THE PRISON
187
Nietzsche's song over the metallic din of the wheels, mixed with the
image of the old man of Reichbach awaiting death behind the drawn
curtains of his room, with the funeral repast, the caricature that
corpses impose on those who approach them,-the metallic beat of
the handles of the coffin being carried away on the men's shoulders.
. . . The privilege that Walter was speaking of, how much more
power it had against the stars in the sky than against pain! though
even then it would perhaps have triumphed over a dead man's face,
if the face were not a face that one loved.... For Walter, man was
only the "pitiful little heap of secrets" made to nourish those works
that as far as the far depths of the shadows surrounded his immobile
face; for my father, all the stars in the sky were imprisoned in the
feeling that caused a being already inhabited by the wish for death,
at the end of a not brilliant and often painful life, to say:
"If
I could
choose another life, I would choose my own.... "
Walter tapped his fingers nervously on the book on which his
hands were resting. My father recalled the face where the only marks
of suicide were a poignant serenity, the disappearance of wrinkles,
the agonizing youth of death. . . . And he observed before him the
almost similar face, with its strong planes of shadow, the glassy eyes
motionless, and on the table, in the full light, Walter's trembling
hands, the same as his own though larger, the woodcutter's hands of
the Bergers of Reichbach, veins and hair grey.
(Translated
by
Eleanor Clark)
