Hyperion Read online

  Have I won you over now? replied Alabanda, do you speak thus? how deep, how soulful all becomes once my Hyperion grasps it! He flatters, I cried, so as to coax the unthinking word from me for the second time! good gods! so as to win my permission for the journey to the blood court!

  I do not flatter, he replied seriously, I have a right to do what you would like to prevent, and no common right! Honor that!

  There was a fire in his eyes that struck me down like a divine command, and I felt ashamed to say even one more word against him.

  They will not do it, I thought meanwhile, they cannot do it. It is too senseless to slaughter such a glorious life like a sacrificial beast, and this conviction calmed me.

  It was peculiarly profitable still to hear him on the following night, after each of us had prepared for his own journey, and we had gone out again before daybreak to be alone together once more.

  Do you know, he said, among other things, why I never heeded death? I feel in me a life that no god created and no mortal engendered. I believe that our being comes from ourselves, and only out of free pleasure are we so intimately bound to the All.

  Such words I have never before heard from you, I replied.

  And what, he went on, what would this world be if it were not a harmony of free beings? if, from the beginning, living things did not combine in it out of their own joyful impulse into one full-voiced life, how wooden would it be, how cold? what a heartless disarray would it be?

  So it would be true here in the highest sense, I replied, that without freedom, all is dead.

  Yes, indeed, he cried, no blade of grass grows if its own seed of life is not in it! how much more in me! and therefore, dear one! because I feel free in the highest sense, because I feel that I have no beginning, therefore I believe that I have no end, that I am indestructible. Had a potter’s hand made me, he could smash his vessel as he pleases. Yet what lives must not be produced, must be of divine nature in its seed, sublime above all power and all art, and therefore invulnerable, eternal.

  Everyone has his mysteries, dear Hyperion! his more secret thoughts; these were mine; ever since I have thought.

  What lives is ineradicable, remains free in its deepest form of servitude, remains one even if you split it to the ground, remains unwounded even if you shatter it to the marrow and its being flies triumphantly from your hands. – But the morning wind stirs; our ships are awake. O my Hyperion! I have prevailed; I have overcome myself to pronounce the death sentence upon my heart, and to separate you and me, darling of my life! treat me with care now! spare me the parting! let us be quick! come! –

  A coldness rushed through all my bones when he began thus.

  O for the sake of your loyalty, Alabanda! I cried, prostrate before him, must it be, must it? You drowned me out unfairly, you drove me into a frenzy. Brother! you left me not enough sense even to ask: Where are you going?

  I may not name the place, dear heart! he replied; yet perhaps we will see each other once again.

  See each other again? I replied; thus I am a belief richer! and thus I will become richer and richer in belief, and in the end all will be belief for me.

  Dear one! he cried, let us be silent when words are no help! let us end in a manly fashion! You spoil the last moments for yourself.

  Meanwhile, we had approached the harbor.

  One more thing! he said, when we were at his ship. Greet your Diotima! Love each other! be happy, beautiful souls!

  O my Alabanda! I cried, why can I not go in your place?

  Your calling is more beautiful, he replied; keep to it! you belong to her, that lovely being is from now on your world – O! because no happiness is without sacrifice, accept me as the sacrifice, O fate, and leave the lovers in their joy! –

  His heart began to overpower him, and he tore himself from me and sprang into the ship, so as to shorten the parting for himself and for me. I felt this moment like a thunderbolt followed by night and deathly silence, but in the midst of this annihilation, my soul brought itself to hold him, the dear departing man, and my arms flew toward him of themselves. Woe! Alabanda! Alabanda! I cried, and heard a muffled farewell from the ship.

  HYPERION TO BELLARMIN

  It turned out that the vessel that was to bring me to Calaurea was delayed until evening after Alabanda had already gone his way in the morning.

  I remained on the shore, gazed silently into the sea from one hour to the next, weary from the pains of parting. My spirit took stock of the suffering days of my slowly dying youth, and errant like the beautiful dove, it hovered over the future. I wanted to strengthen myself, I took out my long-forgotten lute to sing myself a song of fate that I had once, in happy, ignorant youth, repeated after my Adamas.

  You walk up there in the light

  On soft ground, blessed Genii!

  Shining divine breezes

  Stir you lightly

  As the fingers of the artist

  Her holy strings.

  Free of fate, like the sleeping

  Infant, the heavenly breathe;

  Chastely preserved

  In modest bud

  Their spirit

  Blooms eternally,

  And their blessed eyes

  Gaze in still

  Eternal clarity.

  Yet to us is given

  No place to repose,

  Suffering men

  Dwindle and fall

  Blindly from one

  Hour to the next,

  Like water hurled

  from cliff to cliff,

  downward for years into uncertainty.

  So I sang with the strings. I had scarcely finished when a boat arrived on which I immediately recognized my servant, who brought me a letter from Diotima.

  So you are still on earth? she wrote, and still see the light of day? I thought I would find you elsewhere, my dear! Earlier than you afterward wished, I received the letter that you wrote before the battle at Cesme, and thus I lived for a week in the belief that you had thrown yourself into the arms of death, before your servant arrived with the joyful message that you still live. Besides this, I had also heard a few days after the battle that the ship on which I knew you to be had blown up with the whole crew.

