Andreas (11 page)

With Maria, Andreas is excessively shy, so perfectly does she guide the conversation. The mere thought of asking her an intimate question (for instance, whether she knows anything about the existence of her illegitimate sister) gives him the same feeling as the thought that he might touch the mystery of her body—his head swims. Maria’s soul lies like a veil over her flesh.

Ultimately, his relationship to Maria is such that he is tormented by jealousy of Sacramozo’s “objectless” friendship.

His astonishment that human beings of such a kind exist: they are softer and harder, uglier and more conscientious, more self-possessed as a whole, more sensitive in detail—he feels as though a new sense must be born in him to comprehend this. He begins to suspect that there is something haphazard about our senses.—He realizes that he is merely drifting, like a pig in a rising flood.

He feels how the Knight sustains and elevates him, every one of his sayings enlightens, he feels himself utterly Sacramozo’s creature, but without oppression.

He does not know whether to be more astonished by the woman or the man.

L
AST BOOK

What Sacramozo needs to win this woman is a lofty love of self, a religion of the self.

Sacramozo holds himself guilty of the death of someone he has loved: Mariquita says outright that he poisoned a woman.

Sacramozo believes himself responsible for the insanity of a charming young woman who now lives on like a greedy animal.

To see the “other” in her eyes—that has made him a philosopher. In exactly the same way, a strange change came over his father just before his death. Thus he comes to believe that
masks
are the distinguishing factor. In this sense, he says that neither Goldoni nor Molière has created a character in the individual.

In particular, he reproaches himself with having slept with this person when she was already a “lunatic.” Would she like to have a shell which contains the voice of her dead lover? The duality in Maria’s handwriting also arrives in this occasion.

At Sacramozo’s: portrait of the lady with the Sternkreuz Order: Countess Welsberg (his mother). Sacramozo on the sayings of his German mother:
he forbids himself to remember her: later, he will be allowed to remember her all the more completely.—Sacramozo has understood that his cousin’s return is a dispensation, has learned to be an exile: at Welsberg, his lower nature would have prevailed, the higher development of his nature would have been checked.—Sacramozo wished to buy Welsberg Castle. The night he spent in the room with the Pyramid of Life painted on the wall. His thoughts often turn on the stages of life, of age. (His uncle of ninety-three).—Sacramozo takes for granted that of two dreams, the later always throws light on the earlier—thus everything that comes later always relates to everything that has gone before—in all directions.—The Welsberg dream: in the second he is governor, not recognized as such, who is guilty of everything, who had to pronounce sentence of death, etc.

Sacramozo: faith and superstition in time. In his hours of exaltation, he is convinced that he alone possesses the real key to the world, everybody else glides past the secret lock unaware—everything serves him, even a landscape seen once, a pool of dark water in the West Indies. He would be mad if he were not right. He is right in everything, even in taking Andreas to the Countess. His knowledge: he knows that the body forgets nothing (just like the macrocosm, the great body).—He knows Maria’s life
far better than the confessors.—Sacramozo’s fate: the Key of Solomon in Hebbel’s epigram. (“
We believe we hold the key of Solomon in our hands, and can unlock heaven and earth with it, but it dissolves in figures, and, to our horror, we see the alphabet renew itself. Yet let us take comfort, it has in the meantime grown more august
.”)

He likes the symbolism of the Rosicrucians: the use of words in an absolutely symbolic sense, so that the words spurn the world. For, he says, everything is in the soul, everything that has power to raise spirits, and the spirits that are to be raised. “Every word evokes spirits; whatever spirit calls, its like responds” (Novalis).

In this way he can grasp the essence of poetry—the magic of configurations. To him, Goldoni (Zustina’s world, the utterly unmetaphysical) is abhorrent, Molière means little, the
mimus
is indifferent; the vital thing is the
incantatio
. True poetry is the arcanym that unites us with life, separates us from life. Separation—if we separate, death itself can be borne, only the impure is horrible (a fine, pure hour of death like Stilling’s)—but it is as indispensable to unite as to separate—the
aurea catena
of Homer—“
Separabis terram ab igne, subtile a spisso, suaviter magna cum ingenio
” (Thou shalt separate earth from fire, the subtle from the dense, smoothly and with great skill) (
Tabula smaragdina Hermetis
).

Sacramozo knows the power of the creative function. “We know only in so far as we create. We only know creation in so far as we are ourselves God. We do not know it in so far as we are world” (Novalis). Sacramozo knows: things are simply what the power of a human soul unceasingly makes them. Unceasing creation. The relation between two human beings as a sylph born of them (Rosicrucians).

