?’ said the Emperor.

No one moved or said a word.

‘Off with his head,’ said the Emperor.

The executioner whirled his silver ax.

‘Burn the kite and the inventor’s body and bury their ashes together,’ said the Emperor.

The servants retreated to obey.

The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying. ‘Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour.’

‘You are merciful, Emperor.’

‘No, not merciful,’ said the old man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw the dark smoke climb into the sky. ‘No, only very much bewildered and afraid.’ He saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. ‘What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought.’

Ray Bradbury

Stories volume 2

He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny foxes loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.

‘Oh,’ said the Emperor, closing his eyes, ‘look at the birds, look at the birds!’

Nastasya Filippovna

 Nastasya Filippovna snatched up the packet with both hands.

"Ganka, I've got an idea: I want to reward you, because why should you lose everything? Rogozhin, will he crawl to Vassilievsky Island for three roubles?"

"He will!"

"Well, then listen, Ganya, I want to look at your soul for the last time; you've been tormenting me for three long months; now it's my turn. Do you see this packet? There's a hundred thousand in it! I'm now going to throw it into the fireplace, onto the fire, before everyone, all these witnesses! As soon as it catches fire all over, go into the fireplace, only without gloves, with your bare hands, with your sleeves rolled up, and pull the packet out of the fire! If you pull it out, it's yours, the whole hundred thousand is yours! You'll only burn your fingers a little—but it's a hundred thousand, just think! It won't take long to snatch it out! And I'll admire your soul as you go into the fire after my money. They're all witnesses that the packet will be yours! And if you don't get it out, it will burn; I won't let anyone else touch it. Stand back! Everybody! It's my money! I got it for a night with Rogozhin. Is it my money, Rogozhin?"

"Yours, my joy! Yours, my queen!"

"Well, then everybody stand back, I do as I like! Don't interfere! Ferdyshchenko, stir up the fire."

"Nastasya Filippovna, my hands refuse to obey!" the flabbergasted Ferdyshchenko replied.

"Ahh!" Nastasya Filippovna cried, seized the fire tongs, separated two smoldering logs, and as soon as the fire blazed up, threw the packet into it.

A cry was heard all around; many even crossed themselves.

"She's lost her mind, she's lost her mind!" they cried all around.

"Maybe .. . maybe we should tie her up?" the general whispered to Ptitsyn. "Or send for...she's lost her mind, hasn't she? Lost her mind?"

"N-no, this may not be entirely madness," Ptitsyn whispered, pale as a sheet and trembling, unable to tear his eyes from the packet, which was beginning to smolder.

"She's mad, isn't she? Isn't she mad?" the general pestered Totsky.

"I told you she was a colorful woman," murmured Afanasy Ivanovich, also gone somewhat pale.

"But, after all, it's a hundred thousand!..."

"Lord, Lord!" was heard on all sides. Everyone crowded around the fireplace, everyone pushed in order to see, everyone exclaimed...Some even climbed onto chairs to look over the heads. Darya Alexeevna ran to the other room and exchanged frightened whispers with Katya and Pasha about something. The German beauty fled.

"Dearest lady! Queen! Almighty one!" Lebedev screamed, crawling on his knees before Nastasya Filippovna and reaching out towards the fireplace. "A hundred thousand! A hundred thousand! I saw it myself, I was there when they wrapped it! Dearest lady! Merciful one! Order me into the fireplace: I'll go all the way in, I'll put my whole gray head into the fire! ...A crippled wife, thirteen children—all orphaned, I buried my father last week, he sits there starving, Nastasya Filippovna!!" and, having screamed, he began crawling into the fireplace.

"Away!" cried Nastasya Filippovna, pushing him aside. "Step back, everybody! Ganya, what are you standing there for? Don't be ashamed! Go in! It's your lucky chance!"

But Ganya had already endured too much that day and that evening, and was not prepared for this last unexpected trial. The crowd parted into two halves before him, and he was left face to face with Nastasya Filippovna, three steps away from her. She stood right by the fireplace and waited, not tearing her burning, intent gaze from him. Ganya, in a tailcoat, his hat and gloves in his hand, stood silent and unresponding before her, his arms crossed, looking at the fire. An insane smile wandered over his face, which was pale as a sheet. True, he could not take his eyes off the fire, off the smoldering packet; but it seemed something new had arisen in his soul; it was as if he had sworn to endure the torture; he did not budge from the spot; in a few moments it became clear to everyone that he would not go after the packet, that he did not want to.

