The brass city

 How had he hit on Damascus and then the leap to Spain, through which Abd-ur Rahman had escaped being murdered? For almost three centuries, a branch of the Omayyads, who had been exterminated in Syria, flourished in Cordoba. Along with mosques, the faïences testified to this branch of Arabic civilization, a branch long since withered. And then there were the castles of the Beni Taher in Yemen. A seed fell into the desert sand, managing to yield four harvests.

The fifth Omayyad, an ancestor of Abd-ur Rahman, had dispatched Emir Musa to the brass city. The caravan traveled from Damascus through Cairo and the great desert, into the western lands, and all the way to the coast of Mauritania. The goal was the copper flasks in which King Solomon had jailed rebellious demons. Now and again, the fishermen who cast their nets in the EI-Karkar Sea would haul up one of these flasks in their catches. They were closed with the seal of Solomon; when they were opened, the demon spurted forth as smoke that darkened the sky.

Emirs named Musa also recur subsequently in Granada and other residences of Moorish Spain. This emir, the conqueror of Northwest Africa, may be regarded as their prototype. His Western features are unmistakable; of course, we must bear in mind that the distinctions between races and regions vanish on the peaks. Just as people resemble one another ethically, indeed become almost identical, when approaching perfection, so too spiritually. The distance from the world and from the object increases; curiosity grows and with it the desire to get closer to the ultimate secrets, even amid great danger. This is an Aristotelian trait. One that makes use of arithmetic.

It has not come down to us whether the emir felt any qualms about opening the flasks. From other accounts, we know that his step was risky. For instance, one of the imprisoned demons had sworn to himself that he would make the man who freed him the most powerful of mortals; he had spent hundreds of years thinking about how to make him happy. But then the demon's mood had soured; gall and venom had concentrated in his dungeon. When a fisherman finally opened the flask centuries later, he would have suffered the fate of being ripped to shreds by the demon had he not resorted to a trick. Evil becomes all the more dreadful the longer it is deprived of air.

In any case, Musa, needless to say, could not have recoiled from the unsealing. This is already evidenced by the uncommon boldness of his expedition through the wastelands. The aged Abd-es Samad, who possessed The Book of Hidden Treasures and could read the stars, guided the caravan to the brass city within fourteen months. They rested in deserted castles and amid the graves in decaying cemeteries. At times, they found water in wells that Iskander had dug while trekking westward.

The brass city was likewise dead and was enclosed by a ring wall; it took another two moons for blacksmiths and carpenters to build a ladder all the way to the battlements. Anyone who climbed up was blinded by a spell, so that he clapped his hands, and crying “Thou art beautiful!” plunged down. Twelve of Musa's companions perished, one after another, until at last Abd-es Samad succeeded in resisting the witchcraft by incessantly calling out Allah's name while clambering up and, after he reached the top, reciting the verses of salvation. Under the mirage as under a watery surface, he saw the shattered bodies of his predecessors. Said Musa: “If that's how a rational man acts, what will a madman do?”

The sheik then descended through one of the turrets and, from the inside, opened the gates of the necropolis. However, it was not these adventures - although they have their secret meaning - that prompts the mention of Emir Musa; rather it was his encounter with the historical world, which becomes a phantasm vis-a-vis the reality of the fairy tale.

The emir had the poet Thalib read aloud the inscriptions on the monuments and on the walls of the deserted palaces:

Ah, where are they whose strength has built all these

With unbelievably lofty balconies?

Where are the Persian shahs in castles tall?

They left their land - it did forget them all!

Where are the men who ruled the vast countries,

Sind and Hind, the proud hosts of dynasties?

To whom Sendge and Habesh did bend their will

And Nubia when it was rebellious still?

Await no tiding now from any tomb,

No knowledge is forthcoming from its womb.

The times changed, weaving death from every loom; 

The citadels they built brought naught but doom.

These verses filled Musa with such profound sorrow that life became a burden for him. As they wandered through the rooms, they came to a table carved out of yellow marble or, according to other reports, cast in Chinese steel. There, the following words were notched in Arabic letters:

At this table, a thousand kings have dined whose right eyes were blind and a thousand others whose left eyes were blind: they have all passed on and now they populate the graves and catacombs.

When Thalib read these words aloud to him, everything went dark before Musa's eyes; he shrieked and rent his garment. Then he had the verses and inscriptions copied down.

Eumeswil

By Ernest Jünger

The state of mind during dying & rebirth

The Brahmin Uṇṇābha

At Sāvatthī. Then the brahmin Uṇṇābha approached the Blessed One and exchanged greetings with him. When they had concluded their greetings and cordial talk, he sat down to one side and said to the Blessed One:

“Master Gotama, these five faculties have different domains, different resorts; they do not experience each others’ resort and domain. What five? The eye faculty, the ear faculty, the nose faculty, the tongue faculty, the body faculty. Now, Master Gotama, as these five faculties have different domains, different resorts, and do not experience each others’ resort and domain, what is it that they take recourse in? And what is it that experiences their resort and domain?”

“Brahmin, these five faculties have different domains, different resorts; they do not experience each others’ resort and domain. What five? The eye faculty, the ear faculty, the nose faculty, the tongue faculty, the body faculty. Now, brahmin, these five faculties having different domains, different resorts, not experiencing each others’ resort and domain—they take recourse in the mind, and the mind experiences their resort and domain.”

“But, Master Gotama, what is it that the mind takes recourse in?”

“The mind, brahmin, takes recourse in mindfulness.”

“But, Master Gotama, what is it that mindfulness takes recourse in?”

“Mindfulness, brahmin, takes recourse in liberation.”

“But, Master Gotama, what is it that liberation takes recourse in?”

“Liberation, brahmin, takes recourse in extinction.”

“But, Master Gotama, what is it that extinction takes recourse in?”

“You have gone beyond the range of questioning, brahmin. You weren’t able to grasp the limit to questioning. For, brahmin, the holy life is lived with extinction as its ground, extinction as its destination, extinction as its final goal.” Then the brahmin Uṇṇābha, having delighted and rejoiced in the Blessed One’s statement, rose from his seat and paid homage to the Blessed One, after which he departed keeping him on his right.

Then, not long after the brahmin Uṇṇābha had departed, the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus thus:

“Bhikkhus, suppose in a house or hall with a peaked roof, opposite a window facing east, the sun was rising. When its rays enter through the window, where would they settle?”

“On the western wall, venerable sir.”

“So too, bhikkhus, the brahmin Uṇṇābha has gained faith in the Tathāgata that is settled, deeply rooted, established, firm. It cannot be removed by any ascetic or brahmin or deva or Māra or Brahmā or by anyone in the world. If, bhikkhus, the brahmin Uṇṇābha were to die at this time, there is no fetter bound by which he might again come to this world.”*
SN 48 : 42

* Commentary rightly recognises here the case of jhāna nonreturner† (lower sekha below the non-returner who nevertheless has the same future destination as non-returner if his death occurs during the jhāna. While he abandoned the five hindrances only temporarily, in the state of jhāna there is no actually any difference between him and non-returner. It is a valuable information, it looks like our state during the death has a strong influence on the rebirth. ↓

†The very commentary claims that senses don't work at jhāna, what tell us much more about an intellectual level of commentaries than about jhānas. Apart that such claim is contradictory with verbal definitions of jhānas given by Suttas, it is in existential contradiction with the very Sutta, how Uṇṇābha could walk?

The Exposition on Burning

“Bhikkhus, I will teach you a Dhamma exposition on the theme of burning. Listen to that….

“And what, bhikkhus, is the Dhamma exposition on the theme of burning? It would be better, bhikkhus, for the eye faculty to be lacerated by a red-hot iron pin burning, blazing, and glowing, than for one to grasp the sign through the features in a form cognizable by the eye. For if consciousness should stand tied to gratification in the sign or in the features, and if one should die on that occasion, it is possible that one will go to one of two destinations: hell or the animal realm. Having seen this danger, I speak thus.

“It would be better, bhikkhus, for the ear faculty to be lacerated by a sharp iron stake burning, blazing, and glowing, than for one to grasp the sign through the features in a sound cognizable by the ear. For if consciousness should stand tied to gratification in the sign or in the features, and if one should die on that occasion, it is possible that one will go to one of two destinations: hell or the animal realm. Having seen this danger, I speak thus.

“It would be better, bhikkhus, for the nose faculty to be lacerated by a sharp nail cutter burning, blazing, and glowing, than for one to grasp the sign through the features in an odour cognizable by the nose. For if consciousness should stand tied to gratification in the sign or in the features, and if one should die on that occasion, it is possible that one will go to one of two destinations: hell or the animal realm. Having seen this danger, I speak thus.

“It would be better, bhikkhus, for the tongue faculty to be lacerated by a sharp razor burning, blazing, and glowing, than for one to grasp the sign through the features in a taste cognizable by the tongue. For if consciousness should stand tied to gratification in the sign or in the features, and if one should die on that occasion, it is possible that one will go to one of two destinations: hell or the animal realm. Having seen this danger, I speak thus.

“It would be better, bhikkhus, for the body faculty to be lacerated by a sharp spear burning, blazing, and glowing, than for one to grasp the sign through the features in a tactile object cognizable by the body. For if consciousness should stand tied to gratification in the sign or in the features, and if one should die on that occasion, it is possible that one will go to one of two destinations: hell or the animal realm. Having seen this danger, I speak thus.

“It would be better, bhikkhus, to sleep—for sleep, I say, is barren for the living, fruitless for the living, insensibility for the living—than to think such thoughts as would induce one who has come under their control to bring about a schism in the Saṅgha. Having seen this danger, I speak thus.

“In regard to this, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple reflects thus: ‘Leave off lacerating the eye faculty with a red-hot iron pin burning, blazing, and glowing. Let me attend only to
this: So the eye is impermanent, forms are impermanent, eye-consciousness is impermanent, eye-contact is impermanent, whatever feeling arises with eye-contact as condition—whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant—that too is impermanent.

“‘Leave off lacerating the ear faculty with a sharp iron stake burning, blazing, and glowing. Let me attend only to this: So the ear is impermanent, sounds are impermanent, ear-consciousness is impermanent, ear-contact is impermanent, whatever feeling arises with ear-contact as condition … that too is impermanent.

