Meister Eckhart: if you have given up self, then you have really given up

 Be assured of this as I live: if we are to receive thus from Him, we must be raised up in eternity, above time.

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What is a pure heart? That is pure which is separated and parted from all creatures, for all creatures produce impurity, because they are nothing and nothing is a lack and tarnishes the soul. All creatures are mere nothing, neither angels nor creatures are anything.
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All things are created out of nothing, therefore their true source is nothing, and as far as this noble will inclines to creatures, it is dissipated with creatures in their nothing. The question arises, whether this noble will can be so dissipated that it can never return. The masters generally declare that it can never return insofar as it is dispersed in time. But I say, whenever this will turns back from itself, and from all creation for a moment into its primal source, then the will has its true birthright of freedom and is free, and in this moment all time lost is recovered.

People often say to me, 'Pray for me.' And I think, 'Why do you go out? Why do you not stay within yourself and draw on your own treasure? For you have the whole truth in its essence within you.' That we may thus truly stay within, that we may possess all truth immediately, without distinction, in true blessedness, may God help us. Amen.
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You should be firm and steadfast; that is, you should be the same in weal and woe, in fortune and misfortune, having the noble nature of precious stones; that is, all virtues should be enclosed in you and flow out of you in their true being. You should traverse and transcend all the virtues, drawing virtue solely from its source in that ground where it is one with the divine nature.
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Why did God become man? That I might be born God Himself. God died that I might die to the whole world and all created things.

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It has naught in common with anything. All that is created or creaturely is alien. It is a single one in itself, and takes in nothing from outside.

Our Lord ascended into heaven, beyond all light, beyond all under­ standing and all human ken. The man who is thus translated beyond all light, dwells in eternity. Therefore St. Paul says, "God dwells in a light to which there is no approach" (1 Tim. 6: 16), and that is in itself pure unity. Therefore a man must be slain and wholly dead, devoid of self and wholly without likeness, like to none, and then he is really God-like. For it is God's character, His nature, to be peerless and like no man.
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A man once came to me - it was not long ago - and told me he had given up a great deal of property and goods, in order that he might save his soul. Then I thought, Alas! how little and how paltry are the things you have given up. It is blindness and folly, so long as you care a jot for what you have given up. But if you have given up self, then you have really given up.
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The just man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, and the closer he is to justice, the closer he is to freedom, and the more he is freedom itself. Whatever is created, is not free. So long as there is anything at all above me, that is not God, that oppresses me, however small it may be or whatever its nature; even though it were reason and love, as long as this is something created and not God Himself, it oppresses me, for it is not free.
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In created things - as I have said before - there is no truth. There is something that transcends the created being of the soul, not in contact with created things, which are nothing; not even an angel has it, though he has a clear being that is pure and extensive: even that does not touch it. It is akin to the nature of deity, it is one in itself, and has naught in common with anything. It is a stumbling­ block to many a learned cleric. It is a strange and desert place, and is rather nameless than possessed of a name, and is more unknown than it is known. If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all that this is in itself. But as long as you mind yourself or any thing at all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of color or my eye of taste: so little do you know or discern what God is.
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"Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing." I think this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he1 calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.
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God is the true light: to see it, one must be blind and must strip from God all that is 'something.' A master says whoever speaks of God in any likeness, speaks impurely of Him. But to speak of God with nothing is to speak of Him correctly. When the soul is unified and there enters into total self-abnegation, then she finds God as in Nothing.
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The soul cannot experience love or fear without knowing their occasion. If the soul does not go out into external things, she has come home, and dwells in her simple, pure light. There she does not love, nor does she know anxiety or fear.
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Therefore there is nothing for it but to peel off and shed all that belongs to the soul: her life, her powers, her nature - all must go, and she must stand in the pure light where she is one single image with God: there she will fi nd God. It is characteristic of God that nothing alien enters Him, nothing is superimposed on Him or added to Him. Therefore the soul should have no alien impressions, nothing superimposed, nothing added.
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We use the word homo for women as well as for men, but the Latins refuse it to woman because of her weakness.
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This light is so potent that it is not merely in itself free of time and space, but whatever it falls on it  robs of time and space and all corporeal images and whatever is alien to it. I have said before, if there were no time or place or anything else, all would be one being. If a man were one like this and would cast himself into the ground of humility, he would there be watered with grace.
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...'go forth and depart': go out of this world and leave everything your soul still inclines to. And wherever she is still attached to anything, let her hate it.
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"And I have set you over nations," that is, over all the world, which you must be rid of, and "over kingdoms," that is: what­ ever is more than one is too much, for you must die to all things and be again in-formed in the height, where we dwell in the Holy Ghost.
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It is the sign of a good man that he praises good people. So if a good man praises me, then I am truly praised, but if a bad man praises me, then in truth I am blamed. But if a bad man blames me, then in truth I am praised. "Of that which fills the heart, the mouth speaks" (Matt. 12:34). It is always the sign of a good man that he likes to speak of God, for people like to speak of what they are concerned with. Those who are concerned with tools like to talk about tools, those who are concerned with sermons like to talk about sermons. A good man likes to speak of nothing so much as God.
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St. Dionysius says that holiness is complete purity, liberty, and perfection. Purity means that a man is separated from sin, and this makes the soul free.
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Again, 'holiness' denotes 'what is withdrawn from the world.' God is something and is pure being, and sin is nothing and draws us away from God. ... When she is free from earthly things the soul is holy. ... St. Augustine says, 'If a man would be holy let him forsake mundane things.' I have often said that the soul cannot be pure unless she is reduced to her original purity, as God made her, just as gold cannot be made from copper by two or three roastings: it must be reduced to its primary nature.
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It is easy to make show of virtues, or to talk of them: but to have them in reality is extremely rare.
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Plato: 'What God is, I do not know, but what He is not I know well enough,'

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St. Augustine says he rejoices all the time who rejoices above time. He says, "Rejoice all the time," that is, above time, and "have no care: the Lord is at hand and is near." The soul that is going to rejoice in the Lord must of necessity cast off all care, at least during the time when she yields herself to God.
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St. Paul says, "In the fullness of time God sent His Son" (Gal. 4:4). St. Augustine says what this fullness of time is: 'Where there is no more time, that is the "fullness of time." '
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Another meaning of "fullness of time": if anyone had the skill and the power to gather up time and all that has happened in six thousand years or that will happen till the end of time, into one present Now, that would be the "fullness of time." That is the Now of eternity ...
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The soul in which God is to be born must drop away from time and time from her, she must soar aloft and stand gazing into this richness of God's ...and inasmuch as the soul has dropped away from time, there is there no woe or pain; even distress is turned for her to joy.
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St. Augustine says a good man desires no praise, he desires to be worthy of praise. Now our masters say virtue is so pure, so wholly abstract and detached from all corporeal things in its ground and true nature that nothing whatever can enter into it without defiling the virtue and making it a vice. A single thought or any seeking of one's own advantage, and it is not a true virtue, it is turned to vice. Such is virtue by nature.

Now a pagan master says if a man practices virtue for the sake of anything else but virtue, then it never was a virtue. If he seeks praise or anything else, he is selling virtue. One should never give up a virtue by nature for anything in the world. Therefore a good man desires no praise, but he desires to be worthy of praise. A man should not be sorry if people are angry with him, he should be sorry to deserve the anger.
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How should a man be who is to see God? He must be dead. Our Lord says, "No man can see me and live" (Exod. 33:20).7 Now St. Gregory says he is dead who is dead to the world. Now judge for yourselves what a dead man is like and how little he is touched by anything in the world. If we die to the world we do not die to God.
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He who would hear God must be far removed from people.
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"Then the woman said, 'Sir, give me of the water.' Then our Lord said, 'Bring me your husband,' and she said, 'Sir, I have none.' Then our Lord said, 'You are right, you have none. But you have had five, and the one you have now is not yours.' " St. Augustine says, 'Why does our Lord say, "You are right"? He means to say "the five husbands are the five senses: they had you in your youth according to all their will and desire. Now you have one in your old age and he is not yours: that is the intellect, that you do not obey."
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This birth does not take place once a year or once a month or once a day, but all the time, that is, above time in the expanse where there is no here or now, nor nature nor thought.
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Where is Christ sitting? He is sitting nowhere. Whoever seeks him anywhere will not fnd him. His least part is everywhere, his highest nowhere. A master says that whoever knows anything does not know God. Christ means the anointed, he who is anointed by the Holy Ghost. The masters say sitting denotes rest and implies timelessness. What turns and changes has no rest, and also, resting adds nothing. Our Lord says, "I am God and do not change" (Mal. 3 : 6).
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Thus God cannot work except in the ground of humility, for the deeper we are in humility, the more receptive to God.
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In the silence and peace - there God speaks in the soul and utters Himself completely in the soul.
... Therefore it is a much greater thing to be silent about God than to speak.
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The reason why you find nothing is simply because you seek nothing. All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say they are a trifle or they are anything: they are pure nothing. What has no being, is not. All creatures have no being, for their being consists in the presence of God. If God turned away for an instant from all creatures, they would perish. I have sometimes said, and it is true, that he who possessed the whole world with God would have no more than if he had God by Himself. All creatures have nothing more without God than a midge would have without God - just the same, neither more nor less.