  But O sweet voice! once again I heard you, once again the speech of the dear one stirred me like May air, and your beautiful, hopeful joy, the lovely phantom of our future happiness, for a moment deceived me, too.

  Dear dreamer, why must I awaken you? why can I not say: Come, and make true the beautiful days that you promised me! But it is too late, Hyperion, it is too late. Your maiden has wilted since you have been gone, a fire in me has gradually consumed me, and only a small remnant is left. Do not be appalled! All that is natural purifies itself, and everywhere the blossom of life wrests itself freer and freer from coarser matter.

  Dearest Hyperion! you must not have thought you would hear my swan song this year.

  CONTINUATION

  Soon after you had gone, and even in the days of parting, it began. A strength in my spirit that frightened me, an inner life before which the life of the earth grew pale and faded like night lamps in the red dawn – shall I say it? I would have liked to go to Delphi and build the god of enthusiasm a temple under the cliffs of ancient Parnassus; a new Pythia, I would have liked to inflame the slack peoples with divine oracles, and my soul knows that my maidenly mouth would have opened the eyes of the godforsaken, and smoothed their dull brows, so powerful was the spirit of life in me! Yet my mortal limbs became wearier and wearier, and the frightening heaviness dragged me inexorably down. O! often in my quiet arbor I have wept for the roses of youth! they faded and faded, and your maiden’s cheek turned red only from tears. The old trees were still there, the old arbor was there – there your Diotima, your child, once stood, Hyperion, before your happy eyes, a flower among the flowers, and the powers of earth and heaven met peacefully in her; now she walked, a stranger among the buds of May, and her intimates, the lovely plants, nodded to her amia
bly, but she could only mourn; yet I passed none by, yet I took leave of all the playmates of my youth, one after the other, the groves and wellsprings and rustling hills.

  O! as long as I still could, I often walked with hard, sweet effort up to the height where you dwelled with Notara, and spoke of you with our friend with as much levity as possible, so that he should write nothing to you of me; but soon, when her heart became too loud, the dissembler stole out into the garden, and there I was at the railing above the cliff where I once gazed down with you and out into open nature, O! where I stood, held by your hands, embraced by your eyes, in the first shuddering warmth of love, and wished to pour out my overflowing soul like sacrificial wine into the abyss of life, there I now staggered about and wailed my sorrow to the wind, and my gaze drifted like a timid bird and scarcely dared to look at the beautiful earth from which I should part.

  CONTINUATION

  So it has gone for your maiden, Hyperion. Ask not how, do not seek to explain this death to yourself! He who thinks to fathom such a fate in the end curses himself and everything, and yet no soul is guilty of it.

  Shall I say that grief for you has killed me? O no! O no! it was welcome to me, this grief, it gave the death that I bore in me form and grace; you die to honor your darling, I could now tell myself. –

  Or has my soul grown too ripe for me in all the enthusiasms of our love, and does it therefore, like an overweening youth, no longer stay in the humble home? Speak! Was it my heart’s abundance that severed me from mortal life? Has the nature in me, through you, you glorious man! grown too proud to tolerate it any longer on this mediocre star? But if you have taught it to fly, why do you not also teach my soul to return to you? If you ignited the ether-loving fire, why did you not tend it for me? – Hear me, dear one! for the sake of your beautiful soul! do not accuse yourself of my death!

  Could you hold me back, when your destiny pointed you the same way? and had you, in the heroic battle of your heart, preached to me – be content, child! and reconcile yourself to the time – would that not have been the vainest of all the vain?

  CONTINUATION

  I will tell you exactly what I believe. Your fire lived in me, your spirit had passed into me; but that would hardly have harmed me, and only your destiny has made my new life deadly to me. My soul had become too powerful for me through you, it would also have become quiet again through you. You drew my life away from the earth, you would also have had the power to fetter me to the earth, you would have taken my soul spellbound into your embracing arms as into a magic circle; O! one of your heartfelt glances would have held me fast, one of your loving speeches would have made me into a joyful, healthy child again; yet when your own destiny drove you into solitude of the spirit, as floodwaters drive men to mountain summits, O only when I fully believed that the storm of battle had burst open your prison, and that my Hyperion had flown up into the ancient freedom, then it was decided for me, and now will soon end.

  I have uttered many words, and yet the great Roman woman died in silence when her Brutus and her fatherland struggled in the throes of death. What better could I do in the best of my last days of life? – And I am still compelled to say various things. My life was silent; my death is eloquent. Enough!

  CONTINUATION

  I must say only one more thing to you.

  You would have to perish, you would have to despair, yet the spirit will save you. No laurel will console you, and no myrtle crown; Olympus will do it, the living, present Olympus that blooms eternally youthful about all your senses. The beautiful world is my Olympus; in it you will live, and with the holy beings of the world, with the gods of nature, with them you will be joyful.

