And There Was Light Page 8

  From time to time I was obliged to remind myself that they were girls hiding something essential from me, and that made me uneasy. But as a rule I didn’t think about it. I lived with them outside the real world, and benefited from this liberty.

  Then the day came — and it was difficult — when they stopped coming to see me. They had turned into jeunes filles, and Jean and I had a long way to go to recapture them.

  Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, both the bad boys and the pretty girls had left us. It was the time for holidays shared between the two of us; for those interminable and often pointless confidences; for the world you discover with its ever new life, a world reminding you that you are not yet fully alive; the time for thoughts which are born but have no time to grow before others take their place; the time for the pure joy of living which, for want of a better word, we called love.

  WE HAD BEEN CLIMBING in shale and brush along the side of a hill above the Seine Valley. All of a sudden, having just noticed that the landscape had made a final dip on my right, I said to Jean: “Just look! This time we’re on top. You’ll see the whole bend of the river, unless the sun gets in your eyes!”

  Jean was startled, opened his eyes wide and cried: “You’re right.”

  This little scene was often repeated between us, in a thousand forms. And if it surprises you, that is only because you forget how hard it is for people who have something — eyes, luck or happiness — to realize it and make use of it. When we came in from our walks, Jean would say to his family, “It’s fantastic how many things he made me see today!”

  I should add, but perhaps you have already guessed it, that Jean spent hours dreaming. He was continually diving down into his inner world. He believed me when I told him that this world, if not richer than the other, was certainly as rich, and almost completely unexplored. I had pointed out to him ways to approach it, for I knew the route well. And now he came very close to going further along it than I.

  Still, though he had learned to go down into himself, he was clumsy when it came to climbing up again. The ascent is always the most difficult part of this journey. I had been making the return trip regularly for five or six years, and for me it was routine.

  I explained to Jean that it was a preconceived idea which made the process hard for him — an idea, by the way, which almost everyone shares — that there are two worlds, one without, the other within. I kept having to explain all over again, because Jean wanted to believe me but couldn’t. The preconceived idea always stood in the way.

  We talked about this at least once a week in the frame of mind of people going to Mass on Sunday. After all, it was a religious subject. The reality — the oneness of the world — left me in the lurch, incapable of explaining it, because it seemed obvious. I could only repeat: “There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”

  To pass from the inner light to the light of the sun was not the work of the senses. A click sufficed, a slight change in point of view, like turning one’s head a hundredth part of the circle. It was enough in the end to believe. The rest came by itself.

  To convince Jean (which mattered terribly to me) I assembled all my arguments. If he wanted to be completely happy, there must be only one world, for this was the indispensable condition.

  This joy was well known to me. It was the Grace of my state of being. When I read in the gospels that the Word was made Flesh, I told myself that this was indeed true. At the same time I was aware that I had done nothing to deserve it. It had simply been given to me, and I prayed God that Jean, too, should receive it.

  If there is a difference between a boy of fifteen years and a man of forty, I am afraid, alas, that it is to the advantage of the former. The boy does everything by attention. The man no longer does anything except by habit. Jean knew how to pay attention, to the point where nothing could distract him, neither nightfall, nor my endless chattering, not even hunger. Fifteen years old! The age when you dare to say anything, when you always find someone to listen. I, too, knew how to listen to Jean. When one of us was trying to draw an idea out of his head, or a whole scene which stubbornly refused to take shape, the other found that entirely natural. He waited and already understood.

  Try telling a grown-up person that you don’t see things as he does! Beware! You will annoy him and probably even shock him. And if you embark on the description of your differences, you have a fifty-fifty chance of making an enemy. But Jean and I were able to bear everything coming from each other. We were on the watch for even the smallest novelty.

  For a whole hour he would tell me about the effect that Schubert’s music had on him, and how different was the effect of Beethoven’s. For my part, I would unroll for him the film of history. I simply don’t know how it all came to me. But every time someone mentioned an event (whether it was in the reign of Tiberius or in the First World War), the event immediately projected itself in its place on the screen, which was a kind of inner canvas. This canvas could open out or fold up — like the altarpieces artists painted in the Middle Ages — and could do this as often as I wanted. If I needed the century of Augustus, I fixed it on the canvas and left hidden the Roman Republic on the left, and the rest of the emperors and their decline on the right.

  I could widen or narrow my field of vision at will. Periods when not much happened — like the sixth and seventh centuries between the prophecy of Mohammed and the crowning of Charlemagne — I saw in shades of gray. Crowded periods, like the ones which began with the American and French Revolutions, I could cut up into as many pictures as they needed. In this way, I hardly need to say it, the study of history became a game for me. And what a vivid game!

  In these pictures, large or small, it was not figures or lines of print I saw, but the great people and places of history, in all the detail which I had learned about them: Joan of Arc at Reims, Joan of Arc at the stake, the plague in Marseilles, Gutenberg and his first Bible, Santa Sofia sacked by the Turks, Christopher Columbus on his caravel.

