Hyperion Page 6
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
Among the flowers, her heart was at home, as if it were one of them. She called them all by name, created for them new, more beautiful names out of love, and knew precisely the most joyful time of life for each one.
Like a sister when a loved one approaches her from every corner and each wants to be greeted first, the quiet being was occupied with eye and hand, blissfully distracted, whenever we walked in the meadow or in the forest.
And this was so utterly unaffected, unfeigned, it had so naturally grown up with her.
It is an eternal certainty, and can be seen everywhere: the more innocent, more beautiful a soul, the more intimately it lives with the other happy beings that are called soulless.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
A thousand times I have laughed with joy in my heart at men who imagine that a sublime spirit could not possibly know how to prepare a vegetable. At the proper time, Diotima could speak quite spiritedly of the hearth, and there is surely nothing nobler than a noble maiden who tends the all-beneficent flame and, akin to nature, prepares the heart-delighting meal.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
What is all artful knowledge in the world, what is the whole proud maturity of human thought over against the unsought tones of the spirit that knew not what it knew, what it was?
Who does not prefer the grape full and fresh as it sprang from the root to the dried, plucked berry that the merchant presses into the box and sends into the world? What is the wisdom of a book over against the wisdom of an angel?
She appeared always to say so little, and said so much.
I escorted her home once in late twilight; like dreams, dewing cloudlets crept over the meadow; like hearkening Genii, the blessed stars gazed through the branches.
One seldom heard a “how beautiful!” come out of her mouth, even though her pious heart left no whispering leaf, no trickling of a wellspring unheeded.
This time, however, she spoke it out to me – how beautiful!
It is probably so for our sake! said I, more or less the way that children say something, neither in jest nor in earnest.
I can imagine what you say, she replied; I like best to think of the world as a house of life, in which each being, without exactly thinking about it, reconciles itself to the other, and in which we live for the pleasure and joy of one another, simply because it comes thus from the heart.
Happy, sublime belief! I cried.
She fell silent for a while.
We, too, then, are children of this house, I finally resumed, are and will be.
Will be eternally, she replied.
Will we? I asked.
In this, she went on, I trust nature just as I trust her daily.
O I would have liked to be Diotima when she said this! But you do not know what she said, my Bellarmin! You have not seen and heard it.
You are right, I cried to her; eternal beauty, nature, suffers no loss in herself, just as she suffers no addition. Her trappings are tomorrow different than they were today; but she cannot dispense with our best, with us – us, and you least of all. We believe that we are eternal, for our soul feels the beauty of nature. She is a patchwork, not the divine, the complete, if ever you are missing in her. She does not deserve your heart if she must blush before your hopes.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
I have known nothing so without need, so divinely content.
As the surge of the ocean around the shores of blessed islands, so my restless heart flowed around the peace of the heavenly maiden.
I had nothing to give her but a soul full of wild contradictions, full of bleeding memories, nothing to give her but my boundless love with its thousand worries, its thousand raging hopes; but she stood before me in changeless beauty, effortless, in smiling perfection, and all the longing, all the dreaming of mortality, O! all that the Genius presages of higher regions in golden morning hours, it was all fulfilled in this one quiet soul.
They say that the battle will die away over the stars; and not until the future, they promise us, when our yeast has sunk, will fermenting life be transformed into the noble wine of joy; they no longer search on earth for the inner repose of the blessed. I know otherwise. I have come the shorter way. I stood before her and heard and saw the peace of heaven, and in the midst of sighing chaos, Urania appeared to me.
How often have I stilled my laments before this image! how often have overweening life and striving spirit been soothed when I, sunk in blessed contemplation, looked into her heart as one looks into the wellspring when it trembles serenely from the touches of heaven, which trickles down on it in silver drops!
She was my Lethe, this soul, my holy Lethe, from which I drank the forgetting of existence, so that I stood before her like an immortal and chided myself joyfully, and, as after heavy dreams, had to smile about all the chains that oppressed me.
O I would have become a happy, excellent man with her!
With her! but that failed, and now I wander about in that which is before me and in me, and beyond, and do not know what I shall make of myself and of other things.
My soul is like a fish cast out of its element onto the sandy shore, and it writhes and flings itself about until it dries up in the heat of the day.
O! if only there were still something in the world for me to do! if there were work, if there were a war for me – that should refresh me!
Little boys torn from their mother’s breasts and cast into the desert were once, so they say, suckled by a she-wolf.
My heart is not so fortunate.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
I can speak only here and there a word about her. I must forget what she wholly is, if I am to speak of her. I must deceive myself into believing that she lived a long time ago, that I knew something of her from hearsay, if her living image is not to seize me so forcefully that I expire in enchantment and in pain, if I am not to die the death of joy over her and the death of mourning for her.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
It is in vain; I cannot conceal it from myself. Wherever I flee with my thoughts, up into the heavens and into the abyss, to the beginning and to the end of times, even if I throw myself into the arms of that which was my last refuge, which once consumed every worry in me, which once scorched all pleasure and all pain of life in me with the flame in which it revealed itself, the glorious secret spirit of the world, even if I submerge myself in its depths as in the bottomless ocean – even there, even there the sweet terror finds me, the sweet, bewildering, killing terror, that Diotima’s grave is near to me.