"Hey, it'll burn up, and they'll shame you," Nastasya Filippovna cried to him, "you'll hang yourself afterwards, I'm not joking!"

The fire that had flared up in the beginning between the two smoldering logs went out at first, when the packet fell on it and smothered it. But a small blue flame still clung from below to one corner of the lower log. Finally, a long, thin tongue of fire licked at the packet, the fire caught and raced along the edges of the paper, and suddenly the whole packet blazed in the fireplace and the bright flame shot upwards. Everyone gasped.

"Dearest lady!" Lebedev kept screaming, straining forward once more, but Rogozhin dragged him back and pushed him aside again.

Rogozhin himself had turned into one fixed gaze. He could not turn it from Nastasya Filippovna, he was reveling, he was in seventh heaven.

"There's a queen for you!" he repeated every moment, turning around to whoever was there. "That's the way to do it!" he cried out, forgetting himself. "Who among you rogues would pull such a stunt, eh?"

The prince watched ruefully and silently.

"I'll snatch it out with my teeth for just one thousand!" Ferdyshchenko offered.

"I could do it with my teeth, too!" the fist gentleman, who was standing behind them all, rasped in a fit of decided despair. "D-devil take it! It's burning, it'll burn up!" he cried, seeing the flame.

"It's burning, it's burning!" they all cried in one voice, almost all of them also straining towards the fireplace.

"Ganya, stop faking, I tell you for the last time!"

"Go in!" Ferdyshchenko bellowed, rushing to Ganya in a decided frenzy and pulling him by the sleeve. "Go in, you little swaggerer! It'll burn up! Oh, cur-r-rse you!"

Ganya shoved Ferdyshchenko aside forcefully, turned, and went towards the door; but before going two steps, he reeled and crashed to the floor.

"He fainted!" they cried all around.

"Dearest lady, it'll burn up!" Lebedev screamed.

"Burn up for nothing!" the roaring came from all sides.

"Katya, Pasha, fetch him water, spirits!" Nastasya Filippovna cried, seized the fire tongs and snatched the packet out.

The outer paper was nearly all charred and smoldering, but it could be seen at once that the inside was not damaged. The packet had been wrapped in three layers of newspaper, and the money was untouched. Everyone breathed more easily.

"Maybe just one little thousand is damaged a tiny bit, but the rest is untouched," Lebedev said tenderly.

"It's all his! The whole packet is his! Do you hear, gentlemen?" Nastasya Filippovna proclaimed, placing the packet beside Ganya. "He didn't go in after it, he held out! So his vanity is still greater than his lust for money. Never mind, he'll come to! Otherwise he might have killed me...There, he's already recovering. General, Ivan Petrovich, Darya Alexeevna, Katya, Pasha, Rogozhin, do you hear? The packet is his, Ganya's. I grant him full possession of it as a reward for...well, for whatever! Tell him that. Let it lie there beside him...Rogozhin, march! Farewell, Prince, I've seen a man for the first time! Farewell, Afanasy Ivanovich, merci!"

The whole of Rogozhin's crew, with noise, clatter, and shouting, raced through the rooms to the exit, following Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna. In the reception room the maids gave her her fur coat; the cook Marfa came running from the kitchen. Nastasya Filippovna kissed them all.

"Can it be, dearest lady, that you're leaving us for good? But where will you go? And on such a day, on your birthday!" the tearful maids asked, weeping and kissing her hands.

"I'll go to the street, Katya, you heard, that's the place for me, or else I'll become a washerwoman! Enough of Afanasy Ivanovich! Give him my regards, and don't think ill of me..."

The prince rushed headlong for the front gate, where they were all getting into four troikas with little bells. The general overtook him on the stairs.

"Good heavens, Prince, come to your senses!" he said, seizing him by the arm. "Drop it! You see what she's like! I'm speaking as a father..."

The prince looked at him, but, without saying a word, broke away and ran downstairs.

At the front gate, from which the troikas had just driven off, the general saw the prince catch the first cab and shout, "To Ekaterinhof, follow those troikas!" Then the general's little gray trotter pulled up and took the general home, along with his new hopes and calculations and the aforementioned pearls, which the general had all the same not forgotten to take with him. Amidst his calculations there also flashed once or twice the seductive image of Nastasya Filippovna; the general sighed:

"A pity! A real pity! A lost woman! A madwoman!...Well, sir, but what the prince needs now is not Nastasya Filippovna..."