Now listen to a true saying! If a man gave a thousand marks of gold for building churches and convents, that would be a great thing. Yet that man would give far more who could regard a thousand marks as nothing; he would have done far more than the other.
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As I have clearly stated before, Whoever would receive from above must be below in true humility. Know this truly: he who is not fully below obtains and receives nothing, however small. If you have an eye to yourself or to any thing or person, you are not right under and will get nothing, but if you are right under, you will receive fully and per­ fectly. It is God's nature to give, and His being depends on His giving to us when we are under. If we are not, and receive nothing, we do Him violence and kill Him. If we cannot do this to Him, then we do it to ourselves, as far as in us lies. If you would truly give Him all, see to it that you put yourself in true humility under God, raising up God in your heart and your understanding. "Our Lord God sent His Son into the world" (Gal. 4:4). I once said here, God sent His Son into the world in the soul's fullness of time, when she had fi nished with time.3 When the soul is free from time and place, then the Father sends His Son into the soul. This is the meaning of the words "The best gift and perfection come from above, from the Father of lights."
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Moses says, "No man has seen God" (d. Exodus 33:20). As long as we are men and as long as anything human attaches to us and we are approaching, we cannot see God; we must be raised up and set in pure rest, and thus see God.
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Anything, however small, adhering to the soul, prevents us from seeing God. ...The soul that is to fi nd God must leap over and pass beyond all creatures. ...Boethius says, 'If you would know truth clearly, cast off joy, and fear, expectation, and hope, and pain.' Joy is a means, fear is a means, expectation and hope and pain are all means. As long as you regard them and they regard you, you cannot see God.
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The first point: it becomes detached from here and now. 'Here and now' means the same as place and time. Now is the minimum of time; it is not a portion of time or a part of time. It is just a taste of time, a tip of time, and end of time. Yet, small though it be, it must go: everything that touches or smacks of time must go. Again, it is detached from here. 'Here' means the same thing as place. The place where I am standing is small, but however small, it must still go before I can see God.
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If a man were to rest on nothing, and cling to nothing, then, if heaven and earth were overturned, he would remain unmoved, since he would cling to nothing, and nothing would cling to him.

Selected from sermons 13 - 42
Translated and Edited by Maurice O'C. Walshe

Death Today -The Triumph of Medicalization

 

Everything proceeds as if the romantic model as it existed in the middle of the nineteenth century underwent a gradual dismantling. First, in the late nineteenth century, there were the changes that occurred in the early stages of dying, the period of very serious illness during which the patient is kept in ignorance and isolation: the case of Ivan Ilyich. Then, in the twentieth century, beginning in World War I, came the taboo against mourning and everything in public life that reminded one of death, at least the so-called natural (i.e., nonviolent) death. The image of death was contracting like the diaphragm of a photographic lens being stopped down. There remained only the actual moment of death, which at the time of Ivan Ilyich, and long afterward, retained its traditional characteristics: the reviewing of the life, the public quality, the scene of the farewells. But after World War II even this last survival disappeared, owing to the complete medicalization of death. This is the third and final stage in the process of reversal.

The essential fact is the well-known advance in surgical and medical techniques, which bring into play complex equipment, competent personnel, and frequent interventions. These techniques can only be fully effective in the hospital, at least so it has been believed until our own time. The hospital is not only a place of medical expertise, observation, and instruction, it is a focal point where auxiliary services such as pharmaceutical laboratories and rare, costly, and delicate equipment are concentrated, giving the hospital a local monopoly on death.

As soon as an illness seems serious, the doctor usually sends his patient to the hospital. Advances in surgery have brought parallel advances in resuscitation and in the reduction or elimination of pain and sensation. These procedures are no longer used only before, during, or after an operation; they have been extended to all the dying, in order to relieve their pain. For example, the dying man is given food and water intravenously, thus sparing him the discomfort of thirst. A tube runs from his mouth to a pump that drains his mucus and prevents him from choking. Doctors and nurses administer sedatives, whose effects they can control and whose doses they can vary. All this is well known today and explains the pitiful and henceforth classic image of the dying man with tubes all over his body.

By a swift and imperceptible transition someone who was dying came to be treated like someone recovering from major surgery. This is why, especially in the cities, people stopped dying at home—just as they stopped being born at home. In New York City in 1967, 75 percent of all deaths occurred in hospitals or similar institutions, as compared with 69 percent in 1955 (60 percent for the United States as a whole). The proportion of deaths in hospitals has risen steadily since then. In Paris it is common for an old man with a cardiac or pulmonary condition to be hospitalized so that he can have a painless death. It might be possible to provide the same care by hiring a visiting nurse, but home care is less well covered, if at all, by Social Security. It also imposes on the family a burden that it can no longer bear, especially when the wife works and there is no child, sister, cousin, or neighbor available.

At the beginning of this chapter I talked about the indecency of serious illness, the physical distaste it inspires, the need to conceal it from others and from oneself. To square their conscience, the family confuses their unconscious intolerance for the sordid aspects of disease with the requirements of cleanliness and hygiene. In most cases, especially in large cities like Paris, the family has made no attempt to keep the dying at home or to bring about social legislation less favorable to their departure.

The hospital is no longer merely the place where one is cured or where one dies because of a therapeutic failure; it is the scene of the normal death, expected and accepted by medical personnel. In France this is not true of the private clinics, which do not want to frighten their clientele, and also perhaps their nurses and doctors, by the presence of death. When death does arrive, when one is unable to avoid it, they immediately send the body home; one is regarded as having died in the eyes of the state, the medical expert, and the world.

This dispatching of the body is not possible in public hospitals, which tend therefore to be crowded with the very old, the incurable, and the dying. In some countries there is a movement to keep these patients in places that specialize in painless death and preparation for it, places where they could avoid the disadvantages of a medical organization designed for another purpose, to keep the patient alive at all costs. This is the new conception of the “hospice,” the model for which is the Hospice of Saint Christopher, in the suburbs of London.

Today Ivan Ilyich would have been sent to the hospital. Perhaps he would have been cured, and there would be no novel.

This transfer of death to the hospital has had profound consequences. It has accelerated an evolution that began in the late nineteenth century and pushed it to its logical conclusion. Death has been redefined: It has ceased to be the instant that it became in the seventeenth century, but whose punctuality it had not until then possessed. In the traditional mentality, the sense of the moment of death was softened by the certainty of a continuation: not necessarily the immortality of the Christians, but a subdued prolongation of some kind. After the seventeenth century, the more widespread belief in the duality of the soul and the body and in their separation at death eliminated the margin of time. Death became an instant.

The medicalized death of today has restored this margin, but by borrowing time from this life, not from the beyond. The time of death has been both lengthened and subdivided. Sociologists have the satisfaction of being able to apply their classificatory and typological methods; thus, there is brain death, biological death, and cellular death. The old signs, such as cessation of heartbeat or respiration, are no longer sufficient. They have been replaced by the measurement of cerebral activity, the electroencephalogram.

The time of death can be lengthened to suit the doctor. The doctor cannot eliminate death, but he can control its duration, from the few hours it once was, to several days, weeks, months, or even years. It has become possible to delay the fatal moment; the measures taken to soothe pain have the secondary effect of prolonging life.

Sometimes this prolonging of life becomes an end in itself, and hospital personnel refuse to discontinue the treatments that maintain an artificial life. The world will remember the Shakespearean agony of Franco, surrounded by his twenty doctors. The most sensational case is no doubt that of Karen Ann Quinlan, an American girl of twenty-two who, for thirteen months, was kept on a respirator and fed and given antibiotics intravenously. No one expected that she would ever regain consciousness. In spite of the pressure of the family and a court order, the hospital persisted in keeping her alive artifically because she was not in a state of brain death, that is, her electroencephalogram was still registering. It is not our purpose here to discuss the ethical problems raised by this rare case of “therapeutic tenacity.” What interests us is that medicine can cause someone who is almost dead to remain alive almost indefinitely: and not only medicine but the hospital itself, that is, the whole system that turns medical activity into a business and a bureaucracy that obeys strict regulations regarding method and discipline.

The example of Karen Ann Quinlan is exceptional, a borderline case caused specifically by the persistence of cerebral activity. Today doctors usually discontinue treatment when brain death has been determined, thus allowing vegetative life to be extinguished as well. In 1967 there was a public outcry when it was discovered that in a certain hospital in England the staff was marking the beds of certain old people NTBR, that is, “not to be resuscitated.”22

The duration of death may therefore depend on an agreement involving the family, the hospital, and even the court, or on a sovereign decision of the doctor. The dying man, who had already formed the habit of confiding to survivors wishes he no longer included in his will, abdicated gradually, abandoning to his family the control of the end of his life, and of his death. The family, in turn, passed this responsibility on to the scientific miracle worker, who possessed the secrets of health and sickness and who knew better than anyone else what should be done.

It has been noted that the doctor is less mysterious and less absolute in the home than he is in the hospital. This is because in the hospital he is part of a bureaucracy whose power depends on discipline, organization, and anonymity. These hospital conditions have given rise to a new model of medicalized death.

Death has ceased to be accepted as a natural, necessary phenomenon. Death is a failure, a “business lost.”23 This is the attitude of the doctor, who claims the control of death as his mission in life. But the doctor is merely a spokesman for society. When death arrives, it is regarded as an accident, a sign of helplessness or clumsiness that must be put out of mind. It must not interrupt the hospital routine, which is more delicate than that of any other professional milieu. It must therefore be discreet. What a shame that Mélisande did not die in a hospital! She would have made a good patient. The doctors and nurses would have made a fuss over her and remembered her fondly. It may be desirable to die without being aware of it, but it is also correct to die without anyone else being aware of it either.

If death is too noticeable, too dramatic, and too noisy, most especially, if it is also dignified, it arouses in the staff an emotion quite incompatible with their professional life, still less with hospital routine. For death has been brought under control in order to reconcile an accidental, sometimes inevitable phenomenon with the psychological security of the hospital.