“‘Leave off lacerating the nose faculty with a sharp nail cutter burning, blazing, and glowing. Let me attend only to this: So the nose is impermanent, odours are impermanent, nose-consciousness is impermanent, nose-contact is impermanent, whatever feeling arises with nose-contact as condition … that too is impermanent.

“‘Leave off lacerating the tongue faculty with a sharp razor burning, blazing, and glowing. Let me attend only to this: So the tongue is impermanent, tastes are impermanent, tongue-consciousness is impermanent, tongue-contact is impermanent, whatever feeling arises with tongue-contact as condition … that too is impermanent.

“‘Leave off lacerating the body faculty with a sharp spear burning, blazing, and glowing. Let me attend only to this: So the body is impermanent, tactile objects are impermanent, body-consciousness is impermanent, body-contact is impermanent, whatever feeling arises with body-contact as condition … that too is impermanent.

“‘Leave off sleeping. Let me attend only to this: So the mind is impermanent, mental phenomena are impermanent, mind-consciousness is impermanent, mind-contact is impermanent, whatever feeling arises with mind-contact as condition … that too is impermanent.’

“Seeing thus, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple experiences estrangement towards the eye, forms, eye-consciousness, eye-contact, and whatever feeling arises with eye-contact as condition—whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant … towards the mind, mental phenomena, mind-consciousness, mind-contact, and whatever feeling arises with mind-contact as condition…. Experiencing estrangement, he becomes dispassionate.

Through dispassion [his mind] is liberated. When it is liberated there comes the knowledge: ‘It’s liberated.’ He understands: ‘Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being.’

“This, bhikkhus, is the Dhamma exposition on the theme of burning.”
SN 35 : 235

Human Time

Our era, more than any other, has thought and written about time as a condition of human life. Twentieth-century thought has taken temporality seriously, perhaps for the first time in history. Not only has philosophy centered on this theme, from Dilthey and Bergson to the present day, passing through Ortega and Heidegger, not only is the title of the latter’s most important book Sein und Zeit, but the other intellectual disciplines have explored temporality in all directions: in society—theory of generations—in psychology, in literature, in art. In my own work I have had to devote many pages, from different perspectives, to the problem of time and temporality, pages which I am not going to repeat here; I shall limit myself to recalling them to the degree indispensable for comprehension of what I must now say.

We are dealing—let us not forget—with an anthropological perspective, but we must be well aware that this anthropology is metaphysical. This means, as we have said repeatedly, a biographical perspective; not the perspective of human life as radical reality, not that of analytical theory, but that which pertains to the empirical structure of that life. And so we must try to see how temporality functions, in a precise way, as one of the ingredients of this life; that is, of the empirical but structural form in which it actually takes place, and which we call “man.”

Human life is temporal and successive. The definition of eternity given by Boethius is literally presented as a negative cast of human temporality: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, “the simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life.” Human life is not everlasting, but has begun and will end—most important of all, will end, whatever its ulterior fate. Furthermore, its possession is not simultaneous, but specifically successive—it is possessed bit by bit—and it is not perfect, but highly imperfect and precarious: unstable in the present instant, pale and impoverished in memory of the past, uncertain and vague in anticipation of the future. Life presents itself in any case as affected by temporal finitude: its formula is that of “our days are numbered.” Stretching from birth to death, we might say that the radical form of “installation” in life is precisely time; time is that in which I “am,” properly speaking, and the temporal mode of being—as we saw in general elsewhere—is “to keep on being”: expressed more succinctly, “to endure.”Birth is the absolute past. While all the contents of my previous life have been present at some time, birth was never present: it was never present to me, I did not “attend” it. The past is recalled in memory and the future is anticipated in the imaginary project; but, in a more immediate way, life is both “retention” and “protention.” The “instant” is not a point without duration, but a temporal surrounding when we are dealing with human life and not with cosmic time. Past and future are present in a decision, in a human doing. What is done is done “because of something and for some purpose,” and it is that presence—no matter how “abbreviated” it may be—of motivation and aim, which introduces temporal distension, duration, into every instant of my life. This means that, strictly speaking, life does not consist of instants, but moments. This is the form of the intrinsic temporality of human life.That temporal and successive quality is expressed, in a way that cannot be improved upon, by saying that human life happens. Language uses different and ultimately metaphorical expressions to describe what “goes on.” The most frequent of these—which unconsciously emphasize the chance dimension of life, a point which we shall have to discuss—allude to “falling”: incident, incidence, accident, and so on. The particular shading of “hazard” is explicit in the Greek τυνχάνειν (tynkhánein), from the same root as τύχη (tykhé), luck or fortune. The idea of “arriving” or “coming” is very close to συμβαίνειν, (symbaínein), hence συμβεβηκός, (symbebekós) “accident,” occur (oc-currere), and the French arriver. In the English word happen we again find the idea of luck, fortune, or chance; in the Spanish word acaecer (“to fall out”), the idea of falling reappears. The word acontecer (happen) in Spanish is deeper and more interesting: it is derived from contigere, a Vulgar Latin form of the Classical contingere (that is, con-tangere); it is “what touches,” that is, the luck which falls to someone; it is not mere casualidad (coincidence), derived from casus or fall, but the “lot” or portion (méros, mórion); in short, it is what corresponds to μοῐρα (moîra), and in this sense the word acontecer is semantically related to destino, “destiny” or “fate.” (We find something similar in the German Ereignis and the reflexive verb sich ereignen, in which the root eigen, “own,” shows through: in acontecer, one makes something one’s own, what happens belongs to one or touches one.) And this etymologicnl connection shows us that man’s temporality and contingency are unexpectedly linked.What happens happens to us; that is, it takes place, it “touches” us (contingit, attingit, from which the Spanish verb atañer, to touch or affect). Therefore, what happens “remains”; it gradually constitutes the content of life, its “resources,” its “riches,” its ousía, and in this sense is the substance of life. The future, for its part, is a reality which does not yet exist, and therefore is not possessed, but with which we have to make our life. Hence we live “on credit,” reckoning with the future which is possessed by anticipating it in the form of belief. As it passes, time “brings me into realization” and, in a certain sense, “thingifies” me. I mean that the past “I,” as it “continues to be,” once that it “has been,” ceases to be I and becomes circumstance: the “I” which I was is something that I encounter, with which I have to count, which conditions me, which opens up certain possibilities to me and closes off others. (I can speak English because I learned it before, because an “I” who is now past learned it; I cannot speak Russian because no past “I” of mine learned it, or because I forgot it, and so on.) That is, time affects me, like the other ingredients of my circumstance. The executive I, the true I in its pronominal function—not the substantive one, not “the I”—the function in which I say “I,” is present, is pure presentness and momentness, but its reality consists in projecting itself vectorially toward the future. I am not future, but present and actual and acting, and therefore future-oriented.On the other hand, if we attempt to understand in a concrete, non-abstract way, not in the sense of pure measurement, the meaning of the finitude of life, of the limited time of its duration, we must regard it dramatically. Human life does not “last” a longer or shorter time, like a building or a utensil, not even like an organism, but has a “plot.” In the phrase ars longa, vita brevis, the brevity of life depends on the longevity of art. Life is short because it is not long enough for the art which must be learned and executed; that is, for one’s projects. Human time is not a mere quantity, but is always the time there is not enough of—or too much of. When there is too much time, that tremendous situation we call boredom occurs, and then we say that we have to “kill time.” There is not enough when the “plot” of our life needs more time than is available. Man frequently complains that he “has no time for anything,” but then he usually discovers that he “has nothing for time,” and his life takes on the form of tedium. This means that time is not mere passage or flow, that it does not limit itself to “passing,” but has structure; and this structure is not that of simple duration or quantification, but the structure imposed by the projective reality of life. Once more we encounter the dual structure which we find everywhere when we analyze human life: installation and vectors. Man is “in” time, the substance of his life. But to live temporally is to aim vectorially in different directions, near or far. There is no such thing as an “indefinite” vector, and this will lead us to the ultimate questions posed by human life when it is considered as totality, and when, in consequence, its configuration becomes problematical.

All this is characteristic of human life in general, of biographical life as it reveals itself to the analysis of its necessary, and therefore universal, structure. But if we now go on to the higher concreteness of its empirical structure, we find some aspects which affect its temporality. Worldhood, corporeality, the actual sensorial system, the interaction of biographical life and its biological substratum, real social forms, the rhythm of history—all this conditions the true reality of human time. We must consider it briefly within this anthropological perspective.

Time appears as articulated; it is not a continuum, a permanent and homogenous flow. From the point of view of human “doing,” we have already seen that the elective and decisive quality of human life, founded on motivation and projection, imposes the structure of the moments of which life is composed. The moment is not a chronological unit—it makes no sense to ask “how long” a moment lasts—but it is a vital one, that is, a biographical unit. Man lives moment after moment—and these moments are not instantaneous—and the linkage between them establishes the articulated continuity of the biographical trajectory. But the world as it actually is imposes another empirical articulation which is superimposed on the previous one: that of day and night, with light and darkness, which correspond to the periods of wakefulness and sleep, and these are dependent on human corporeality. (But, it might be objected, are there not other more elemental and primary articulations, such as the beating of the heart or the rhythm of breathing? Do not these impose the most characteristic structure of human temporality? No; for heartbeats, inhalation and exhalation, are primarily somatic and not biographical. Normally I do not notice them, they do not have biographical relevance for me save in exceptional cases; they are abstract units, what we might call “submultiples” of vital time.)The cyclical quality of biological and terrestrial life, insofar as it conditions biography, is the primary mode of quantification of time; the “tale” of the numbered days allows them to be counted. Imagine a man who never slept, in a world that was always the same, where light was perpetual: he would have a completely different experience of life with respect to time and its finitude. On a larger scale, the rhythm of the seasons projects a new and higher structure on temporality, which reinforces the “plotlike” quality of life. To the passage of the days is added the recurrence of the seasons, and with it the “passage of the years,” which is what is counted, strictly speaking, what makes us feel at a certain level in our vital trajectory. Daily life, by its repetition, creates an illusion of eternity: that which we do “each” day makes us feel as if we could do it “every” day; that is, forever. At the same time, variation and innovation impress the “plotlike” quality of life upon us. And from this arise all the concrete forms of sensation in relation to time: expectation, waiting, hope, despair (which becomes the experience of “this can’t go on”), hopelessness (expressed in the melancholy experience of “things can go on like this indefinitely”).Naturally, the chief characteristic of time as a form of empirical structure is age. In the first place, life has a “normal” duration (which has nothing to do with “mean” duration, for that can be altered by infant mortality, accidental death, and so on). It is not the time one is going to live, but the time one counts on; in consequence, the time which makes us feel at a certain “altitude” in life. This is of an order of magnitude which in practice is constant, but by no means unchangeable: between the Romantic period and today, in a period of 150 years, the normal life of Western man has been extended by a good fifty per cent, and the end is not yet in sight. Age, on the other hand, besides being an accumulation of reality—what we call “experience,” and that is why we distinguish between the time that “passes” and the age that we “are”—presents itself as a qualification of human possibilities, inextricably linked with biological powers. According to his age, man feels himself to be in each respect—in each vectorial orientation—in a situation which could be expressed in these terms: “not yet,” “now,” and “no longer.” These expressions never affect the whole of life, but only each of its dimensions, and the “not yet” in respect to something coincides with the “now” in respect to something else, and so on.