He seeks life where it is to be found: in all that is most delicate, in the folds of things.

The abyss in such a being as Sacramozo: the despair of the onlooker, who must ask: “Do I even exist? If I must go—shall I have been?—have I known hate-love?—or was it all nothing?”

What does a man like Sacramozo
want
—a raving of anger at his impotence—“His Impotenceship.”

He suffers the sylph born of Andreas and the Countess, which is the stronger, to kill the weaker, whose father he is.

Sacramozo on the mystic limbs of men: it is rapture merely to think of them, to move them in silence (Maria’s dream).

On Powers: the man who is capable of prayer: “If the Countess could pray, she would be healed.”

Sacramozo’s mystic love of children, human beings as such, neither man nor woman, but both in one.

Andreas has to learn from the Knight: to discern what has real existence, to overcome the mean and common (—everything Austrian is mean and common, the hordes of chamberlains, everything in masses. In Vienna, the chief concern of everybody is to be taken for somebody).

Sacramozo’s pessimistic conception: whether I am a Christian or an atheist, a fatalist or a sceptic—I shall decide that as soon as I know who I am, where I am, and where I cease to be.

Sacramozo: “The hope and desire of man to return to his former condition is like the desire of the moth for the light” (Leonardo).

The look he fixes on the friends of his youth. Women amuse him more than men, men touch him more deeply.

Sacramozo—that is his offence—believes it is possible to lead a second life, in which everything left undone can be done, every failure made good.—“Forty years—I have nothing more to gain, but I must lose nothing more.”

Sacramozo knows the moment that is auspicious for Andreas’s union with Maria. He chooses that moment for voluntary death—he is sure he will return, to be united to Maria transformed, (he knows that elements too are transformed)—that Andreas will then be forced to yield before him—
how, he purposely avoids considering—fills him with sorrowful sympathy for Andreas.

He has always known that this would happen to him in his fortieth year. He divides his life thus: three periods of twelve years: the first, fulfilment, revelation; the second, confusion; the third, damnation or ordeal. Then three years of action, then the fortieth—
annus mirabilis
.

“The truly philosophic act is suicide” (Novalis).—Suicide on the one hand as the most sublime act of self-enjoyment, the indisputable dominion of the spirit over the body, on the other as the most sublime communion with the world; harmony in contrast, at last, with the final word of Oriental philosophy (
Neo-Platonists
on suicide).

How, in the smallest, subtlest detail, the body is to be persuaded—that is the secret and the difficulty. At the same time, attention to and reverence for that which does not return.

“To destroy the principle of contradiction is perhaps the supreme task of higher logic” (Novalis).

“Gradual increase of
inward
responsiveness is thus the chief concern of the artist of immortality” (Novalis).

Conversation with Maria on suicide: “Above all, one must be sure of destroying oneself entirely.”—Here Sacramozo smiles.

Sacramozo: “Every morning the sun rises on millions of men, but where among those millions is the one heart that responds to it in pure music like the pillar of Memnon?—I stood with ten thousand on a hill, a pilgrimage, etc.,—but my heart was separated from theirs. When has the morning sun ever
really
illuminated me? Once, perhaps, in that brief dream. But I shall go where a virgin light will meet me on virgin shores.”—“Every beginning is serene. Hail to him who can always begin again!”

D
AY OF SACRAMOZO’S DEATH
.
The preparation. Fasting. Aspect of the world. Onset of doubt. Anxiety, resolve wavers, grows firm again.

Last conversation with Maria: farewell and meeting again: the power of this conversation on her.

The last afternoon, evening. His thoughts
during
. The drops: the realization that he can stop between one drop and the next. Ecstasy of dissolution, how it fades at the thought that he can stop. The aspect of the world between life and death: the finality sanctifies the ecstasy: an enormous
honouring
of God in His creatures: a moving into the temple of God. Onset of fear of death: paroxysm. Transfiguration.

Before death: hears water flowing, desire to conjure up all water he has ever heard flow.

Stages of dissolution: a wonderful drawing near
to every being that is borne towards him by a gentle, shining river; the beings rise like swimmers out of a holy stream: he knows that nothing he has done in his life has been in vain. The approaching beings singular, like a kiss dissolving the soul—the blueness of a garment, the breath of a lip, the voice of a bird (the objects in the room: sky-blue stuff, a mask, silver candelabras, flowers, fruit, bowls of water)—he takes it for the promise of an ineffable union, and now knows he cannot turn back.

The death-room of the Knight with alabaster lamps and flowers. His ecstatic letter of farewell: universal love. For him, this is no vague dissolution, but the most sublime preservation of personality.