Hospital personnel have defined an “acceptable style of facing death.” This is the death of the man who pretends that he is not going to die. He will be better at this deception if he does not know the truth himself. His ignorance is more necessary than it was in the time of Ivan Ilyich. His ignorance is for him a factor in his recovery, and for the hospital staff a necessary condition of their efficiency.24What today we call the good death, the beautiful death, corresponds exactly to what used to be the accursed death: the mors repentina et improvisa, the death that gives no warning. “He died tonight in his sleep: He just didn’t wake up. It was the best possible way to die.”

But today, with the advances in medicine, such an easy death has become rare. It takes skill to bring the slow death of the hospital closer to the mors repentina. The surest method is no doubt the ignorance of the patient. But this strategy is sometimes foiled by his diabolical cunning in interpreting the attitudes of the doctor and nurses. So, instinctively, unconsciously, the staff forces the patient to feign ignorance. In some cases the silence takes the form of a conspiracy; in others, fear of a confession or a call for help cuts off all communication.

The patient’s passivity is maintained by sedatives, especially at the end, when the pain becomes unbearable and would otherwise produce the “horrible screams” of an Ivan Ilyich or a Mme. Bovary. Morphine controls the great crises, but it also diminishes a consciousness that the patient then recovers only intermittently.

Such is today’s “acceptable style of facing death.” The opposite is the “embarrassingly graceless dying,” the bad death, the ugly death without elegance or delicacy, the disturbing death. This is always the death of a patient who knows. In some cases he is rebellious and aggressive; he screams. In other cases, which are no less feared by the medical team, he accepts his death, concentrates on it, and turns to the wall, loses interest in the world around him, cuts off communication with it. Doctors and nurses reject this rejection, which denies their existence and discourages their efforts. In it they recognize the hated image of death as a phenomenon of nature, whereas they had turned it into an accident of illness that must be brought under control.25In the case, fortunately more frequent, of the good death, one sometimes ends up not knowing whether the patient is dead or alive. This is the most desirable situation. Thus, David Sudnow tells us that a young student nurse in an American hospital could not get a seriously wounded man to drink through a straw. She called her supervisor for help. “Why, honey, of course he won’t respond. He’s been dead for twenty minutes!” It would have been a beautiful death for everyone if the young student nurse had not had an attack of hysterics.26

In charity hospitals the staff takes advantage of this uncertainty to select the most favorable moment for certain procedures. For example, they close the eyes of the dying a little while before they die; it’s easier. Or they arrange to have them die in the early morning, just before the night shift leaves. These are presumptuous and extreme acts in unsupervised and obscure places, the refuges of the old and abandoned. Yet their very crudeness reveals some aspects of that bureaucratization and “management” of death that are inseparable from the hospital as institution and the medicalization of death, and are to be found everywhere. Death no longer belongs to the dying man, who is first irresponsible, later unconscious, nor to the family, who are convinced of their inadequacy. Death is regulated and organized by bureaucrats whose competence and humanity cannot prevent them from treating death as their “thing,” a thing that must bother them as little as possible in the general interest.27The Return of the Warning;The Demand for Dignity; Death Today

This was the situation at the end of the 1950s. It has changed, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, in one essential respect: the ignorance of the dying. But in France, the attitude of the early twentieth century still exists. In 1966 the journal Médecine de France published a discussion between the philosopher Jankélévitch and three doctors, J.-R. Debray, P. Denoix, and P. Pichat. “The liar is the one who tells the truth,” declared Jankélévitch. “I am against the truth, passionately against the truth.” (It is a position that is accompanied by a scrupulous respect for life and its prolongation: “Even if you should prolong the life of the patient by only twenty-four hours, your efforts would be worthwhile. There is no reason to deprive him of this day. For a doctor, life itself has value, no matter how diminished or pathetic the person who is living it.”)

Robert Laplane understands the complexity of the problem: “M. Denoix was right to stress that there are cases in which the truth must be told in order to relieve the patient. I have said that most patients ask only not to be confronted with the truth about their condition. This is true in the majority of cases, but it also happens sometimes that we doctors are afraid of this truth, that we take refuge behind our authority, that we play hide-and-seek.… There are doctors who never say anything. The lie of convenience very often takes the form of silence.”

But in the United States in the past few years a complete reversal of attitudes has been taking place. The change was not initiated by the medical fraternity; it has been imposed on them by a group of psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists who became aware of the pitiful situation of the dying and decided to defy the taboo. It was not easy. Before 1959 when Herman Feifel wanted to interview the dying about themselves, no doubt for the first time, hospital authorities were indignant. They found the project “cruel, sadistic, traumatic.” In 1965 when Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was looking for dying persons to interview, the heads of the hospitals and clinics to whom she addressed herself protested, “Dying? But there are no dying here!” There could be no dying in a well-organized and respectable institution. They were mortally offended.

But this resistance on the part of hospital personnel could not discourage the interest and sympathy of a few pioneers, who rapidly gained adherents. The first manifestation of the new attitude was an anthology edited by Feifel in 1959, The Meaning of Death.28 Ten years later another collective work, The Dying Patient, contained a bibliography of 340 titles published after 1955, all in English, on the subject of dying, as distinct from funerals, cemeteries, or mourning. The quantity of this literature gives some idea of the movement that shook the little world of the social sciences and that eventually reached the medical and hospital establishment. It was a woman who played a vital role in this effort, because she was a doctor and knew how to talk to her colleagues, in spite of many discouragements and humiliations. I refer, of course, to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose fine book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, has had a profound impact in America and England, where more than a million copies have been sold.29The new trend, born of pity for the alienated dying, was directed toward the amelioration of the actual process of death by restoring to the dying man his forgotten dignity. Banished from medical expertise except in cases of legal medicine, regarded as a temporary failure of science, death had not been studied for its own sake; it had been dismissed as a subject of philosophy that had nothing to do with science. Recent research is attempting to restore its reality and reintegrate it into medical study, from which it disappeared after the end of the nineteenth century.

The doctor, who along with the priest had long been the witness and messenger of death, these days has no experience of death outside the hospital. But it is now believed that a better-informed doctor will be able to prepare his patients better and will be less inclined to take refuge in silence.

It is the dignity of death that is at issue. This dignity requires first of all that death be recognized, not only as a real state but as an important event, an event that should not be conjured away.

One of the conditions of this recognition is that the dying man be informed of his state. English and American doctors have yielded to the pressure very rapidly, no doubt because it enabled them to share a responsibility that they were beginning to find intolerable.

Are we on the eve of a new and profound change in attitudes? Is the rule of silence becoming obsolete?

On May 13, 1976, an American television network broadcast an hour-long film called Dying, which received considerable attention, especially in the press, although many Americans ignored it.

The director, Michael Roemer, observed death in postindustrial America the way an ethnologist might study a primitive society. He took his camera into the homes and hospital rooms of terminal cancer patients and their families and lived intimately with them over a period of time. The resulting documentary is extraordinary and upsetting. It reveals the present state of public opinion better than all the literature published in the last few years.

One trait is common to the four cases presented and corresponds closely to the traditional death with which we are familiar. The patient and his family are given very specific notification by the doctor of the diagnosis and the probable course of the disease.

The first case is presented in the form of a monologue, in which a young woman in her thirties tells about the illness and death of her husband. They both knew what was happening. Indeed, the awareness the couple had of the situation, far from traumatizing them, brought them closer than ever. Surprising as it may seem, the wife said that the very last days were the happiest and most beautiful of her life. More than a century later, I seem to hear the accents of Albert or Alexandrine de La Ferronays. Here in the middle of the twentieth century, I recognize the romantic model of the beautiful death.

The fourth and last case is the long passion of a black preacher in his sixties. This time the camera takes us inside his modest home, among his large and harmonious family: his wife, whose simplest gestures have the natural nobility of a great tragedian; his married children; his grandchildren, still very young. He has cancer of the liver. We attend the consultation during which the doctor tells him and his wife that he is going to die. We sense what is going through their minds: a mixture of sadness and resignation, pity and tenderness, and faith. We are in church on Sunday when the minister makes his farewells to the congregation, who punctuate his sermon with short cries of response. We accompany him and his son on a pilgrimage to his childhood home in the Deep South, to visit the grave of his parents. When death approaches, we are at his bedside in the crowded room in which the whole family is gathered, the old and the young; we see the children come to kiss his deeply lined but peaceful face for the last time. Finally, we attend the funeral ceremony in the church, we watch the congregation file by the open coffin, we hear the singing and the tears. There is no mistaking it: This is the tame death, the familiar and public death.

The other two cases have nothing in common with our ancient or known models. On the contrary, they are typical of the new death of today among young adults in the comfortable milieu of the golden suburbs.

First there is the case of a young woman of thirty who has cancer of the brain and who lives with her mother. Her shaved head has been disfigured by the operation she has undergone, her body is half paralyzed, her speech difficult. However, she speaks to us very openly, in a detached manner, about her life, and about the death she expects any day now. She is not afraid of it; one must die; she doesn’t care when it is, as long as she is unconscious, in a coma.

She impresses us by her courage, but also by a complete absence of emotion, as if death were something of no importance, mors ut nihil. This resembles the omnia ut nihil of the seventeenth century, except that here the nihil has lost its tragic sense and has become quite ordinary.

The patient would be very much alone without the silent and attentive presence of her mother. As the disease grows worse, it reduces her to the state of dependence of a young child or animal who must be fed with a spoon and who can do nothing except open her mouth. Outside the complicity that binds mother and daughter beyond tears or confessions lies the solitude of beautiful empty houses and large deserted gardens. They are totally alone.

The other case takes place in a similar setting. A man of about the same age also has cancer of the brain, but he is married and the father of two teenage sons. His wife, who is traumatized (and perhaps upset by the presence of the camera), is trying to avoid all emotion and to convey an air of realism and efficiency. One afternoon she calls her husband in the hospital to inform him that she has succeeded in obtaining a plot in the cemetery. She speaks in a detached tone, as if she were talking about a hotel reservation. She has not even bothered to send the children out of the room, and they play on as if they were oblivious to everything.