Do you hear? do you hear? Diotima’s grave!
Yet my heart grew so still, and my love was buried with the dead woman whom I loved.
You know, my Bellarmin! for a long time, I did not write to you of her, and when I wrote, I wrote to you calmly, I believe.
So what is it now?
I go out to the shore, and look across toward Calaurea, where she rests – that is it.
O may no one lend me his rowboat, may no one take pity and offer me his oar and help me across to her!
May the good sea not remain calm, so that I may not chop myself a piece of wood and swim across to her.
But I want to fling myself into the raging sea and implore its waves to cast me onto Diotima’s shore! –
Dear brother! I console my heart with all sorts of fantasies, I give myself many sleeping draughts; and it would surely be nobler to free oneself forever than to make do with palliatives; but who is doing any differently? Thus I am content with this.
Content? O that would be good! then help would be provided where no god can help.
Now! now! I have done what I could! I demand from destiny my soul.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
Was she not mine, you sisters of fate, was she not mine? I call the pure wellsprings to witness, and the innocent trees that overheard us, and the daylight and the ether! was she not mine? united with me in all the tones of life?
Where is the bei
ng that knew her as mine did? in what mirror did the rays of this light converge as they did in me? was she not joyfully frightened by her own gloriousness when she first became aware of it in my joy? O! where is the heart that was so near to her everywhere as mine was, that filled her and was filled by her, that was there only to embrace hers, as the eyelash is there for the eye.
We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other, like the flower when it loves and conceals its tender joys in its closed cup.
And yet, yet was she not torn from me like a usurped crown and laid into the dust?
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
Before either of us knew it, we belonged to each other.
When, with all the tributes of my heart, blissfully overcome, I stood before her in silence, and all my life surrendered itself to the beams of the eyes that saw only her, embraced only her, and then she, tenderly doubting, regarded me in turn and did not know where I was with my thoughts; when, buried in pleasure and beauty, I often overheard her at an enticing task, and my soul wandered and flew about her softest movement as the bee about a swaying branch; and when she then turned toward me in peaceful thoughts and, surprised by my joy, had to conceal my joy from herself, and sought and found her calm at the dear work –
When she, wondrously all-knowing, revealed to me every harmony, every discord at the moment it arose in the depths of my being, before I myself perceived it, when she saw every shadow of a cloudlet on my brow, every shadow of melancholy, of pride on my lip, every spark in my eye, when she hearkened to the ebb and flow of my heart, and concernedly anticipated gloomy hours as my spirit drained itself too unrestrainedly and prodigally in exuberant conversation, when the dear being, more faithfully than a mirror, betrayed to me every change in my cheek and often admonished me in friendly concern about my unstable being and chided me like a precious child –
O! when once, innocent maiden, you counted on your fingers the steps from our mountain down to your house, when you showed me your walks, the places where you had once sat, and told me how the time passed for you there, and finally told me that now you felt as if I, too, had always been there –
Had we not then long since belonged to each other?
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
I dig my heart a grave so that it may rest; I spin a cocoon around myself because it is winter everywhere; I wrap myself up in blissful memories against the storm.
We sat once in Diotima’s garden under blooming almond trees with Notara – the friend with whom I was living – and several others who also, like us, were among the eccentrics in Calaurea, and we spoke, among other things, about friendship.
I had contributed little to the conversation, I had been wary for some time of uttering too many words about things that lie nearest to the heart, my Diotima had made me so monosyllabic –
When Harmodius and Aristogiton lived, someone finally cried, friendship was still in the world. That pleased me too much for me to keep silent.
One should weave you a crown for this statement! I cried to him; do you then really have an inkling, do you have an image of the friendship of Aristogiton and Harmodius? Forgive me! But by the ether! one must be Aristogiton to feel how Aristogiton loved, and surely the man who wants to be loved with Harmodius’s love must not fear lightning, for I am utterly mistaken if the terrible youth did not love with the severity of Minos. Few have stood such a test, and it is no easier to be the friend of a demigod than, like Tantalus, to sit at the table of the gods. But there is also nothing more glorious on earth than a proud pair like these men who are so subject to each other.
This is also my hope, my desire in solitary hours, that such great tones, and greater ones, must return one day in the symphony of the world’s course. Love gave birth to centuries full of living men; friendship will give birth to them again. The peoples once set out from the harmony of childhood; the harmony of spirits will be the beginning of a new world history. Men began from the happiness of plants and grew up, and grew until they ripened; from then on, they unceasingly fermented, inwardly and outwardly, until now the human race, infinitely dissolved, lies there like a chaos, so that dizziness seizes all who still feel and see; but beauty flees from the life of men upward into spirit; the ideal becomes what nature was, and if below the tree is dried-up and weathered, a fresh crown has still sprung from it and grows green in the sunshine as the trunk did once in the days of youth; the ideal is what nature was. By this, by this ideal, this rejuvenated divinity, the few recognize one another and are one, for there is one spirit in them, and from them, from them begins the second age of the world – I have said enough to make clear what I think.