The child, whose reality is intrinsically immature, who is not yet...we shall see what...nevertheless is with unusual fullness. He has a certain very obvious “substantivity,” which on the other hand, in a form not easy to determine, persists throughout his biography: we keep on being, to an unsuspected degree, the child that we have been. But we have seen elsewhere that the child is not yet the person he is going to be. This explains the anxiety felt by parents about their children as they grow and mature: literally, they do not know who that child is going to be. This is only known—or it begins to be known—when the sexuate condition achieves the maturity of sexual development: at puberty. This is why the young person never feels quite identified with the child he has been, with that child whom people tell him about and whom he perhaps remembers: it is not obvious that “he” is that child. Hence he must “revalidate” his loves, his friendships, his devotions, his childish beliefs, and largely reject them, at least temporarily; that is why I say that he has to revalidate them. The crisis of belief—religious belief, for example—in a young person is not primarily due to the expansion of his mental horizon, to contact with books or teachers who teach hip things that are different from those he has received, but above all to the fact that the young person is a different person from the child who began to believe; and he must begin again, must revise and accept out of his own self what he cannot receive passively from the child he bears within, but whom he has left behind. This is the anthropological basis that gives meaning to the sacrament of confirmation, which is stripped of its human significance when it is administered before the age of puberty, before the “who” is established in the first fullness of adulthood.

The young person is defined by his minimum of reality and his maximum of real possibilities—those of the child are abstract, are not yet “his” possibilities. This is why youth consists very largely in the absorption of reality and the exploration of its possibilities—the traditional Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre, years of apprenticeship and travel. The child, and even the youth, considers the “grownup,” the adult, as a stable and already formed reality, but when he reaches adulthood he discovers his instability, and, in consequence, the need to keep on inventing. As for the old man, independently of what his physical state of decline may be—that is, if we consider old age as a temporal level, as a form of age—in principle he represents a positive form: the maximum richness of reality, and possibilities which are reduced but in fact broadened by the accumulation of experience of life. The old man’s powers are certainly less than those of the youth or the mature adult, but their significance is much greater to the degree in which his biographical life is a great deal more ample—at least, as long as physical decline does not impose a narrowing stemming from biological factors but with personal repercussions. The important thing about old age, however, is something different: “one can’t go beyond old age,” which means, if we look at things from inside life, that it is the last age, that there is no further age. But this means that the old man has to persevere in his vital phase, and this transforms the “plotlike” meaning of his life. Hence, the meaning of old age depends entirely on how one confronts death, on what this means for each old person. Don Juan’s famous exclamation, “What a long credit you give me!” is a strictly juvenile attitude, which the young man cannot really escape. Old age, on the other hand, is the season of realization and fulfillment, that situation where life is installed in a form which is either “definitive”—unlike all the others—or results in death. And since death is a question mark, the life of the old person is determined by it and by the meaning which, in each case and at every moment, he gives it. This brings us to another problem, one we will have to deal with in its proper place.

Of course, all this is linked to the concrete form—not individual, but collective, historico-social—in which human life takes place. For example, at the present day longevity is encountering a number of social patterns which did not foresee it—retirement, statistical tabulations of age, difficulty of “starting over,” and so on. The scale of the generations depends on the role of ages, and is affected by alterations in the biographical structure; historical knowledge conditions possession of the past and the possibilities of invention. I have spoken at length of all these subjects—from Reason and Life to Generations: A Historical Method and The Social Structure, in a different form in “Experience of Life,” and most specifically in my “books about countries,” The Spaniards, Julián Marías on the United States, Our Andalusia, and so on—and I need not repeat what I have said before and what does not belong in this book. Just now I am interested in the anthropological aspect of what I have studied elsewhere from the viewpoint of analytical theory, social structure, or the ultimate concreteness of the historical forms of life.

Life is circumstantial invention. It is not creation, for life never exists “out of nothing,” but is a making of oneself together with things: it is not, however, mere “realization,” for it consists in the previous invention of possibilities as such. This quality of quasi-creation has a temporal correspondence which affects man as the image of God, imago Dei. In Genesis, in contrast to the instantaneous fiat of the creation of things, γενηθήτω, (genethéto in the version of the Septuagint), a very different expression is used when the creation of man is being described: faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, ποιήσομεν ἄνθρωπον κατ' εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ' ὁμοίωσιν (poiésomen ánthropon kat’ eikóna hemetéran kai kath’ homoíosin), “let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Leaving aside the suspicion of some theologians that the plural contains a reference to the Trinity—one that is more interesting than it seems, even in an anthropological perspective, for we have already observed that the notion of person is connected with the concept of “living-with,” and not in vain did Unamuno say: “An isolated person would cease to be one; whom, indeed, would he love?”—“Let us make” rather than “let him be made” seems to indicate a continuity, an undertaking; perhaps the best translation of faciamus would be “we are going to make.” And if we ask ourselves in what man’s resemblance to God consists, what allows us to think of man as an image of God, we would have to find it in his indefiniteness, the finite version of infinity. Man is essentially imperfect, that is, unfinished, uncompleted, always a thing-to-be-done and as yet undone. Different from God, who is infinite and eternal, but the opposite of things. Things are in time, but man is making himself from the stuff of time; and since the real man, in his empirical structure, is in a certain sense also a thing—the articulation of a who and a what—his temporality is conditioned by all the structures we have just been examining, not forgetting the sexuate condition, which introduces two forms of biographical human time. Nicholas of Cusa said that man is Deus occasionatus. We might say that in his created but creative temporality, the absolute innovation which has to make itself successively in the form of happening, we find the anthropological meaning of his nature as the image of God.

Julián Marías

METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Empirical Structure of Human Life

Person and I

The theme of the person is one of the most difficult and elusive in the whole history of philosophy, and for reasons which are not at all coincidental. Around this theme perhaps the most radical transformation of that whole history has taken place—or is taking place—and strictly speaking it is a question, rather than of the different ways of studying or interpreting a reality, of the emergence of that same reality and of its establishment as such on the mental horizon of the West. Customarily the origin of the notion of person is sought in the Latin word persona, and this is considered to be the equivalent of the Greek prósopon which, as a Hellenic word, is naturally taken as “previous” to the Latin one. But none of this is particularly clear when we take a closer look at things.

In the first place, the word πρόσωπον (prósopon) is very infrequent in philosophical texts, and rarely means “person” or anything like it. Among the pre-Socratics it appears in three texts, Antiphon, Democritus, and Empedocles, and means face, countenance, even the visage of Helios, the Sun. In Plato it also means countenance. This is again the meaning which appears in Aristotle, who speaks at length of the prósopon and its parts (the nose, for example), and also of the face of the Moon. Somewhere he remarks that one says prósopon of a man, but not of an ox or a fish. This remark is interesting, for in the use of the Greek language there is frequent mention of the “face” (prósopon) of animals: ibis, dogs, horses, deer, fish. Of course, the most interesting meaning of this Greek word, the one which has been taken as a basis or starting point for the notion of “person,” is the meaning in which it coincides with the Latin word for mask, the tragic or comic mask worn by actors, for example. It is from this that meanings of “role” or “character” or “personage,” and ultimately “person,” are derived. It is possible, though not certain, that the meaning of prósopon as “mask” is indebted to influence from the Latin persona; this word has a doubtful, probably an Etruscan, etymology.The direction the word has taken—the mask and the personage represented by the actor—has led to abandonment of another which strikes me as interesting: the meaning of “face” in speaking of animals or stars, and also the “façade,” more specifically, the front of a building. In a moment we shall see why this is more important than it appears to be at first glance.

During the Scholastic period, when there was an attempt to think about “person” philosophically, the notions which have been decisive are not the ones arising from these contexts, but from those of “property” or “subsistence” (hypóstatis). Boethius’ famous definition, which has been so influential—persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia—started off from the Aristotelian notion of ousía or substantia thought of primarily in relation to “things.” Always explained with the eternal examples of the statue and the bed, this notion was founded on the old Greek ideal of the “independent” or sufficient, of the “separable” (khoristón). That this substance or thing which we call “person” is rational, is no doubt important, but not sufficiently so to react upon this quality of ousía and modify its mode of being, its manner of reality. The person is a hypóstasis or suppositum like the others, only it is of a rational nature. Signoriello’s Lexicon peripateticum, which is so careful in its distinctions, says literally: “persona nihil addit supra suppositum, nisi aliquam dignitatem et excellentiam petitam ex natura intellectuali” (“Person adds nothing to substance, except some dignity and excellence required by the intellectual nature”). That is, the person is simply a thing with a slightly greater degree of dignity and excellence than the rest.