But beneath this facade, the poor woman is ready to crack. One day, at the end of her rope, she goes to see the doctor—still on camera—in revolt. Her husband is so weak that he has become indifferent and takes no part in the life of the family. And yet the interminable prolongation of his life makes it impossible for her to remarry, to find another father for her children. And tomorrow it may be too late! One senses her wishes, but the doctor refuses to understand.

In the last images we see the patient, after he has left the hospital for the last time, back in his beautiful house and garden, imprisoned in a silence from which he will never emerge. The nonverbal communication that existed between mother and daughter in the preceding case is absent. Here the solitude is total.

The new phenomenon revealed by Dying is not so much this solitude as the desire to divulge things having to do with death and to speak about them naturally instead of hiding them. But the difference is not as great as it appears, and the exhibition achieves the same purpose as the silence of the taboo: to stifle emotion, to desensitize behavior. Indeed, the audacity of Dying seems more effective than the shame of the taboo. It succeeds even better in ruling out all possibility of communication; it ensures the most perfect isolation for the dying. Both attitudes, which are really very close, are responses to the uneasiness caused by the continued existence of death in a world that is eliminating suffering: moral suffering—hell and sin—in the nineteenth century; and physical suffering—pain and disease—in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century. Death should have disappeared along with disease, but it persists; it is not even any longer in retreat. Its persistence is a scandal whose presence calls up two possible attitudes. One is the attitude of the taboo, which consists in behaving as if death did not exist by banishing it from daily life. The other is the attitude of Dying: accepting death as a technical fact but reducing it to the state of an ordinary thing, as insignificant as it is necessary.

But even in the second case, some people think that the state of the dying has become intolerable. Dying must be made bearable, either by allowing the natural dignity of the dying to reappear, as in the case of Mélisande, or by means of a training which is learned like an art, a training such as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gives at the University of Chicago. There students behind a one-way mirror are able to observe dying persons who have agreed to talk about themselves with men of feeling and science, the new masters of the art of dying. Those who receive this training may be able to alleviate some of the effects of death in the world of technology, but this does not mean that they will be able to eliminate death itself.

In the current debate, those who are not satisfied by such alleviations and who reject them as ambiguous compromises are led to contest the medicalization of society. Such is the case of Ivan Illich, who has the courage to take his idea to its logical conclusion. For him, the medicalization of death is only one case, albeit a particularly significant and serious one, of the general medicalization of culture. For him, the improvement of death would necessarily involve its demedicalization and the demedicalization of society as a whole.30But Ivan Illich is only one man. On the whole, the debate opened in 1959 by Feifel has remained confined to an intelligentsia, albeit a large one. Now and then this intelligentsia has contact with a wider public, which on these rare occasions reveals its underlying uneasiness and anxiety. For the reopening of discussion on death has not shaken society’s determination to repress the real image of death. I have some recent examples that show the persistence of the rejection of mourning. When a young European woman living in the United States suddenly lost her mother, she went abroad to attend her funeral, but she came back as soon as she could, dazed and suffering, to be with her husband and children. She hoped to have the support of her friends, but the telephone did not ring. Like Geoffrey Gorer’s sister-in-law, she was in quarantine: mourning in reverse. This is a very unusual attitude in a society where people are quick to feel pity and are always accessible.

Some people want to improve death in the hospital, provided death does not leave the hospital. However, there is a breach in the medical defense system through which life and death, so carefully separated, may well come together in a flood of popular protest. This is the question of euthanasia and the power to discontinue or prolong treatment.

Today nobody is really consciously concerned about the manner of his own death. But the image of another person dying in a tangle of tubes all over his body, breathing artificially, is beginning to break through taboos to galvanize a sensibility that has long been paralyzed. Perhaps public opinion will be aroused and will seize on the subject with the passion it has shown for other vital issues, notably abortion. Many things would be changed. Claudine Herzlich asks, “Are we about to witness a resurgence of the problems of death that will go beyond professional circles and eventually bring about a social movement as important as that of abortion? We know today that in some cases, at least, people die [or do not die] because someone else has decided it was time. Are people going to demand to die when they are ready to die?”31 We have no idea yet, but the very fact that the question is being raised in this way is significant. The most recent model of death is associated with the medicalization of society, that is, with the segment of industrial society in which the power of technology has been most widely accepted and is still least contested. For the first time, people are questioning the unconditional benevolence of this power. It is in this area of the collective conciousness that a change in contemporary attitudes might well occur.

Ariès, Philippe [date]

The hour of our death

Jean Starobinski - Poppaea's Veil

The hidden fascinates. "Why did Poppaea conceive the idea of masking the beauties of her face, except to make them dearer to her lovers?" (Montaigne). In dissimulation and absence there is a strange force that compels the spirit to turn toward the inaccessible and, for the sake of conquest, to sacrifice all it possesses. Fairy tales, works of realism as far as the mechanism of desire is concerned, know only hidden treasures, concealed in some dark depth. If these treasures must belong to someone, they will go to the one who has renounced everything, even the hope of becoming their master. The essence of mystery is to compel us to regard as worthless and tiresome anything that does not make it more easily accessible. Yes, the shadow has the power to make us release all our prey simply because it is shadow and provokes in us a nameless anticipation. Fascination persuades us, so that we may belong to it, to give up everything, even concern for our own lives. It takes all we have simply by promising everything we want. At first we were able to dream of laying hold of what lay hidden, but the roles were quickly reversed: all at once we found ourselves passive and paralyzed, having renounced our will and allowed ourselves to be inhabited by the imperious call of absence.

Moralists, of course, have deemed this sacrifice outrageous. What! Lose all that one has for an illusion! Allow oneself to be robbed of the present and to live forever after in destructive ecstasy? Scorn visible beauty for love of what does not exist? The passion for the hidden has not lacked critics, who reproved it sometimes for concealing the allure of the devil, sometimes that of God. But what we need is an explanation of the passion not unduly hasty to dismiss it as a mystification.

The hidden is the other side of a presence. The power of absence, if we attempt to describe it, leads us to the power possessed in varying degrees by certain real objects. These objects point beyond themselves toward a magical space. They are indices of something they are not.
Obstacle and interposed sign, Poppaea's veil engenders a perfection that is immediately stolen away, and by its very flight demands to be recaptured by our desire. Thus the impediment created by the obstacle gives rise to a vast profundity, which is mistaken for essential. The fascination emanates from a real presence that obliges us to prefer what it hides, to prefer something remote, which it prevents us from attaining even as it offers itself. Our gaze is irresistibly drawn into the vertiginous void that forms in the object of fascination: an infinity opens up, devouring the real object by which it made itself sensible. In truth, if the object of fascination calls for the abdication of our will, it is because that object itself is annihilated by the absence it provokes. This strange power in a way stems from a lack, an insufficiency in the object. Rather than hold our fascination, it allows itself to be transcended in a perspective of the imagination, an obscure dimension. But objects can seem insufficient only in response to an exigency in our gaze, which, awakened to desire by an allusive presence and finding no employment for all its energies in the visible thing, transcends it and loses itself in an empty space, headed for a beyond from which there is no return. Poppaea runs the risks that her face, unveiled, will disappoint her lovers, or that her eyes, wide open and beckoning, will seem still covered by a dark veil: desire can no longer cease to search elsewhere.

To be fascinated is the height of distraction. It is to be prodigiously inattentive to the world as it is. But this inattention in a way rests upon the very objects it neglects. Having responded too impetuously to the veiled seductress, our gaze hurtles beyond the possessable body and is captured by the void and consumed in the night. Poppaea Sabina (in the "portrait" of her painted by an unknown master of the School of Fontainebleau) allows her body to be glimpsed beneath the gauze, and smiles: she is not culpable. Her lovers do not die for her; they die for the promises she does not keep.

If one looks at the etymology, one finds that to denote directed vision French resorts to the word regard [gaze], whose root originally referred not to the act of seeing but to expectation, concern, watchfulness, consideration, and safeguard, made emphatic by the addition of a prefix expressing a redoubling or return. Regarder [to look at, to gaze upon] is a movement that aims to recapture, reprendre sous garde, [to place in safekeeping once again]. The gaze does not exhaust itself immediately. It involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery or reconquering what is about to escape. What interests me is the fate of the impatient energy that inhabits the gaze and desires something other than what it is given. It lies in wait, hoping that a moving form will come to a standstill or that a figure at rest will reveal a slight tremor, insistent on touching the face behind the mask, or seeking to shake off the bewildering fascination with depths in order to rediscover the shimmering reflections that play on the water's surface.

Some, invoking the example of Greece, have argued that the realm of the visible, the realm of light, was also the realm of measure and order: figures circumscribed by their forms, space made rhythmic by a harmonious module, by a law granting to each vantage an empire at once sovereign and precarious. But there is a hidden extravagance in the apparent triumph of measure. The will to delineate, geometrize, and fix stable relationships implies a violence beyond the natural experience of the gaze. The space of geometrical measurement is the product of a vigilant effort, which, compass in hand, revises the affective prejudices to which living space owes its "deformations." It is hard to deny that in this there is extravagance of the second degree, which consists in seeking equilibrium by rejecting the spontaneous extravagance of desire and anxiety.