A few moralizing and admonishing words of the same sort were also uttered by two other interlocutors from among Nastasya Filippovna's guests, who had decided to go a little way on foot.

"You know, Afanasy Ivanovich, they say something of the sort exists among the Japanese," Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn was saying. "An offended man there supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: 'You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,' and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender's eyes, no doubt feeling an extreme satisfaction, as if he had indeed revenged himself. There are strange characters in the world, Afanasy Ivanovich!"

"And you think it was something of that sort here, too?" replied Afanasy Ivanovich with a smile. "Hm! Anyhow, you've wittily...and the comparison is excellent. You saw for yourself, however, my dearest Ivan Petrovich, that I did all I could; I cannot do the impossible, wouldn't you agree? You must also agree, however, that there are some capital virtues in this woman...brilliant features. I even wanted to cry out to her just now, if only I could have allowed myself to do it in that bedlam, that she herself was my best defense against all her accusations. Well, who wouldn't be captivated by this woman on occasion to the point of forgetting all reason...and the rest? Look, that boor Rogozhin came lugging a hundred thousand to her! Let's say everything that happened there tonight was ephemeral, romantic, indecent, but, on the other hand, it was colorful, it was original, you must agree. God, what might have come from such a character and with such beauty! But, despite all my efforts, even education—all is lost! A diamond in the rough—I've said it many times..."

And Afanasy Ivanovich sighed deeply.

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Time shall be no more

 He fell to thinking, among other things, about his epileptic condition, that there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake), when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life's forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause. But these moments, these glimpses were still only a presentiment of that ultimate second (never more than a second) from which the fit itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable. Reflecting on that moment afterwards, in a healthy state, he had often said to himself that all those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the "highest being," were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: "So what if it is an illness?" he finally decided. "Who cares that it's an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?" These vague expressions seemed quite comprehensible to him, though still too weak. That it was indeed "beauty and prayer," that it was indeed "the highest synthesis of life," he could not doubt, nor could he admit of any doubts. Was he dreaming some sort of abnormal and nonexistent visions at that moment, as from hashish, opium, or wine, which humiliate the reason and distort the soul? He could reason about it sensibly once his morbid state was over. Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness— if there was a need to express this condition in a single word— self-awareness and at the same time a self-sense immediate in the highest degree. If in that second, that is, in the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had happened to succeed in saying clearly and consciously to himself: "Yes, for this moment one could give one's whole life!"—then surely this moment in itself was worth a whole life.[67] However, he did not insist on the dialectical part of his reasoning: dullness, darkness of soul, idiocy stood before him as the clear consequence of these "highest moments." Naturally, he was not about to argue in earnest. His reasoning, that is, his evaluation of this moment, undoubtedly contained an error, but all the same he was somewhat perplexed by the actuality of the sensation. What, in fact, was he to do with this actuality? Because it had happened, he had succeeded in saying to himself in that very second, that this second, in its boundless happiness, which he fully experienced, might perhaps be worth his whole life. "At that moment," as he had once said to Rogozhin in Moscow, when they got together there, "at that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.[68]Probably," he had added, smiling, "it's the same second in which the jug of water overturned by the epileptic Muhammad did not have time to spill, while he had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah."

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The idea of going nowhere

 None of us, of course, would want to be in a Nowhere we hadn’t chosen, as prisoners or invalids are. Whenever I travel to North Korea or Yemen—to any of the world’s closed or impoverished places—I see how almost anyone born to them would long to be anywhere else, and to visit other countries with the freedom that some of the rest of us enjoy. From San Quentin to New Delhi, the incarcerated are taught meditation, but only so they can see that within their confinement there may be spots of liberation. Otherwise, those in solitary may find themselves bombarded by the terrors and unearthly visitations that Emily Dickinson knew in her “still—Volcano—Life.”

I once went into the woods of Alberta and sat in a cabin day after day with letters from Dickinson, the poet famous for seldom leaving her home. Her passion shook me till I had to look away, the feeling was so intense and caged; her words were explosives in a jewel box. I imagined standing with the woman in white at her window, watching her brother with his young wife, Susan—to whom Dickinson addressed some of her most passionate letters (“Oh my darling one”; “my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts”)—in the house they shared one hundred yards away, across the garden.  I felt her slipping through her parlor while her brother conducted an adulterous affair in the next room, betraying the Sue they both adored. I saw her crafting, in a fury, her enflamed letters to her “Master,” the atmosphere charged around her in her solitude, or writing, “I see thee better—in the Dark.”

