The Torch in my Ear, page 15
I didn’t notice her leaving the room, and I didn’t notice her coming back. I wouldn’t have noticed anything so long as the writing pad wasn’t used up. All at once, Dr. Laub stood in our room, our family doctor, the old senior medical officer. Mother stood behind him, half concealed, her face averted. I knew it was her, but I couldn’t look into her eyes. She was hiding behind him, and now I realized that there had been a loud knocking at the door. “What’s wrong with the little boy?” he said in his elevated speech. His slowness, the pauses after each sentence, the emphatic stress on each word, the ineffable triviality of his weighty declarations, the seamless welding with the previous visit as if nothing had occurred in between (last time, it was jaundice; what was it now?)—everything together had its effect, bringing me back to my senses. Although I still had a few sheets left, I instantly stopped writing.
“What are we writing so diligently?” said Dr. Laub. It took him an eternity to get the sentence out. I fell off the express train in which I had been sweeping across the paper; and, in a tempo more like his own, I handed him the last page. He read it solemnly. He pronounced it, the word, as I had uttered it. But in his mouth, it didn’t sound hateful, it sounded thoughtful, as if one ought to think it over tenfold before releasing such a precious word from one’s lips. Since he lisped, it sounded thrifty, and even though I said that to myself, I remained calm. I was surprised that I didn’t flare up anew. He read aloud everything that was written on this last page; and since it was more than half covered and he never read any faster, it took him quite a while. No “MONEY,” not a single one, was lost. And when he was finished, I misinterpreted a movement of his; I thought he wanted a second page from me in order to keep reading aloud the MONEYs. But when I held out another page, he begged off, saying: “Fine. The time has come.” Then he cleared his throat, placed his hand on my shoulder, and asked, as though honey were dripping from his mouth: “And now tell me: Why do we need money?” I don’t know whether he was being wise or innocent, but his question made me talk. I told the entire Karwendel story chronologically. I said the project had been heard at home for weeks without the least objection; indeed, she had even added to the plans. And now suddenly she had quashed the whole project. Nothing had happened in the meantime to alter anything; it was absolutely arbitrary, like most of the things happening in our home. I wanted to get away from here, get away and go to the ends of the earth, where I would never have to hear that damn word.
“Aha,” he said, motioning to the papers covering the floor. “That is why we wrote it down so often, so that we might know what we no longer wish to hear. But before we go to the ends of the earth, let us instead go to the Karwendel Mountains. It will do us good.” At this prospect, my heart melted; he sounded as certain as if he were in charge of the money needed for this trip, as if it were in his keeping. The form of my attention changed, I began to pin my hopes on him. And I might think back to him with gratitude, if he hadn’t promptly spoiled everything with his inexcusable wisdom. “There’s more here than meets the eye,” he declared. “The issue is not money. It is an Oedipus complex. A clear case. This has nothing to do with money.” He examined me a bit and left me. The door to the vestibule remained open. I heard my mother’s anxious question and his verdict: “Let him take the trip. Tomorrow would be best. This will be good for the Oedipus complex.”
The matter was thus settled. Physicians were the supreme authority for my mother. In regard to herself, she liked to get opinions from several physicians. She could thereby pick out whatever suited her from all the verdicts together and never acted against any. For us, however, one doctor and one opinion sufficed, and we had to adhere. The trip was now settled, quibbling was out of the question. I was allowed to go to the mountains with Hans for two weeks. I spent two more days in the apartment. There were no more accusations. I was regarded as threatened; my mind was unstable. The written sheets had been picked up from the floor, carefully assembled, and put aside. Since so much paper had been wasted, those pages should at least be preserved as a symptom of my mental disturbance.
I felt no less oppressed during these last few days at home, but I now had the prospect of going far away. I managed to hold my tongue, which was anything but my wont, and she managed to do the same.
The Justification
On July 26, Hans and I went to Scharnitz. There, we began our hike through the Karwendel range. The bare, rugged chalk mountains made a deep impact on me; seeing them did me good in my condition. I didn’t realize what a bad state I was in, but I felt as if I were leaving everything behind, all the superfluous things, especially the family, and starting out with nothing but naked stone, a knapsack containing very little but more than enough for two weeks. Perhaps I would have been better off without a knapsack. Nevertheless, my knapsack contained several important things: two notebooks and a book, for the further week of vacation. I wanted to settle in at some place I liked and begin the “work,” as I called it with some pretension. The notebook was meant for comments and criticism on the book I had along, a book on crowds. This was to be the basis of my work, a delimitation against whatever ideas were circulating about the topic. After just cursory acquaintance with this book, I already knew how unsatisfying it was, and I had made up my mind to remove all “scribblings”—as I called them—from crowds, to have the crowd before me as a pure, untouched mountain, which I would be the first to climb without prejudices. In the second notebook, I planned to free myself from the pressure accumulated at home and to jot down anything that moved me about the new landscape and the people inhabiting it.