It is difficult for the gaze to limit itself to ascertaining appearances. By its very nature it must ask for more. In fact this impatience inhabits all the senses. Beyond the usual synesthesias, each sense aspires to exchange its powers with the others. In a celebrated Elegy Goethe said: the hands want to see, the eyes want to caress. We may add: the gaze wants to speak. It is willing to give up the faculty of immediate perception in exchange for the gift of fixing more permanently whatever flees its grasp. By contrast, speech often seeks to efface itself in order to clear the way for pure vision, for intuition perfectly oblivious of the noise of words. In each realm the highest powers are apparently those that impose a sudden, overwhelming substitution. And do not forget that the night of the blind is replete with unfulfilled gazes or, rather, gazes diverted toward the hands, converted into gropings. In the absence of a visual function, the gaze, an intentional relation with others and with the horizon of experience, may assume compensatory forms, proceeding by way of an attentively cocked ear or through the fingertips. For by gaze in this context I mean not so much the faculty of collecting images as that of establishing a relation.

Of all the senses, sight is the one most obviously ruled by impatience. A magical wish, never entirely fulfilled yet never discouraged, accompanies each of our glances: to seize, to undress, to petrify, to penetrate: to fascinate—that is, to illuminate the flame of the hidden in an immobile pupil. All are implicit actions, which do not always remain mere intentions. By revealing the intensity of desire, sometimes the gaze produces real effects. "How many children if looks could impregnate! How many dead if looks could kill! The streets would be filled with corpses and pregnant women." Can it be that Valery did not notice all the corpses and pregnant women in our streets?

If not betrayed by an excess or want of light, the gaze is never satisfied. It opens the way to an unrelenting assault. Intelligence, cruelty, and tenderness only begin to tell the tale. They remain unappeased, unslaked. These passions awaken in the gaze and grow through the act of vision, in which, however, they find too little to satisfy them. Sight opens all space to desire, but desire is not satisfied with seeing. Visible space attests to both my power to discover and my powerlessness to attain. Everyone knows how sad the concupiscent gaze can be.

Seeing is a dangerous act. It is the passion of Lyncaeus, but Bluebeard's wives die of it. On this point there is striking unanimity in myth and legend. Orpheus, Narcissus, Oedipus, Psyche, and Medusa teach us that the soul that seeks to extend the scope of its vision is destined to blindness and night: "Truly, the dagger fell from her hands, but not the lamp. She had too much to do, and had not yet seen all there was to see" (La Fontaine). The burning of the oil (or of the gaze) awakens the sleeping god and brings about Psyche's dizzying fall into the desert.

The gaze, which enables consciousness to escape from the place occupied by the body, is an excess in the strict sense of the word. Whence the severity of the Church Fathers: of all the senses, sight is the most fallible, the most naturally culpable—"Do not fix your eyes on an object that pleases them, and remember that David perished by a glance" (Bossuet). The "concupiscence of the eyes" includes and epitomizes all others: it is the quintessential evil. "Under the eyes all the other senses are in some way included. And in common parlance to feel and to see are often the same thing." Here Bossuet is merely repeating Saint Augustine. Our hunger to see is perpetually subject to frivolous curiosity, idle distraction, and cruel spectacle. The least pretext is enough to capture our eyes, to lure our spirit from the path Poppaea's Veil of salvation. Augustine found it most difficult to deny himself the pleasures of the circus. But the arena is not the only place where animals devour one another, and everything becomes theater for the ascetic unfaithful to his resolutions: "When I sit at home and watch a lizard catching flies or a spider wrapping insects that fall into its web, is not my attention conquered?" Yet the very same people who castigate the indiscretion and dispersion of the worldly gaze invoke the same power to direct it toward "supernatural light" and intelligible forms. What they see as the natural extravagance of the gaze ceases to be culpable if directed beyond this world. Augustine, wresting himself free of the temptations of light, "that queen of colors," hopes that darkness will favor the advent of a new light, this time spiritual, invisible to the eye of the flesh. Access to the idea, whose very name refers to the act of seeing, is "like a vision emancipated from the limitations of sight" (Maurice Blanchot). In carnal curiosity as well as spiritual intuition, the will-to-see claims second sight as its right.

It is my hunger to see more, to repudiate and transcend my provisional limits, that impels me to question what I have already seen, to hold that it is a * misleading decor. Thus begins the strange rebellion of those who, in order to grasp reality beyond appearances, make themselves enemies of what is immediately visible: they denounce the illusion of appearances without suspecting that by revoking the privileges of first sight they leave second sight little hope, in their impatience reducing the admirable theater of vision to ruins. Probably they have no choice. In the exigent gaze lies a whole critique of the primary data of vision. This critique cannot avoid discourse in one of its many forms: geometry, with its logical arguments, corrects the vague apprehensions of the eye with the purity of the abstract; poetic language seeks to transpose visible appearance into a new essence, because to speak, to name things, tends to prolong (if not complete) the work of safekeeping that in the gaze remains forever incomplete and precarious. The extremity of the gaze is already something more than gaze, and pursues its aim in the act whereby vision renounces and sacrifices itself. Yet criticism, having condemned deceptive appearances, is not incapable of turning on itself. If a little reflection takes us away from the sensible world, a more demanding philosophy brings us back—as if, having braved the limits of the horizon and traversed the void, the gaze had no alternative but to return to immediate evidence: everything recommences here. Montaigne, in this view, would have proposed the most aggressive critiques of appearance in the name of a truth to be unveiled, a fascination to be conjured away, attacking masks and shams only to arrive in the end at a wisdom that would allow itself to be "molded by appearances" and would accept the veil by means of which Poppaea is able to arouse in us such delicious discomfort and impatience. Skepticism first warns us against universal deception, then leads us very gently to the idea of recommencing knowledge with a wisdom that, under the protection of the reflexive gaze, trusts in the senses and in the world the senses reveal.

My studies here are all concerned in one way or another with literary works that deal with the pursuit of a hidden reality, a reality temporarily dissimulated yet within the grasp of anyone who knows how to force it out of hiding and compel its presence. What was needed, accordingly, was to retrace the history of a gaze lured by desire from discovery to discovery. It was also necessary to show, in a variety of circumstances, how the pursuit of what lies hidden, being an exorbitant ambition, poses the risk of failure and disappointment.

This book is much less and much more than a systematic exploration of a theme. Much less, because I felt no need to catalog all the expressive means (physiognomy, seduction, language of signs) and perceptual devices (world view, interplay of surfaces and depths) involved in the exercise of vision. Much more, because by consistently attending to the fate of the demand implicit in the gaze and unsatisfied by first appearances, I was obliged to trace an adventure that was almost always played out in the interval between the intended prey and the eye that wished to subdue it. The gaze was the living link between the person and the world, between self and others: the writer's every glance questions anew the status of reality (and of literary realism) as well as the status of communication (and of human community). Hence I am not dealing with an artificially isolated theme of literature. In this inquiry I try to understand what constitutes the necessity of the works studied.

For writers—and also, despite appearances, for painters—the adventure continues beyond the first view, even if unsatisfied desire must later, after losing contact with the sensible, return us there. In these essays my aim is to describe a language that begins with a glance, at times dazzled, at times lustful, at times defiant, and then proceeds Poppaea's Veil along other, often deviant paths in pursuit of what it finds lacking in its original vision. To have declined to follow the same path (or absence of a path), to have shunned its risks, would have been to flout the underlying law of the gaze, which refuses to be satisfied with what it is offered initially. Full knowledge of vision's excess is required, full understanding of the extravagance that causes the gaze to overstep its bounds and risk blindness. 

 By refocusing on distant objects (whose fate is often merely to be glimpsed) consciousness begins by transforming itself. Its own tension, its own desire, undergoes metamorphosis. Hence these essays seek not so much to describe the specific world of sight as to retrace the shifting fate of the libido sentiendi in its relation to the world and to other human consciousnesses.

In Corneille everything begins in dazzlement. But dazzlement is a precarious thing, which lasts only a fleeting instant. Drawn to brilliant objects, the Cornelian hero struggles against falling adoringly into their clutches. The bedazzled consciousness throws off passivity and seeks to effect a reversal of roles. It aspires to be dazzling itself, to achieve the power that comes with brilliance. It claims this privilege first of all through the language of generosity. But glorious speeches are not enough. It is necessary to proceed to action—to action promised, perhaps imprudently, in language. Boasts of valor bind the hero and make inevitable the decision that consecrates his greatness. Thus is man born to the admirable destiny that he has invented for himself: he offers himself triumphant to the world's gaze.

His greatest happiness lies neither in the act of seeing (voir) nor in the energy of doing (faire) but in the complex act of demonstrating (faire voir). What exploit, what wish will reveal the hero's everlasting brilliance and spread his renown? The one effective course of action, the one certain to produce the desired "effect," is self-sacrifice, in which the individual turns all his energy against himself, denying himself so completely as to be reborn for all eternity in the eyes of generations called to witness. In this way the hero establishes an immortal name. For this, however, he requires the consent and vigilant complicity of crowds of onlookers: if doubt is cast on human memory and the endurance of renown, everything crumbles in obscurity and vanity, leaving nothing but a dusty stage set; the generous hero becomes nothing but a parody of himself, a ridiculous actor in a "comic illusion."

In Racine passion and desire control everything. A strange weakness, a fatal blindness, prevents Racine's heroes from fully dominating their actions. An obscure and wicked force dictates their crimes, subjects them to misfortune, and exposes them to our piteous regard. They are beset by bewildering uncertainties that reason is unable to surmount. Though not incapable of recognizing their downfall, critical awareness does not prevent them from hastening to their ruin. Full lucidity comes to them only when it is too late, and the clarity of tragic knowledge coincides with a feeling of total impotence in the face of irrevocable misfortune.