She could feel Death calling for her in her bed, she wrote, as she plumbed the shadows within the stillness; again and again she imagined herself posthumous, mourners “treading—treading” in her brain. She knew that you do not have to be a chamber to be haunted, that “Ourself behind ourself concealed— / Should startle most.” Her unsettling words brought to mind poor Herman Melville, conjuring up at the same time his own version of a motionless ghost, Bartleby, a well-spoken corpse conducting a makeshift Occupy Wall Street resistance by sitting in a lawyer’s office in lower Manhattan, “preferring” not to go anywhere.

Nowhere can be scary, even if it’s a destination you’ve chosen; there’s nowhere to hide there. Being locked inside your head can drive you mad or leave you with a devil who tells you to stay at home and stay at home till you are so trapped inside your thoughts that you can’t step out or summon the power of intention.

A life of stillness can sometimes lead not to art but to doubt or dereliction; anyone who longs to see the light is signing on for many long nights alone in the dark. Visiting a monastery, I also realized how easy it might be to go there as an escape, or in the throes of an infatuation  certain not to last. As in any love affair, the early days of a romance with stillness give little sign of the hard work to come.

Sometimes, when I returned to my monastery in midwinter, the weather was foul as I pulled up. The rain pattered down on the tin roof of my trailer throughout the night. The view through the picture windows was of nothing but mist. I didn’t see or hear a living soul for days on end, and my time felt like a trial, a penitential exercise in loneliness. The downpour was so unending that I couldn’t go out, and so I sat in the fog, stuck and miserable, reminded how the external environment can too easily be a reflection of—sometimes a catalyst for—an inner one. (...)

The idea of going nowhere is, as mentioned, as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. “All the unhappiness of men,” the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, “arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.” After Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.” Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by today’s standards. The amount of data humanity will collect while you’re reading this book is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we’re never caught up with our lives.

 And the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.

It’s easy to feel as if we’re standing two inches away from a huge canvas that’s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. It’s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture.

The Art of Stillness 

Pico Iyer

‘The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in the fairy tales about God.’

 ‘May I sit down?’ the foreigner asked politely, and the friends somehow involuntarily moved apart; the foreigner adroitly sat down between them and at once entered into the conversation:

‘Unless I heard wrong, you were pleased to say that Jesus never existed?’ the foreigner asked, turning his green left eye to Berlioz.

‘No, you did not hear wrong,’ Berlioz replied courteously, ‘that is precisely what I was saying.’

‘Ah, how interesting!’ exclaimed the foreigner.

‘What the devil does he want?’ thought Homeless, frowning.

‘And you were agreeing with your interlocutor?’ inquired the stranger, turning to Homeless on his right.

‘A hundred per cent!’ confirmed the man, who was fond of whimsical and figurative expressions.

‘Amazing!’ exclaimed the uninvited interlocutor and, casting a thievish glance around and muffling his low voice for some reason, he said: ‘Forgive my importunity, but, as I understand, along with everything else, you also do not believe in God?’ He made frightened eyes and added: ‘I swear I won’t tell anyone!’

‘No, we don’t believe in God,’ Berlioz replied, smiling slightly at the foreign tourist’s fright, ‘but we can speak of it quite freely.’

The foreigner sat back on the bench and asked, even with a slight shriek of curiosity:

‘You are — atheists?!’

‘Yes, we’re atheists,’ Berlioz smilingly replied, and Homeless thought, getting angry: ‘Latched on to us, the foreign goose!’

‘Oh, how lovely!’ the astonishing foreigner cried out and began swivelling his head, looking from one writer to the other.

‘In our country atheism does not surprise anyone,’ Berlioz said with diplomatic politeness. ‘The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in the fairy tales about God.’

Here the foreigner pulled the following stunt: he got up and shook the amazed editor’s hand, accompanying it with these words:

‘Allow me to thank you with all my heart!’

‘What are you thanking him for?’ Homeless inquired, blinking.

‘For some very important information, which is of great interest to me as a traveller,’ the outlandish fellow explained, raising his finger significantly.