But suppose that there were an error in all this? Suppose that the “model” of reality which has been used to think about things were not applicable to the person? Suppose it were completely inadequate? The introduction of the theological viewpoint in the theory of the person represented a decisive step as well as a risk. Beginning very early, Scholasticism spoke of divine persons; moreover, the word “person” is applied more to God than to man; in fact, man is described as homo and only secondarily as persona; it is the person—the divine person—of Christ who is simultaneously God and man (homo tends to become relegated to natura). Similarly, it was thought that the person could be divine or angelic or human. This is fruitful in one sense: the divine person is not, of course, a “thing,” and in this sense theology has been a fertile stimulus for the investigation of personal reality. But it also contains a serious risk: the notion of person was thought of in such a way that it could “harbor” the reality of divine or angelic persons as well as human ones. This has caused a loss of contact with immediate reality, with that which becomes immediately present to us. Perhaps it is better to proceed from presence, phenomenologically, reserving the right to add and subtract later so as to be able to arrive at other persons and to think about them from the only person who is clear to us. To begin with, the only persons we know are human ones: I, thou.

We cannot even say “man,” for this is to say a great deal. When we hear a knock on our door we ask “Who is it?” (Although philosophy and science have been mistakenly asking “What is man?” for 2,500 years and receiving, as was to be expected, mistaken answers.) The normal and sufficient answer to the question “Who is it?” is “I.” Naturally, an “I” is accompanied by a voice—a known voice—that is, by a circumstance. If the voice is unknown the answer does me no good, which means that the significance of that word “I” has been changed. Now it means something else, a non-circumstantial I, that is, anybody at all; as if someone were to say “an I.” But I already knew that when I asked “Who is it?” and the answer does not resolve my doubts. What I was asking for when I inquired was precisely the pronominal position of that “someone” who is knocking, his concrete circumstantialization in “I,” unsupplantable, unequivocal, irreplaceable. This pronominal function of the circumstantial “I” or “thou” is equivalent to a proper name—a personal name—if, of course, we always keep in mind that this has not only a significance but a denominative function, along with another vocative function whose full significance will become apparent later on.Certainly, when I say “I,” “thou,” or a proper name, I am thinking of a body; we must not forget this for a single moment, and we must not content ourselves with saying it once and then leaving it inoperative as we go on thinking. But we think of a body insofar as it is the body of someone. That corporeal someone is, to begin with, what we understand a person to be. But now let us try, without relinquishing that first piece of evidence, to see more clearly what we actually understand and are trying to say.The corporeal someone or person not only “happens” but is identified with futurition, that forward tension—or pretension—which is life. Now we begin to glimpse the meaning of prósopon as “front” or “façade” or “forward part.” It is important to retain that frontal quality of the person because life is an operation performed in a forward direction. That “someone” is future-oriented; that is, present and real but turned toward the future, oriented toward it, projected toward it. The face in which the person expresses and shows himself faces the future and hence the face is, among all the parts of the body, the strictly personal one, that in which the person is concentrated and revealed, in which he is expressed. But this future-oriented condition of the person contains one essential trait: it is partially unreal, for the future is not as yet, but will be. In the countenance or person we now see—truly present—the person he will be. By person we understand a reality that is not only real. A “given” person would cease to be one. The programmatic, projective quality is not something that merely happens to the person; rather, it constitutes that person. The person is not “there,” he can never be there as such, but he is arriving.When we say that he “is being made,” we can easily misunderstand what is being sought is his “result.” That is not the point: the person already is, is made as a person, and on the other hand his “finishedness” or result is unimportant. His present being is to be becoming; better still, to be arriving. Every strictly personal relationship—friendship, love—proves this. In such relationships, “being” means “to keep on being,” a condition made of duration and primarily of future, a constant arriving and setting forth, especially a “going to be.” The personal relationship, insofar as it is truly personal and not “thingified,” is always “the eve of delight” even in the fullest presence or possession.Of course, this is also true of myself. My possession of myself has the same programmatic, durative, and arriving quality, by means of which the personal pronoun—me, I—is possessive: mine. And this turns the traditional ontological definition upside down. So far from possessing sovereignty or sufficiency, the person is defined by the indigence, the neediness, the unreality of anticipation, poised on an expectant reality.

I am a person, but “the I” is not the person. “I” is the name we give to that programmatic and arriving condition. When I say “I,” I “prepare” or “get ready” to be. For man, to be is to prepare oneself to be, to get ready to be, and therefore he consists in disposition and readiness. When we say “I” we are not dealing with a simple point or center of the circumstance, but with the fact that this circumstance is mine. Because I am I myself I can have something which is mine. In the person there is selfhood, but not identity: I am the same one but never the same. But here we must add something which I have said many times but which is often forgotten: the past “I” is not I, but circumstance with which I find myself; that is, the circumstance which I—the projective and future-oriented I—encounter when I am going to live. And mere “succession” would not be sufficient for selfhood. There is need for that anticipation of myself, that already being what I am not, that intrinsic futurition or neediness. Man can possess himself throughout his whole life and be the same man because he does not possess himself wholly at any moment in that life.The common noun signifies what is; the proper name, as I have already noted, denominates who one is. The reality of that “who” is never given, and simultaneously includes a certain infinitude and an essential opacity. That infinitude does not affect the finite character of human reality. The image of infinity is lack of definition, and only in this form is the human person infinite: not to be “given,” always able to be something more, to be arriving. The arcane quality of that reality consists in its superlatively internal condition, its intimacy (intimate is the superlative of inner). Hence, the need and possibility of the expression as the person’s mode of being: the secret intimacy in which that arcane person consists rises to the surface in the face—which is the person as he is projected forward. And one’s own person? you will ask. One’s own person is the means by which each can understand himself, interpret himself, and thus project himself. My own reality is reflected in those mirrors which are other people; in them I find my expression, I recognize myself, and thus project myself. This is why personal life is essentially living-with.In the Introduction to Lessons in Logic, Kant summed up the field of philosophy in the mundane sense (in dieser weltbürgerlichen Bedeutung) in these four questions:

What can I know? (Metaphysics.)

What ought I to do? (Ethics.)

What can I hope for? (Religion.)

What is man? (Anthropology.)

And he said that fundamentally all these questions could be included in anthropology, for the first three are reduced to the last. Well—and leaving aside the Kantian correlation between the questions and the philosophical disciplines, which today would be debatable—my point of view would be considerably different.

I think that everything could be reduced to two radical and inseparable questions, whose meaning lies in an intrinsic mutual connection: 1) Who am I? 2) What is to become of me? It is not a question of “man,” or of “what,” but of “I” and “who.” And that question can only be answered by living, with an executive response. The second is also a personal question: I ask “what,” but inquire what is to become of me. The articulation of the “who” and the “what” is precisely the problem of personal life.

But the decisive point is the interconnection of both questions. To know the first means not to know the second and in the measure in which the second is answered, the personal quality of that me vanishes and becomes more like a what, a thing. The more I know who I am, the more I possess my programmatic and projective reality, future-oriented, unreal, and “arriving.” The more authentically I am “I” in the mode of personal life, the less I know what is to become of me, the more uncertain is my future reality, which is thus the more open to possibility, to invention, chance, and innovation.This is the radical neediness of man as person, projected forward, facing the future, going toward the other and especially toward the other person. The person needs the other person in the measure in which that person is presented to him as irreplaceable and unreasonable. And since every human person is affected by that same insufficiency and neediness, we find here the reason why the personal being, considered to its ultimate consequences, brings us to the need for something that is described by one of the most obscure words there is: salvation.

Julián Marías

METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

The Empirical Structure of Human Life

Dhamma is visible here and now, immediately effective, inviting inspection, onward leading, to be experienced by the wise for themselves

Attached to Dhamma→

“Friend Saviṭṭha, apart from faith, apart from personal preference, apart from oral tradition, apart from reasoned reflection, apart from acceptance of a view after pondering it, I know this, I see this: ‘extinction is the cessation of being.’”

“Then the Venerable Musı̄la is an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed.”

When this was said, the Venerable Musı̄la kept silent.

Then the Venerable Nārada said to the Venerable Saviṭṭha: “Friend Saviṭṭha, it would be good if I were asked that series of questions. Ask me that series of questions and I will answer you.”

“Then let the Venerable Nārada get to answer that series of questions. I will ask the Venerable Nārada that series of questions, and let him answer me.”

(...)

“Friend Nārada, apart from faith, apart from personal preference, apart from oral tradition, apart from reasoned reflection, apart from acceptance of a view after pondering it, does the Venerable Musı̄la have personal knowledge thus: ‘extinction is the cessation of being’?”

“Then the Venerable Nārada is an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed.”

“Friend, though I have clearly seen as it really is with correct wisdom, ‘extinction is the cessation of being,’ I am not an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed. Suppose, friend, there was a well along a desert road, but it had neither a rope nor a bucket. Then a man would come along, oppressed and afflicted by the heat, tired, parched, and thirsty. He would look down into the well and the knowledge would occur to him, ‘There is water,’ but he would not be able to make bodily contact with it. So too, friend, though I have clearly seen as it really is with correct wisdom, ‘extinction is the cessation of existence,’ I am not an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed.”

When this was said, the Venerable Ānanda asked the Venerable Saviṭṭha: “When he speaks in such a way, friend Saviṭṭha, what would you say about the Venerable Nārada?”

“When he speaks in such a way, friend Ānanda, I would not say anything about the Venerable Nārada except what is good and favourable.” SN 12 : 68

“‘With the cessation of birth, cessation of ageing and death’: so it was said. Now, bhikkhus, do ageing and death cease with the cessation of birth or not, or how do you take it in this case?”
“Ageing and death cease with the cessation of birth, venerable sir. Thus we take it in this case: ‘With the cessation of birth, cessation of ageing and death.’”

“‘With the cessation of being, cessation of birth’…‘With the cessation of clinging, cessation of being’…‘With the cessation of craving, cessation of clinging’…‘With the cessation of feeling, cessation of craving’…‘With the cessation of contact, cessation of feeling’ …’With the cessation of the sixfold base, cessation of contact’…‘With the cessation of name-&-matter, cessation of the sixfold base’…‘With the cessation of consciousness, cessation of name-&-matter’…‘With the cessation of determinations, cessation of consciousness’…‘With the cessation of ignorance, cessation of determinations’: so it was said. Now, bhikkhus, do determinations cease with the cessation of ignorance or not, or how do you take it in this case?”