You should have seen Diotima then, how she sprang up and gave me both hands and cried: I have understood it, dear man, completely understood all that you say.
Love gave birth to the world, friendship will give birth to it again.
O thus, you future men, you new Dioscuri, thus linger a little when you pass by the place where Hyperion sleeps, linger heedfully over the ashes of the forgotten man, and say: He would be like one of us, were he here now.
This I have heard, my Bellarmin! this I have known, and do not willingly go to my death?
Yes, yes! I have been paid already, I have lived. A god could bear more joy, but not I.
HYPERION TO BELLARMIN
Do you ask how I was at this time? As one who has lost everything so as to gain everything.
Admittedly, I often came from Diotima’s trees like a man intoxicated with triumph, I often had to hurry away from her so as to betray none of my thoughts; thus raged the joy in me, and the pride, the all-inspiring faith in being loved by Diotima.
Then I sought the highest mountains and their breezes, and like an eagle whose bleeding pinion has healed, my spirit stirred in the open air, and spread over the visible world as if the world were its own; wonderful! I often felt as if the things of the earth were purified and melted together in my fire like gold, and something divine emerged from them and me, thus raged in me the joy; and how I lifted up the children and pressed them to my beating heart, how I greeted the plants and the trees! I might have wished for a magic spell to call together the shy deer and all the wild birds of the forest around my generous hands like a small domestic gathering, so blissfully foolish was my love for everything!
But not for long, and all of this was extinguished in me like a light, and mute and mournful as a shade, I sat there and sought the vanished life. I did not want to lament, and nor did I want to console myself. I threw away hope like a lame man whose crutch has been spoiled for him; I felt ashamed of weeping; I felt ashamed of existing at all. But finally the pride broke out into tears, and the suffering that I would have liked to deny became dear to me, and like a child, I held it to my breast.
No, cried my heart, no, my Diotima! it does not hurt. Preserve your peace for yourself and let me go my way. Do not let your calm be disturbed, fair star! if below you all ferments and is murky.
O do not let your rose pale, blessed youth of the gods! Do not let your beauty grow old in the worries of the earth. This is my joy, sweet life! that you bear within you carefree heaven. You shall not become destitute, no, no! you shall not see within yourself the poverty of love.
And when I again walked down to her – I would have liked to ask the breeze and to see by the drift of the clouds how I would be in an hour! and how it delighted me when some friendly face encountered me on the way and called “Good day!” to me not too dryly.
When a little girl came from the forest and offered me a bunch of strawberries for sale, with a manner as if she wanted to give them to me, or when a farmer sat in his cherry tree plucking as I passed by, and called down to me from the branches to ask if I would not like to taste a handful; those were good signs for the superstitious heart!
When one of Diotima’s windows stood fully open facing the path that I came down, what good that could do me!
Perhaps she had gazed out not long before.
And now I
stood before her, breathless and wavering, and pressed my folded arms against my heart, so as not to feel its trembling; like a swimmer in raging waters, my spirit struggled and strove not to go under in infinite love.
Of what shall we speak now? I would cry, one often has trouble finding the subject matter to which thoughts can hold fast.
Are your thoughts taking off again into the air? replied my Diotima. You must bind their wings with lead, or I will tie them to a string as the boy does with his flying kite, so that they no longer escape us.
The dear maiden sought to help herself and me with a joke, but this did not accomplish much.
Yes, yes! I cried, as you wish, as you think best – shall I read aloud? Your lute is probably still tuned from yesterday – and I have nothing to read aloud just now –
You have already promised more than once, she said, to tell me how you lived before we knew each other, would you not like to tell me now?
That is true, I replied; my heart gladly plunged into it, and I told her now, as I have told you, of Adamas and my lonely days in Smyrna, of Alabanda and how I was separated from him, and of the unfathomable sickness of my being before I came across to Calaurea – now you know all, I said to her calmly when I finished, now you will take less offense at me; now you will say, I added with a smile, mock not this Vulcan when he limps, for two times the gods have hurled him from heaven to earth.
Be silent, she cried with a choked voice, and concealed her tears in her handkerchief, O be silent, and do not joke about your destiny, about your heart! for I understand it, and better than you do.
Dear – dear Hyperion! You are indeed hard to help.
Do you know then, she went on with a raised voice, do you know then for what you are starving, the only thing that you lack, what you seek as Alpheus his Arethusa, what you mourn in all your mourning? It did not depart years ago, one cannot say so precisely when it was there, when it went away, but it was, it is – it is in you! It is a better time, that is what you seek, a more beautiful world. In your friends you embraced only that world, with them you were that world.