While I was thinking about Skjolden, I lay on the bed with my hands linked behind my head, looking at the ceiling. And then I remembered a friend who once told me that any form of exile for a spiritual man became a prompt for inner reflection. How good that phrase could have felt if I’d thought of it or remembered it in the morning, when I tended to be in a better mood. Even so, it did help keep me going. In the long run, I thought, one realizes that attending to one’s personal matters in a productive way is the most important thing in the world.
I looked at the clock and saw it was a good time to call Barcelona. My elderly parents told me the nationalist demonstration in Barcelona hadn’t been exactly nationalist but more pro-independence, at least that’s what the local television stations repeated ad infinitum.
It suddenly occurred to me to think that you can’t defend the freedom of the masses, only your own. Perhaps because I found myself on the threshold of my inner reflection, of the creation of the cabin, it was logical that talk of mass movements should startle me, just when the move I was preparing to make demanded individuality.
Then I phoned my wife and told her my day had in no way resembled an action novel, but things had constantly been happening to me. When she asked me what things, I could only say I had been joking. I didn’t want to tell her, for example, that I had no sooner arrived than the people of Kassel seemed to be expecting me, and this misapprehension had made me think of the day I drove to Antwerp with my nephew Paolo and, near the pretty train station, began to feel a wave of presentiment that the city would suffer some sort of retribution. These visions seemed anchored in reality, but from what ancestor’s remote past did they spring? Was it preposterous to imagine that I’d lived out previous existences in European cities and seen catastrophes coming? Was it crazy to sense I was back on streets I had traveled repeatedly in other times? Nothing could be ruled out in a place like Kassel, which, opening its doors to the ideas of the avant-garde, was implicitly rejecting any invitation to logic.
I didn’t want to tell my wife any of this, perhaps because these were things you don’t say over the phone. So I said goodbye and soon afterward began to notice — no doubt this was brought on by the lonely state I’d plunged into — that from outside, through curtains stirred by a gentle current of air, could be heard isolated cries, cradled on the wind. The reflections of light dancing on the ceiling seemed to forecast that a crack was about to open all the way across it at any moment. Perhaps the conversations of the guests in the room above would reach me clearly through that chink. When I was in Barcelona with John William Wilkinson, we’d thought I might set myself up on the top floor of the Chinese restaurant facing the forest, but now I could see that none of that was happening or would happen, rather the complete opposite: the place the dark forces seemed to have offered me to spy on wasn’t beneath, but above; it was as if Galway Bay were out there above the ceiling of that room. And there was one more problem. Seeing it properly, it was clear no such scenario existed, that the reflections of light on the ceiling had simply created it, perhaps connected with my lighthouse in the hotel annex, my lighthouse in the night.
22
I got up from the bed in order to escape from my private Galway Bay, and I had a depraved glance at Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria: “The peddler has perfectly naked eyelids, without a single lash, and a wooden leg crudely fixed to the stump with thongs.”
Afterward, I played the game of pretending to myself that what I’d read astonished me. Peddler, naked eyelids, wooden leg. I feigned surprise when I knew perfectly well that in reading Cela I was bound to encounter the medievaclass="underline" another world a thousand light-years from where I found myself.
Then I went straight to the computer and looked up information about the city I was in, and the first thing I came across was material about the Documenta of 1972. If I read that 72 backwards, I got my room number. This didn’t exactly compel me to keep reading, but it did make me take more interest in what I read. An admirer of “that historic Documenta”—the one in ’72—claimed to have discovered in it that the latest members of the avant-garde belonged to the purest strain of romanticism, the beatniks in particular.
Suddenly, for reasons that still escape me today, my attention focused entirely on the beatniks. What did I know about those people? For a moment, I was disorientated by my own question. I only managed to leave the muddle of the beatnik mystery behind when I remembered I had that old copy of Romanticism, by Rüdiger Safranski, lying in my suitcase. Once again, I hadn’t made a mistake in choosing it for company. I opened it to the page where I could read that only as aesthetic phenomena are the world and existence eternally justified.
I thought: Didn’t I come to Kassel precisely to seek the aesthetic instant? Yes, but not only that. Besides, I’d never found that instant in my entire life so far, and everything seemed to indicate that things would go on the same for me after passing through Kassel. In fact, I didn’t even know what an aesthetic instant might really be, since up to that point I’d only managed to get glimpses of it, not much more. I paused to think. Why had I traveled to that city? I’ve come, I told myself, purely to think. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to mentally construct a cabin, a human refuge in which I can meditate on the lost world. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to read something about a peddler and his stump and an incurably gloomy Spain. I’ve come to discover the mystery of the universe, to initiate myself into the poetry of an unknown algebra, to seek an oblique clock, and to read about Romanticism. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to investigate what the essence, the pure, hard nucleus of contemporary art is. I’ve come to find out if there still is an avant-garde. In fact, I’ve come to carry out research on Kassel. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come simply so that on my return home I can tell people what I’ve seen. I’ve come to find out what beatniks are. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to get acquainted with the general condition of the arts. Again, I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to recover enthusiasm. I paused a little less thoughtfully. I’ve come so I can narrate my journey later on, as if I’d been to the country estate in Locus Solus, or to the Alcarria, an Alcarria described by Roussel, for example. I’ve come to gain access to that instant when a man seems to take on, once and for all, who he is. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to leave my wife in peace for a few days. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to hesitate. I paused doubtfully. I’ve come to find out whether there is any logic in being invited to Kassel to pull off a Chinese number. I paused thoughtfully.
I paused for even more reflection when I noticed that the pessimism that came over me so inexorably at that hour had begun to strongly take hold. I was beginning to see that the so famous aesthetic instant (I had thought that one day I would or wouldn’t know what it was) would never be within my grasp. Was it normal for my pessimism to increase so much in so few minutes? Unfortunately, yes. The onset of the black hours always erupted without warning, and straightaway I got to thinking that I didn’t have many years left and everything in my life had gone by very fast; why, just a few days ago, I was young and carefree, but it had all changed in a short time, this was now an incontrovertible fact, and I felt sad. When the black hours flared up almost punctually evening after evening, I could never avoid sliding relentlessly down the slippery slope of the most pessimistic and dangerous thoughts.