ESSAY ON THE SUCCESSFUL DAY
A self-portrait by William Hogarth, an eighteenth-century moment, showing a palette divided approximately in the middle by a gently curving line, the so-called Line of Beauty and Grace. And on my desk a flat, rounded stone found on the shore of Lake Constance, dark granite, traversed diagonally by a vein of chalky white, with a subtle, almost playful bend, deviating from the straight line at exactly the right moment and dividing the stone into two halves, while at the same time holding it together. And that trip in a suburban train through the hills to the west of Paris, at the afternoon hour when as a rule the fresh air and clean light of certain early-morning departures are vitiated, when nothing is natural any longer and it seems likely that only the coming of darkness can bring relief from the closeness of the day, then suddenly the tracks swing out in a wide arc, strangely, breathtakingly high above the city, which unexpectedly, along with the crazy reality of its enigmatic structures, opens out into the fluvial plain — there on the heights of Saint-Cloud or Suresnes, with that unforeseen curve, an instant transition changed the course of my day, and my almost abandoned idea of a “successful day” was back again, accompanied by a heartwarming impulse to describe, list, or discuss the elements of such a day and the problems it raises. The Line of Beauty and Grace on Hogarth’s palette seems literally to force its way through the formless masses of paint, seems to cut between them and yet to cast a shadow.
Who has ever experienced a successful day? Most people will say without thinking that they have. But then it will be necessary to ask: Do you mean “successful” or only “happy”? Are you thinking of a successful day or only of a “carefree” one, which admittedly is just as unusual. If a day goes by without confronting you with problems, does that, in your opinion, suffice to make it a successful day? Do you see a distinction between a happy day and a successful one? Is it essentially different to speak of some successful day in the past, with the help of memory, and right now after the day, which no intervening time has transfigured, to say not that a day has been “dealt with” or “got out of the way,” but that it has been “successful”? To your mind, is a successful day basically dif ferent from a carefree or happy day, from a full or busy day, a day struggled through, or a day transfigured by the distant past — one particular suffices, and a whole day rises up in glory — perhaps even some Great Day for Science, your country, our people, the peoples of the earth, mankind? (And that reminds me: Look — look up — the outline of that bird up there in the tree; translated literally, the Greek verb for “read,” used in the Pauline epistles, would signify a “looking up,” even a “perceiving upward” or “recognizing upward,” a verb without special imperative form, but in itself a summons, an appeal; and then those hummingbirds in the jungles of South America, which in leaving their sheltering tree imitate the wavering of a falling leaf to mislead the hawk …) — Yes, to me a successful day is not the same as any other; it means more. A successful day is more. It is more than a “successful remark,” more than a “successful chess move” (or even a whole successful game), more than a “successful first winter ascent,” than a “successful flight,” a “successful operation,” a “successful relationship,” or any “successful piece of business”; it is independent of a successful brushstroke or sentence, nor should it be confused with some “poem, which after a lifetime of waiting achieved success in a single hour.” The successful day is incomparable. It is unique.
It is symptomatic of our particular epoch that the success of a single day can become a “subject” (or a reproach). Consider that in times gone by more importance was attached to faith in a correctly chosen moment, which could indeed stand for the whole of life. Faith? Belief? Idea? In the remote past, at all events, regardless of whether you were herding sheep on the slopes of Pindus, strolling about below the Acropolis, or building a wall on the stony plateau of Arcadia, you had to reckon with a god of the right moment or time-atom, a god in any case. And in its day, no doubt, this god of the moment was more powerful than all seemingly immutable embodiments of gods — always present, always here, always valid. But in the end he, too, was dethroned — or, who knows? — mightn’t it have been your god of “now!” (and of the eyes that meet, and of the sky which, formless only a moment ago, suddenly took on form, and of the water-smooth stone, which suddenly showed the play of its colors, and, and) that was dethroned by the faith that came after — no longer image or idea, but faith “born of love” in a new Creation, in which all moments and epochs are fulfilled through the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of the Son of God, and thus in so-called eternity, a gospel whose missionaries proclaimed first that it was not made to the measure of man, and second that those who believed in it would transcend the mere moments of philosophy and enjoy the aeons, or, rather, the eternities of religion. There then followed, distinct from both the god of the moment and the God of eternity, though without sufficient zeal to demolish the one or the other, a period of purely immanent, or, to state it plainly, secular power, which put its reliance — your kairos-cult, your Greeks, your heavenly beatitude, your Christians and Muslims mean nothing to me — on something intermediary, on the success of my here-and-now, of the successful individual lifetime. Faith? Dream? Vision? Most likely — at least at the start of this period — a vision: the vision of people who have been disillusioned with all faith of any kind; a sort of defiant daydream. Since nothing outside me is thinkable, I will make the utmost of my life. Thus the era of this third power was superlative in word and deed: labors of Hercules, world movements. “Was”? Does it follow that this era is past? No, the idea of a whole life made successful by activity is of course still in force and will always remain fruitful. But apparently there is little more to be said about it, for the epics and romances of adventure of the pioneers, who resolutely lived the original dream of the active life, have already been told and provide the models for today’s successful lives — each one a variant of the well-known formula: Plant a tree, get a child, write a book — and all that’s left to talk about are strange little variations or glosses, tossed off at random, something for example about a young man of thirty, married to a woman whom he was confident of loving to the end, a teacher at a small suburban school, to whose monthly magazine he contributed occasional theater or movie notes, who had no further plans for the future (no tree, no book, no child), telling friends, not only since the completion of his thirtieth year, but on his last few birthdays as well, with festively lit-up eyes, of his certainty that his life had been successful (the words sound even weirder in the French original, “j’ai réussi ma vie”—“I’ve made a good thing of my life”?). Was the epochal vision of the successful life still at work in this man of today? Was his statement still an expression of faith? It is a long time since those words were spoken, but in my imagination, regardless of what may have happened to the man since, I feel sure that if anyone asks him he will still automatically give the same reply. So it must be faith. What sort of faith? — What can have become of that young “successful life”?