“Determinations cease with the cessation of ignorance, venerable sir. Thus we take it in this case: ‘With the cessation of ignorance, cessation of determinations.’”

(RECAPITULATION ON CESSATION)

“Good, bhikkhus. So you say thus, and I also say thus: ‘When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.’ That is, with the cessation of ignorance comes cessation of determinations; with the cessation of determinations, cessation of consciousness; with the cessation of consciousness, cessation of name-&-matter; with the cessation of name-&-matter, cessation of the sixfold base; with the cessation of the sixfold base, cessation of contact; with the cessation of contact, cessation of feeling; with the cessation of feeling, cessation of craving; with the cessation of craving, cessation of clinging; with the cessation of clinging, cessation of being; with the cessation of being, cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, ageing and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering.

(PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE)

“Bhikkhus, knowing and seeing in this way, would you run back to the past thus: ‘Were we in the past? Were we not in the past? What were we in the past? How were we in the past? Having been what, what did we become in the past?’?”—“No, venerable sir.”—“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you run forward to the future thus: ‘Shall we be in the future? Shall we not be in the future? What shall we be in the future? How shall we be in the future? Having been what, what shall we become in the future?’?”—“No, venerable sir.”—“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you now be inwardly perplexed about the present thus: ‘Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where will it go?’?”—“No, venerable sir.”

“Bhikkhus, knowing and seeing in this way, would you speak thus: ‘The Teacher is respected by us. We speak as we do out of respect for the Teacher’?”—“No, venerable sir.”—“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you speak thus: ‘The Recluse says this, and we speak thus at the bidding of the Recluse’?”—“No, venerable sir.”—“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you acknowledge another teacher?”—“No, venerable sir.”—“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you return to the observances, tumultuous debates, and auspicious signs of ordinary recluses and brahmins, taking them as the core [of the holy life]?”—“No, venerable sir.”—“Do you speak only of what you have known, seen, and understood for yourselves?” —“Yes, venerable sir.”

“Good, bhikkhus. So you have been guided by me with this Dhamma, which is visible here and now, immediately effective, inviting inspection, onward leading, to be experienced by the wise for themselves. For it was with reference to this that it has been said: ‘Bhikkhus, this Dhamma is visible here and now, immediately effective, inviting inspection, onward leading, to be experienced by the wise for themselves.’ MN 38

Dependent arising undermines puthujjana's certainty of being, the attitude "I am". It can, or rather it has to be seen here and now, knowledge about past and future are totally irrelevant to such insight. With upādanā (here clinging) as condition bhava (being) is timeless relationships between the two items and can be seen directly "apart from faith, apart from personal preference, apart from oral tradition, apart from reasoned reflection, apart from acceptance of a view after pondering it".

This has to be distinguish from such wisdom: as long as there is the attitude ‘I am’ there is organization of the five faculties of eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. SN 22:47 or

I declare, Vaccha, rebirth for one with fuel, not for one without fuel. Just as a fire burns with fuel, but not without fuel, so, Vaccha, I declare rebirth for one with fuel, not for one without fuel.”*
*Sa-upādānassa khvāhaṃ Vaccha upapattiṃ paññāpemi no anupādānassa. There is a double meaning here, with upādāna meaning both “fuel” and subjective “clinging,” (Bhikkhu Bodhi)

With upādanā (clinging) as condition rebirth isn't something that average sotapanna is able to see directly, unlike direct knowledge about ones own birth, which depends on the present self-identification and can be withdrawn here and now. Even most of arahats "merely" have the direct knowledge:

This field of perception is void of the taint of sensual desire; this field of perception is void of the taint of being; this field of perception is void of the taint of ignorance. There is present only this non-voidness, namely, that connected with the six bases that are dependent on this body and conditioned by life. MN 121

Certainty that after dissolution of the six bases that are dependent on this body new body will not appear, still may require some amount of faith, in the case of arahats without supernormal powers.

But, Sāriputta, if they were to ask you: ‘Friend Sāriputta, through what kind of deliverance have you declared final knowledge thus: “I understand: Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being”?’—being asked thus, how would you answer?”

“If they were to ask me this, venerable sir, I would answer thus: ‘Friends, through an internal deliverance, through the destruction of all clinging, I dwell mindfully in such a way that the taints do not flow within me and I do not despise myself.’ Being asked thus, venerable sir, I would answer in such a way.”

“Good, good, Sāriputta! This is another method of explaining in brief that same point: ‘I have no perplexity in regard to the taints spoken of by the Ascetic; I do not doubt that they have been abandoned by me.’” SN 12 : 32

Direct knowledge that taints spoken by the Buddha are abandoned is one thing, faith that the Buddha is indeed the Buddha, and he knows what he is talking about when he says:
I declare, rebirth for one with upādanā, not for one without upādanā, is another thing.

Nanavira Thera: It is, no doubt, possible for a Buddha to see the re-birth that is at each moment awaiting a living individual who still has tanhā—the re-birth, that is to say, that is now awaiting the individual who now has tanhā. If this is so, then for a Buddha the dependence of re-birth upon tanhā is a matter of direct seeing, not involving time. But this is by no means always possible (if, indeed, at all) for an ariyasāvaka, who, though he sees patticcasamuppāda for himself, and with certainty (it is aparapaccayā ñānam), may still need to accept re-birth on the Buddha’s authority .s In other words, an ariyasāvaka sees birth with direct vision (since jāti is part of the patticcasamuppāda formulation), but does not necessarily see re-birth with direct vision.

... (Past and future only make their appearance with anvaye ñānam [see Na Ca So [a]), not with dhamme ñānam. ‘As it is, so it was, so it will be.’ Patticcasamuppāda is just ‘As it is’—i.e. the present structure of dependence.)

Animittavihārī

Attached to Sekha→

Tissa

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling at Rājagaha on Mount Vulture Peak. Then, when the night had advanced, two deities of stunning beauty, illuminating the entire Vulture Peak, approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, and stood to one side. One deity then said to the Blessed One: “Bhante, these bhikkhunīs are liberated.”

The other said: “Bhante, these bhikkhunīs are well liberated without residue remaining.”

This is what those deities said. The Teacher agreed. Then, [thinking]: “The Teacher has agreed,” they paid homage to the Blessed One, circumambulated him keeping the right side toward him, and disappeared right there.

Then, when the night had passed, the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus: “Last night, bhikkhus, when the night had advanced, two deities of stunning beauty, illuminating the entire Vulture Peak, approached me, paid homage to me, and stood to one side. One deity then said to me: ‘Bhante, these bhikkhunīs are liberated.’ And the other said: ‘Bhante, these bhikkhunīs are well liberated without residue remaining.’ This is what those deities said, after which they paid homage to me, circumambulated me keeping the right side toward me, and disappeared right there.”

Now on that occasion the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna was sitting not far from the Blessed One. Then it occurred to the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna: “Which devas know one who has a residue remaining as ‘one with a residue remaining’ and one who has no residue remaining as ‘one without residue remaining’?”

Now at that time a bhikkhu named Tissa had recently died and been reborn in a certain brahmā world. There too they knew him as “the brahmā Tissa, powerful and mighty.” Then, just as a strong man might extend his drawn-in arm or draw in his extended arm, the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna disappeared from Mount Vulture Peak and reappeared in that brahmā world. Having seen the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna coming in the distance, the brahmā Tissa said to him:

“Come, respected Moggallāna! Welcome, respected Moggallāna! It has been long since you took the opportunity to come here. Sit down, respected Moggallāna. This seat has been prepared.” The Venerable Mahāmoggallāna sat down on the prepared seat. The brahmā Tissa then paid homage to the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna and sat down to one side. The Venerable Mahāmoggallāna then said to him:

“Which devas, Tissa, know one who has a residue remaining as ‘one with a residue remaining’ and one who has no residue remaining as ‘one without residue remaining’?”

“The devas of Brahmā’s company have such knowledge, respected Moggallāna.”

“Do all the devas of Brahmā’s company have such knowledge, Tissa?”

“Not all, respected Moggallāna. Those devas of Brahmā’s company who are content with a brahmā’s life span, a brahmā’s beauty, a brahmā’s happiness, a brahmā’s glory, a brahmā’s authority, and who do not understand as it really is an escape higher than this, do not have such knowledge.

“But those devas of Brahmā’s company who are not content with a brahmā’s life span, a brahmā’s beauty, a brahmā’s happiness, a brahmā’s glory, a brahmā’s authority, and who understand as it really is an escape higher than this, know one who has a residue remaining as ‘one with a residue remaining’ and one who has no residue remaining as ‘one without residue remaining.’

“Here, respected Moggallāna, when a bhikkhu is liberated in both respects, those devas know him thus: ‘This venerable one is liberated in both respects. As long as his body stands devas and humans will see him, but with the breakup of the body, devas and humans will see him no more.’ It is in this way that those devas know one who has a residue remaining as ‘one with a residue remaining’ and one who has no residue remaining as ‘one without residue remaining.’

(2) “Then, when a bhikkhu is liberated by wisdom, those devas know him thus: ‘This venerable one is liberated by wisdom. As long as his body stands devas and humans will see him, but with the breakup of the body devas and humans will see him no more.’ It is in this way, too, that those devas know one who has a residue remaining….

(3) “Then, when a bhikkhu is a body witness, those devas know him thus: ‘This venerable one is a body witness. If this venerable one resorts to congenial lodgings, relies on good friends, and harmonizes the spiritual faculties, perhaps he will realize for himself with direct knowledge, in this very life, that unsurpassed consummation of the spiritual life for the sake of which clansmen rightly go forth from the household life into homelessness, and having entered upon it, dwell in it.’ It is in this way, too, that those devas know one who has a residue remaining….