  Jean had the right to all these details, a hundred times over, and never tired of them. Comparing my world with his, he found that his held fewer pictures and not nearly as many colors. This made him almost angry: “When it comes to that,” he used to say, “which one of us two is blind?” That is why when I asked him to see, he was willing and really looked. Then, immediately, I made use of his eyes. And when my turn came to say, “I have seen the forest, I see the sun setting,” he believed me.

  Still, it was necessary to keep these secrets to ourselves, for they were not really commonplace enough to be spread abroad. And, when Jean was gone, I had to wait years before I got back the courage to confide in anyone. It is not always easy to be different.

  [ 6 ]

  THE VISUAL BLIND

  THE FIRST CONCERT HALL I ever entered, when I was eight years old, meant more to me in itself alone in the space of a minute than all the fabled kingdoms. The first musician I heard there, right in front of me only a few steps from my seat in the orchestra, was another child, Yehudi Menuhin.

  Every Saturday from October to May for six years, my father came to get me when school was out, called a taxi and took me to one of the concerts given by one of the large symphony orchestras in Paris. Paul Paray, Felix Weingartner, Charles Munch, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter became so familiar to me that I knew, without anyone having to tell me, who was on the podium that day. The orchestra followed Munch’s pace or Toscanini’s, and who could mistake them?

  Going into the hall was the first step in a love story. The tuning of the instruments was my engagement. After that I threw myself into the music just as one tumbles into happiness.

  The world of violins and flutes, of horns and cellos, of fugues, scherzos and gavottes, obeyed laws which were so beautiful and so clear that all music seemed to speak of God. My body was not listening, it was praying.
My spirit no longer had bounds, and if tears came to my eyes, I did not feel them running down because they were outside me. I wept with gratitude every time the orchestra began to sing. A world of sounds for a blind man, what sudden grace! No more need to get one’s bearings. No more need to wait. The inner world made concrete.

  I loved Mozart so much, I loved Beethoven so much that in the end they made me what I am. They molded my emotions and guided my thoughts. Is there anything in me which I did not, one day, receive from them? I doubt it.

  Today, music for me hangs from a golden nail called Bach. But it is not my tastes which have changed but my relationships. As a child I lived with Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner and Dvořák, because they were the ones I met every week. Before becoming the word of a man, even if the man is Mozart, all music is music. A kind of geometry, but one of inner space. Sentences, but freed from meaning. Without any doubt, of all the things man has made, music is the least human. When I heard it I was all there, with my troubles and my joys, yet it was not myself exactly. It was better than I, bigger and more sure.

  For a blind person music is nourishment, as beauty is for those who see. He needs to receive it, to have it administered at intervals like food. Otherwise a void is created inside him and causes him pain.

  My father was in the habit of walking home from the concert, making me a present of some of the most beautiful hours of my childhood. How can people call music a pleasure? Pleasure satisfied impoverishes and saddens, but music builds as it is heard. Holding my father by the arm, I was filled with sounds and guided by them. My father whistled, hummed a melody. He talked to me about the concert. He talked to me about all the things that life, someday, would offer me. He no longer needed to explain them. Intelligence, courage, frankness, the conditions of happiness and love, all these were in Handel, in Schubert, fully stated, as readable as the sun high in the sky at noon. If only fathers would share with their sons, as mine did, something beyond themselves, life would be better for it!

  However — though who would believe it — I was not a musician, not really. I learned to play the cello. For eight years I practiced scales and did exercises. I played some simple pieces respectably. Once I belonged to a trio and managed not to destroy it altogether. But music was not my language. I excelled in listening to it, but I would never be able to speak it. Music was made for blind people, but some blind people are not made for music. I was among them; I was one of the visual blind.

  I did not become a musician, and the reason was a strange one. I had no sooner made a sound on the A string, on D or G or C, than I no longer heard it. I looked at it. Tones, chords, melodies, rhythms, each was immediately transformed into pictures, curves, lines, shapes, landscapes, and most of all colors. Whenever I made the A string sound by itself with the bow, such a burst of light appeared before my eyes and lasted so long that often I had to stop playing.

  At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colors of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright that I could not remember having seen it on any object. When it was the oboe’s turn, a clear green ran all through me, so cool that I seemed to feel the breath of night. I visited the land of music. I rested my eyes on every one of its scenes. I loved it till it caught my breath. But I saw music too much to be able to speak its language. My own language was the language of shapes.

  Strange chemistry, the chemistry which changed a symphony into moral purpose, an adagio into a poem, a concerto into a walk, attaching words to pictures and pictures to words, daubing the world with colors, and finally making the human voice into the most beautiful of all instruments!

  With Jean, who was more of a musician than I, I had long arguments on this subject. All of them ended with an exciting discovery, and it was always the same one: that there is nothing in the world which cannot be replaced with something else; that sounds and colors are being exchanged endlessly, like the air we breathe and the life it gives us; that nothing is ever isolated or lost; that everything comes from God and returns to God along all the roadways of the world; and that the most beautiful music is still only a path. Yet there are enchanted paths, and those which bear the names of Vivaldi, Beethoven and Ravel went further, I knew, than any roads on earth.

