BERNARD AVISHAI
239
was black.. .. As we came nearer, the island, glaciers, and rock
constantly changed their color, from red to violet, to molten gold,
and the sea from black to faint lavender. Yet this fantastic display
caused no surge of elation-rather a feeling of awe and oppression;
in the heavy silence which dated from the last Ice Age, the faint
hum of our engines swelled to a roaring blasphemy.... [T]here is
a psychic effect of the arctic landscape known as Eiskoller, the
"glacial tantrum." It has been responsible for many polar tragedies
and seems to stem from the unbearable feeling of solitude when
[one] is exposed to another, prehuman geological age-an experi–
ence of cosmic rejection.
One imagines Koestler dictating this portion of
Arrow in the Blue
in
one of his morbid oceanic reveries. As a matter of fact, his diary records:
"Finished boring Zeppelin part-at last." Perhaps actually flying "like
an arrow in the blue" was disappointing to him in the way the realiza–
tion of a long-imagined fantasy leaves one feeling diminished: the
adventure was too graphic, too full, the subtle colors and barren ice
mountains might well have encroached upon his beloved metaphor, as
choreography may ruin a piece of music.
But-obviously, Koestler understood this-the polar landscape was
also a journey into sheer loneliness, and it exposed the real shallows of
his emotional reserves.
If
there were such a thing as cosmic acceptance,
where was it to be found?
V.
NOT
BY
PROCESS OF ELIMINATION
KOESTLER'S SWING TO the Communist Party was perverse not because it
was unreasonable on pragmatic grounds. In
1932,
one-third of the Ger–
man workforce was unemployed, and Stresemann's Social Democratic
Party was crushed between the fascist gangs and Communist cells. Civil
war seemed imminent. During the summer of
1932,
the Social Democ–
ratic government of Prussia was chased out of office by one lieutenant
and eight men, acting on Von Papen's orders. Koestler had been sympa–
thetic to the Social Democrats; now he could barely contain his revul–
sion for socialist politicians:
[H]atred, like love, can flourish only where there is common
ground .. .. I had regarded them as the legitimate heirs and trustees
of the Judeo-Christian tradition-of the Hebrew prophets and the
Sermon on the Mount; of the Kantian imperative; of liberty, equal–
ity, and fraternity. The Nazis were savages who remained true to