The important information apparently had indeed produced a strong impression on the traveller, because he passed his frightened glance over the buildings, as if afraid of seeing an atheist in every window.

‘No, he’s not an Englishman ...’ thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought: ‘Where’d he pick up his Russian, that’s the interesting thing!’ and frowned again.

‘But, allow me to ask you,’ the foreign visitor spoke after some anxious reflection, ‘what, then, about the proofs of God’s existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?’

‘Alas!’ Berlioz said with regret. ‘Not one of these proofs is worth anything, and mankind shelved them long ago. You must agree that in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God’s existence.’

Bravo!‘ cried the foreigner. ’Bravo! You have perfectly repeated restless old Immanuel‘s19 thought in this regard. But here’s the hitch: he roundly demolished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed a sixth of his own.’

‘Kant’s proof,’ the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, ‘is equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller20 say that the Kantian reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss21 simply laughed at this proof.’

Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: ‘But, anyhow, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?’

They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in Solovki22 for such proofs!‘ Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly.

‘Ivan!’ Berlioz whispered, embarrassed.

But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures.

‘Precisely, precisely,’ he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, flashed. ‘Just the place for him! Didn’t I tell him that time at breakfast: “As you will, Professor, but what you’ve thought up doesn’t hang together. It’s clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You’ll be laughed at.”’

Berlioz goggled his eyes. ‘At breakfast ... to Kant? ... What is this drivel?’ he thought.

‘But,’ the outlander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz’s amazement and addressing the poet, ‘sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in no way possible, I assure you.’

Too bad!‘ the feisty poet responded.

‘Yes, too bad!’ the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on: ‘But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?’

‘Man governs it himself,’ Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.

‘Pardon me,’ the stranger responded gently, ‘but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period — well, say, a thousand years - but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?

‘And in fact,’ here the stranger turned to Berlioz, ‘imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ... hem ... hem ... lung cancer ...’ — here the foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — ‘yes, cancer’ — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word — ’and so your governing is over!

‘You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.

‘And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk’ — here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz - ’a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?‘ And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh.

Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. ‘He’s not a foreigner ... he’s not a foreigner ...’ he thought, ‘he’s a most peculiar specimen ... but, excuse me, who is he then?...’

‘You’d like to smoke, I see?’ the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. ‘Which kind do you prefer?’

‘What, have you got several?’ the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly.

‘Which do you prefer?’ the stranger repeated.

‘Okay — Our Brand,’ Homeless replied spitefully.

The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Homeless:

‘Our Brand ...’

Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid.

Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: ‘No, a foreigner!’, and Homeless: ‘Well, devil take him, eh! ...’

The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker Berlioz declined.

‘I must counter him like this,’ Berlioz decided, ‘yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is ...’

However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke:

‘Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal — there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’

‘What an absurd way of putting the question ...’ Berlioz thought and objected:

‘Well, there’s some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya ...’

‘No brick,’ the stranger interrupted imposingly, ‘will ever fall on anyone’s head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.’

‘Maybe you know what kind precisely?’ Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. ‘And will tell me?’

‘Willingly,’ the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: ‘One, two ... Mercury in the second house ... moon gone ... six — disaster ... evening — seven ...’ then announced loudly and joyfully: ‘Your head will be cut off!’

Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly:

  ‘By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?’23

‘No,’ replied his interlocutor, ‘by a Russian woman, a Komsomol24 girl.’

‘Hm ...’ Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger’s little joke, ‘well, excuse me, but that’s not very likely.’

‘And I beg you to excuse me,’ the foreigner replied, ‘but it’s so. Ah, yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it’s not a secret?’

‘It’s not a secret. Right now I’ll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will chair it.’

‘No, that simply cannot be,’ the foreigner objected firmly.

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ the foreigner replied and, narrowing his eyes, looked into the sky, where, anticipating the cool of the evening, black birds were tracing noiselessly, ‘Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place.’

Here, quite understandably, silence fell under the lindens.

‘Forgive me,’ Berlioz spoke after a pause, glancing at the drivel-spouting foreigner, ‘but what has sunflower oil got to do with it ... and which Annushka?’

‘Sunflower oil has got this to do with it,’ Homeless suddenly spoke, obviously deciding to declare war on the uninvited interlocutor. ‘Have you ever happened, citizen, to be in a hospital for the mentally ill?’

‘Ivan! ...’ Mikhail Alexandrovich exclaimed quietly.