  O be welcome, all you good and you true! you deeply missed, you unrecognized! children and eldest! Sun and earth and ether with all living souls that play about you, about which you play, in eternal love! O take the all-attempting men, take the fugitives back into the divine family, take them into the home of nature from which they escaped! –

  You know this word, Hyperion! You began it in me. You will complete it in yourself, and only then repose.

  I have enough of it to die joyfully, as a Greek maiden.

  The poor souls who know nothing but their meager, botched work, who serve only necessity and scorn the genius and do not honor you, childlike life of nature! they may fear death! their yoke has become their world; they know nothing better than their servitude; they shy from the divine freedom that death gives us?

  But not I! I have risen above the piecework that human hands have made, I have felt the life of nature that is higher than all thoughts – if I were to become a plant, would the loss be so great? – I will be. How should I become lost from the sphere of life, in which the eternal love that is common to all holds together all natures? how should I part from the union that links all beings? It does not break as easily as the loose bonds of this time. It is not like a market day, when the people congregate and make a commotion and disperse. No! by the spirit that unites us, by the divine spirit that is each man’s own and common to all! no! no! in the union of nature, loyalty is no dream! We part only to be more intimately at one, more divinely at peace with all, with each other. We die so as to live.

  I will be; I do not ask what I will become. To be, to live, that is enough, that is the honor of the gods; and therefore all that lives in the divine world is equal, and in this world there are no masters and slaves. Natures live together like lovers; they have all in common, spirit, joy and eternal youth.

  The stars have chosen constancy, they shine unceasingly in silent fullness of life and do not know age. We represent perfection in flux; we divide the great chords of joy into ever-changing melodies. Like harp players among the thrones of the most ancient, we live, ourselves divine, among the silent gods of the world; with the fleeting song of life we temper the blessed seriousness of the sun-god and the others.

  Look up into the world! Is it not like an ever-moving triumphal procession in which nature celebrates eternal victory over all corruption? and does not life lead death with it in golden chains to glorification, as the commander once led captive kings with him? and we, we are like the maidens and the youths who accompany the majestic procession with dance and song in changing forms and tones.

  Now let me fall silent. To say more would be too much. We may well encounter each other again. –

  Mourning youth! soon, soon you will be happier. Your laurel did not ripen, and your myrtles faded, for you shall be priest of divine nature, and your poetic days already germinate.

  O if only I could see you in your future beauty! Farewell.

  At the same time, I received a letter from Notara, in which he wrote:

  The day after she wrote to you for the last time, she became very quiet, spoke a few more words, and then said that she would rather part from the earth in fire than be buried, and that we should gather her ashes into an urn and set it in the woods at the place where you, my dear friend! first encountered her. Soon thereafter, when it began to grow dark, she said goodnight to us as if she wanted to sleep, and laid her arms around her beautiful head; we heard her breathing until toward morning. As it then became utterly silent, and I heard nothing more, I went to her and listened.

  O Hyperion! what else shall I say? It was over, and our laments awakened her no more.

  It is a terrible mystery that such a life should die, and I will confess to you that I myself have neither sense nor faith since I saw this.

  Yet a beautiful death is always better, Hyperion! than such a sleepy life as ours now is.

  To ward off flies, that is our work in the future; and to gnaw at the things of the world as children gnaw at the dried iris root, that is our joy in the end. To grow old among youthful peoples seems to me a pleasure, but to grow old where all is old seems to me worse than all else. –

  I would almost like to advise you, my Hyperion! not to come here. I know you. It would rob you of your senses. Besides, you are not safe here. My dear friend! th
ink of Diotima’s mother, think of me, and spare yourself!

  I will confess to you that I shudder when I reflect on your fate. But I also believe that the blazing summer does not dry up the deeper wellsprings, only the shallow rain-fed stream. I have seen you at moments, Hyperion! when you seemed to me a higher being. You are now put to the test, and time must tell who you are. Farewell.

  So Notara wrote; and you ask, my Bellarmin! how I am now, while I tell you this.

  Dearest friend! I am calm, for I want nothing better than the gods. Must not everything suffer? And the more excellent it is, the more deeply? does not holy nature suffer? O my divinity! that you could mourn as you are blissful – this I was long unable to grasp. But the bliss that does not suffer is sleep, and without death there is no life. Should you be eternally like a child and slumber like nothingness? dispense with triumph? not traverse all perfections? Yes! yes! grief is worthy of lying at the heart of men, and of being your intimate, O nature! For it alone leads from one bliss to another, and there is no other companion than it. –

  When I began to revive again, I wrote to Notara from Sicily, to which a ship from Paros had first brought me:

  I have obeyed you, my dear friend! am already far from you and our other friends and want now to give you news; but words are hard for me; that I may confess. The blessed where Diotima now is do not speak much; in my night, in the depths of the mourner, speech has also come to an end.

  My Diotima died a beautiful death; in this, you are right; this is also what awakens me and gives me back my soul.

  But it is no longer the former world to which I return. I am a stranger like the unburied when they come up from the Acheron, and even if I were on my native island, in the gardens of my youth that my father closes to me, O! nonetheless, nonetheless I would be a stranger on earth, and no god would link me to the past anymore.