TWO STORIES
473
had succeeded in giving their works an appearance of the impersonal
and the eternal. He half knew all this in the way that clever men
accustomed to ideas know these obvious and terrifying things. He
even knew or surmised that some part of his own attempts at writing
would perhaps impress the readers of a later time as "true poetry,"
that future men of letters would perhaps look back with yearning to
him and to his times as though to a golden age in which real poets,
real feelings, real human beings, a real nature and a real soul had
still existed. The comfortable philistine of the Biedermeier period and
the fat philistine of some small medieval city had, he knew, con–
trasted their own refined and decadent times in just the same critical
and sentimental fashion with an innocent, naive, blessed yesterday
and had regarded their own grandfathers and their way of life with
just the same mixture of envy and sympathy with which the men
of today regard the blessed time before the invention of the steam
engine.
All these thoughts were familiar to the writer, all these truths
were known to him. He knew: the same game, the same eager, noble,
hopeless striving for something valid, enduring, valuable in itself,
that impelled him to cover sheets of paper with words, actuated all
others as well: the general, the .ambassador, the senator, the woman
of fashion, the merchant's apprentice. All human beings were striv–
ing in some fashion, however cleverly or stupidly, to transcend them–
selves and the possible, fired by secret desires, dazzled by models,
enticed by ideals. No lieutenant who did not bear within him the
idea of Napoleon-and no Napoleon who had not at times felt
himself an ape, his triumphs false coins, his goals illusory. No one who
had not joined in this dance. No one, either, who had not at some
time, through some crevice, perceived the truth about this illusion.
To be sure, there were some who were perfect, there were the men–
gods, there was a Buddha, there was a Jesus, there was a Socrates.
But even they were made perfect, were penetrated through and
through by omniscience, only at a single instant, at the instant of
their deaths. Indeed their deaths had been nothing but the last state
of transfused understanding, the last, finally successful surrender.
And conceivably every death had this significance, conceivably every–
one at the point of death was at the point of perfection, having put
aside the error of striving, having surrendered himself and no longer
desiring to be.