But the foreigner was not a bit offended and burst into the merriest laughter.

‘I have, I have, and more than once!’ he cried out, laughing, but without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. ‘Where haven’t I been! Only it’s too bad I didn’t get around to asking the professor what schizophrenia is. So you will have to find that out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Gracious, Ivan Nikolaevich, who doesn’t know you?’ Here the foreigner took out of his pocket the previous day’s issue of the Literary Gazette, and Ivan Nikolaevich saw his own picture on the very first page and under it his very own verses. But the proof of fame and popularity, which yesterday had delighted the poet, this time did not delight him a bit.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, and his face darkened, ‘could you wait one little moment? I want to say a couple of words to my friend.’

‘Oh, with pleasure!’ exclaimed the stranger. ‘It’s so nice here under the lindens, and, by the way, I’m not in any hurry.’

‘Listen here, Misha,’ the poet whispered, drawing Berlioz aside, ‘he’s no foreign tourist, he’s a spy. A Russian émigré25 who has crossed back over. Ask for his papers before he gets away...’

‘You think so?’ Berlioz whispered worriedly, and thought: ‘Why, he’s right ...’

‘Believe me,’ the poet rasped into his ear, ‘he’s pretending to be a fool in order to find out something or other. Just hear how he speaks Russian.’ As he spoke, the poet kept glancing sideways, to make sure the stranger did not escape. ‘Let’s go and detain him, or he’ll get away ...’

And the poet pulled Berlioz back to the bench by the arm.

The unknown man was not sitting, but was standing near it, holding in his hands some booklet in a dark-grey binding, a sturdy envelope made of good paper, and a visiting card.

‘Excuse me for having forgotten, in the heat of our dispute, to introduce myself. Here is my card, my passport, and an invitation to come to Moscow for a consultation,’ the stranger said weightily, giving both writers a penetrating glance.

They were embarrassed. ‘The devil, he heard everything ...’ Berlioz thought, and with a polite gesture indicated that there was no need to show papers. While the foreigner was pushing them at the editor, the poet managed to make out the word ‘Professor’ printed in foreign type on the card, and the initial letter of the last name — a double ’V’ — ‘W’.

‘My pleasure,’ the editor meanwhile muttered in embarrassment, and the foreigner put the papers back in his pocket.

Relations were thus restored, and all three sat down on the bench again.

‘You’ve been invited here as a consultant, Professor?’ asked Berlioz.

‘Yes, as a consultant.’

‘You’re German?’ Homeless inquired.

‘I? ...’ the professor repeated and suddenly fell to thinking. ‘Yes, perhaps I am German...’ he said.

‘You speak real good Russian,’ Homeless observed.

‘Oh, I’m generally a polyglot and know a great number of languages,’ the professor replied.

‘And what is your field?’ Berlioz inquired.

‘I am a specialist in black magic.’

‘There he goes! ...’ struck in Mikhail Alexandrovich’s head.

‘And ... and you’ve been invited here in that capacity?’ he asked, stammering.

‘Yes, in that capacity,’ the professor confirmed, and explained: ‘In a state library here some original manuscripts of the tenth-century necromancer Gerbert of Aurillac26 have been found. So it is necessary for me to sort them out. I am the only specialist in the world.’

‘Aha! You’re a historian?’ Berlioz asked with great relief and respect.

‘I am a historian,’ the scholar confirmed, and added with no rhyme or reason: ‘This evening there will be an interesting story at the Ponds!’

Once again editor and poet were extremely surprised, but the professor beckoned them both to him, and when they leaned towards him, whispered:

‘Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.’

‘You see, Professor,’ Berlioz responded with a forced smile, ‘we respect your great learning, but on this question we hold to a different point of view.’

There’s no need for any points of view,‘ the strange professor replied, ’he simply existed, that’s all.‘

‘But there’s need for some proof...’ Berlioz began.

‘There’s no need for any proofs,’ replied the professor, and he began to speak softly, while his accent for some reason disappeared: ‘It’s all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan...’27

[...]

The Seventh Proof

‘Yes, it was around ten o’clock in the morning, my esteemed Ivan Nikolaevich,‘ said the professor.

1 The poet passed his hand over his face like a man just coming to his senses, and saw that it was evening at the Patriarch’s Ponds. The water in the pond had turned black, and a light boat was now gliding on it, and one could hear the splash of oars and the giggles of some citizeness in the little boat. The public appeared on the benches along the walks, but again on the other three sides of the square, and not on the side where our interlocutors were.