A
T THE
same time, Andreas wins Zustina in the lottery. She wants to give herself to him, hoping by that to win him so that he will remain her husband. Confesses the trick by which she made him win, which was very cleverly contrived. Her tears and her recovery: evidence that Nina too is in love with him.—News of Romana.—Zustina speaks of the way in which Nina loves him in contrast to her own, deduces both, very acutely and delicately, from their physical constitution. At this moment, Zustina is extraordinarily beautiful. Zustina: “When Nina is in love, everything stops for her soul: the world has
changed—she cannot understand how she can have lived yesterday. Till now I was never in love—and if there is no way of being in love but Nina’s, I still don’t know love. For the world is always the world for me, even though it contains a being whom it is delicious to meet.”

L
AST CHAPTER
As Andreas takes flight and travels up the mountains, he feels as if the two halves of his being, which were torn asunder, were reuniting.

At San Vito, he finds a farmhand driving home by night. When he reaches Castle Finazzer the next day, Romana is not there. Bit by bit he hears that she has fled to the alp on his account; then that she has had a terrible fever, has constantly spoken of him, then taken a vow never to see him again unless he comes from Vienna to make her his wife. (Modesty now as infinitely exaggerated as previous freedom).

He leaves a decisive letter for Romana.

Last Chapter. He leaves at daybreak. They arrive at sunrise. Up to the Alps with the mother. Romana creeps into the farthest cranny and, in the end threatens to throw herself down from the precipice.

G
ENERAL PLAN
(rough), 12. IX. 1912.
I. Arrival. Lodging. Lottery. Visit to the cocotte. First meeting. II. The Knight of Malta. Conversation. Visit to the Countess after another visit to Nina. III. Developments in the affair with the widow. Amorous friendship with the Countess. Jealous of the Knight. IV. The Countess is moved: her story. The widow: the present in its most fiery form, impish, knowledge of the “other.” V. The Countess begins to withdraw (change of confessor). Evening visit. The
billet
with the threat. VI.…VII. Evening visit; feeling in Andreas, as he goes up, how completely he has changed. The weight of experience: nothing that could not have happened.

A
NDREAS
—Reason for sending him on the tour: difficult, protracted convalescence after a mental crisis, some listlessness, loss of a sense of value, confusion of ideas.

Influence of a Father Aderkast who has suspended life for Andreas, made it illusory (performances of Calderón).—The meeting with Father Aderkast (who bears down on him fulsomely—he feels as if his whole past were breaking in upon him, inescapably) interwoven with an adventure with Mariquita: the more distraught Andreas grows, owing to the repeated meetings with Father Aderkast, whose insistence he can hardly understand, the more charming he appears to Mariquita.

Andreas does not really believe in his experiences; what happens to him, of all people, cannot be worth much: he is always at extremes, on the one hand sensual, on the other idealistic.—He always assumes that people must know what is going on in him.—His demands were gentle, without insistence, he was content with little.

Andreas’s apprenticeship: to recognize the existence of higher things, to realize the value of life.

In his memories of childhood, there remains a painful confusion which his whole life will hardly suffice to unravel. To die reconciled to one’s childhood. (Journal: “I should like to die reconciled to my childhood.”)

His grandfather, a carter at Spitz, came down from the forest. Drives Princess Brunswick who notices him and hires him as a groom in place of one who
has fallen ill. The Emperor rides to meet her with a hundred horsemen, has himself presented to her last under the
incognito
of Count Falkenstein, but as he kisses her hand, presses it, so that she jumps up, startled and falls into his arms, and he now kisses both of her hands in turn. (This in 1716, the grandfather born 1699; Andreas’s father, born in 1731, is now forty-eight.) The Spanish
genre
in these stories.

C
LOSE
of the tour chapters: encounter with the “woman on the Aar”—the adventure with the inconsolable widow.

Leaving the Finazzer farm: he does not believe in himself; he creates in himself the figure of another, who will return. Now startled in the house on the river, where the mourning widow comes towards him with her “Really you! It is really you! You cannot escape yourself!”—The mood of supreme exaltation, which has lasted for several days since the moment of the mountain, suddenly reversed in this adventure (the widow’s hand on his breast in the night).