It was better to conceal these “grand” intentions during the hike. The tools for implementing them lay at the bottom of my knapsack. I pulled out neither the notebooks nor the book, and I didn’t even tell Hans of their existence. On the other hand, I took in the mountains with great gulps, as though they could be breathed. Although we did climb to certain heights, it wasn’t the views that mattered to me so much as the endless bareness, which we left behind us and which stretched out in front of us. Everything was stone, there was nothing but stone. Even the sky seemed like not altogether permissible relief. And whenever we came to water, I was secretly displeased that Hans pounced on it, instead of passing it by and doing without it.
He couldn’t know what sort of a state I’d been in when starting out on this hike. He learned nothing about my difficulties at home. I was too proud to let on anything; and even if I had, he would scarcely have understood me. My mother enjoyed great prestige among the Asriels; she was considered an intelligent and original woman, with her own ideas and opinions beyond her middle-class background. Alice Asriel had no notion of the effect of the Arosa sanatorium on my mother; there, everything in her background had been revived. Alice saw Mother as she had been earlier: the proud, young, self-willed widow of our first Viennese days. Alice considered her wealthy, as she herself had once been, and she didn’t mind, because she sensed nothing of the narrowness that was linked to Mother’s wealth. Perhaps Mother concealed from her how greatly she had changed. Her childhood friend was now living in straitened circumstances, and how could Mother talk to her about money without offering to help her? Thus, money, which had become the main topic between us, an everlasting droning and nagging, was taboo in her conversations with Alice. And Hans felt he had good reason to envy me for my “healthy” conditions at home.
We talked about everything else, incessantly; it was almost impossible to keep silent with Hans. His drive to compete with me forced him to interrupt my every sentence, finish it, and provide adjoining sentences that seemed unending. In order to say more than I, he spoke faster, denying himself time to reflect. I was thankful for the hike, which had been his idea, and which he had prepared. And so I played a peculiar game with him: as long as he left the mountains verbally untouched, I was willing to talk to him about anything. He noticed, when he came to peaks and possibilities of climbing, that I shifted the conversation to books, and he assumed that talking about mountains bored me. Since scarcely anything was to be seen but eternally consistent bare rock, longer discussions about the mountains would have really been fruitless. Thus, his words soon likewise avoided the mountains, which I had made it my job to leave intact. Not that I could have designated it as my job: I am simply trying to give an abbreviated description of what was going on inside me. I had to pile up bare fruitlessness in front of me, because I had committed myself to an assignment, the “work,” which would remain fruitless for a long time. It was no mining operation, nothing was to be carried away, it had to maintain its overall ominous character and remain intact, without thereby becoming burdensome or hateful to me. I was to travel up and down, from end to end, touch the assignment at many points, but always in the knowledge that I still didn’t know it.
Thus the undiscussed Karwendel range, which I entered right after my twentieth birthday, stood at the outset of the period that became the longest in my life and also the most important in content.
It is indeed amazing that for five or six days I spent every moment with a person who never stopped talking, whom I answered and discussed things with (I don’t believe there was a moment of silence between us). Yet we never brought up the space through which we were moving, and I never touched on the thing that had become an agonizing pressure upon me in the course of the preceding year. Chitchat about books flowed glibly and meaninglessly from our lips. I did mean what I said, and Hans, so far as he found the strength in himself, meant what he said. But it was all nothing but interchangeable blabber. It could just as easily have been other books than those we were talking about. He was satisfied to be holding his own or even anticipating me; I was satisfied to be saying nothing about what I was filled with. Today, I couldn’t repeat even one sentence, even one syllable of our blather. This was the real water during that hike through chalk; it oozed into the chalk and vanished without a trace.
It appears, however, that words can’t be treated like that impunitively. For when we reached Pertisau on Lake Achen, there was a sudden and unexpected catastrophe. Hans stretched out in the sun by the lake. I, instead of doing the same, ambled up and down. His hands were folded under his head and his eyes were shut. It was hot, the sun was high. I thought he was asleep, so I paid no attention to him. I strolled along the shore of the lake, not far from him. The sand crunched under my heavy hiking boots; I wondered if the noise had woken him up and I glanced over at him. His eyes were wide open, he was staring at my movements with a hatred so powerful that I could feel it. I would never have thought him capable of strong emotions; this was the very thing I missed in him. I was amazed at this hatred and I didn’t think that it was aimed at me or that it could have consequences. I remained at the railing by the water, so that I could keep an eye on him from the side. He was silent and staring motionlessly. And gradually it dawned on me: his hatred was so powerful that it prevented him from talking. His silence was as new for me as the feeling that dictated it. I undertook nothing against it, I respected it; all words between us were invalidated by their endless numbers.
His condition must have lasted for quite a while. He lay there as if paralyzed. But his eyes weren’t paralyzed; their effect intensified so greatly, that the word murder crossed my mind. I walked a few paces toward my knapsack, which lay next to his on the ground. I picked up my knapsack and walked away before unbuckling it. He saw that the knapsacks were now separated; he shook off his rigidity, leaped up, and got his knapsack. He stood there, an open knife blade; he was already striding away, he was already on the road down to Jenbach, without having glanced at me.