The sky over Moscow seemed to lose colour, and the full moon could be seen quite distinctly high above, not yet golden but white. It was much easier to breathe, and the voices under the lindens now sounded softer, eveningish.

‘How is it I didn’t notice that he’d managed to spin a whole story? ...’ Homeless thought in amazement. ‘It’s already evening! ... Or maybe he wasn’t telling it, but I simply fell asleep and dreamed it all?’

But it must be supposed that the professor did tell the story after all, otherwise it would have to be assumed that Berlioz had had the same dream, because he said, studying the foreigner’s face attentively:

‘Your story is extremely interesting, Professor, though it does not coincide at all with the Gospel stories.’

‘Good heavens,’ the professor responded, smiling condescendingly, ‘you of all people should know that precisely nothing of what is written in the Gospels ever actually took place, and if we start referring to the Gospels as a historical source...’ he smiled once more, and Berlioz stopped short, because this was literally the same thing he had been saying to Homeless as they walked down Bronnaya towards the Patriarch’s Ponds.

‘That’s so,’ Berlioz replied, ‘but I’m afraid no one can confirm that what you’ve just told us actually took place either.’

‘Oh, yes! That there is one who can!’ the professor, beginning to speak in broken language, said with great assurance, and with unexpected mysteriousness he motioned the two friends to move closer.

They leaned towards him from both sides, and he said, but again without any accent, which with him, devil knows why, now appeared, now disappeared:

‘The thing is ...’ here the professor looked around fearfully and spoke in a whisper, ‘that I was personally present at it all. I was on Pontius Pilate’s balcony, and in the garden when he talked with Kaifa, and on the platform, only secretly, incognito, so to speak, and therefore I beg you - not a word to anyone, total secrecy, shh ...’

Silence fell, and Berlioz paled.

‘You ... how long have you been in Moscow?’ he asked in a quavering voice.

‘I just arrived in Moscow this very minute,’ the professor said perplexedly, and only here did it occur to the friends to take a good look in his eyes, at which they became convinced that his left eye, the green one, was totally insane, while the right one was empty, black and dead.

‘There’s the whole explanation for you!’ Berlioz thought in bewilderment. ‘A mad German has turned up, or just went crazy at the Ponds. What a story!’

Yes, indeed, that explained the whole thing: the most strange breakfast with the late philosopher Kant, the foolish talk about sunflower oil and Annushka, the predictions about his head being cut off and all the rest — the professor was mad.

Berlioz realized at once what had to be done. Leaning back on the bench, he winked to Homeless behind the professor’s back — meaning, don’t contradict him — but the perplexed poet did not understand these signals.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Berlioz said excitedly, ‘incidentally it’s all possible ... even very possible, Pontius Pilate, and the balcony, and so forth ... Did you come alone or with your wife?’

‘Alone, alone, I’m always alone,’ the professor replied bitterly.

‘And where are your things, Professor?’ Berlioz asked insinuatingly. ‘At the Metropol?1 Where are you staying?’

‘I? ... Nowhere,’ the half-witted German answered, his green eye wandering in wild anguish over the Patriarch’s Ponds.

‘How’s that? But ... where are you going to live?’

‘In your apartment,’ the madman suddenly said brashly, and winked.

‘I ... I’m very glad ...’ Berlioz began muttering, ‘but, really, you won’t be comfortable at my place ... and they have wonderful rooms at the Metropol, it’s a first-class hotel ...’

‘And there’s no devil either?’ the sick man suddenly inquired merrily of Ivan Nikolaevich.

‘No devil...’

‘Don’t contradict him,’ Berlioz whispered with his lips only, dropping behind the professor’s back and making faces.

‘There isn’t any devil!’ Ivan Nikolaevich, at a loss from all this balderdash, cried out not what he ought. ‘What a punishment! Stop playing the psycho!’

Here the insane man burst into such laughter that a sparrow flew out of the linden over the seated men’s heads.

‘Well, now that is positively interesting!’ the professor said, shaking with laughter. ‘What is it with you — no matter what one asks for, there isn’t any!’ He suddenly stopped laughing and, quite understandably for a mentally ill person, fell into the opposite extreme after laughing, became vexed and cried sternly: ‘So you mean there just simply isn’t any?’

