Kornel Esti (21 page)

“I repeat, the president was a kindly man, noble, tolerant, and broad-minded. It was because of his broad-mindedness that he slept. What else could he have done? I, a young man of twenty, fit as a fiddle, with nerves of steel, who had listened only for nine months, day after day, to those lectures which he as president must have listened to for fifty-seven years, I went to pieces and developed alarming symptoms. As a result of the nauseating stupidity and eccentric bragging generally called lyric poetry, the dull and insipid nonsense which generally passed for science, that man-pleasing hairsplitting, that hodgepodge of theories generally called politics, one night in my student room I suffered a fit of rage, suddenly began to go crosseyed and shout, and bellowed at the top of my voice for two hours until the faithful Zwetschke hurried to my bedside and administered scopolamine, which—as you will know—is usually used to calm raving lunatics. Imagine what would happen to that respectable president, who truly deserved a better fate, if he had not discovered in early life the sole solution, and his healthy spirit had not taken the stand that it had against injury. It must have been simply his instinct for self-preservation that suggested it to him. By it, however, he saved not only himself but also culture, science, and literature too, saved his nation, and also humanity as it strove toward progress.

“Yes, his sleep was the very fulfillment of national and human obligation. As he slept objectively, impartially, apolitically and without bias, to left and right equally, toward men as toward women, toward Christians and Jews alike, in brief, as he slept without regard to distinctions of age, sex, or religion, it appeared that he closed his eyes to all human failings, and not only did it ‘appear,’ but it was in fact so. Believe me, that sleep was veritable approval. The sleeper nods, thereby approving everything. I’ll venture to state that at times in the honorable paneled lecture hall of the Germania, even the most forbearing member of the audience wished the lecturer to Hell, wished that he might have a seizure, that cancer of the tongue might render him dumb, distend his revolting mouth—and only one single person showed himself at all times tolerant toward him, the president, who was always asleep. Like outspread angelic wings, his sleep fluttered above millions upon millions of foolishnesses and vanities of the human spirit, above sterile ambition and paltry attention-seeking, the St. Vitus’ dance of envy and meanness, all the nastiness and futility that is public life, science, and literature.
Qui tacet consentire videtur.
^*
He that is silent agrees to everything. But is there so true an agreement as sleep? His sleep was a bulwark against vandalism, it was reassurance, the saving of society; it was understanding itself, forgiveness itself.

“My friends, a sleeper is always understanding and forgiving. A sleeper can never be hostile to us. The moment he goes to sleep he turns his back on the world, and all hatred, all wickedness cease to be as far as he is concerned, as they cease for the dead. The French have a saying, ‘To go away is to die a little.’ That I’ve never believed, because I love traveling, and every time that I get on a train I feel revitalized. To sleep, however, is certainly to die a little, and not a little but a lot, as much as departing life (which, when all’s said and done, is nothing more than awareness of the self), as much as dying completely for a short time. This is precisely why the person who is asleep leaves the field, turns his will—with its sharp, damaging point—inward, and behaves toward us with the indifference of one who began long ago to decay. Who wants a greater benevolence on this earth? I have always insisted on respect for those who are asleep, and will not allow them to be disturbed in my presence. ‘Nothing but good of the sleeper’ has been my slogan. Frankly, I don’t understand why we don’t occasionally celebrate sleepers, why we don’t toss onto their beds at least a flower, why we don’t organize a minor, heartwarming wake after they go off, because we are for a while free of their often burdensome, often dull company, and why, when they wake, we don’t play children’s toy trumpets and so proclaim our daily resurrection. That’s the least they deserve.

“He would have deserved more, much more. Most of humanity, however, are incorrigible blockheads, full of fussy prejudice and false modesty. After a while even he was attacked. It was mainly the poets who plotted against him, those cantankerous crackpots who pretend to be apostles, but if two get together they flay the hide off a third; the poets, who sing of purity but avoid even the vicinity of the bathroom; the poets, who beg everyone, even beggars, at street-corners for just a little fame, just a little affection, just a little statue, beg mortals for immortality; those light-minded, jealous, wan exhibitionists who will sell their souls for a rhyme or an epithet, set out their innermost secrets for sale, turn to profit the deaths of their fathers, mothers, and children and in later years, in the ‘night of inspiration,’ dig up their graves, open their coffins, and rummage for ‘experiences’ by the dark lantern of vanity like grave robbers after gold teeth and jewels, then confess and snivel, those necrophiles, those fishwives. Forgive me, but I loathe them. There in Darmstadt, in my youth, I came to loathe them. They couldn’t abide that elevated president. And they had reason. They, who in their nauseating verse described themselves, without any basis, as ‘knights of dreams’ and ‘dreamers of dreams,’ envied that noble old man who was a dreamer in the strict sense of the word. They played interminable tasteless, malicious jokes on him. They said that after all those years he was satisfying his need for sleep in front of the biggest audience that he could find, like a hunger artist starving in an officially sealed glass cage in the public view. They said that he never took off his pince-nez during sessions just so as to be able to see the images more clearly in his dreams, because he was so shortsighted that he wouldn’t even be able to see dream images and would wake up out of boredom. They said that since he’d been active in the sphere of public life, that fine proverb ‘Life is a brief dream’ had lost its meaning, because life now seemed a very long dream. I clasped my hands together and begged them for mercy and clemency. I emphasized that even the most outstanding persons have some little shortcoming which we must disregard because of their other qualities. I quoted Horace at them too.
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.
^*
To which they replied that that was quite right, but the president didn’t just nod but slept all the time, and was incapable of anything else.

