72
PARTISAN REVIEW
my amazement I saw the bear standing on his hind legs, leaning with
his back on a stake, to which he was chained, his right paw lifted up,
ready for anything. He looked me in the eye. That was his fencing
position. I did not know whether I was dreaming when I saw myself
opposite such an adversary; but-'Strike! strike!' said Mr. von G.,
'and try, if you can, to do something to him.' Having recovered a bit
from my amazement I went at him; the bear made a very slight
movement with his paw and parried the blow. I tried to tempt
him
with feints; the bear did not stir. Once more I went at him with an
immediate
skill;
I would have struck the chest of a man, without any
doubt; the bear made a brief movement and parried the blow. Now
I was almost in the position of young Mr. von G. The gravity of
the bear's manner reduced my self-assurance. Blows and .feints followed
each other, I was dripping with perspiration. In vain. Not only did
the bear, like the best fencer
in
the world, parry all my blows; but–
and here was a thing no fencer would be able to follow-he did not
even seem to notice the feints: eye to eye, as
if
he could read my
soul, he stood there, his paw ready for anything, and whenever my
blows were not meant seriously, he simply did not move. Do you
believe this story?"
"Perfectly," I cried, with joyous applause, "I would believe it
from any stranger, more than probably; how much more from you!"
"Now, my excellent friend," said Mr. C., "now you are in pos–
session of everything necessary to understand me. We see that in the
degree in which reflection becomes darker and feebler in the organic
world, grace emerges all the more shining and dominating. But just
as the intersection of two lines from the same side of a point, after
passing through the infinite, finds itself suddenly again on the other
side; or, as the image of the concave mirror, after having gone off
into the infinite, suddenly stands right before us again, so grace returns
again after knowledge, as it were, has gone through the world of the
infinite, in that it appears best in that human bodily structure which
has no consciousness at all, or has an infinite consciousness-that
is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God."
"Therefore," I said, somewhat confused, "we would have to
eat again of the tree of knowledge to fall back into the ·state of
innocence?''
"To be sure," he replied. "That's the last chapter of the history
of the world."
(Translated by Eugene ]olas and reprinted from his anthology
Vertical,
published by the Gotham Book Mart in 1941.)
