And There Was Light Page 9

  FROM 1937 TO 1944 A WHOLE PART OF MY LIFE was unfulfilled. Every day for eight years I would hear the call of Germany. I felt myself irresistibly drawn to the e ast. It seemed to me as if every day were the eve of a possible departure. Germany gave me the joy of life, it brought all my possibilities and capabilities on to a higher level.*

  When I was fourteen I was a small edition of the Tower of Babel. Latin words, German words, French and Greek words led a riotous life inside my head. Every night I went to sleep with my ears ringing. That’s what happens when you are too conscientious as a student, with too much memory, when you have a bent for literature, when you read more than is good for you, and when words have grown as real to you as people.

  Luckily I had found a way of protecting myself. I had discovered, contrary to what all the books taught, that the less seriously you took words, the more sense they made. The proper way to look at them was from a distance, in the mass. The more numerous they were, the more chance they had of taking on significance.

  I used to stop reading all of a sudden, lift my head above the waves of language and keep my ears open. I caught words on the fly, and it wasn’t hard for there were always words floating around me in the room. I trained my headlights on each one of them for a second, and then quickly replaced them with others. The associations, the marriages that resulted often seemed to me admirable. But I didn’t take note of them for this would have spoiled my pleasure.

  My greatest pleasure was in hearing words sound, in watching them make all those comical attempts to convince me that they had meaning. Besides, they were not abstract figures moving around in the world of the mind. Each of them had a voice, a voice that fluttered, but one my ear could hear distinctly.

  On Thursdays, I felt like a truant when I went off to the Comédie Française. But can you imagine a more serious form of diversion? I was going to hear Polyeucte and Britannicus, Tartuffe, Athalie, Zaïre!

  For once, Jean was not with me, since he always had some schoolwork to finish. I turned to more frivolous boys, less conscientious, all of whom, more or less recently, had fallen in love with an actress. I catered to their passion by making it their responsibility to accompany me. From the top gallery they looked down on the object of their desire, caught by the cruelty of a Trojan prince or absorbed in taking poison. I was intoxicated by this weekly dose of classical alexandrines.

  Since the seats farthest from the stage were the only ones we could afford — especially if we wanted to allow ourselves the luxury of an eskimo pie between the acts — we usually had trouble hearing the lines. Only the tragic cries rose to the place where we were. The blank spots we had to fill in with our imagination, but that kept us forever awake and entranced.

  Wandering through the marble busts of all the French playwrights since the Renaissance, along the solemn galleries of the theater, we made all kinds of assumptions about episodes in the play we had not heard. And without exception, they went to our heads. For hours after the show was over, my brain swayed right and left to the rhythm of the alexandrines, as they say the sea does through the attraction of the moon.

  Up there in “the gods” I heard poorly because of distance and also because the theater fans — they were as thick as flies those days — could not refrain from reciting Marivaux’s prose or the verse of Racine along with the actors in loud and passionate tones. And finally, I heard badly because my blindness kept me from seeing what was happening. But at the same time my powers of invention flourished.

  A nudge from my companions was enough to make me understand that the traitor, the executioner or the lover had come onstage. Fragments of sentences whispered in my ear set the scene, described the action: “She is falling down….He is dying….There is an armchair on the right….He is lifting his hat….” That was all I asked, I didn’t need anything more.

  In the intermission, my buddies, who had seen the hat or the dagger, asked me, in the most serious way, for my opinion of the production. It was a habit with them. I gave my opinion and corrected their judgment. They never for a moment thought me ridiculous.

  It was true that I had seen the play. I had chosen the position of the columns for every vestibule in the Roman palace. I had seen to the makeup of Agrippina and Nero with the greatest care. I had changed the lighting from one act to the next. Why shouldn’t I say so?

  From time to time, I came upon an unbeliever, but his doubts did not embarrass me for very long. “After all,” I said to him, “when you read a novel, you don’t see the characters. You don’t see the places. Yet you do see them, or else it is a bad novel.” Already my friend’s resistance softened.