An attentive reading of Racine's plays, a methodical analysis of his expressive means, reveals that the gaze takes the place of theatrical gesticulation and becomes the act par excellence. It expresses the pained keenness of a desire that knows in advance that possession equals destruction but is unable to renounce either one. For Racine the tragic is not associated exclusively with either the structure of the plot or the fatality of its outcome. It is the very heart of the human condition that is condemned, since every desire is caught in the inevitable failure of the gaze. No one accepts this failure. Racine's characters struggle in vain, which only compounds their guilt. Voyeurism—the desire to possess solely through sight, to wound through the act of looking—is exacerbated by the feeling that it must remain forever unsatisfied. In the crudest scenes, in which the power to torture is expressed exclusively in the gaze, the frustrated torturer suffers as much as his victims. In the very heart of desire, in the intense glow of visual lust, we can thus make out a desperate, self-consuming flame. Incapable of obtaining the desired object, desire can transcend its suffering only by choosing catastrophe, only by dying in darkness. The hero plunges into the abyss, while in a heaven filled with light the implacable gods bear sovereign witness to a disaster that exalts their omnipotence.

For Rousseau the happiness of childhood lay in living a carefree life under the gaze of a witness raised to the level of benevolent deity. But soon this benevolence gave way to a sense of all-enveloping hostility. From then on it became impossible to desire publicly even the most innocent of pleasures without incurring criticism or ironic comment. Shamefaced desire was forced to beat a retreat, give up the idea of possession, and resort to the clandestine glance. Now we can understand why Rousseau exhibits such clear signs of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Fearful of guilty contacts or initiatives, he contents himself, from a distance, with seeing and being seen. At first these predilections take perverse forms, but later they are disguised and Poppaea's Veil transformed through sublimation: in La Nouvelle Heloise Wolmar, the virtuous atheist, proclaims his desire to become pure vision, a "living eye." In Emile the preceptor finds moral pretexts for observing his pupils' most intimate caresses. The "ridiculous object" is exhibited once again, albeit in novel fashion, in the virtuous cynicism of total confession. But to see and be seen is still too much. The hostility is too great, and Rousseau, incapable of combatting it head on, generally prefers to concede defeat and to retreat into a more secret realm. Desire, once manifest, becomes a latent power. It renounces all external objects. Reveling in itself, it exposes itself to neither error nor punishment. But this inward retreat, with its concomitant dissimulation of desire, is compensated by a discovery that reveals what had remained hidden since the inception of civilization: neglected nature and natural man. This is a most important discovery, since it establishes a norm against which existing societies can be properly judged and a more equitable community can be imagined.

Both the man of sentiment and the child are gripped by a quite irrational conviction, that to avoid looking at external temptations and to abandon hope of external conquest is to avoid being looked at in return, hence a way of escaping hostile scrutiny and warding off persecution. At the center of a world of enchanted fictions, Rousseau reconciles the innocence of time's beginning with love's most searing pleasures. He invents a bewildering and loving spectacle in which nothing prevents him from participating in person. Nothing intervenes to compromise the transparency of happiness regained. As in his child's paradise, his ego binds itself to benevolent counterparts through trusting dialogue: avoiding the misunderstandings inherent in speech, they communicate through the language of signs and understand one another at a glance.

Yet beyond this spectacle of the imagination and by dint of the enthusiasm that overcomes him, Rousseau attains an extreme of ecstasy, a pure sentiment of existence, in which all images disappear. The dreamer's inward gaze having exhausted the pleasures of Active celebration, desire wants to know a still higher degree of satisfaction, and it succeeds in doing so. At this moment all vision is abolished, replaced by a voluptuous stupefaction that is both total light and absolute darkness.

More than anyone else, Rousseau forces us to acknowledge that the gaze, from the moment of its first awakening, bears within it a strange power of separation. It discovers objective space, but only at the price of acquiescing in distance. It obliges us to see things as distinct— distinct from us and distinct from one another. Thus it disrupts a prior unity, a unity originally enjoyed by being (I'etre) in its blind self-absorption. 

When gaze becomes reflection this loss of unity is further accentuated, for to reflect is to relinquish contact with the immediate and to sink ever more deeply into the misfortune of separate existence. Discursive reason, insofar as it is a product of reflexive thought, marks the utmost estrangement from primitive unity. But the trial of division ignites and fans the flames of a desire to regain the lost unity: enduring loss leads to discovery of the need for communication, which will repair the fragmentation of reality. Logical reflection must not be banished. To be rid of it one must follow it unflinchingly to its ultimate conclusion. When speech, having done its job, falls silent, consciousness enlightened by reason returns to the law of sentiment and to the undivided unity of the beginning. A cycle is completed: separate vision and the evil of reflection lead consciousness down a path that returns to the original happiness.

Rousseau is far from an irrationalist, but his rationalism goes along with the conviction (shared by the romantics) that "existential" truth belongs to the realm of time—or of the instant—and not to the realm of objective space subject to the quantitative operations of reason. Don't forget that this adventure of consciousness, whose goal is to transcend the servitude of conventional language, is presented to us entirely through the vehicle of language. If the reflexive gaze, rigorously pursued, can lead beyond the misfortune of reflection, then perfected language (that is, poetry or opera) seeks and finds an analogous power to transcend. It seems clear that Rousseau made a decisive contribution to the revelation of this power.

Stendhal, like Rousseau, began by experiencing a sudden shock of shame when confronted by the ironic gaze of others. But with Stendhal the feeling of guilt was less onerous. This accounts for the extraordinary vivacity of his riposte. How should one respond to a hostile gaze? By becoming someone else, transforming or masking oneself. Stendhal responds to an external affront by mounting a disciplined counteroffensive. His metamorphoses only appear to be escapes. One problem preoccupies him constantly: how to portray himself, how to influence the situation in such a way that his enemies, vanquished, cease to fight and unwittingly become allies in his own projects, auxiliaries in his pursuit of happiness. In extreme cases he would have to make himself fascinating by means of magic. Stendhal dreamed of this, not without self-indulgence. For a long time he believed that with logic, lessons from professional actors, and his knowledge of Destutt de Tracy he would be able to create a seductive and triumphant character for himself. The society in which he lived was so vile that anyone who hoped to succeed required a mask. Direct energy and strength of character were regarded as suspect. Stendhal played the game well enough, though he expressed nostalgia for those times and places when men won power and esteem through noble deeds. Why didn't he settle for what he had? What dissatisfaction drove him to ask for more? In the end he required nothing less than literature, which he saw as a game of chance. He created characters who lived lives different from his own but in whom he could feel himself living. He looked to the future to provide his audience. Above all, he transformed himself through the effect that the written work had upon his life.

And what about reading? What about the critical gaze? The exigencies that animate it are not unlike the ones we find in the creators. Sight is asked to lead the mind beyond the realm of vision into that of meaning. The critical gaze deciphers words in order to intuit their full meaning: this perception is a visual act only in the metaphorical sense. Thus the critical gaze loses itself in the meaning it awakens. It blazes a trail, but only to make pure pleasure possible without laborious access (Mallarme's "pur plaisir sans chemin"). It transforms the written signs on the page into living speech and, beyond that, establishes a complex world of images, ideas, and feelings. This absent world was waiting for help, anxious for protection. Once awakened, however, this imaginary world requires the reader to make an absolute sacrifice: it no longer allows him to keep his distance. It demands contact and involvement; it imposes its own rhythm and its own destiny.

The critic is a person who, while consenting to the fascination of the text, nevertheless seeks to maintain his right of scrutiny. He desires greater penetration: beyond the manifest sense that is revealed, he perceives a latent significance. Beyond the initial "sight reading," further vigilance is necessary if he is to advance toward a second meaning. Do not overestimate that term, however: unlike medieval exegesis, modern criticism is interested not in deciphering an allegorical or symbolic equivalent of the original text but in revealing the vaster life or transfigured death inherent in it. Frequently the search for what is most remote leads to what is nearest at hand: to what was obvious at first glance, the forms and rhythms that seemed merely to hold the promise of a secret message. After a long detour we come back to the words themselves, where meaning chooses to reside, and that gleaming mysterious treasure we had felt compelled to seek in a "deeper dimension."

The truth is that the critical gaze is drawn toward two opposing possibilities, neither of which can be fully achieved. The first is to lose oneself in intimate intercourse with the fabulous consciousness glimpsed in the work: comprehension then becomes a matter of progressive pursuit of total complicity with the creative subjectivity, a passionate participation in the sensual and intellectual experience unfolded in the work. Yet no matter how far he goes in this direction, the critic can never stifle the conviction that he possesses a separate identity, the banal but insistent certainty that he is not one with the consciousness with which he desires union. Even assuming that it is possible for him to utterly confound himself with that consciousness, the result, paradoxically, would be loss of his own voice. He would inevitably fall silent. Through sympathy and mimickry the perfect critical discourse would give the impression of the most complete silence. Unless he manages in some way to break the pact of solidarity that ties him to the work, the critic is capable only of paraphrase or pastiche. One must betray the ideal of identification in order to acquire the power to speak of this experience and to describe, in a language other than that of the work, the life one has found there. Thus, in spite of our desire to drown in the vital depths of the work, we are obliged to stand at a distance if we are to speak of it at all. So why not deliberately establish a distance capable of revealing in a panoramic view the surroundings with which the work is organically associated? We might attempt to identify certain significant relations unnoticed by the writer; to interpret his unconscious motives; to understand the complex interactions between, on the one hand, a life and a work and, on the other hand, their social and historical circumstances.

This second possible mode of critical interpretation I shall call the panoramic gaze. The eye wishes to lose none of the patterns revealed by distance. In this expanded field of view, the work is of course the primary focus, but it is not the only object that commands attention. It is defined by other, nearby objects and makes sense only in relation to its context. There's the rub: the context is so vast, the number of relations so large, that vision succumbs to a secret despair. 