A German-speaking widow from the lowest-lying of the
Sette Communi
. The picture of the accident painted on paper, the wedding-ring attached. Sends her sixteen-year-old daughter to kneel and weep by the river. Her cough (hysterically exaggerated by
herself)—at times she tells the story in fuller detail. The picture is her prayer-book, her all.—Impression on Andreas: “A single moment!”—from this moment on he can pray, it comes home to him. (In between, the merchant’s servant, looking after his luggage, abrupt revulsion from prayer. Idle, empty chatter with a fellow traveller about the gentry of the
terra ferma
)—The widow’s complaints and monologues, have not stopped for seventeen years: the daughter’s callous way of detailing it all, saying in a weary drawl, “Nothing gives her pleasure, she feels the world as her coffin”—the mother says the same thing, but in a raving way, so that even in her anguish there is still a trace of the breath of God, of the inexhaustibility of nature and life. On the other hand, even the daughter’s bearing is dreadful, listlessly dragging herself along by her mother’s side, listlessly answers, “Yes, yes”—with side-long looks, listlessly saying, “Father has been dead for eighteen years now, and she will not stop, she will never get over it till she lies in her grave.”—Here Andreas becomes aware of how mysteriousness is the connection that rules between the moment and the year, even between the moment and life as a whole: how in a way a moment can devour a whole life (—something similar in the Countess’s fate).

He hears her talking, interrupted by weeping;
she means to drown herself. The daughter hard beyond her years. He begins to feel that the whole of existence rests on a healthy feeling of self-confidence, like Mount Kaf on an emerald. After all these imaginings, he feels inseparably united to Romana—in very truth her spouse.

The scene where the daughter tries to drag her mother away to stop her making herself a nuisance to the stranger, saying to her mother, who is clinging to the stranger’s breast, the bitterest, most frigid truths. “That is a strange man. Chance, which he will curse, made him stop here for the night. He cares nothing about what has happened to you, he curses the place and your screams; they pierce his ears. His carriage will hardly have turned the corner when he will have forgotten you and me like the vermin in a dirty inn.”—Andreas’s feelings terribly torn, confronted by misery—absolutely infinite. He despises himself for every comfort he possesses—here the journal of the tour breaks off abruptly.

He did not reflect on all these experiences in detail, yet they were all present in him; each one was in some way always there, his soul was like a quivering magnetic needle: all these things perpetually diverted it from its pole; he was empty and overburdened. His nature needed and longed for passion which, by carrying us away, relieves us of the burden of self.

The house on the river, with the inconsolable widow, in all the rooms, outhouses, etc., encompasses him completely.—In her grief-worn face a sudden brightness, the eyes kind, the mouth pretty, the natural in its greatest truth and purity.—Question: whether the existence of his parents is not hell in disguise.

Andreas roaming sadly about: these quite small details: picking up a twig, throwing it away with love, but gently, not far from him, still feels it as it lies there, licks blades of grass for joy.

He has listened to the widow as no one has for a long time past: that is why she comes to him in the night, touches his breast—where, after such a long lapse of time, she feels a human response, something of him she has lost wakes and lives again.

The evening, at supper: she walks up and down, raving of the dead man. The daughter says: “The wind is in the south.”—She takes the stranger’s hand “Oh take that—only that from me—that I did it of set purpose, with full knowledge. Do I not stand like a stone in the wall? It is on the point of collapsing, that is just why it must stand fast! Can you understand me? The lust of murder (
imp of the perverse
) is nothing compared to it. I did it out of frozen horror of the world”—(at once contradicts herself, accusing herself of devilish selfishness). Frightful pause, in which life,
even movement, stands still, transfixed. The daughter pushes her away: “The gentleman’s supper is ready, leave him alone!”—how young the mother looks in her moments of greatest anguish.—The daughter: the priest dismisses her from the confessional for obdurate despair.

Andreas: in a generally dull, a dispirited state of mind, certain subtleties, certain improbable, favourite associations, which his mind constantly pursues, which he feels to be reality itself, while he is never aware of the rest of life as unalloyed. He is thus visited by a sense of the actual that evening by the river where the mourning widow’s house stands. Then the strange adventure in the night when the half-mad woman kneels on his breast. Previously, he identifies himself with the dead man, imagines that that look came from his eyes. In bed, thinks intensely of Romana.

Later, reversing the roles, he puts himself in the place of the wretched murderess, Romana in the place of the man. He is morbid enough to imagine the murder. All his mania of self-abasement converges on this point: he pictures to himself all that he has destroyed in Romana: he does not let her die completely, but live on, a joyless spirit—by this the richness of her life is just revealed to him—he feels bound to her as never before, the value of life dawns
upon him—he is happy.—“By what are we moved—by what power—from what point?” he asks, and he is appalled by his ignorance of the power which is above all things.

Constant elevation of the substance Romana by all that happens. He can only possess Romana when he believes her.

