The Play of the Eyes, page 14
I soon realized that, though he disregarded what was near at hand, it did not escape him. If he never wasted a word about the people who sat near us day after day, it was out of tact; he never impugned anyone, not even people who could never have found out. He was never lacking in respect for the dividing lines between individuals. I called this his ahimsa, the Indian word for the inviolability of all life. But I see today that there was something more English about it. He had spent an important year of his life in England, that was one of the two or three autobiographical facts I was able to infer from his conversation. For at bottom I knew nothing about him, and even when I spoke of him with other people who knew him, there was little concrete information to be gleaned. Maybe we were reluctant to talk about him as we did about anyone else, for his essential qualities were hard to formulate, and even persons who were themselves devoid of moderation admired his moderation. Thus we were exceedingly careful, in talking of him, to avoid distortions.
I asked him no questions, just as he asked none. I made suggestions, that is, I brought up a topic as though it had been going through my head for some time, hesitantly rather than urgently. And hesitantly he took it up. While continuing to talk about something else, he pondered my suggestion. Then with a sudden knife thrust he would cut into the topic and treat it with brilliant clarity and stunning thoroughness. He spoke with the ice-cold clarity of one who grinds perfect lenses, who will have nothing to do with anything murky until it is clarified. He examined an object by taking it apart, yet preserved it in its wholeness. He did not dissect; he irradiated. But he selected specific parts to irradiate, removed them with care, and his operation once completed, carefully rejoined them into a whole. What to me was marvelously new was that so penetrating a mind neglected no detail. Every detail had to be treated with care and for this reason alone became important.
He was not a collector, for with all his vast knowledge he kept nothing for himself. He had read everything, yet I never saw him with a book. He himself was the library he did not own. Whatever book we talked about, he seemed to have read it long ago. He never tried to conceal his knowledge of it. He didn’t boast, he never trotted it out inopportunely but there it was without fail when the need arose, and most amazing of all, no part of it was ever missing. Some people were irritated by his precision. He did not change his manner when speaking to women; he never spoke lightly, never belied his intellect or his seriousness, never flirted; he did not overlook beauty or hide his admiration for it, but it never led him to change his ways. Even in its presence he remained the same. The presence of beauty might inspire other men to eloquence; he on the contrary fell silent and only found his tongue again when it had gone away. He was capable of no greater homage, but this was something few women understood. Some women may not have been prepared for him in the best possible way. I would begin by putting him on a pedestal, high above myself, and this was bound to put a woman off if her love for me contained an element of veneration in which she lived and breathed.
That’s how it was with Veza, and she was steadfast in her refusal to appreciate Sonne. When she saw him for the first time at the house of the painter Georg Merkel, she said to me: “He does not look like Karl Kraus. How can you say such a thing? A mummy of Karl Kraus, that’s what he looks like.” She was referring to his sunken, ascetic look and she was referring also to his silence. For in company, among many people, he never said a word. I sensed that he was impressed by Veza’s beauty, but how was she to read that in those rigid features? And even when she heard from others and of course from me what surprising things he said of her beauty, she didn’t change her mind.
Once when I came home after a marvelous conversation with him at the Café Museum, she received me with hostility: “You’ve been with your seven-month baby, I can tell by looking at you, don’t tell me about it. It only makes me miserable to see you wasting yourself on a mummy.” By my seven-month baby she meant that he was not a normal, complete person, that something was missing. I was used to her extreme reactions, we had bitter arguments about people; she would see something that was really there and exaggerate it in her passionately intransigent way. As my reactions were just as extreme, there were violent clashes, but we both loved them, for they were lasting proof that we told each other the whole truth. It was in connection with Dr. Sonne that she showed a deep resentment, resentment against me, for here was I, who had never submitted to anyone, who, as she recognized, had guarded whole areas of myself even from Karl Kraus, submitting wholly and without hesitation to Dr. Sonne, for she had never heard me express doubt about anything he said.
I knew nothing about Sonne; he consisted entirely of his statements, so much so that the prospect of discovering anything else about him would have frightened me. No particulars of his life were bandied about, no illness, no complaint. He was ideas, so much so that one noticed nothing else. We didn’t make appointments, and when occasionally he failed to appear, he never felt obliged to explain his absence. Then of course I thought he might be ill, he was pale and did not seem to be in good health, but for over a year I didn’t even know where he lived. I could have asked Broch or Merkel for his address. I didn’t, it seemed right that he should have none.