The whole picture consists of so many elements that the single gaze can never gather them all in. What is more, the moment one decides to situate a work in terms of historical coordinates, the scope of the inquiry can be limited only by an arbitrary decision. It could in principle be expanded to the point where the literary work ceases to be the primary focus, now reduced to one of many manifestations of an era, a culture, or a "world view." As the gaze expands to embrace more and more correlative facts in the social world or the author's life, the work vanishes. Hence the triumph of the panoramic gaze is also a kind of failure. The panoramic gaze causes us to lose sight of the work and its meanings by trying to give us the world in which it is immersed.

Perhaps the most comprehensive criticism is that which aims at neither totality (the panoramic view) nor intimacy (intuitive identification). It is the product of a gaze that can be panoramic or intimate by turns, knowing that truth lies in neither one nor the other but in the ceaseless movement between the two. Neither the vertigo of distance nor that of proximity is to be rejected. One must aim for that double excess in which the gaze is always close to losing its power entirely.

Yet criticism is wrong, perhaps, to seek to discipline its gaze in this way. Often it is better to forget oneself and make room for surprise. We may then be rewarded by the feeling that the work is developing a gaze of its own, directed toward us, a gaze that is not only a reflection of our interrogation. An alien consciousness, radically other, seeks us out, fixes us, summons us to respond. We feel exposed by its probing. The work interrogates us. Before speaking for ourselves, we must lend our voice to the strange power that queries us. Yet docile as we may be, there is always the risk that we will prefer comforting tunes of our own invention. It is not easy to keep our eyes open, to welcome the gaze that seeks us out. But surely for criticism, as for the whole enterprise of understanding, we must say: "Look, so that you may be looked at in return."

Jean Starobinski THE LIVING EYE

What Is Fear?

 

What is fear, into which people today seem to have fallen so deeply that they have forgotten their ethical, political, and religious beliefs? It is surely something familiar and yet, at the same time, if we attempt to define it, it seems to obstinately evade comprehension. 

In Par. 30 of Being and Time, Heidegger offers an exemplary discussion of fear as a mode of attunement. Fear can only be understood if we begin with the fact that Dasein (the term Heidegger uses to refer to the existential structure of man) is always already rooted in attunement—the latter describing Dasein’s originary openness to the world. Since attunement is this originary openness to and discovery of the world, consciousness is always already anticipated by it. Consciousness can, therefore, neither dispense with attunement nor expect that it can master it. Attunement should not be confused with a psychological state—it is, ontologically, the openness that has always already shown man in his being-in-the-world-ness. Only through attunement are experiences, affections, and knowledge possible: “reflection can find ‘experiences’ only because the there is already disclosed in attunement” 20. A mood may assail us, yet “[i]t comes neither from ‘without’ nor from ‘within’, but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being”21. However, this openness does not mean that what it is being revealed to is recognised as such. On the contrary, openness makes manifest just a naked facticity: “[t]he pure ‘that it is’ shows itself, the whence and the whither remain obscure”.22 This is why Heidegger can say that attunement opens the there precisely in “the thrownness […] of […] being into its there”23. The openness that occurs in attunement is, in other words, a being-given-over to something that cannot be assumed and which it vainly attempts to escape.This is evident in bad moods, in boredom, and in depression. Like any other attunement, they disclose Dasein “more primordially, but [they] also close […] it off more stubbornly, than any not-perceiving”24. So, in depression, “Dasein becomes blind to itself, the surrounding world of heedfulness is veiled, the circumspection of taking care is led astray”25. Even in this case, however, Dasein is consigned to a disclosure from which it cannot possibly free itself. It is in the context of this ontology of attunement that we should situate our analysis of fear. Heidegger starts by examining three aspects of that phenomenon: the ‘before which’ (Wovor) of fear, the ‘fearing itself’ (Fürchten), and the ‘about which’ (Worum) of fear. The ‘before which’, the object of fear, is always something intramundane. What is frightening is always—whatever its nature—something within the world and as such it has a dangerous and threatening nature. It can be more or less known and nonetheless “‘unnerving’ [‘geheuer’]”26, and it is placed within a determinate nearness however far away it is.  

As something threatening, what is harmful is not yet near enough to be dealt with, but it is coming near. As it approaches, harmfulness radiates and thus has the character of threatening. […] As something approaches in nearness […] what is harmful is threatening, it can get us, and yet perhaps not. […] [W]hat is harmful, approaching near, bears the revealed possibility of not happening and passing us by. This does not lessen or extinguish fearing, but enhances it.27 

(This ‘certain uncertainty’ which characterises fear is also evident in Spinoza’s definition: an “intermittent pain […] arising from the image of a dubious event”28.)As for the second characteristic of fear, ‘fearing itself’, Heidegger specifies that “[i]t is not that we initially ascertain a future evil (malum futurum) and then are afraid of it”29. Rather, the fearsomeness of the thing approaching us is discovered at the outset. 

As a dormant possibility of attuned being-in-the-world, fearing, ‘fearfulness’ has already disclosed the world with regard to the fact that something like a fearful thing can draw near to us from this fearfulness. The ability to draw near is itself freed by the essential, existential spatiality of being-in-the-world.30 

Fearfulness as originary disclosedness of Dasein always precedes any determinable fear. 

Lastly, regarding that ‘about which’ fear is afraid, it is always the same being that feels fear, the Dasein, this determined man that is at question. 

Only a being which is concerned in its being about that being can be afraid. Fearing discloses this being in its jeopardization, in its being left to itself.31 

Being afraid for our own house, for our property, or for others, does not challenge this diagnosis. It can be said that we are ‘fearful’ for someone else without our being truly scared, but if we actually feel afraid it is for ourselves, because we fear that the other could be “snatched away from us”32.

In this sense, fear is a fundamental mode of attunement that shows humans in their being as always already exposed and threatened. Naturally, this threat has different degrees: if something threatening, which is in front of us with its “not right now, but at any moment”33 character, suddenly hits this being, fear becomes alarm (Erschrecken); if what is threatening is not already known but is instead profoundly unfamiliar, fear becomes horror (Grauen). When something threatening combines both, then fear becomes terror (Entsetzen). In any case, all these different forms of attunement show that man, in his own disclosedness, is fundamentally fearful. The only other attunement that Heidegger analyses in Being and Time is anxiety. And it is to anxiety, and not to fear, that the status of ‘fundamental’ attunement is attributed. But it is specifically in relation to fear that Heidegger is able to define the nature of anxiety, by determining at the outset “[h]ow […] what anxiety is anxious about [is] phenomenally differentiated from what fear is afraid of […]”34. While fear always has to do with something, “[w]hat anxiety is about is not an innerworldly being”35. Not only is the perceived threat potentially harmless, but  

[w]hat anxiety is about is completely indefinite. This indefiniteness not only leaves factically undecided which innerworldly being is threatening, it also means that innerworldly beings in general are not ‘relevant’ […].36 

What anxiety is about is not a being, but the world as such. That is to say, anxiety is “the world in its worldliness”37: 

only because anxiety always already latently determines being-in-the-world, can being-in-the-world […] be afraid. Fear is anxiety which has fallen prey to the ‘world’. It is inauthentic and concealed from itself as such.38  

It has been rightly observed that the primacy of anxiety over fear affirmed by Heidegger can easily be reversed: instead of defining fear as a diminished anxiety which has fallen into an object, we can legitimately define anxiety as a fear deprived of its object. If the object is taken away from fear, fear is transformed into anxiety. In this sense, fear would then be the fundamental attunement into which man is already and always at risk of falling. Hence its essential political meaning—going back at least as far as Hobbes—which constitutes fear as that by which power is both established and justified. 

Let’s try to unpack and develop Heidegger’s analysis. It is significant, in the present context, that fear always refers to a ‘thing’, to an intramundane being (in the present case to a virus, the tiniest of beings). Its intramundane nature means that it has lost any relation with openness to the world, and that it exists factitiously and inexorably without the possibility of transcendence. If the structure of being-in-the-world implies for Heidegger a transcendence and an openness, it is this same transcendence that delivers Dasein to the sphere of thinghood. Being-in-the-world means, in fact, being co-originally restored to the things that that openness to the world reveals. While the animal, without a world, cannot perceive an object as such, man, in opening to a world, can be assigned to a thing as a thing without escape. 

This leads to the originary possibility of fear: it is the attunement disclosed when man, losing the nexus between the world and things, finds himself irremissibly consigned to intramundane beings and cannot figure out his relationship with a ‘thing’, which now becomes threatening. Once his relationship to the world is lost, the ‘thing’ becomes in itself terrorising. Fear is the dimension into which humanity falls when consigned, as has happened in modernity, to an unavoidable thingness. The fearsome being, the ‘thing’ that attacks and threatens people in horror movies, is thus nothing more than an incarnation of this inescapable thingness.

This also brings out the feeling of impotence that defines fear. Those who feel fear try in every way and by every means to protect themselves from the thing that threatens them—by wearing a mask, for example, or by staying at home. This does not reassure them, however, but on the contrary renders their impotence against the ‘thing’ even more palpable and constant. Fear can in this light be defined as the opposite of the will to power. The essential character of fear is a will to impotence, a wanting-to-be-impotent in the face of the fearsome thing. Likewise, those who feel fear seek reassurance from those who are recognised as possessing some authority (doctors, civil protection officials, etc.), but this does not in any way get rid of the feeling of insecurity that accompanies fear—which is an essential element of the will to insecurity, the wanting-to-be-insecure. The truth of this is evident from the fact that the very subjects whose responsibility it is to reassure are those who, instead, perpetuate insecurity. They tirelessly repeat, for the good of the frightened, that the object of their fear can never be defeated or eliminated. 