  What I liked in the theater was that, like music, it opened doors to life which I had not seen. In real life I had never met the Misanthrope, or Phèdre, but I realized that these people were not unreal, no more and no less than my parents or my teachers. The astonishing thing in seeing Phèdre or the Misanthrope was their transparency. These characters hid nothing.

  For me, everything happened at the theater as it did with voices. Appearances melted as fast as snow under the sun. After all, for some time I had been in the habit of recognizing the cruelty in the languid voice of a society woman, the silliness in the rhetoric of a professor stuffed with learning, and a hundred similar kinds of ugliness. Theatrical people must be like me, endowed with a double ear.

  Naturally, some incomprehensible things remained. Adultery, lust for power, premeditated murder, infidelity and incest, which abounded in the plays at the Comédie Française, left me befuddled. Whenever, miraculously, my companion and I had enough money left over to pay for a glass of beer after the show, these great problems took on an air of conspiracy around the table at the bistro. At the time we thought the world was an uneasy affair, doubtless still more extraordinary than all of Racine and all of Shakespeare. We were so anxious to see for ourselves that we went home on the run.

  In those days the Comédie Française was somewhat contemptuous of Shakespeare. It is amazing that the love of Shakespeare has always been subject to eclipse in France, as if Frenchmen, from time to time, were unhappy to meet such a great man away from home. Still, one evening on the radio, I came upon a production of Hamlet. I remember clearly that I understood nothing but was fascinated.

  This play was as convincing as Racine, with mist added, fog everywhere, between the lines, between the scenes, characters of whom you never knew exactly where they were or what they should be called. Were they mad or rational, ambitious or good? The ambiguity of the English seemed to me more true than all the definitions of the French.

  In Shakespeare I had at last discovered a spirit as complex as life itself. I began to read the whole of it in translation. Dramatizing Shakespeare in my head was a joy. And how much help he gave! He poured out upon you all the shade and all the sun, the songs of birds and the groans of ghosts. He never said anything that was abstract. With him you no longer had to imagine Romeo and Juliet. You touched them and even thought you yourself were Romeo.

  No more need for the small or even the broad bounds of the intelligence. The suitable and the unsuitable, the probable and the improbable mingled, as they should and as they do in real life. Shakespeare was greater than the others, because he had what I had looked for vainly everywhere in the French theater: the divine excess. Puck, Mercutio, Prospero, Henry VIII, Lady Macbeth, King Lear and Ophelia tripped over each other in my head. They ended by obsessing me. There was only one thing left for me to do to get free of them: to put myself to work.

  In two years I composed ten Shakespearean tragedies. Granted not one of them reached the stage of being written down. I was not at all concerned with the written text. I was not composing, I was creating! Between a Latin translation and a problem in geometry, I took refuge in fantasy and in the theater. Walls spotted with blood and haunted castles moved in procession.

  It must be said that the French side of my nature was not long in coming back at a gallop. At the end of the Shakespearean drama, my heroes, who
thought dying in bunches was premature, not to say primitive, turned to reasoning. They made very long speeches to each other, and these in the end appeased them. They calculated with passion, but what they calculated was compromise, reconciliation.

  In short, to bring back the dead — through an exchange arranged for in good time — to prevent Hector’s body being dragged in shame around the walls of Troy, seemed to me a noble poetic function. And I decided that this function would be mine.

  TO GO TO THE LYCÉE, Jean and I had a choice between two different routes. We could take the Rue d’Assas and cross the Luxembourg on the diagonal till we came to the Boulevard St-Michel, or we could go directly to the gardens of the Observatoire, and cut straight across the Luxembourg. The same distance in each case, the same encounters, but two climates and one so different from the other.