I was not surprised when a busybody whom I had always avoided sat down at my table and asked me at once whether I knew Dr. Sonne. I quickly replied in the negative, but he refused to be silenced, for he had something on his mind that puzzled him and left him no peace: a fortune had been given away. This Dr. Sonne, he told me, was the grandson of an immensely wealthy man in Przemysl, and he had donated the whole of the fortune inherited from his grandfather to charitable causes. But he was not the only lunatic in the world. Another was Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher, the brother of the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein; he had done the same, except that he had inherited from his father rather than his grandfather. And my busybody knew of other cases, which he listed, along with the testator’s name and net worth. He was a collector of refused or donated inheritances, I’ve forgotten the names, which meant nothing to me; it may be that I wasn’t interested in the others because the information about Sonne meant so much to me. I accepted it without further inquiry, I believed it because it appealed to me and because I knew the story about Wittgenstein to be true. I had gathered from a number of conversations with Sonne that he had had firsthand experience of war but had not been a soldier. He knew what it meant to be a refugee as well as if he himself had been one, or rather, as if he had borne responsibility for refugees, organized whole shipments of refugees and taken them to a place where their lives were no longer in danger. Accordingly, I inferred from what the busybody had told me that he had spent his inherited fortune on refugees.
Sonne was a Jew. That was the only fact concerning him that was known to me from the start. We often talked about religions, those of India and China and those based on the Bible; in his concise way, he showed a sovereign knowledge of every religion we came across in our conversation. But what impressed me most was his mastery of the Hebrew Bible. He could quote any passage from any book verbatim, and translate it without hesitation into a supremely beautiful German that struck me as the language of a poet. Such conversations developed from his objections to Martin Buber’s translation, which was then coming out. I liked to bring the conversation around to it, it gave me a chance to get acquainted with the Hebrew text. This was something I had hitherto avoided, it would have narrowed me down to learn more about things that were so close to my origins, though I had preserved a keen interest in every other religion.
* * *
It was the clarity and firmness of Sonne’s diction that reminded me of Musil’s way of writing. Once he started on any path, he did not deviate from it until he reached a point where it branched out quite naturally into others. Arbitrary steps were avoided. In the course of the two hours or so that we spent together every day, we spoke of many things, and a list of the topics that came up would look—contrary to what I have just said—like an aimless hodgepodge. But that would be an optical illusion, for if the exact wording of such conversations were available, if a single one had been recorded, it would be evident that each and every topic under discussion was exhausted before we went on to something else. But it is not possible to show how that was done; it would be necessary—and quite impossible!—to write Sonne’s Man without Qualities. Such a book would have to be as clear-headed and transparent as Musil; it would command one’s full attention from the first to the last word; far removed from sleep or twilight, it would be equally engrossing regardless of where you opened it. Musil could never have come to the end of his book; once a writer starts refining such a precision process, he will never be free of it; if it were given him to live forever, he would have to go on writing forever. That is the true, the essential eternity of such a work; and inevitably it is passed on to the reader, who can content himself with no stopping place and reads again and again what would otherwise come to an end.
Of this I had a twofold experience: in Musil’s thousand pages and in a hundred conversations with Sonne. The convergence of the two was a stroke of good fortune probably granted to no one else. For though they were comparable in intellectual content and quality of language, they were contrary in innermost intention. Musil was chained to his undertaking. True, he had total freedom of thought, but he felt subordinated to his purpose, regardless of what might befall him; he never forwent an experience, he had a body, which he acknowledged, and through his body retained his attachment to the world. Though himself a writer, he observed the goings-on of others who called themselves writers; he saw through their futility, and condemned it. He respected discipline, especially that of the sciences, but did not deny himself other forms of discipline. The work he undertook can be regarded as a war of conquest; he was reconquering a lost empire, not its glory, not the shelter it had offered, not its antiquity; no, he was reconquering the ramifications of all its greater and lesser spiritual itineraries, reconquering a map composed of human beings. The fascination of his work is comparable, I believe, to that of a map.
Sonne, on the other hand, wanted nothing. His posture, so tall and erect, was misleading. The days when he had thought of reconquering his country were past. That he had also undertaken to reconquer its language was long unknown to me. He had access to all religions but seemed committed to none. He was free from purpose of any kind and was in competition with no one. But he took an interest in other people’s purposes, thought about them and criticized them. Though he applied the highest standards and there was much that he could not approve, it was never the project that he judged but solely the outcome.
He seemed the most down-to-earth of men, not because earthly possessions were important to him but because he wanted nothing for himself. A lot of people know what selflessness is, and some are so sickened by the self-seeking they see around them that they try to eradicate it from themselves. But in those years in Vienna I knew only one man who was totally free from self-seeking and that was Dr. Sonne. Nor have I met anyone like him since. For in the period when Eastern wisdoms were finding countless adepts, when large numbers of people were renouncing earthly aims, this attitude was invariably accompanied by hostility to European thought. Everything was thrown overboard, and what was condemned most of all was clear thinking; in eschewing participation in the environing world, our adepts also relinquished responsibility for it. In other words, they declined responsibility for phenomena they rejected. A widespread attitude was summed up in the words: “It serves you right.” Sonne had given up his activity in the world, why I did not know. But he remained in the world, he clung to the world with every one of his thoughts. He withdrew from action, but he did not turn his back; even in the unbiased justice of his conversation one sensed a passion for this world, and my impression was that his only reason for doing nothing was that he wished to do no one an injustice.