  In 1937, at the age of thirteen, I went on a journey that holds a peculiarly unique place in my life. My parents and I traveled to Dornach, a Swiss village not far from Basel. There, at the top of a hill, rose a singular building: the Goetheanum. Rudolf Steiner had had it built [before his death in 1925], in order to have a place for the working and meeting together of all those who followed his teachings. He himself had spoken there. And he spoke; he did not prophesy. In a wonderfully simple, completely sober method of speaking, he showed that spiritual worlds do exist. Deliberately and without pathos he affirmed with quiet force that it is the spiritual worlds that determine our physical one. He explained what these spiritual worlds consist of, why we generally know nothing of them, and the reasons for our ignorance and its significance. But now the time had come, he said, openly to reveal these secrets, even though they had been withheld up to now by a small number of initiates.

  By birth Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian and in the German language he held hundreds and hundreds of lectures in which he seemed never to invent but rather to describe spontaneously what was before his eyes at the very moment. Dornach, in its wreath of surrounding hills, still cherished the marks of his earthly path, profound yet not austere, respectful yet not idolizing.

  My father had for many years been active and influential in the French section of the Anthroposophical Society. He devoted all his free time to a regular lecturing schedule. To me, too, he spoke a great deal about Steiner and his work. Gradually I began to understand more and more, and a quiet and unforced veneration filled my mind and thought. The teachings of this astonishing man — at least, those that impressed me at the time — struck me with a feeling unknown until then: namely, a feeling of certainty, a feeling that the teachings were self-evident. The cycle of successive reincarnations, in particular, gave to my consciousness complete tranquility. I can still experience it today. For in accord with this new insight, any indignation about earthly injustice and unmerited suffering is wiped away. The misfortune that meets us can only be measured by our own responsibility; our anxiety and despair are now revealed as a result of our ignorance. We must pay for our past mistakes and answer for our present faults, but we shall be able to atone for them in a future life.

  Only our outward, visible history seems absurd and arbitrary. Our inner destiny knows only equilibrium and compensation. To some extent we are masters of our own personal fate, no longer — as so many religions would teach — condemned to exist, to be born, to die, but guilty only when given over entirely to matter and forgetful of our essential Self. And thus eternity is no longer so inexplicably projected into the future but rather encompasses our life on all sides, this life of ours which is both trivial and at the same moment so significant.

  I used to listen to these teachings, one after the other, but without ever summoning in myself the will to accept them. I was not fostering a belief. I was merely willing to see what was shown to me. Life itself would decide my choice.

  I spent two weeks in Dornach and paid careful attention to everything. One event, however, absorbed my interest more than anything else. I was allowed to attend a eurythmy performance. On an ordinary theater stage in the Goetheanum men and women were dancing, or rather, they seemed to dance. For eurythmy was not stylized choreography, but an art, a new art, just as complete and original an art as poetry or music. Steiner had created its foundations and established its first laws. One can say that eurythmy would reconcile word and motion, would let a movement of the body correspond to each spoken sound, would make the sense of poetry or prose visual, pictorial. There was, accordingly, a eurythmic alphabet based on the inner spiritual meaning of the sounds of speech
, and a freely applied grammar to hold them together. Sometimes the eurythmists developed their art in connection with music, sometimes with a recited poem.

  On that evening poems by Goethe and also several by Steiner himself were recited. They touched me deeply, for without quite understanding them (they were spoken in German) I could guess their meaning without any effort. The speakers brought the words to life in the same way that one makes a gesture with the hand or the arm or with the whole body.

  The German language seemed immediately to me of an extraordinary, musical beauty; most of all, it seemed imbued with a miraculous and unique flexibility. It never sounded finite, never closed or dead. It brought sounds into uninterrupted motion, rich invention. It let them rise or sink in an uninterrupted flow, always following certain curves that were impossible to predict. Though often rough and sometimes heavy or, at least, ponderous, it struck the air with solemn drumbeats. But it never was satisfied with itself; it seemed always to be in search of and following its moving forms.

  Its grace beguiled me. Yes, I say: its grace — certainly not that brilliant and proportioned grace of the French language, but more ardent, more willed. I heard how the vowels or the warm diphthongs — ü [“au” as in “how”], ä [“ai” as in “light”], ö [“eu” as in “oil”] — following a slow, very determined rhythm, soften the piano-like tones of the st, pf, cht; how at other times they put their feet on the ground and emphasize their strength in the endings -g or -t: Wirkung, aufgebaut. German became for me the language of a musician-architect, to whom the speech sounds have given building-stones and the impulse of will patiently to erect his speech edifice.

  Through all this I was filled with an enthusiasm which was to last for almost ten years without diminishing — and which today can still seize me at every new opportunity: I simply had a passion for the German language. Soon there followed a passion for Germany as well, and for everything it conceals of menace and of treasure. I found myself confronted with a mystery.