Daunt Books Publishing

Does there exist an ominous right (or duty) to bear witness? Tenacious of life, the supposition that someone must always go on writing.

My pain for this continent is in part a phantom pain: not only the pain for a lost limb, but for limbs that have not yet been formed, not developed; for unlived feelings, unfulfilled longing. All of this compensated for in literature: for how long?

But the line the narrator pursues is that of male action. Everyday life, the world of women, shines through only in the gaps between the descriptions of battle.

I see our three figures in the meadow from a long distance off. A feeling of loss of reality – as if someone had made a hole in the plastic bag that has been slipped over us and now the air is escaping along with the sky.

Later, as I sit on the bench outside the house pitting plums, I wonder how many more years I will sit on the bench this way. How many years do I want to go on sitting here? A sudden tug of age.

According to these figures, there are three European tons of TNT for every person on earth, that is, for each one of us. The Great Powers could annihilate each other more than a dozen times over. And so on. We laugh, slightly embarrassed. ‘Normal feelings’ are numbed by such statistics. Indignation, revolt would be inappropriate. The aesthetic of resistance to it all has yet to be developed.

The second of the wild animals behind the wire fence has been shot; it is bleeding from a shoulder wound, looks at us reproachfully, sadly, and at the same time implacably. ‘Did you shoot at it?’ I ask H. ‘Naturally,’ he says, ‘what else could one do?’ He has taken a hunting rifle that was hanging on a wall in the kitchen. But he could not shoot again, he says. The animal does not look as if it was about to die of this wound. It occurs to us that the animals might have escaped from a passing circus. It is too late to make inquiries. We cannot possibly live with them. We cannot kill them, either. They will not leave our kitchen voluntarily. We stand there, eye to eye with the mute wild beasts, and know: it is a hopeless situation.

The visions which overwhelm her no longer have anything to do with the ritual decrees of her oracle. She ‘sees’ the future because she has the courage to see things as they really are in the present.

And Kerényi, the Hungarian mythology researcher and religion scholar, dedicates to the ‘highly esteemed’ Mann, as an opening gift, the idea of the ‘wolfish,’ the ‘dark’ Apollo. This, by Mann’s own admission, touches on the ‘roots’ of Mann’s ‘intellectual existence.’ The two men have in common their burning interest in the ‘deeper psychic reality’ behind myth (a word which among the Greeks meant nothing other than ‘the true word,’ ‘the facts,’ later ‘the facts about the gods’). So, there was a ‘dark’ underground and background to the ‘god of light.’ This claim plainly contradicts the received opinion about Apollo, the Greek god who was pushed farthest of all into the realm of the ‘bright’ and the ‘spiritual.’ It removes him from the unfruitful antinomy of the pair of opposites, ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian.’ It also confirms the ambivalence which Thomas Mann seems to feel in his urge to identify origins: ‘Who can say where the stories originated, above or below?’

I hear myself saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ but inside me is a voice that says, it would take time to neutralise the self-destructive trend of today’s megasystems gradually, non-violently: time that we do not have. ‘Perhaps,’ says M., ‘we should proceed like the South Africans when they tried to free themselves from the racist regime: they got things absolutely clear in their own minds and accepted the knowledge: Our situation is hopeless. Maybe freedom can come out of that, after all.’ ‘So can resignation,’ says T.

‘In a situation like that, is there any value higher than life?’