How is one to deal with this fundamental attunement, in which man seems always and constitutively to be in the act of collapsing? Since fear precedes and forestalls knowledge and reflection, it is quite useless to try and convince the frightened with rational arguments and evidence; more than anything, fear denies them access to a reasoning process that would preclude fear itself. As Heidegger writes, fear “bewilders us and makes us ‘lose our heads’”39. So much so that, in the face of the epidemic, it was evident that the publication of irrefutable data and opinions from trustworthy sources was being systematically ignored and discarded in favour of others that, by the way, did not even feign scientific credibility. Given the originary character of fear, the only way we can ever untangle it is by accessing an equally originary dimension. Such a dimension does exist: it is an openness to the world in which only things can appear and threaten us. Things become fearsome because we forget their co-belonging to a world that transcends them and, at the same time, makes them present. The only possibility of severing the ‘thing’ from the fear from which it seems inseparable lies in remembering that openness in which it has always and already been exposed and revealed. Not reasoning, but memory—remembering ourselves and our being-in-the-world—is what grants us again access to a thingness that is free from fear. This ‘thing’ that terrifies me, invisible to the eye though it is, is as open in its pure existence as are all other intramundane beings—this tree, this stream, this man. Only because I am in the world can things appear to me and, potentially, scare me. They are a part of my being-in-the-world, and it is this fact—rather than a thingness abstractly separate and wrongfully established as sovereign—which dictates the ethical and political rules of my behaviour. Of course, the tree may break and fall on me, the stream can overflow and flood the town, and this man can unexpectedly hit me. If these contingencies materialise, a proportionate level of concern will dictate the appropriate course of action. No need to lose our heads, no need to let anyone exercise power on the basis of fear or, by transforming an emergency into a permanent state, to rewrite the rules that guarantee our freedom and determine what we can and cannot do.

quotes in text from  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh 

Cornell University Press, 2014)

From

Giorgio Agamben

Where Are We Now?

Letter to scientist

 LETTER

IT WAS ACCIDENTALLY discovered in the 1920s—to be exact, in 1924-in an antique-book shop in Leyden. Three sheets of cream-colored paper of the dimensions 11.5 by 17 centimeters, with traces of humidity, but the handwriting well preserved, the small, clear letters completely readable. An unknown person had pasted the letter onto the inside of the cover of an old, once very popular romance called The Knight with a Swan, published in 1651 by the Amsterdam firm of Cool.

The majority of scholars have written skeptically about this discovery—for example, Isarlo, Gillet, Clark, De Vries, Borrero, and Goldschneider; only a young poet and historian from Utrecht, van der Velde (later stabbed with a dagger in mysterious circumstances not far from Scheveningen), fiercely defended the authenticity of the letter to the end of his life. According to the young scholar, its author was none other than Johannes Vermeer, and its recipient Anton van Leeuwenhoek1, a naturalist whose merits in the field of improving the microscope are well known. The scholar and the artist were both born in the same year, the same day, and spent their entire lives in the same city.

The letter shows no traces of corrections or subsequent interpolations, but it contains two spelling mistakes and changes; obviously it must have been written in a hurry. A few lines have been crossed out so decidedly and energetically that we will never learn what foolish or shameful thoughts were covered forever by the blackness of the ink.

The handwriting with its pointed letters, “v” written like an open eight, a somewhat wavy movement of the pen as if someone was speeding up and then suddenly stopping, reveals a striking similarity if not identity with the only preserved signature of Vermeer in the register of Saint Luke’s Guild in 1662. Chemical analysis of the paper and ink allows us to date the document at the second half of the seventeenth century. Everything indicates, then, that the letter could have been written by Vermeer’s hand, yet we lack irrefutable proofs. We know that technically perfect falsifications have been made.

All those who spoke against the authenticity of the document put forward numerous arguments, but to tell the truth, they are not too convincing. Scholarly prudence and even far-reaching skepticism are undoubtedly praiseworthy virtues. But one could sense something between the lines of the critical remarks that no one clearly stated: the main reservations were caused by the letter’s content. Let us suppose that if Vermeer wrote to his mother-in-law, Maria Tins, asking her to lend him a hundred florins for the baptism of his son, Ignatius, or let us also imagine if he offered one of his paintings to his baker van Buyten as a guarantee against a debt, I believe no one would protest. But when after two and a half centuries the Great Mute speaks with his own voice, and what he says is an intimate confession—a manifesto and a prophecy—we don’t want to accept it because we have a great fear before a revelation, and withhold of consent to a miracle.

Here is the letter:

Undoubtedly You will be surprised I am writing rather than simply dropping by your laboratory before dusk, as so often happens. But I think I do not have enough courage, I do not know how to tell you to your face what you will read in a moment.

I would prefer not to write this letter. I hesitated for a long time, because I really did not want to expose our long friendship to danger. Finally I made up my mind to do it. There are, after all, things more important than what unites us, more important than Leeuwenhoek, more important than Vermeer.

A few days ago you showed me a drop of water under your new microscope. I always thought it was pure like glass, while in reality strange creatures swirl in it like in Bosch’s transparent hell. During this demonstration you watched my consternation intently, and I think with satisfaction. Between us there was silence. Then you said very slowly and deliberately: “Such is water, my dear, such and not otherwise.”

I understood what you wanted to say: that we artists record appearances, the life of shadows and the deceptive surface of the world; we do not have the courage or ability to reach the essence of things. We are craftsmen, so to speak, who work in the matter of illusion, while you and those like you are the masters of truth.

As you know my father owned the tavern Mechelen at the marketplace. An old sailor often came there who had wandered all over the world, from Indochina to Brazil and from Madagascar to the Arctic Ocean. I remember him well. He was always quite tipsy but told splendid stories, and everyone gladly listened to him. He was the attraction of the place, like a big colorful picture or exotic animal. One of his favorite stories was about the Chinese emperor Shi Huang-ti.

This emperor ordered his country to be surrounded by a thick wall, in order to shut out everything that was different. He burned all books so he would not have to listen to the admonishing voice of the past; he forbade cultivation of any of the arts under penalty of death. (Their complete uselessness was blatantly clear when they were compared to such important tasks of state as building a fortress, or cutting off rebels’ heads.) Thus poets, painters, and musicians hid in the mountains and remote monasteries; they led the life of exiles tracked by a pack of informers. On the squares piles of paintings were burned, fans, statues, ornate fabrics, objects of luxury, and all things that could be considered pretty. Men, women, and children all wore the same ash-colored clothes. The emperor declared war even on flowers; he ordered their fields to be buried under stones. A special decree announced that at sunset everyone was to be at home, the windows tightly covered with black curtains because (you know yourself) what incredible pictures can be painted by the wind, clouds, and the light of sunset.

The emperor valued only science. He showered scientists with honors and gold. Every day astronomers would bring news of the discovery of a new or imaginary star. In servile fashion it was given the name of the emperor, and soon the entire firmament teemed with the luminous points of Shi Huang-ti I, Shi Huang-ti II, Shi Huang-ti III, and so on. Mathematicians labored to invent new numerical systems, complicated equations, and unimaginable geometrical figures, knowing only too well their labors were sterile, of no use to anyone. Naturalists promised they would develop a tree whose crown was embedded in the ground and whose roots reached the sky, also a wheat grain as large as a fist.

At last the emperor wished for immortality. Physicians performed cruel experiments on men and animals to discover the secret of the eternal heart, the eternal liver, eternal lungs.

As it often happens with men of action, the emperor desired to change the face of the earth and sky so his name would be inscribed forever in the memory of future generations. He did not understand that the life of an ordinary peasant, shoemaker, or grocer was far more worthy of respect and admiration, while he himself was becoming a bloodless letter, a symbol among countless symbols of madness and violence monotonously repeating themselves.

After all the crimes, all the devastation he caused in human minds and souls, his own death was cruelly banal: he choked on a single grape. To remove him from the surface of the earth, nature did not exert herself to produce a hurricane or deluge.

Probably you will ask: Why do I tell you all this, and what is the connection between the story of the foreign ruler and your drop of water? I will most likely answer you not very clearly or coherently, hoping you will understand the words of a man who is full of forebodings and anxiety.

I am afraid that you and others like you are setting out on a dangerous journey that might bring humanity not only advantages but also great, irreparable harm. Haven’t you noticed that the more the means and tools of observation are perfected, the more distant and elusive become the goals? With each new discovery a new abyss opens. We are more and more lonely in the mysterious void of the universe.

I know that you want to lead men out of the labyrinths of superstition and chance, that you want to give them certain, clear knowledge, which according to you is the only defense against fear and anxiety. But will it really bring us relief if we substitute the word necessity for the word Providence?

Most likely you will reproach me that our art does not solve any of the enigmas of nature. Our task is not to solve enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder. If you absolutely require discoveries, however, I will tell you that I am proud to have succeeded in combining a certain particularly intensive cobalt with a luminous, lemonlike yellow, as well as recording the reflection of southern light that strikes through thick glass onto a gray wall.

The tools we use are indeed primitive: a stick with a bunch of bristles attached to the end, a rectangular board, pigments and oils. These have not changed for centuries, like the human body and nature. If I understand my task, it is to reconcile man with surrounding reality. This is why I and my guild brothers repeat an infinite number of times the sky and clouds, the portraits of men and cities, all these odds and ends of the cosmos, because only there do we feel safe and happy.

Our paths part. I know I will not convince you, and that you will not abandon polishing lenses or erecting your Tower of Babel. But allow us as well to continue our archaic procedure, to tell the world words of reconciliation and to speak of joy from recovered harmony, of the eternal desire for reciprocated love.

The Collected Prose 1948–1998

Zbigniew Herbert (from pocryphas)