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PARTISAN REVIEW
men have managed to draw from within themselves an answer that
permeates, so to speak, with immortality those who are worthy of it.
And in that railroad carriage...."
For the first time he made a rather flowing gesture, not with
his hand but with his fist, as though wiping off a blackboard.
"And in that railroad carriage, you see, and sometimes since–
! say only: sometimes- the millennia of stars in the sky have seemed
to me as much eclipsed by man, as our individual destinies are eclipsed
by the stars in the sky.... "
He had stopped looking at my father, who was the more troubled
by
his
sudden and apparently absent eloquence, because it took the
same form as his own. Even as a child he had never seen Walter;
and those ellipses, those abrupt and instinctive images had always
been alien to Dietrich Berger. But already Walter had resumed the
strange tone of disdain that seemed to be directed, beyond my father,
to some invisible interlocutor:
"People passionately in love-! believe that is the expression?–
oppose love to death. I never experienced it myself. But I know that
certain works withstand the dizziness that comes from the contem-
plation of our dead, of the stars in the sky, of history.... There are
a few of them here. No, not those gothic ones; you ... know the
head of the young man from the museum of the Acropolis? The
first piece of sculpture to represent a human face, simply a human
face; freed from monsters ... from death ... from the gods. That
day, man was also drawn forth by man from clay.... That photo–
graph, there, behind you. I have had the experience of studying it
after looking a long time into a microscope. . . . The mystery of
matter doesn't touch it."
The low, vast grating of the rain more and more delicate on
the leaves, like the sound of burned paper disintegrating, came from
outside; the big drop was still forming, and resounding as it fell
into a puddle, regularly. Walter's voice became more withdrawn
than ever:
"The greatest mystery
is
not that we should be thrown by
chance between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is
that in this prison we should extract from ourselves images strong
enough to negate our nothingness.... "
Through some dormer-window, the mushroom-like smell of
the trees dripping in the still tepid night came
in
along with the
grating of the woodland silence, mingling with the dusty smell of
bindings in the library sunk in darkness. In my father's mind,