In the widow’s house. At the window, at sunrise, clouds over the river. Profoundest experience: the presentiment of all love and no love in himself: the presentiment: Nothing can happen to me. I shall not be a loser in the end. Before, in stages, deepest temptations; his chief fear, to be cheated of the essential, of the substance of life.—To himself: “Whoever you are, religious or irreligious, child or father, you cannot be cast away, something sustains you.” He imagines he can comprehend this something. What he did not believe himself worthy of, what he did not believe possible, what he refused to believe himself capable of—in the past it seemed possible, in dreams it was unassailably his.—One thing above all he found toilsome—to attain to himself, and in this toil his nature was fulfilled.

A
NDREAS
’ path: first to become capable of love, then to learn that body and spirit are one. He has suffered all the time from this dualism: now the one, now the
other in himself, seemed worthless. Now he learns to feel, one behind the other, to feel the one always sustaining the other.

How Romana comes to life in him: single traits, a smile as of a secret understanding with him. These moments, when she comes to life in him, always bring anxiety, which alternates with serenity. Once he thinks he sees Romana sitting on the Riva on a trunk: she is beginning to unpack. He does not dare to approach her.

Chapter I, end: Andreas sitting on the bed. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for him to become, in the real sense of the word, the lover of the Spanish woman, of Zustina, or of Nina—anyone else could. Now, thinking of Romana, beautiful radiance: the walk. Four castles in the air in which he lives with each of the four.

Episode of the tailor’s wife—at the same time, estrangement from the Knight. The wife of a tailor, who would like to be married to him. The little tailor humours her. Humble surroundings, full of backstairs gossip, about strangers in the town too. Offers to belong to him and to procure others for him: at the same time, immense respect for virtue. Quite primitive lower-class life, like the life of the people in ancient times. The tailor’s wife has sixteen brothers and sisters. Kindly eyes and a pretty mouth,
accommodant
, at the first meeting she treats him like a great gentleman, afterwards more as one of her own class. Her husband dies. The woman’s children: the grave boy, as he gazes at him, seeming to forget himself, the girl nestling up to him with a rather deceitful look.

Here Andreas is, in a way, at home: with the Countess he feels as if he were not alive, but only dreaming; he wonders if he has ever lived. This life in the tailor’s house, which he mentions to nobody, makes him feel a liar and traitor.—During this time Andreas sits to Zorzi for his portrait, maliciously breaks off the sittings. To frighten him, Zorzi threatens him with intervention by the authorities. The catastrophe caused by the death of the husband, the children change towards him, their bitterness. Andreas reproaches himself: “Can I say that I am bound to anyone?”—He cannot bear the sight of the pictures in the churches, they humiliate him, the figures in them are so manifold. He is disgusted by his own capacity to understand everybody with his mind and his heart—even the spy Zorzi, an old hunchbacked messenger, and so on. He wants to confess this self-contempt to the Knight, but does not do so. The Knight realizes his state, sees in his changed, contemptuous way of speaking that he is at odds with himself.

T
HE KNIGHT
gives Andreas Ariosto to read on account of the wonderful “world” that is his. He does not read Ariosto with an eighteenth-century mind. He understands what the Knight means when he says that there is no such thing as the past: everything that exists is present, more is born at the present moment (feeling when listening to Bach’s music).

For Andreas, Fate is fulfilled in what is most individual—in what is most individual lies power. Nothing that is to work, magically is in any way vague or general, but most particular, most momentary. Love—illuminated by a sudden ridiculous fancy, an awkwardness, a hesitation, as well as by a gesture of courage, of freedom. The ordinary “I” an
insignificant
construction, a scarecrow.

Andreas and the two women: “The nature of things is completely exhausted in opposition and intensification” (Goethe at eighty)—on the one hand, demands more of each every time—to what end? (Tact embodied in the bearing of the Knight)—on the other hand, sense of polarity; in each he loves the other with the most delicate, chaste love, and in this way learns to abandon the search for the absolute in the world.

Andreas fears to become aware, in Maria or Mariquita, of the other being, and hence to lose the unique quality of the loved one. He is on the point
of murdering Mariquita in order to save Maria for himself. (The temptations to which his weakness is here exposed—“learn to live!”)

Andreas’s humble wish to be Mariquita’s husband. Gradual realization of the impossibility of the step: imagines letter to his parents announcing the plan.

M
ARIA AND MARIQUITA.
—Novalis: “all evil is isolated and isolating, it is the principle of separation”—by union, separation is abolished and not abolished, but wickedness (evil) as apparent separation and conjunction is actually abolished by true separation and union, which only exist in reciprocity.