He walked fast. I hesitated until he vanished from sight, then I started off, taking the same road as he. In Jenbach, I planned to catch the train to Innsbruck. Soon, I noticed how relieved I was to be alone, all alone. No word had passed between us—one single word could have led to others, but these would have been a hundred thousand words; the sheer thought of them nauseated me. Instead, he had kept silent, slicing everything in two. I didn’t try to find a reason for his silence. Nor was I worried about him. He was determined to walk off, with no intention (contrary to his habit) of going into a detailed explanation of his behavior. Striding along, I reached back to my knapsack and felt the book and the notebooks. I hadn’t shown them to him, hadn’t even mentioned taking them along. He knew that after the hike, I wanted to settle down in some spot for a week in order—as I said—to work. We hadn’t discussed whether he would stay in the same place during this week. Perhaps he expected a clear invitation to spend the second week with me. I never extended the invitation. In Pertisau, the hike was over. The Karwendel Mountains lay behind us; the road to Jenbach in the Inn Valley was short. That’s where the railroad station was, that’s where the train to Innsbruck would come and, going the opposite way, his train to Vienna.
And that’s how it was. I saw him as I crossed the tracks in Jenbach. He stood not far from me, waiting on the platform, where the train to Vienna was announced. He seemed a bit indecisive, not at all so rigid; his knapsack dangled limply from his thin shoulders, and his alpenstock appeared to have lost its tip. He made no effort to approach me on my platform. Perhaps he did follow me, but in such a way that he was concealed by railroad cars. I sat in my train, and with no bad conscience whatsoever, I rode off toward Innsbruck, escaping the danger of a last-minute reconciliation. All I felt toward him was something like gratitude for not standing by my track, where a confrontation would have been difficult to avoid. Not until later did I realize that his personal misfortune was to create the distances separating him from people he was close to. He was a distance builder; this was his talent, and he built distances so well that it was impossible for others and for him to leap across them.
In Innsbruck, I took a train to Kematen, which lay at the entrance to the Sellrain Valley. There, I spent the night, descending into the valley the next day. I wanted to find a room in Gries and begin my week of solitude with the notebooks.
It was a rainy, almost stormy day when I set out. I walked through clouds of fog; the rain lashed my face. This was the first time that I hiked alone, and it was not a friendly start. I was soon drenched; my clothes stuck to my skin. I dashed along in order to escape the bad weather and I quickly became breathless. During the previous week in the radiant sun, everything had been too easy. It seemed right that I had to pay a price for being alone. The rain poured over my face; I drank the drops. I could see only a few paces ahead of my feet. Sometimes, on a wayside farmhouse, I could make out a pious sentence, which greeted me in the storm. I was soaked from head to foot, and I made sure not to knock on the door of any of these neat, trim, word-adorned houses. It wasn’t very long, perhaps two hours, before I reached the flat, higher level of the valley. In Gries, the main village, I soon found a room in the home of a farmer, who was also the village tailor. The welcome was friendly, my things dried out. Toward evening, the rain cleared up, fine weather was predicted for the next day, and I could make my preparations.
I told the farmer and his wife that I had to study during the ten days I planned to stay, and that I intended to devote every morning to work. I was given a card table, which I could set up in the tiny garden next to the house. I rose very early and, right after breakfast, sat down outside, with pencils, both notebooks, and the aforementioned book. It was a wonderfully clear, cool morning when I began. I wasn’t surprised at the farmer and his wife for shaking their heads. I was surprised at myself for managing to open up this book out here, even though it repelled me from the very first word, and still repels me no less fifty-five years later: Freud’s Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis.
The first thing I found in it, typical for Freud, was quotations by authors who had dealt with the same subject matter; most of these passages were from Le Bon. The very manner in which the topic was approached irritated me. Nearly all these writers had closed themselves off against masses, crowds; they found them alien or seemed to fear them; and when they set about investigating them, they gestured: Keep ten feet away from me! A crowd seemed something leprous to them, it was like a disease. They were supposed to find the symptoms and describe them. It was crucial for them, when confronted with a crowd, to keep their heads, not be seduced by the crowd, not melt into it.
Le Bon, the only one attempting a detailed account, recalled the early working-class movement and probably the Paris Commune as well. In his choice of readings, he was decisively influenced by Taine; he was enchanted with Taine’s History of the French Revolution, especially the narrative of the massacres of September 1792. Freud was under the repulsive impact of a different sort of crowd. He had experienced the war enthusiasm in Vienna as a mature man of almost sixty. Understandably, he defended himself against this sort of crowd, which I, too, had known as a child. But he had no useful tools for his enterprise. Throughout his life, he had studied processes in individuals. As a physician, he attended patients whom he saw repeatedly during a lengthy treatment. His life unrolled in his medical office and in his study. He participated no more in the military than in a church. These two phenomena, army and church, resisted the concepts that he had previously developed and applied. He was too serious and too conscientious to overlook the significance of those two phenomena, and his late investigation was meant to tackle them. But what he lacked in personal experience he obtained from Le Bon’s description, which was nourished by very different manifestations of a crowd.