“I struggled desperately. The rising flood, however, soon threatened to cover everything. Sometimes the poets’ anger would appear publicly in a humorous publication or in a hostile article. They hated him. What was the reason? Well, probably their pompous-mawkish outlook. The very ones who deliberately lived their lives on a dunghill just so a few colorful toadstools should grow there could not endure that purity, that mighty, peerless quality of leadership, that irreproachable genius. While he was peacefully asleep in the presidential chair they saw all kinds of nightmares—without reason, naturally, because their view was always distorted, their judgment always clouded. They thought of the helmsman of a ship, overcome by sleep at the wheel while the ship ran onto an iceberg. They thought of the railwayman snoring beside the switch box while behind his back the skeleton grinned as it directed the train to thunder to its fate on the wrong track. What false perceptions, what lame comparisons. The ship and the train must of course be taken care of. They are physical entities. Harm could result if they collided with others. But I ask you, what harm could come to science and literature? I ask you, whom or what did that harmless, honorable president injure by sleeping, worn out by his manifold activities? I ask you, wasn’t he rather beneficial to everything and everybody? I think I’m right.

“It has been my experience, at least, that in public life peace and harmony can be maintained only if we let things take their course and don’t interfere with the eternal laws of life. These don’t depend on our wishes, so we can do virtually nothing to alter them. The president’s high-minded sleep, overarching opposition, gave expression to this. All the disorder on this earth has arisen from the desire of some to create order, all the filth from the fact that some have swept up. Make no mistake, the real curse in this world is planning, and true happiness the lack of it, the spontaneous, the capricious. I’ll give you an example. I was the first to arrive here. For a few minutes I was all alone in the private room of the Torpedo. In came Berta, the bakery girl. I bought a
császárzsemle
^*
from her and kissed her on the lips. A second before I had no idea that I would do that. Nor had she. So it was beautiful. Nobody had planned that kiss. If kisses are planned they turn into marriage and duties, become sour and insipid. Wars and revolutions too are planned, and that’s why they’re so dreadfully hideous and vile. A stabbing in the street, the murder of a wife or husband, the massacre of a whole family, is much more humane. Planning kills literature too—the formation of cliques, the guild system, in-house criticism which writes ‘a few warm lines’ about the in-house sacred cow. Whereas the writer that scribbles his never-to-be-published verses on an iron table by the washroom in the coffeehouse is always a saint. Examples show that those who have dragged mankind into misfortune, blood, and filth have been those who were enthusiastic about public affairs, took their mission seriously, burned the midnight oil passionately and respectably, whereas the benefactors of humanity have been those who minded their own business, shunned responsibility, took no interest, and slept. The trouble’s not that the world has been guided with too little wisdom. The trouble is that it has been guided at all.

“Don’t be surprised, my friends, at hearing such profound philosophizing from me on this occasion, because I’m much happier with frivolous talk. I learned it from the man from whom I’ve learnt more than from anyone else in my life, my loved and respected mentor and preceptor, but he never taught me anything, merely slept all the time. He was wisdom itself. Those piffling, snotty, unkempt poets, who spoke of him so disparagingly, had no idea how wise he was. What had he not seen, what did he not know! He’d seen tendencies appear and disappear without trace. He’d seen the greatest writers in Germany become the least overnight and new poets suddenly go out of fashion—for no apparent reason, in just a few minutes, while they were shaving at home, not suspecting a thing. He’d welcomed geniuses who later rotted on straw in stables, and he’d condemned and officially denounced the false doctrines of charlatans in the cultural association under his direction, then a couple of years later endorsed those doctrines in the cultural association under his direction, and consequently later even taught them at the university. He knew that everything was hopelessly relative, and that there was no reliable means of assessment. He also knew that people generally disagreed through conflicts of interest, protested solemnly against things, but then generally solemnly retracted, made peace, and that the deadly enemies of yesteryear walked arm-in-arm in the corridors of the Germania and sat whispering on velvet couches in alcoves. Once he’d discovered that, nothing surprised him again. He had a wonderful knowledge of people and life, which would always sort itself out somehow, one should just not worry about it. What else can anyone so wise do but sleep? Put your hands on your hearts and tell me, can there be a better place for sleeping than in public, on the presidential dais, on which, like a bier, candles flicker, and there is a comfortable, imposing, presidential armchair? I tell you, he did indeed sleep out of wisdom, patience, insight, mature, manly contemplation, and therefore relied on the capricious and unexpected, and permitted the ship or train of science and literature to speed freely ahead.