(4) “Then, when a bhikkhu is one attained to view … (5) one liberated by faith … (6) a Dhamma follower, those devas know him thus: ‘This venerable one is a Dhamma follower. If this venerable one resorts to congenial lodgings, relies on good friends, and harmonizes the spiritual faculties, perhaps he will realize for himself with direct knowledge, in this very life, that unsurpassed consummation of the spiritual life for the sake of which clansmen rightly go forth from the household life into homelessness, and having entered upon it, dwell in it.’ It is in this way, too, that those devas know one who has a residue remaining as ‘one with a residue remaining’ and one who has no residue remaining as ‘one without residue remaining.’

Then, having delighted and rejoiced in the words of the brahmā Tissa, just as a strong man might extend his drawn-in arm or draw in his extended arm, the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna disappeared from the brahmā world and reappeared on Vulture Peak. He approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, sat down to one side, and reported to the Blessed One his entire conversation with the brahmā Tissa.

[The Blessed One said:] “But, Moggallāna, didn’t the brahmā Tissa teach you about the seventh person, the one who dwells in the signless?”

“It is the time for this, Blessed One! It is the time for this, Fortunate One! The Blessed One should teach about the seventh person, the one who dwells in the markless. Having heard it from the Blessed One, the bhikkhus will retain it in mind.”

“Then listen, Moggallāna, and attend closely. I will speak.”

“Yes, Bhante,” the Venerable Mahāmoggallāna replied. The Blessed One said this:

(7) “Here, Moggallāna, through non-attention to all signs, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the signless mental concentration. Those devas know him thus: ‘Through non-attention to all signs, this venerable one enters and dwells in the signless mental concentration. If this venerable one resorts to congenial lodgings, relies on good friends, and harmonizes the spiritual faculties, perhaps he will realize for himself with direct knowledge, in this very life, that unsurpassed consummation of the spiritual life for the sake of which clansmen rightly go forth from the household life into homelessness,  and having entered upon it, dwell in it.’ It is in this way, too, that those devas know one who has a residue remaining as ‘one with a residue remaining’ and one who has no residue remaining as ‘one without residue remaining.’”
AN 7 : 56

*In the normal sevenfold classification of noble individuals, the seventh individual is the faith follower (saddhānusārī). Here, however, the seventh place is taken by the animittavihārī, “one who dwells in the signless.

Animitta cetosamādhi

In MN 121 animitta cetosamādhi comes after the eight attainments

“Again, Ānanda, a bhikkhu—not attending to the perception of the base of nothingness, not attending to the perception of the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception—attends to the singleness dependent on the signless concentration of mind. His mind enters into that signless concentration of mind and acquires confidence, steadiness, and resolution.

He understand thus: ‘Whatever disturbances there might be dependent on the perception of the base of nothingness, those are not present here; whatever disturbances there might be dependent on the perception of the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, those are not present here. There is present only this amount of disturbance, namely, that connected with the six bases that are dependent on this body and conditioned by life.’ He understands: ‘This field of perception is void of the perception of the base of nothingness; this field of perception is void of the perception of the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. There is present only this non-voidness, namely, that connected with the six bases that are dependent on this body and conditioned by life.’ Thus he regards it as void of what is not there, but as to what remains there he understands that which is present thus: ‘This is present.’ Thus, Ānanda, this too is his genuine, undistorted, pure descent into voidness.

“Again, Ānanda, a bhikkhu—not attending to the perception of the base of nothingness, not attending to the perception of the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception—attends to the singleness dependent on the signless concentration of mind. His mind enters into that signless concentration of mind and acquires confidence, steadiness, and resolution. He understands thus: ‘This signless concentration of mind is determined and intentionally produced. But whatever is determined and intentionally produced is impermanent, subject to cessation.’ When he knows and sees thus, his mind is liberated from the taint of sensual desire, from the taint of being, and from the taint of ignorance. When it is liberated there comes the knowledge: ‘It is liberated.’ He understands: ‘Birth is destroyed, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being.’

While animitta cetosamādhi in this description replaces the attainment of cessation of perception and feeling, it should not be confused with it. Animitta cetosamādhi is not animittā cetovimutti.

Animittā cetovimutti - the signless liberation of mind

“Friend, how many conditions are there for the attainment of the signless liberation of mind?”

“Friend, there are two conditions for the attainment of the signless liberation of mind: non-attention to all signs and attention to the signless element. These are the two conditions for the attainment of the signless liberation of mind.”

“Friend, how many conditions are there for the persistence of the signless liberation of mind?”

“Friend, there are three conditions for the persistence of the signless liberation of mind non-attention to all signs, attention to the signless element, and the prior determination [of its duration]. These are the three conditions for the persistence of the signless liberation of mind.”

“Friend, how many conditions are there for emergence from the signless liberation of mind?”

“Friend, there are two conditions for emergence from the signless liberation of mind: attention to all signs and non-attention to the signless element. These are the two conditions for emergence from the signless liberation of mind.” (...)

“Lust is a maker of signs, hate is a maker of signs, delusion is a maker of signs. In a bhikkhu whose taints are destroyed, these are abandoned, cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, done away with so that they are no longer subject to future arising. Of all the kinds of signless liberation of mind, the unshakeable liberation of mind is pronounced the best. Now that unshakeable deliverance of mind is void of lust, void of hate, void of delusion. MN 43

Animitta cetosamādhi, unlike signless liberation of mind, doesn't guarantee permanent liberation from sensual desire:

“Then, a bhikkhu might say thus: ‘I have developed and cultivated the signless liberation of the mind, made it my vehicle and basis, carried it out, consolidated it, and properly undertaken it, yet my consciousness still follows after signs.’ He should be told: ‘Not so! Do not speak thus. Do not misrepresent the Blessed One; for it is not good to misrepresent the Blessed One. The Blessed One would certainly not speak in such a way. It is impossible and inconceivable, friend, that one might develop and cultivate the signless liberation of the mind, make it one’s vehicle and basis, carry it out, consolidate it, and properly undertake it, yet one’s consciousness could still follow after signs. There is no such possibility. For this, friend, is the escape from all signs, namely, the signless liberation of the mind.’
AN 6 : 13

“Then, friends, through non-attention to all signs, some person enters and dwells in the signless mental concentration. [Thinking,] ‘I am one who gains the signless mental concentration,’ he bonds with [other] bhikkhus, bhikkhunīs, male and female lay followers, kings and royal ministers, sectarian teachers and their disciples. As he bonds with them and becomes intimate with them, as he loosens up and talks with them, lust invades his mind. With his mind invaded by lust, he gives up the training and reverts to the lower life.

“Suppose that a king or royal minister had been traveling along a highway with a four-factored army and set up camp for the night in a forest thicket. Because of the sounds of the elephants, horses, charioteers, and infantry, and the sound and uproar of drums, kettledrums, conches, and tom-toms, the sound of the crickets would disappear. Could one rightly say: ‘Now the sound of the crickets will never reappear in this forest thicket’?”

“Certainly not, friend. For it is possible that the king or royal minister will leave that forest thicket, and then the sound of the crickets will reappear.”

“So too, through non-attention to all signs, some person here enters and dwells in the signless mental concentration. Thinking, ‘I am one who gains the signless mental concentration,’ he bonds with [other] bhikkhus … he gives up the training and reverts to the lower life.”

On a later occasion the Venerable Citta Hatthisāriputta gave up the training and returned to the lower life. AN 6 : 60

Nevertheless signless concentration of mind while it doesn't offer permanent safety from lust is helpful for overcoming lust:

Ānanda

On one occasion the Venerable Ānanda was dwelling at Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s Park. Then, in the morning, the Venerable Ānanda dressed and, taking bowl and robe, entered Sāvatthī for alms with the Venerable Vaṅgīsa as his companion. Now on that occasion dissatisfaction had arisen in the Venerable Vaṅgīsa; lust had infested his mind. Then the Venerable Vaṅgīsa addressed the Venerable Ānanda in verse:

“I am burning with sensual lust,
My mind is engulfed by fire.
Please tell me how to extinguish it,
Out of compassion, O Gotama."

[The Venerable Ānanda:]
“It is through an inversion of perception
That your mind is engulfed by fire.
Turn away from the sign of beauty
Provocative of sensual lust.

“See determinations as alien,
As suffering, not as self.
Extinguish the great fire of lust;
Don’t burn up again and again.

“Develop the mind on foulness,
One-pointed, well concentrated;
Apply your mindfulness to the body,
Be engrossed in revulsion.

“Develop meditation on the signless,
And discard the tendency to conceit.
Then, by breaking through conceit,
You will be one who fares at peace.”
SN 8 : 4

“There are, bhikkhus, these three kinds of unwholesome thoughts: sensual thought, thought of ill will, thought of harming. And where, bhikkhus, do these three unwholesome thoughts cease without remainder? For one who dwells with a mind well established in the four establishments of mindfulness, or for one who develops the signless concentration. This is reason enough, bhikkhus, to develop the signless concentration. When the signless concentration is developed and cultivated, bhikkhus, it is of great fruit and benefit.

“There are, bhikkhus, these two views: the view of being and the view of not being. Therein, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple reflects thus: ‘Is there anything in the world that I could cling to without being blameworthy?’ He understand thus: ‘There is nothing in the world that I could cling to without being blameworthy. For if I should cling, it is only form that I would be clinging to, only feeling … only perception … only determinations… only consciousness that I would be clinging to. With that clinging of mine as condition, there would be existence; with existence as condition, birth; with birth as condition, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair would come to be. Such would be the origin of this whole mass of suffering.’ (...) SN 22 : 80

Animitta samādhi, apart protection against lust, seems to offer an escape from the views mentioned above, in which puthujjana is imprisoned (see MN 11).

