Potgieter said that the guy was crazy and that back in Piet Hein’s day….
The little poet took his course through the wastelands of Amsterdam, poetizing all the way. Nothing but Dutch people as far as the eye could see. Again he greeted someone, a gentleman in a top hat and tails straight out of an Eduard Verkade play. They spoke briefly, there on the square in front of Centraal Station.
On the ground floor God came strolling by in his yellow Panama hat, with a silver-handled walking stick and a shabby coat of an indefinable brown color draped loosely across his back, dandruff on his collar, his trousers too wide and too long and bunched on the tops of his shoes. You could see his muttonchops from behind and when he slowly climbed the two steps up to the station hall, the evening sun, low in the sky, glowed in God’s polished left shoe.
“Who was that gentleman?” asked the little poet. “God,” said the devil, and the knobby bumps on his forehead grew bigger. The little poet said nothing. “Your God, your boss’s God and your father-in-law’s God and your boss’s accountant’s God and the manager of the Nieuwe Karseboom’s God. Your aunt’s, the one who told you you had to doff your hat when you walked past your boss’s house in Delft or Oldenzaal, or wherever it was, even if no one was there, because you never knew if someone might see. Your aunt who always makes your sister knit: ‘An idle woman is the devil’s plaything.’ The God of all those people who say ‘I never expected that from you’ when you try to live a little, and who say ‘I thought so, that was bound to end badly’ when you end up in the poorhouse later. The God who resents that you have Saturday afternoons off, the God of Professor Volmer, lecturer in accounting and business, who thinks you spend too much time looking up at the sky. The God of everyone who has no other option besides work or boredom. The God of the Netherlands, of all of the Netherlands, from Surhuis moor down to Spekholz heath, the patron and benefactor of the League of Heads of Large Families and of the Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women. They call it falling. I’m fallen too.”
“It’s not a very accurate metaphor, you’re right,” the little poet said absently.
He had been looking all this time at a lady who was standing there waiting. At the wonderful sharp edges of the tendons on her ankles, right above her flat white shoes. Of course she was wearing white flats with a short skirt and stockings with a terribly open weave so that her white legs shimmered through. “Now’s not a bad time to fall,” the little poet thought.
“Mon âme prend son élan vers l’infini,” said the devil with an ironic smile, the way he had smiled for all eternity.
Then the little poet saw the square in front of the station again, and saw the devil, and heard what he had said.
“Devil,” he said, “don’t try to trick me.”
The devil just shrugged his shoulders and looked at the station clock. Ten past seven. He held his hand over his mouth and yawned. Eternity wasn’t going anywhere. And the fact is, he knew all too many little poets already. Why bother giving such big speeches?
The little poet set off for home and looked up at the wheel with little wings on it, on the railing of the high railroad bridge over the west passage, the wheel on a little iron post that wants to fly and never leaves its place and can be seen from the distant places it never reaches, even the Torensluis, looking up the Singel. The blue sky was still so hopelessly far above it. Even the lampposts at either end of the bridge hold their arc lights high above the little wheel. There’s not much you can do if you’re mounted on a little iron post on a railroad bridge. At best you can sit there and think, and that doesn’t get you anywhere. The little poet thought that it’s better to be a wheel on a post than a little poet. The wheel is made of iron, a little poet isn’t.
Meanwhile God sat by himself in a first-class compartment on the train to Delft and stared out the window and saw nothing. He had never been much for sightseeing. He held a report in his hand and files lay next to him on the seat.
The God of the Netherlands thought. These were strange times. God started reading again:
“Man’s fate is to feel regret when he fails to reach his goal and to feel regret when he succeeds.
“There is no consolation in virtue and no consolation in sin.
“Therefore, cheerfully renounce all expectations. Place your hope in eternity: there is no awakening from this dream.”
These were truly strange times. It couldn’t end well. And now he’d gone and said that a new age had dawned. The age of Ironic Dilettantism was over, a new age of Trailblazing Optimism and Dynamic Vigor had begun. That’s what he’d gone and said. And then, with a sigh, God turned back to the manuscript of a thick book about Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management and started reading.
The little poet had never fallen.
To be a great poet, and then to falclass="underline" When the little poet thought about what he actually wanted most of all, it was that. To astound the world, just once, and to have just once an affair with a poetess. He thought this thought again and again, for years, he was so naïve.
The little poet was respectably married to an adorable, unaffected, lively young woman. Of course he had fallen in love right away, as soon as he started to see the world. Mornings he saw her while he was walking to the office and she to school; afternoons at a quarter past one, during “market hour” when the stock market was in session and he was allowed out of the office and she was coming out of the dairy where she ate her sandwiches with a glass of milk and sometimes a cream puff or a piece of apple pie with whipped cream. Her sandwiches.
And she was so mad at him for always standing there like that, he was simply ridiculous. The other girls called him “Mr. Right” because he wore a cape and had such beautiful black hair (he didn’t wear it cut short back then), and they looked at him as they walked past, three of them arm in arm, just looked for a second and then giggled at each other, the two outer girls with their heads bent in toward the middle girl, who looked at the ground, giggling too. But she walked grandly past and never looked and told Mien Bus that he had come for her, for Mien, and then they all laughed because they knew better. She stamped her little seventeen-year-old schoolgirl foot on the ground. “For me? That creep?” and she threw back her head.
And he was unhappy. He counted the hours. At eleven at night he looked up at the sky. It was exactly halfway from one thirty in the afternoon to eight thirty in the morning. And he wrote poetry.