  If we took the Rue d’Assas, silence fell upon us. We could not speak. Words hung suspended in our heads, till they gave us a feeling of impatience or grief. On the other hand, going by the Observatoire, we had so much to say that we had to restrain each other. I should never have been able to communicate my impressions to other people, for they would have laughed in my face. But with Jean, I didn’t even need to describe them. He was living them at the same time as I.

  To us, no two places in the world were ever alike. No sidewalk was unimportant, no wall blind, no crossroad nameless, no tree replaceable by another, nothing without its own individuality. Ours the observation, ours the familiarity, and we clung to it as if it were treasure.

  At last, one summer our parents planned a vacation for us together. The two of us were going to spend a month in the mountains. The place was the Haut Vivarais, in the foothills of the Massif Central to the east, at the exact point where it plunges down on two levels, rounded off but as clearly defined as steps, toward the valley of the Rhône. It was a land of pastures scented with lemon balm and marjoram, low bushes blue with bilberries, pine forests humming with flies and bees, valleys sloping steeply with grass- and moss-covered sides where the rocks seldom broke through the soil.

  I had discovered the mountains a few years earlier, but then Jean was not there. The joy they brought me I had kept secret. This time I could describe them in detail and sing about them aloud. For Jean was not the one to think it silly! We set out in the morning and came back at night, working hard on the way. Our legs could not carry us any farther, and yet we still longed to stay up there in the air.

  In order to guide me better, Jean had invented a code. The pressure of his hand on my right shoulder meant: “Slope on the right. Shift the weight of your body to the left,” and vice versa. Pressure in the middle of my back said: “No danger in a straight line in front of you. We can walk faster.” Pressure on my back but on the left side was a warning: “Slow up! Right turn ahead.” And when the weight of his hand became heavier, it was because the turn ahead was a hairpin bend.

  For every obstacle there was a sign: a stone to climb over, a brook to jump across, branches to avoid by lowering your head. Jean declared that in less than an hour he had perfected the method, that for me it was as if I had found my eyes, that for him it was so simple that he hardly had to think about it.

  As a matter of fact, his system of radar worked so well that going down a narrow path, along the edge of a precipice and on rolling stones, created a tension hardly greater than walking along the Champs-Elysées for an aperitif. Physical problems could always be solved. That was the lesson of radar. “In any case,” said Jean, “I have to look where I am going, and telling you about it is only a matter of mechanics.”

  To get our bearings, we used the plan of the sundial. When Jean wanted to tell me about the rosy mists which bathed the peak of Mont Chaix around six o’clock in the evening, or show me where they came from or where they were going, he only needed to say: “A minute ago, they stood at three o’clock. But while I am speaking they are moving toward two.” To understand, it was enough to state, once and for all, that noon would be right in front of my face from where we stood. Since in the physical world everything is point of view or convention, there was only one thing to do to master it: invent an equal number of conventions and points of view for ourselves, and put them to use.

  When we were climbing hills or going down through the valleys, everything took care of itself. I no longer asked anything of Jean except, from time to time, to point out a landmark: the tree with the split trunk, the rock with the horns, the roof on the house you could not see, the stile the goat had just crossed. I did the rest.

  Jean was absentminded as you may remember, but never about things that were pressing. Then he felt his responsibility, and never made a mistake. But as for looking at the landscape continuously, it was too much for him. For me it was good, and that was my job on the team.

  Even at the cost of interrupting the conversation, it was up to me to point out every change in the view to Jean. If, at the turn in the road, the forest grew thicker, giving us the chance to catch the light along a darker channel; if the meadow sloped straight down to the stream, then climbed up again on the other side at the same angle, suggesting black and blue reflections at the base, I was supposed to describe it.

  I reported the stages along the way. I pointed out the villages: “Satillieu is down there, behind that hill. When the trees are not so high you will see Saint Victor.” Altogether this made some pretty strange dialogue. The one who saw was in the lead. The blind one described. The seeing one spoke of things nearby, the blind one of those far away. And neither made mistakes.