Cittassa nimittam

‘“One not delighting in solitude could grasp the sign of the mind (cittassa nimittam)”: such a state is not to be found. “One not grasping the sign of the mind could be fulfilled in right view”:
such a state is not to be found. “One not having fulfilled right view could be fulfilled in right concentration”: such a state is not to be found. “One not having fulfilled right concentration could abandon the fetters”: such a state is not to be found. “One not having aban-doned the fetters could realize extinction”: such a state is not to be found.’ AN 6 : 68

Consciousness of puthujjana is firmly established on name-&-matter:

Thus far, Ānanda, may one be born or age or die or fall or arise, thus far is there a way of designation, thus far is there a way of language, thus far is there a way of description, thus far is there a sphere of understanding, thus far the round proceeds as manifestation in a situation,—so far, that is to say, as there is name-&-matter together with consciousness. DN 15

“Friend, these five faculties each have a separate field, a separate domain, and do not experience each other’s field and domain, that is, the eye faculty, the ear faculty, the nose faculty, the tongue faculty, and the body faculty. Now these five faculties, each having a separate field, a separate domain, not experiencing each other’s field and domain, have mind as their resort, and mind experiences their fields and domains.” MN 43

While right view offers perpetual knowledge of what goes beyond name-and-matter,  cittassa nimittam offers temporal freedom from thoughs (“On what basis, Samiddhi, do intentions and thoughts arise in an individual?” "On the basis of name-and-form, Bhante.” AN 9 : 14)  In usual experience mind knows only sensory "data", without knowing its "own nature". Do notice that Sister Vajjira describes sotapatti as "los of dimension of thoughts".

In order to know noble silence, mind has to become silent and recognise what does not belong to sensory experience. As Nisargadatta Maharaj says, when the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence. Cittassa nimittam offers temporary knowledge of such silence, which further can be transformed into perpetual access to such silence by the right view. As soon as one is able to "grasp the sign of the mind" one is able to practice animitta samadhi. That's why Bodhisattva, not being yet ariya, could practice it:

“As I abided thus, diligent, ardent, and resolute, a thought of renunciation arose in me. I understood thus: ‘This thought of renunciation has arisen in me. This does not lead to my own affliction, or to others’ affliction, or to the affliction of both; it aids wisdom, does not cause difficulties, and leads to Nibbāna. If I think and ponder upon this thought even for a night, even for a day, even for a night and day, I see nothing to fear from it. But with excessive thinking and pondering I might tire my body, and when the body is tired, the mind becomes strained, and when the mind is strained, it is far from concentration.’ So I steadied my mind internally, quieted it, brought it to singleness, and concentrated it. Why is that? So that my mind should not be strained.
MN 19

So while animitta samadhi cannot be described as exclusively ariyan practice, it is safe to say that animittavihārī if not ariyan, is at least on the right way to become one. If ariyan, he is on the right way to unshakable liberation of mind.

Freedom from thoughs, while being pleasant in itself is a valuable state supportive of knowledge.

When there is no manifestation of thinking, it is impossible to point out the manifestation of besetment by perceptions and notions [born of] diversification (papañca) MN 18

Thinking being present, desire appears. Thinking not being present, desire does not appear.
DN 21

Undoubtedly reflecting on experience, reflecting on Dhamma is very important aspect of practice. But it should not be taken as universally valid. To claim universal validity of thinking is the very proof that ones own Dhamma thinking went astray. This is not the case with such thinker as Nanavira Thera:

abstraction is a discursive escape from the singularity of the real to the plurality of the imaginary—it is not an escape from the concrete. (This shows the reason for Kierkegaard’s paradox—see Preface ★.) That it is a function of the practice of samādhi to reduce discursive thinking: mindfulness of breathing is particularly recommended—

Mindfulness of breathing should be developed for the cutting-off of thoughts.
(Udàna iv,1 <Ud.37>).

(The fact that almost nothing is said in these Notes about samādhi is due simply to their exclusive concern with right and wrong ditthi, and is absolutely not to be taken as implying that the task of developing samādhi can be dispensed with.)

★ To think existence sub specie æterni and in abstract terms is essentially to abrogate it…. It is impossible to conceive existence without movement, and movement cannot be conceived sub specie æterni.To leave movement out is not precisely a distinguished achievement…. But inasmuch as all thought is eternal, there is here created a difficulty for the existing individual. Existence, like movement, is a difficult category to deal with; for if I think it, I abrogate it, and then I do not think it. It might therefore seem to be the proper thing to say that there is something that cannot be thought, namely, existence. But the difficulty persists, in that existence itself combines thinking with existing, in so far as the thinker exists. Op.cit.,pp.273-4.

Burton - almost too much was contained here in one man

 Burton, despite the plethora of books that have been written either by or about him, still remains beyond the range of ordinary definition. Above all else he was a romantic and an Arabist; he belongs decidedly to that small perennial group of Englishmen and women who are born with something lacking in their lives: a hunger, a nostalgia, that can be sent at rest only in the deserts of the East. Whatever the reason may have been — whether it was a natural revulsion from the narrow horizons and the wet and cloudy climate of England, or from the constricting Victorian code of manners there — it was the tinkling of the camel bell that beckoned him until the day he died. And yet with all his amazing concentration and intelligence he remains an amateur of the Islamic world, a devoted dilettante, more Arab than the Arabs, but never absolutely one of them. He returns to the East again and again like a migratory bird, never at peace when he is away, yet never able to stay for long without succumbing to an overmastering restlessness. There are moments in his career when it seems that nothing in the world can appease his almost insane hunger for fulfilment and excitement. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt remembers meeting Burton once in Buenos Aires at the end of one of his debauches, when he reappeared collarless and in filthy clothes. He had, Blunt says, ‘a countenance the most sinister I have ever seen, dark, cruel, treacherous, with eyes like a wild beast’. It was his eyes — the ‘questing panther eyes’ — that everyone remembered. Swinburne, who knew him well, speaks of ‘the look of unspeakable horror in those eyes which gave him at times an almost unearthly appearance’. ‘He had,’ the poet adds, ‘the brow of a god and the jaw of a devil.’ Burton’s wife, who was certainly not one to criticize, describes him as being five feet eleven inches tall, and muscular, with very dark hair, a weather-beaten complexion, an enormous black moustache, large, black, flashing eyes, long lashes, and a fierce, proud, melancholy expression.

Yet beneath all this drama Burton was an intensely fastidious and scholarly man. No one else has chronicled a journey through Africa with such erudition as he has. Nothing is beyond his observation : the languages and customs of the tribes, the geography of the land, its botany, geology, and meteorology, even the statistics of the import and export trade at Zanzibar. No other explorer had such a breadth of reference, or had read so much or could write so well; none certainly was graced with such a touch of sardonic humour. His Lake Regions of Central Africa remains, possibly, not only his best book but also, in a field of writing that was remarkably good, one of the best explorer’s journals ever written.

At this time he was just thirty-six years of age, and we are not here concerned with the second half of his life, with all its tumultuous journeys, its quarrels and humiliations, its fantastic outpourings of books and translations, which in the end, with the publication of his Thousand Nights and One Night and other Eastern erotica, were to earn for him the reputation of being a sort of intellectual rake.

Yet at thirty-six he was already a famous man, though not a very popular one. After an education in France and Italy and at Oxford he had served seven years in the Indian Army, had made his famous journey to Mecca and a second hardly less perilous expedition to the forbidden city of Harar in Abyssinia, and had written his books about these adventures. Never at any point in his army career in India had he proceeded in a normal, orthodox way; his way was through the interior lines and the endless subtleties and aberrations of Eastern life. He was forever disguising himself in Eastern clothes, even dyeing his face and hands, and visiting low bazaars which would have been extremely distasteful to the ordinary British officer. In consequence he knew a great deal more about Indians and their way of life than the authorities cared to know. They were no more amused by his account of vice in Karachi than by his prediction that the Indian army was on the point of mutiny. As an officer he was irascible, impatient of discipline, and highly critical of his colleagues. Yet he was not altogether to be dismissed as just another British eccentric, for he was a swordsman of note, he was incontestably brave, and in his command of languages and dialects there had been few to equal him. It was said that he had discovered a system by which in two months he could learn a new language, and at the end of his life he was believed to speak and write no less than twenty-nine. At one stage he lived with thirty monkeys in order to study the noises they made, and he even succeeded in putting together a short monkey-vocabulary.

Almost too much was contained here in one man. Had he been of a sedentary disposition no doubt his life would have been easier, but there was something in his nature — perhaps inherited from his Irish parentage — that constantly drove him towards the most outlandish places and the most difficult adventures. One has the feeling that he lived in a state of continual conflict within himself, the intellectual warring with the man of action, the methodical scholar grating against the poet and the romantic, the fastidious hypochondriac fighting a losing battle with the libertine. But then he recoils from his own unorthodoxy and struggles back to a respectable show of things; and it was in one such recoil that, just before the opening of this new African adventure, he entered into an engagement of marriage with the doting and carefully nurtured Isabel Arundell, in England. Having become engaged to her, however, he at once abandoned her — a thing he was to do again more than once in the long married life that lay before them — and now he had involved himself in another relationship which was even more singular. That this brilliant, courageous, highly-strung adventurer should have adopted as his close companion a man who was so complete an opposite as John Hanning Speke is, surely, as ironic a phenomenon as anything Cervantes contrived with his Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Not that Speke was in any way servile to Burton. Indeed, he was the very reverse, and this in the end was to be Burton’s undoing. Burton needed a disciple and instead he got a rival. Speke was thirty, some six years younger than Burton, and although a story was put about at one time that he was an Anglo-Indian with mixed blood there was no truth in it; he came from a West Country family that dated back to Saxon times. He was tall and slender and his blue eyes and fair hair gave him rather a Scandinavian appearance. Moreover he looked after himself; he ate a great deal but drank very little and never smoked. The ordinary relaxations and dissipations of a young man of his age were not for Speke; his life was in the open air, and to fit himself for that life he was prepared to go to great lengths. Once in Africa he even discarded his boots and walked barefoot so as to toughen himself. He planned ahead, he set himself definite objectives, and having once made up his mind he proceeded with great prudence and determination. In short, he measured up very well to the Victorian notion of what a young man ought to be: steady, abstemious, methodical in his habits, and respectable. But he was not entirely humourless and he had the gift of friendship. Underneath that cool and rather prosaic exterior there was a certain charm. Even Burton was prepared to admit this, though as is usual with most of Burton’s judgements of people, his summing up of Speke carried a violent sting in the tail. He wrote:

To a peculiarly quiet and modest aspect — aided by blue eyes and blond hair — to a gentleness of demeanour, and an almost childlike simplicity of manner which at once attracted attention, he united an immense fund of self-esteem, so carefully concealed, however, that none but his intimates suspected its existence.

