Still, in this elsewhere you will find a remarkable dose of transcendence. It is, we realize, if appearances do not deceive, related to fashion. Fashion, after all, is not only marked by the one characteristic, namely that you find it ridiculous in retrospect, but also by the other, that as long as a fashion lasts, you can hardly imagine taking seriously the opinions of a man who is not dressed from head to toe just as ridiculously as you yourself are. I would not know what in our admiration of antiquity could shield a budding philosopher from suicide, if not the fact that Plato and Aristotle wore no pants; pants have contributed far more than you might think to the intellectual development of Europe, for without them, Europeans would most likely never have gotten over their classical-humanistic inferiority complex vis-à-vis the antique. Thus we hold our time’s most profound feeling — that we would not barter with anyone who wasn’t dressed in contemporary clothing. And even of art we only feel for that same reason a sense of progress with each new year; although it may simply be a coincidence that art exhibits, like the latest fashion, appear in the spring and fall. This sense of progress is not pleasant. It reminds you, in the most extreme way, of a dream in which you are seated on a horse and cannot get off, because the horse never stands still. You would gladly take pleasure in progress, if only it took a pause. If only we could stop for a moment on our high horse, look back, and say to the past: Look where I am now! But already the uncanny process continues, and after experiencing it several times, you begin to feel queasy in the stomach with those four strange legs trotting beneath you, constantly carrying you forward.
But what conclusions may we draw from the fact that it is just as ridiculously unpleasant to look at old fashions (so long as they have not yet become costumes), as it is ridiculously unpleasant to look at old pictures, or the outmoded façades of old-style houses, and to read yesterday’s books? Clearly, there is no other conclusion except that we become unpleasant to ourselves the moment we gain some distance from what we were. This stretch of self-loathing begins several years before now and ends approximately with our grandparents, that is, the time to which we begin to be indifferent. It is only then that what was is no longer outdated, but begins to be old; it is our past, and no longer that which passed away from us. But what we ourselves did and were lies almost completely in the realm of self-loathing. It would indeed be intolerable to be reminded of everything that we once considered most important, and the great majority of people would remain surprisingly little moved if, at an advanced age, you were to show them again, in the form of a movie, their grandest gestures and once most stirring scenes.
How are we to make sense of this? Apparently inherent to the nature of temporal matters is a certain degree of exaggeration, a “superplus” and superabundance. Even a slap in the face requires more rage than you can be accountable for. This enthusiasm of “now” burns up, and as soon as it has become superfluous, it is extinguished by forgetting, a very productive and fertile activity by means of which we only really first become — and are ever and anew reconstituted as — that easygoing, pleasant, and consequent person for whose sake we excuse everything on earth.
Art rocks the boat in this regard. Nothing emanates from it that could endure without enthusiasm. It is, as it were, nothing but enthusiasm without bones and ashes, pure enthusiasm that burns for no reason and nonetheless is stuck in a frame or in between the covers of a book, as though nothing had happened. It never becomes our past, but always remains that which has passed from us. It is understandable then that we should look back at it every ten or twenty-five years with an uneasy eye!
Only great art, that indeed which alone, strictly speaking, merits being called art, constitutes an exception. But the latter has never really fit that well in the society of the living.
Binoculars
Slow motion pictures dive beneath the agitated surface, and it is their magic that permits the spectator to see himself with open eyes, as it were, swimming among the objects of life. Movies may have popularized this phenomenon; but it has long been available to us by a means still recommended nowadays because of its convenience: by looking, that is, through a telescope at objects that one would usually not watch through a telescope. An experiment of this sort is described in the following pages.
The first object of our attention was a sign on the gate of a beautiful old building located directly opposite our observation post, a building that houses a well-known government agency. This sign proclaimed, through the binoculars lens, that the government agency held office hours from nine to four. This already elicited the observer’s surprise; for it was three o’clock, and not only was there no official in sight, but the observer could not recall ever having seen with his naked eye an official in the agency at this hour. Finally he discovered two tiny figures standing close together behind a remote window, drumming their fingers on the windowpane and staring down at the street. And no sooner had he discovered them, than, as they stood there trapped in the little circle of his instrument, he understood with warm sympathy and realized with pride how important this telescoping function might yet become for bureaucrats, and for men in general who have a sacrosanct number of hours to sit out in an office.
The second object of his attention was the building itself. It was an old palace with a festoon of fruit on the capital of the stone pillars and a beautiful articulation of the façade in height and breadth, and while the spyglass still searched for the officials in attendance, the observer was already struck by how clearly this support structure, these windows and cornices had positioned themselves in the circle of his looking glass; now that he had taken it all in with a single glance, he was almost startled at the stony perspectival exactitude with which it all returned his gaze. He suddenly realized that these horizontal lines that conjoined at some point toward the back of the building, these contracting windows that became all the more trapezoid the farther to the side that they were situated — indeed, this entire avalanche of reasonable, familiar limitations into a funnel of foreshortening located somewhere to the side and to the rear — that all this had until now struck him as a Renaissance nightmare: an awful painter’s legend, actually, of disappearing lines, reputedly exaggerated, though there may also be some truth to it. But now he saw it before his very eyes, magnified to more than life-size, and looking far worse than the most unlikely rumor.
And if you don’t believe that the world is really like this, just focus on a streetcar. The trolley made an S-shaped double curve in front of the palace. Countless times from his second story window, the observer had witnessed it approaching, seen it make this very S-shaped double curve and drive away again: at every stage of this development, the same elongated red train. But when he watched it through the binoculars, he noticed something completely different: An inexplicable force suddenly pressed this contraption together like a cardboard box, its walls squeezed ever more obliquely together (any minute it would be completely flat); then the force let up, the car grew wide to the rear, a movement swept once again over all its surfaces, and while the flabbergasted eyewitness released the breath he had held in his breast, the trusty old red box was back to its normal shape again. All this happened so clearly, so out in the open, as he watched it with his lens (and not just in the private chamber of his eye), that he could have sworn it was no less real than watching a fan being opened and shut. And if you don’t believe it, you can try it yourself. All you need is an apartment toward which a streetcar approaches in an S-shaped curve.