  The mountains for me were the blessed place of perception at a distance. Was it the buzzing of insects which encircled the forest for me? Was it the bouncing and silent echo of stones which defined the peak in front of me? Was it the acrid smell, suddenly rising from heavy plant vapors, which told me about the rock glistening with cool water? These were questions I no longer asked myself.

  Everything talked, that was sure. There was no tree with exactly the same thickness as the tree near it, etched or twisted in the same fashion. The perfume of wild mint had two ways of diffusing itself as it grew on a rich meadow or a pebbly field. The light crowned the rises in the land or filled the depressions, following their contours faithfully. To know them one had only to follow the light.

  Landscapes composed, changed for me from one second to the next and, when the air was cool, when the wind did not cap my head, did so in a manner so precise that I seemed to be seeing them through a magnifying glass. What a surprise, then, when I pointed out to Jean, without an error, two chains of peaks in series. We stopped at this point, but found nothing to say about it. It was like that — whether or not people believe it, and whether or not they read it in books. On the mountain paths and everywhere else, Jean and I ran into a hard fact — the fact that limits do not exist. If there are any, they are never the ones they taught us.

  People around us seemed satisfied when they said that a lame man walks with a limp, that a blind man does not see, that a child is not old enough to understand, that life ends with death. For the two of us, in our summer of green fields, twilight and dawn continually revolving, none of these statements stood its ground.

  We had friendship on our side. We had ignorance and bliss, and we looked at everything through these channels. They taught us all we knew. The blind man himself saw, and the sighted one close behind him knew it. Life was good, very good.

  * The preceding eleven paragraphs were not included in the original American publication of And There Was Light. They were translated from the original French edition separately and published, with the author’s permission, in the Journal of Anthroposophy, no. 8, 1968.

  [ 7 ]

  THE TROUBLED EARTH

  ON MARCH 12, 1938, I turned the buttons of the radio to make the small tour of Europe I made every night. What was that noise I heard all of a sudden on Radio Vienna?

  Waves of shouting hammered against the loudspeaker, a mass of humanity in delirium. “Deutschland über Alles
,” the “Horst Wessel Lied,” music and voices aimed at you point-blank like loaded pistols. “Anschluss! Heil Hitler. Anschluss.” Germany has just fallen on Austria. Austria is no more. German, this language I love, has been disfigured to the point where I no longer recognize the words. My thirteen-year-old imagination wants to stand up to the shock, but it is too great, coming all at once. History hurls itself on me, wearing the face of the murderers.

  They had spoken to me of suffering, and made much of it. Along with love, it was the only subject in the books. Besides, love and suffering in books almost always came together. I wonder why! In my own life there was no suffering. Immediately after my accident, I had felt a lot of pain. But it did not last long, and then it was an accident. Everyone knows there are things which are inevitable.

  One morning at the lycée during recess, I was present when the boy with the shrill voice threw himself on one of my companions, claws out to scratch his eyes. Luckily the other boy dodged and ran away crying. I was horrified. But everyone in the end concluded that the aggressor was crazy. That at least was an explanation.

  One evening about midnight — it was February 6, 1934 — my father came home from the neighborhood of the Etoile and told us, with tension in his voice which was unfamiliar to me, that demonstrators on the Champs-Elysées were tearing up the metal railings around the flower beds, and throwing them in the faces of the police; that a bus was burning on the Place de la Concorde. I did not really understand. It sounded like a tragedy or a novel. It resembled the history books — only a little hotter. It didn’t seem real.

  I had never seen a person die. Of course all men died, but only when God called them back to Himself. It was not a thing to be angry about. On the contrary.

  In March 1938, I knew enough German to follow the news broadcasts on the Nazi radio. But I was determined to learn the language thoroughly — to be sure, to feel what these men wanted of us. Europe was rocking toward the east, toward Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich, and I was going to rock with it. I could not overcome the feeling. Where this would end I had no idea but I was making my preparations. For the next five years I studied German for two hours every day.