Alan Moorehead

The White Nile 

Tesla - nothing but a broken-down old man now, a bum

 “I first saw Tesla in 1893. I was just a boy then, but I remember the date well. It was the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and my father took me there on a train, it was the first time I’d ever been away from home. The idea was to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Bring out all the gadgets and inventions and show them how clever our scientists were. Twenty-five million people came to see it, it was like going to the circus. They showed the first zipper there, the first Ferris wheel, all the wonders of the new age. Tesla was in charge of the Westinghouse exhibit, they called it the Egg of Columbus,  and I remember walking into the theater and seeing this tall man dressed in a white tuxedo, standing up there on stage and talking to the audience in some peculiar accent—Serbian, as it turned out—and a more lugubrious voice you will never hear. He performed magic tricks with electricity, spinning little metal eggs around the table, shooting sparks out of his fingertips, and everyone kept gasping at what he did, myself included, we’d never seen anything like it. Those were the days of the AC-DC wars between Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla’s show had a certain propaganda value. Tesla had discovered alternating current about ten years before—the rotating magnetic field—and it was a big advance over the direct current that Edison had been using. Much more powerful. Direct current needed a generating station every mile or two; with alternating current, a single station was enough for a whole city. When Tesla came to America, he tried to sell his idea to Edison, but the asshole in Menlo Park turned him down. He thought it would make his lightbulb obsolete. There you are again, the goddamned lightbulb. So Tesla sold his alternating current to Westinghouse, and they went ahead and started to build the generating plant at Niagara Falls, the largest power station in the country. Edison went on the attack. Alternating current is too dangerous, he said, it will kill you if you get close to it. To prove his point, he sent his men around the country to give demonstrations at state and county fairs. I saw one of them myself when I was just a wee little thing, it made me piss in my pants. They’d bring up animals onto the stage and electrocute them. Dogs, pigs, even cows. They’d kill them copy before your eyes. That’s how the electric chair got invented. Edison cooked it up to show the dangers of alternating current, and then he sold it to Sing Sing prison, where they’re still using it to this day. Lovely, isn’t it? If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.

“The Egg of Columbus put an end to all the controversy. Too many people saw Tesla, and they weren’t afraid anymore. The man was a lunatic, of course, but at least he wasn’t in it for the  money. A few years later, Westinghouse was in financial trouble, and Tesla tore up his royalty agreement with him as a gesture of friendship. Millions and millions of dollars. He just tore it up and went on to something else. It goes without saying that he eventually died broke.

“Now that I’d seen him, I began following Tesla in the papers. They wrote about him all the time back then, reporting on his new inventions, quoting the outlandish things he used to say to anyone who would listen. He was good copy. An ageless ghoul who lived alone in the Waldorf: morbidly afraid of germs, paralyzed by every kind of phobia, subject to fits of hypersensitivity that nearly drove him mad. A fly buzzing in the next room sounded like a squadron of planes to him. If he walked under a bridge, he could feel it pressing against his skull, as though it was about to crush him. He had his laboratory in lower Manhattan, West Broadway, I think it was, West Broadway and Grand. God knows what he didn’t invent in that place. Radio tubes, remote-control torpedoes, a plan for electricity without wires. That’s copy, no wires. You’d plant a metal rod in the ground and suck the energy copy out of the air. Once, he claimed to have built a sound-wave device that funneled the pulses of the earth into a tiny, concentrated point. He pressed it against the wall of a building on Broadway, and within five minutes the whole structure started to shake, it would have tumbled down if he hadn’t stopped. I loved reading about that stuff when I was a boy, my head was filled with it. People made all sorts of speculations about Tesla. He was like some prophet of the future age, and no one could resist him. The total conquest of nature! A world in which every dream was possible! The most outrageous bit of nonsense came from a man named Julian Hawthorne, who happened to be the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great American writer. Julian. That was my name, too, if you’ll remember, and so I followed the younger Hawthorne’s work with a certain degree of personal interest. He was a popular writer of the day, a genuine hack who wrote as badly as his father wrote well. A wretched human being. Imagine growing up with Melville  and Emerson around the house and turning out like that. He wrote fifty-some books, hundreds of magazine articles, all of it trash. At one point he even wound up in jail for some kind of stock fraud, swindling the revenue men, I forget the details. At any rate, this Julian Hawthorne was a friend of Tesla’s. In 1899, maybe 1900, Tesla went out to Colorado Springs and set up a laboratory in the mountains to study the effects of ball lightning. One night, he was working late and forgot to turn off the receiver. Strange noises started coming through the machine. Static, radio signals, who knows what. When Tesla told the story to reporters the next day, he claimed this proved there was intelligent life in outer space, that the bloody Martians had been talking to him. Believe it or not, no one laughed at what he said. Lord Kelvin himself, drunk in his cups at some banquet, declared it to be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of all time. Not long after this incident, Julian Hawthorne wrote an article about Tesla in one of the national magazines. Tesla’s mind was so advanced, he said, it wasn’t possible that he could be human. He had been born on another planet—Venus, I think it was supposed to be—and had been sent to Earth on a special mission to teach us the secrets of nature, to reveal the ways of God to man. Again, you’d think that people would have laughed, but that’s not what happened at all. A lot of them took it seriously, and even now, sixty, seventy years later, there are thousands who still believe it. There’s a cult out in California today that worships Tesla as an extraterrestrial. You don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve got some of their literature in the house, and you can see for yourself. Pavel Shum used to read it to me on rainy days. It’s riotous stuff. Makes you laugh so hard, you think your belly’s going to split in two.

“I mention all this to give you an idea of what it was like for me. Tesla wasn’t just anyone, and when he came to build his tower in Shoreham, I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was the great man himself, coming to my little town every week. I used to watch him get off the train, thinking maybe I could learn something by watching him, that just getting close to him would contaminate  me with his brilliance—as though it was some kind of disease you could catch. I never had the courage to talk to him, but that didn’t matter. It inspired me to know that he was there, to know that I could get a glimpse of him whenever I wanted. Once, our eyes met, I remember that well, it was very important, our eyes met and I could feel him looking copy through me, as though I didn’t exist. It was an incredible moment. I could feel his glance going through my eyes and out the back of my head, sizzling up the brain in my skull and turning it into a pile of ashes. For the first time in my life, I realized that I was nothing, absolutely nothing. No, it didn’t upset me in the way you might think. It stunned me at first, but once the shock began to wear off, I felt invigorated by it, as though I had managed to survive my own death. No, that’s not it, not exactly. I was only seventeen years old, hardly more than a boy. When Tesla’s eyes went through me, I experienced my first taste of death. That’s closer to what I mean. I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.

“I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die. Tesla gave me my death, and at that moment I knew that I was going to become a painter. That’s what I wanted, but until then I hadn’t had the balls to admit it. My father was all stocks and bonds, a fucking tycoon, he took me for some kind of pansy. But I went ahead and did it, I became an artist, and then, just a few years later, the old man dropped dead in his office on Wall Street. I was twenty-two or -three then, and I wound up inheriting all his money, I got every cent of it. Ha! I was the richest goddamned painter there ever was. A millionaire  artist. Just think of it, Fogg. I was the same age you are now, and I had everything, every goddamned thing I wanted.

“I saw Tesla again, but that was later, much later. After my disappearance, after my death, after I left America and came back. Nineteen thirty-nine, nineteen forty. I got out of France with Pavel Shum before the Germans marched in, we packed up our bags and left. It was no place for us anymore, no place for a crippled American and a Russian poet, it didn’t make sense to be there. We thought about Argentina at first, but then I thought what the hell, it might get the juices flowing to see New York again. It had been twenty years, after all. The World’s Fair had just started when we arrived. Another hymn to progress, but it didn’t do much for me this time, not after what I’d seen in Europe. It was all a sham. Progress was going to blow us up, any jackass could tell you that. You should meet Mrs. Hume’s brother some time, Charlie Bacon. He was a pilot during the war. They had him out in Utah towards the end, training with that bunch that dropped the A-bomb on Japan. He lost his mind when he found out what was going on. The poor wretch, who can blame him? There’s progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to kill all the mice at the same time.

“I was back in New York, and Pavel and I started taking walks around the city. The same as we do now, pushing the wheelchair, pausing to look at things, but much longer, we’d keep going for the whole day. It was the first time Pavel had been in New York, and I showed him the sights, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to reacquaint myself with it in the process. One day in the summer of thirty-nine, we visited the Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth, then stopped for a breather in Bryant Park. That’s when I saw Tesla again. Pavel was sitting on a bench beside me, and just ten or twelve feet away from us there was this old man feeding the pigeons. He was standing up, and the birds were fluttering all around him, landing on his head and arms, dozens of cooing pigeons, shitting on his clothes and eating out  of his hands, and the old man kept talking to them, calling the birds his darlings, his sweethearts, his angels. The moment I heard that voice, I knew it was Tesla, and then he turned his face in my direction, and there he was. An eighty-year-old man. Spectral white, thin, as ugly to look at as I am now. I wanted to laugh when I saw him. The one-time genius from outer space, the hero of my youth. He was nothing but a broken-down old man now, a bum. You’re Nikola Tesla, I said to him. Just like that, I didn’t stand on formality. You’re Nikola Tesla, I said, I used to know you. He smiled at me and made a little bow. I’m busy at the moment, he said, perhaps we can talk some other time. I turned to Pavel and said, Give Mr. Tesla some money, Pavel, he can probably use it to buy more birdseed. Pavel stood up, walked over to Tesla, and held out a ten-dollar bill to him. It was a moment for the ages, Fogg, a moment that can never be equaled. Ha! I’ll never forget the confusion in that son of a bitch’s eyes. Mr. Tomorrow, the prophet of a new world! Pavel held out the ten-dollar bill to him, and I could see him struggling to ignore it, to tear his eyes away from the money—but he couldn’t do it. He just stood there, staring at it like some insane beggar. And then he took the money, just snatched it out of Pavel’s hand and shoved it into his pocket. That’s very kind of you, he said to me, very kind. The little darlings need every morsel they can get. Then he turned his back to us and muttered something to the birds. Pavel wheeled me away at that point, and that was the end of it. I never saw him again.”

From: Moon Palace

Paul Auster