Through Sonne I learned for the first time what a man’s integrity means; it means that he will not be swayed by questions, even by problems, that he will go his own way without revealing his motives or past history. Even to myself I did not put questions about his person; even in my thoughts he remained inviolable. He spoke of many things and was not sparing of his judgment when something displeased him. But I never looked for motives for his words, they stood for themselves, clearly demarcated even from their source. Quite apart from their quality, this had become most unusual at that time. The psychoanalytic plague had spread, how much so I saw in Broch. It troubled me less in Broch than in more commonplace natures, for, as I’ve said before, his senses were so uniquely fashioned that even the cheapest explanations then in circulation could not detract from his originality. But in general, it was impossible in those days to say anything which would not be invalidated by the motives that would immediately be adduced. Everything was attributed to the same infinitely boring and sterile motives, but that didn’t seem to bother many people. The most astonishing things were happening in the world, but they were always seen against the same background; talk about the background was thought to explain them and once explained they ceased to be astonishing. Much-needed thought was replaced by a chorus of impertinent frogs.
In his work Musil was free from this infection, as was Dr. Sonne in his conversation. He never asked me a question remotely connected with my private life. I told him nothing about myself and made no confessions. I let myself be guided by the example of his dignity and, passionate as our discussions became, they never touched on his person. He often accused, but took no pleasure in accusing. He foresaw the worst and said so, but found no satisfaction in seeing his predictions confirmed. To him evil was still evil, even though he had been right. No one saw what was coming as clearly as he did. I hardly dare list all the calamities he foresaw. He did his best not to show how his foreboding tormented him. It would never have occurred to him to threaten or torment anyone with them. He was keenly aware of his interlocutor’s sensibilities and took care not to offend them. He offered no magic formulas, though he knew many. He spoke with the authority of one passing judgment, but managed, with a simple wave of the hand, to exclude his interlocutor from that judgment. In this there was something more than kindness, there was delicacy, and I am amazed to this day by this combination of delicacy and extreme rigor.
It has only recently come to me that without my daily meetings with Sonne I could never have torn myself away from Karl Kraus. It was the same face. How I wish I had pictures with which to demonstrate the similarity between those faces; unfortunately there are none. But—incredible as it may seem—there was yet another face, which I saw three years later in the death mask of Karl Kraus. This was the face of Pascal. Here anger had become suffering, and a man is marked by the suffering he inflicts on himself. The amalgamation of these two faces: that of the prophetic zealot and that of the sufferer, who was able without presumption to discourse on everything accessible to the human mind—this amalgamation released me from the rule of the zealot without depriving me of what he had given me, and filled me with respect for something that was for me unattainable. Pascal had given me an intimation of it, in Sonne I had it before me.
* * *
Sonne knew a great deal by heart. As I’ve said, he had memorized the whole Bible and could quote any passage in Hebrew without hesitation. But he performed these mnemonic feats with restraint and never made a show of them. I had known him for over a year before I raised an objection to the German of Buber’s Bible translation and he not only agreed with me but supported my criticism with a considerable number of references to the Hebrew original. His way of reciting and interpreting certain short chapters came as a revelation to me; I realized that he must be a poet, and in the Hebrew language.
I didn’t dare ask him about it, for when he himself avoided a subject I was careful not to bring it up. But in this case my tact did not go so far as to stop me from inquiring of others who had known him for years. I learned—and it sounded as if this had been a secret for some time—that he was one of the founders of modern Hebrew poetry.
It seems that when only fifteen he had written, under the name of Abraham ben Yitzhak, some poems which had been compared to Hölderlin by persons versed in both languages—only a very few hymnlike poems, perhaps less than a dozen, of such perfection that he had been numbered among the masters of the newly revived language. But then he had stopped writing poetry and after that no one had ever seen a poem by him. He was thought to have forbidden himself to write poetry. He never talked about it, and preserved an unbroken silence as he did about so many things.
I felt guilty at having made this discovery against his wishes and for a whole week I stayed away from the Café Museum. I had come to regard him as a perfect sage, and what I had learned about the poems of his youth, honorable as it sounded, seemed in a way to detract from that image. He was diminished, because he had done something. But he had done more things and this too I found out gradually and by chance. He had turned away from everything; though he became a master at everything he attempted, none of his efforts had allayed his misgivings and he had abandoned them all on strictly conscientious grounds. And yet, to speak only of his first activity, he had undoubtedly remained a poet. Wherein consisted the magic of his conversation, the precision and charm with which he steered a course among the most difficult subjects, omitted nothing that was worth considering (with the exception of his person); what was it that enabled him to scrutinize the things of the world closely but without identifying with them, how did he hold the horror he felt in check; what was the source of his delicacy, his secret insight into every impulse of the person he was talking to? But now I knew that he had won recognition as a poet and turned his back on it, whereas I was busy fighting for the recognition I had not yet won. I was ashamed of not wanting to forgo it and ashamed of having found out that he had once been something great, which he no longer regarded as great. How could I face him without asking myself the reason for this disparagement of fame? Did he disapprove of me for attaching so much importance to writing? He had read nothing of mine, no book by me had been published. He could know me only from our conversation, and I provided only a minimal part of that.