“Unfortunately, those poets whom I mentioned earlier were also active. Gradually the old, reliable generation died out. The privy councillors and distinguished lawyers who had declaimed regular ballads, epic poetry, and philosophical analyses went one after another beneath the weeping willows in Darmstadt cemetery. A new generation grew up who no longer respected the boundaries of art forms, and in due course forced an entry into the Germania halls. One callow youth stepped onto the dais and announced that he was going to read his
synthetic-exotic
novel, but this consisted of only a single word, and a tasteless, obscene word at that. Another similar wretch introduced his loose and disjointed
neoclassic-metapsychic
dialogues, the content of which the human mind could neither grasp nor anticipate. A futuristic prodigy extolled in his fanciful verse war, the twilight of the universe, the annihilation of the Earth, and its simultaneous reconstitution too. The president clutched his head nervously. At the ends of lines this bloodthirsty futurist either crowed or imitated the explosions of an assortment of weapons—
bangbangbang, dagadagadaga
and the like. At every crow the president was obliged to open his eyes as if dawn had suddenly broken. That was the first time I saw that coolheaded man aroused. He assessed those immature figures indignantly. He didn’t find fault with their literary tendency, nor yet with their views of the world. He approved them just like any other literary tendency and worldview. He merely dubbed them tactless and ill bred, and—let’s admit it—he was right.

“Such things were certainly a strain on his nerves. He often looked pale and worn out. But—as I’ve said—he wasn’t president only there. If he’d had three or four lecture sessions in a day, he was fresh again and went home as if he’d emerged from a tempering steel-bath to start work again next day with renewed vigor. Furthermore, he was never put out. He made good his deficiency anywhere. Should need arise, he could sleep anywhere at all, in the theater, during gala performances, during the noisiest revolutionary scenes, when the masses, freed from their chains, were howling and cheering freedom, equality, and fraternity, in the Opera, during the
Twilight of the Gods
, to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets, indeed, even when exhibitions were being opened, if for no more than a couple of minutes, in the standing position like the soldiers that were driven to death in the Russo-Japanese war. Once I saw him at a reception given by the duke of Hessen, where I’d sneaked in as the representative of a Hungarian paper. The duke came up and greeted him. He was an admirer of his. He immediately brought over his enchanting young wife, who with her bare neck and bare shoulders floated among the glittering flood of light from the chandeliers like a bittersweet swan. The Duchess took the president’s arm and got him to take her to a rococo divan embroidered with pink roses and with a gilded back. She sat him down and sat beside him. She began to chat to him. The president closed his eyes. The Duchess chattered on, laughing from time to time in her ringing contralto voice from behind her diamond-studded feather fan. Baron Wüstenfeld, who was an aristocrat and a recognized witty conversationalist, nodded. By then, however, he was asleep. The most beautiful and most décolleté young women had the same effect on that veteran philosopher as the strongest narcotic. He took every opportunity to recover from the exertions of public life, even the receptions which he likewise held as a matter of conscience at home. Many of the city’s poor also called on him because of his great influence. He received and listened to everyone. In this likewise he had his own system. The widow dressed in mourning, tear-soaked handkerchief at the ready, would plead for his support, implore him to help her, and ask his permission to state the facts of her situation. When the Baron, with a cold and gracious nod, had given his consent, the widow would excuse herself and emphasize that ‘I’ll be brief, very brief,’ and he, who knew that in all cases that meant ‘I’ll be long, very long,’ would close his eyes and then in his sleep, thanks to his tremendous experience, would nod frequently at the right places, sometimes even simulate attention, and sleep quietly for as long as was necessary, so that when he awoke, refreshed and rejuvenated, at almost the final word, he was able charmingly to reassure the grieving, prostrate widow that ‘he would do all that was possible on her behalf,’ knowing beforehand that he would do nothing. This, however, was not bad faith on his part, because the president also knew that those who were so foolish as to canvass the support of others were always doomed, under sentence of death, couldn’t be helped, weren’t even worth helping, because they were nothing but self-deceivers, so feeble that they weren’t even capable of self-deceit and went to others to deceive them instead of themselves, and that they only expected humbug, delusion, and opium, with which the president was not ungenerous. Nor were they ever disappointed. He was respected more and more, his reputation grew and grew, he was considered a charitable man, a gentleman from head to toe, and was loved everywhere.