For many centuries the dreaming city was venerable, a favorite place for the young world, sung about by poets and visited by lovers. However, the people felt a powerful urge more and more to move to other parts of the earth. In the city itself, the heirs of the old native families began to die out or become impoverished. Moreover, the last intellectual flowering had long since experienced its heyday, and only a decayed infrastructure was left. The smaller neighboring cities had also completely disappeared and had become silent heaps of ruin, sometimes inhabited by gypsies and escaped convicts.
In the wake of an earthquake that spared the city, the course of the river was shifted and a part of the ravaged countryside was turned into a swamp and another part into a desert. In the mountains, where the remains of ancient quarries and summer homes crumbled away, the forest climbed up — the old forest. It saw the vast region lying bare, and it began to envelop this land piece by piece, so that everything became part of its green circle. In one area it passed swiftly across a swamp of whispering green and then across a stony region with tenacious young pine trees.
In the end there were no more citizens living in the houses, only packs of vagabonds, wild churlish people who took refuge in the crooked sinking palaces of olden times and let their goats graze in the former gardens and streets. Even these last inhabitants gradually died from disease and insanity. Ever since the rise of the swamps, the entire countryside had been infested with fever and had fallen into neglect.
The remains of the old city hall, which once had been the pride of its time, were still enormous and stood very tall. They had been celebrated in songs in all languages and in numerous legends of neighboring peoples, whose cities also had long since been neglected and whose culture had decayed. The name of the city and its past glory, eerily distorted, appeared in children’s tales, horror stories, and melancholy pastoral songs. Scholars of distant countries in the midst of their own golden age came sometimes to the site of the ruins on dangerous research trips, and the schoolboys of these distant countries eagerly discussed the mysteries of the old city. It supposedly had gates of pure gold and graves full of precious jewels, and the wild nomadic tribes of the region supposedly preserved the remains of thousand-year-old magic from fabulous old times.
But the forest climbed farther down from the mountains to the prairie. Lakes and rivers sprang up and dried out, and the forest moved on and gradually took over and covered the entire country, the remains of the old street walls, the palaces, the temples, and the museums. Foxes and pine marten, wolves and bears inhabited the isolated spot.
A young pine tree stood over one of the fallen palaces, not one stone of which could be seen. The pine had at one time been the most advanced messenger and precursor of the growing forest. Now, however, it looked out at the growth of young trees in front of it.
“We’re moving onward!” cried a woodpecker, who hammered on the trunk of a tree and regarded the growing forest and the glorious, green progress on earth with satisfaction.
Dr. Knoegle’s End
(1910)
Dr. Knoegle, a former high school teacher who had retired early from his profession and had devoted himself to private philological studies, would certainly never have come into contact with vegetarians and vegetarianism if signs of asthma and rheumatism had not at one time compelled him to follow a vegetarian diet. The result was so successful that, from then on, the teacher spent several months every year in some kind of vegetarian health spa or small hotel, mainly in the south. So in spite of his aversion to everything unusual and strange, he began mixing in circles and with individuals with whom he normally did not associate. Nor did he like their unavoidable visits to his hometown, even though they were infrequent.
For many years, Dr. Knoegle spent spring and early summer and even the autumn months in one of the many vegetarian hotels on the coast of southern France or at Lake Maggiore. He became acquainted with many different people at these places and accustomed to many things, such as people walking barefoot, long-haired apostles, fanatics who fasted all the time, and vegetarian gourmands. He made some good friends, especially among the latter, and he himself, whose ailments prevented him more and more from enjoying heavy meals, developed into a modest epicurean in the domain of vegetables and fruit. There was no way that he could be satisfied with your ordinary endive salad, and he would never have mistaken a California orange for an Italian. Otherwise, he did not take a great interest in vegetarianism, for to him it was only a cure, and if it appealed to him at all, it was sometimes due to the splendid linguistic innovations in this area that, as a philologist, he considered to be remarkable. There were vegetarians, vegetarianists, vegetabilitarians, the raw purists, the pulpists, and the mixed vegetarians.
According to the linguistic usage of the initiates, the doctor himself belonged to the mixed vegetarians, because he ate not only fruit and raw food but also cooked vegetables and even dairy products. It did not escape his notice that this diet was an abomination for true vegetarians, above all for purists, who observed a strict code of eating. However, he kept his distance from the fanatical debates conducted by disciples of true vegetarianism, and he demonstrated his status as a mixed vegetarian only through his actions, whereas many acquaintances — namely the Austrians — boasted of their particular status on their business cards.
As I said, Dr. Knoegle did not exactly fit in with these people. With his peaceful red face and broad body, he already looked much different from the disciples of pure vegetarianism, who were mainly lean and ascetic types, often dressed in fantastic clothes. Many had hair that flowed over their shoulders, and they went through life as fanatics, followers of a religion, and martyrs to their special ideals. Dr. Knoegle was a philologist and patriot. He did not support their ideas of humanity and social reform; nor did he share the strange lifestyles of his co-vegetarians. His appearance was such that the porters of the cosmopolitan hotels, who waited at the railroad stations and docks in Locarno and Pallanza and normally could smell every kind of “cabbage-head apostle” from a distance, would confidently recommend their hotels to him. They were always greatly astonished, however, when the man, who looked so respectable, gave his luggage to the porter of the Thalysia or Ceres hotel, or to the donkey master of the Monte Verita.