How winning his appearance was, and how fetchingly he knew how to move about always in the most decorous society, standing out and striding around as one of the most artful seducers of the century, and who, one day, as the air was just beginning to shade into vesperal violet, was walking in my company on steep paths down the mountain, accordingly as an individual whose overcoat I obediently carried, and who suddenly, before my very eyes, in the middle of an old walkway, sank into an abyss that opened at his feet, sank with all his elegant sinuosities, confusing inexplicabilities, like a figure on a stage, simply vanishing.
A woman of the middle class who saw the drama, too, exclaimed in a shrill voice: “Serves him right!” Never shall I forget the curt, bolt-upright way in which this original, i.e., completely singular member of human society, dropped into the downrightest sawn-offness.
Ready, set — and that was the end of him. Mantled in thought, I returned to the house. The estimable gentleman’s overcoat was a showpiece of the garment industry.
“She was spellbound by him,” I believed myself entitled to whisper, thinking the light that had dawned on me not too bright, and first smoking a subtly fragrant cigarette.
It was one of his.
[1927]
Masters and Workers
THERE are not many things that I want to say on the subject of masters and workers. The problem cuts deeply into conditions at the present time, which appear positively to seethe with beings who are workers and who sometimes disregard this particular fact. Don’t we sometimes dream with our eyes open, see blindly, feel without feeling, listen without hearing, and don’t we often, when walking, stand still? What a succession of quiet, solid, honorable questions!
Approach, you real barons, that I may discern the lineaments of veritable master types! Masters, to me, are quite a priceless rarity, and a master is, in my view, a man who is touched now and again by the curious need to forget that he is a master. Whereas the workers are distinguished by the way they please to fancy themselves masters, the masters on occasion look down upon them, envying in an understandable sort of way the gaieties and frivolities of the workers; for it seems to me an indubitable fact that the masters are the lonely ones, insofar as they are perpetually in the right and therefore crave to learn what it tastes and smells like to be in the wrong, a thing they cannot know. The masters can behave as they please; not the workers, who consequently never cease longing for command, which they lack, though it could be said to the contrary that the masters are often fed to the teeth with their directordom, would rather be serving and obeying than issuing decrees, the activity in which they see their lives most monotonously absorbed.
“How I’d love one day to get a really good ticking-off!”—it’s a wish that could easily occur, in my opinion, to this or that master, whereas the workers know nothing of suchlike wishes, which are never fulfilled. It’s not only wealth that makes a master; likewise, on the other hand, a worker doesn’t need to be a poor downtrodden wretch. A master, I’m convinced, is what he is much more because it is he who answers requests, just as a worker is what he thinks he is because it is from his lips that requests ring out. The worker waits; the master keeps people waiting. Yet waiting can sometimes be just as pleasant, or even more so, than keeping waiting, which requires strength. A person waiting can afford the sweet luxury of being in no way responsible; while he waits, he can think of his wife, his children, his mistress, and so on; of course, the person who keeps people waiting can do this too, if it gives him any pleasure. But it can happen that the nondescript who is waiting absolutely refuses to get off his mind, and naturally that’s a burden.
“This dependent of mine may now be smiling to himself with extraordinary placidity,” he thinks; and he’d gladly expire with a magisterial wrath which almost puts him out of countenance; and that such an incomprehensible kind of wrath should be possible at all belongs among the perils of the master’s state. A master frequently ought to be something like a superman, yet still he remains a man, a fellow man, and “Damnation!” he shouts, fearing for himself, as it were. “Hasn’t he been waiting long enough, this man, martyrizing me with his patience?” And he presses the bell button; that’s to say, he gives the button a bash, and sees in an instant the fatuity of his explosion. He snubs an incoming zealot with a melodramatic brutality that should be seen, and he would happily devour, tigerlike, the sheep who’s waiting for his masterednesses and self-composures, and instead of dropping destructively on an enervating nonentity he jumbles up papers that seem to be giving him a professional look, in a daze, as if they were poor sinners, and the worker has no idea what’s got into the master who is offended to be capable of a sentiment, who is insulted to be able now and again to be unhappy, who is emotionally almost demolished to be regarded as a demolisher, which he is not, doesn’t want to be, cannot be.
“Let me help you!” They’re most often unspeakably good-humored, the people who write such turns of speech, and an incredibly bad mood can possess a person who has occasion to write: “I readily assume that such and such has been promptly dealt with.”
Obeying and commanding commingle; good manners rule masters as well as workers. I offer this essay workerishly and regard its peruser as a master to whom I wish acquaintance with the gratification of seeing some chance to prize what I give him.
My theme does meddle somewhat, of course, as if it came too close to life, which may perhaps have grown too sensitive. What made life so? Is it going to stay as it is, or change? Why am I asking this? Why do so many questions come to me, softly, one after the other? I know, for instance, that I can live without questions. I lived without them for a long time, knew nothing of them. I was open-minded, without their invading me. Now they look at me as if I had an obligation to them. I too, like many people, became sensitive. Time is sensitive, like a person begging for help, a person perplexed. The questions beg and are sensitive and insensitive. The sensitivities harden. The disobliged person is perhaps the most sensitive. Obligations make me, for instance, hard. Those who are begged beg the beggars, who don’t understand this. The questions gaze solicitously in upon them, and are not solicitous, and those who take care of them care for the increase of the questions which regard their answerers as being insensitive. The person who’ll not let them disturb his equanimity for an instant is sensitive in their sight. In that they appear to him answered, he answers them. Why do many people not trust them this way?
[1928]
Essay on Freedom
PUTTING on airs, playing squeamish, acting sensitive, shilly-shallying, finessing, fussing, and frequent dreaming in the night, all this too appertains to freedom, which one can never, in my opinion, comprehend, sense, consider, and respect variously enough. One should always be bowing inwardly to the pure image of freedom; there must be no pause in one’s respect for freedom, a respect which seems to bear a persistent relation to a kind of fear. A remarkable thing here is that freedom sets out to be single, tolerates no other freedoms beside itself. Although this can certainly be said with greater precision, I quickly take occasion to insist that I am a person who tends to appear to himself more frail than he perhaps actually is.