ARTISTS AND OLD AGE
319
ings going on and a shivering that comes from your own dismay at
your undertaking. But don't send out an SOS. First of all, there's no
one to hear you, and secondly, after so many voyages your end will
be a quiet one.
Ladies and gentlemen, the portrait of old age
is
finished. We
have left the studio. The helicopter is about to land. Out of the cabin
there steps an
homme du monde,
wearing a gray tie and a black hom–
burg, who disappears in the hustle and bustle of the airfield. The air–
field is out in the country, and this gentleman strolls up to the edge
of it, where he sees poplars like those on the banks of the Loire and
like those long ago in Lombardy, and sees the river a ribbon winding
away into the distance like the Seine, where once the bargemen looked
out for that lighted window in the dark. The same things recur for
as long as there is sameness. And when some day nothing is like any–
thing else any more at all and the great rules change-even then some
kind of order will persist.
"To be mistaken and yet be compelled to go on believing what
one's own innermost being tells one-that is man, and his glory begins
yonder, beyond victory and defeat...." Yes, he would write that
same sentence yet once again, if he had to start all over again, even if
it were misleading, even if it were a falsification. After all, what dic–
tum
is
blameless? Face to face with the western world, I did my work;
I lived as if the day had come-my own day. I was the man that
I shall be. And so at the end I take my stand on all the Church
Fathers, all those ancient men with centuries behind them:
non con–
fundar in aeternum-I
too shall not be condemned eternally.
(Translated from the German
by
Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)
