Gargoyles

Even among his sisters and daughters, Prince Saurau went on to say, when he could no longer bear to stay in his room and went down into the lower rooms “hoping for the relief of conversation,” to find them sitting in “the dusk that always reigns in Hochgobernitz,” either chatting or silently “contemplating themselves in preparation for the night”—even among them he more and more heard the noises that he had often told my father about. For months these noises had not left him, he said.

Devoting more and mor of his intellectual capacities “to the higher exaltation and the higher speculation” (Father’s phrase), in his weaknesses, even in that condition which in the course of the past several months had become an excruciating torment, when he locked himself in his room to conduct, alone with himself, his “masochistic discussions” (Father’s phrase), which he continued even during his son’s stay in England and which, probably due to the fact that he was doomed to stay on in Hochgobernitz to the end of his days, he conducted with utter ruthlessness chiefly toward himself, pitching them at such a level, in spite of the extreme irritability from which he suffered, as to require the utmost tension of his mind, an ever-increasing ruthless tension of his mental powers. “Consistently delving into all scientific phenomena” (Saurau’s phrase), he had heard these “fatal noises” (Father’s phrase) even in the course of last night while he was studying Cardinal Retz’s memoirs, had “been forced to hear them,” though he was no longer able to remember at what point in time these noises had imposed themselves upon him. He now heard them continually, he said, and could no longer fall asleep; he feared these noises more and more. Day and night in the past week these noises had penetrated his consciousness, deranged him, constantly and in the cruelest manner “projected” him into his own death.

The terrible part of it was that to the very degree that he thought he had to withdraw from the world, he was falling prey to it, Prince Saurau said. “We think fantastically and are weary,” he said. In “the drive to exhaust all possibilities” he had cast a pall of gloom over Hochgobernitz, and Hochgobernitz over him. “The analogies are deadly” had by now become one of his recurrent, decisive phrases.

Saurau spoke of his family as “this continual, outrageous truncation of the mind.” They were ruling here in Hochgobernitz in his name. “With the hapless impotence for which they are made they inhale their daily life primarily into their bodies and secondarily into their heads in the form of hundreds and thousands of dismaying intellectual kleptomanias, from the greatest remove.” Meanwhile he, Prince Saurau, in the midst of them, in the midst of their “catastrophic company,” was being plagued by these noises (“rumblings in the earth?” [Father’s phrase]). Feeling his brain (“irruption of water into what has been parched from time immemorial?” [Saurau’s phrase]) painfully as a membrane abused in behalf of all mankind, knowing these noises to have existed always in humanity (“a transformation of what is into something else that will be” [Saurau’s phrase]), he no longer merely heard these noises, but also saw and felt them in his head. His brain must suffer these noises (“expanding fault lines, an ideal disintegrative process in nature!”). He found himself suddenly and uncontrollably injecting all sorts of phrases into his torment, and almost all of them ended with “for the sake of all mankind.”

He often felt, he said, the vast span of “emotional and geological history coalescing into wholly new substances,” which he regarded as a process in which “everything is destroyed in order ultimately to become.”

“Here, on this spot, I always would discuss everything concerning Hochgobernitz with my steward,” Prince Saurau said, and he called our attention to broad areas in the valley that had been devastated by the flood that recently affected a great part of the countryside below Hochgobernitz. “No more than three weeks ago,” Prince Saurau said, “I was walking up and down here, shocked beyond words by this tremendous flood damage. And while I was watching the slow recession of the water, silent, horrified, in a state of derangement that lasted for two hours, Doctor,” he began to think about the dubious life of his son, who was studying in England. “On this spot,” Prince Saurau said, “I always think about my son. The fact is that my son’s life is completely estranged from mine.” From this spot three weeks ago he had watched the receding high waters and then “without saying a single word against nature,” returned to the castle. Now he said: “My son is in England and I am going under here.”