‘Calm down, calm down, calm down, Professor,’ Berlioz muttered, for fear of agitating the sick man. ‘You sit here for a little minute with Comrade Homeless, and I’ll just run to the comer to make a phone call, and then we’ll take you wherever you like. You don’t know the city ...’

Berlioz’s plan must be acknowledged as correct: he had to run to the nearest public telephone and inform the foreigners’ bureau, thus and so, there’s some consultant from abroad sitting at the Patriarch’s Ponds in an obviously abnormal state. So it was necessary to take measures, lest some unpleasant nonsense result.

‘To make a call? Well, then make your call,’ the sick man agreed sadly, and suddenly begged passionately: ‘But I implore you, before you go, at least believe that the devil exists! I no longer ask you for anything more. Mind you, there exists a seventh proof of it, the surest of all! And it is going to be presented to you right now!’

‘Very good, very good,’ Berlioz said with false tenderness and, winking to the upset poet, who did not relish at all the idea of guarding the mad German, set out for the exit from the Ponds at the comer of Bronnaya and Yermolaevsky Lane.

And the professor seemed to recover his health and brighten up at once.

‘Mikhail Alexandrovich!’ he shouted after Berlioz.

The latter gave a start, looked back, but reassured himself with the thought that the professor had also learned his name and patronymic from some newspaper.

Then the professor called out, cupping his hands like a megaphone:

‘Would you like me to have a telegram sent at once to your uncle in Kiev?’

And again Berlioz winced. How does the madman know about the existence of a Kievan uncle? That has certainly never been mentioned in any newspapers. Oh-oh, maybe Homeless is right after all? And suppose his papers are phoney? Ah, what a strange specimen ... Call, call! Call at once! They’ll quickly explain him!

And, no longer listening to anything, Berlioz ran on.

Here, just at the exit to Bronnaya, there rose from a bench to meet the editor exactly the same citizen who in the sunlight earlier had formed himself out of the thick swelter. Only now he was no longer made of air, but ordinary, fleshly, and Berlioz clearly distinguished in the beginning twilight that he had a little moustache like chicken feathers, tiny eyes, ironic and half drunk, and checkered trousers pulled up so high that his dirty white socks showed.

Mikhail Alexandrovich drew back, but reassured himself by reflecting that it was a stupid coincidence and that generally there was no time to think about it now.

‘Looking for the turnstile, citizen?’ the checkered type inquired in a cracked tenor. ‘This way, please! Straight on and you’ll get where you’re going. How about a little pint pot for my information ... to set up an ex-choirmaster!...’ Mugging, the specimen swept his jockey’s cap from his head.

Berlioz, not stopping to listen to the cadging and clowning choirmaster, ran up to the turnstile and took hold of it with his hand. He turned it and was just about to step across the rails when red and white light splashed in his face. A sign lit up in a glass box: ‘Caution Tram-Car!’

And right then this tram-car came racing along, turning down the newly laid line from Yermolaevsky to Bronnaya. Having turned, and coming to the straight stretch, it suddenly lit up inside with electricity, whined, and put on speed.

The prudent Berlioz, though he was standing in a safe place, decided to retreat behind the stile, moved his hand on the crossbar, and stepped back. And right then his hand slipped and slid, one foot, unimpeded, as if on ice, went down the cobbled slope leading to the rails, the other was thrust into the air, and Berlioz was thrown on to the rails.

Trying to get hold of something, Berlioz fell backwards, the back of his head lightly striking the cobbles, and had time to see high up — but whether to right or left he no longer knew — the gold-tinged moon. He managed to turn on his side, at the same moment drawing his legs to his stomach in a frenzied movement, and, while turning, to make out the face, completely white with horror, and the crimson armband of the woman driver bearing down on him with irresistible force. Berlioz did not cry out, but around him the whole street screamed with desperate female voices.

The woman driver tore at the electric brake, the car dug its nose into the ground, then instantly jumped up, and glass flew from the windows with a crash and a jingle. Here someone in Berlioz’s brain cried desperately: ‘Can it be? ...’ Once more, and for the last time, the moon flashed, but now breaking to pieces, and then it became dark.

The tram-car went over Berlioz, and a round dark object was thrown up the cobbled slope below the fence of the Patriarch’s walk. Having rolled back down this slope, it went bouncing along the cobblestones of the street.

It was the severed head of Berlioz.

Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita