Gargoyles

My father goes to see the prince only to treat him for his insomnia, I thought, without doing anything about his real illness, without, as became more and more evident to me while we walked back and forth along the outer wall of the castle, doing anything about his madness. For suddenly I saw quite clearly that the prince is mad, which had not been evident to me while he was talking about his interviews in the morning. It had seemed then that the prince was not mad, and when he spoke about the applicants for the post of steward I had thought that the prince was anything but mad, contrary to my father’s remarks, for my father in the past had always called the prince mad. But now, as we walked faster and faster on the outer walls of the castle, I saw that the prince is actually mad.

The prince said: “The difficulty that morning, Doctor, the morning after the play, was for me this: From the moment I entered the library, saw my relatives sitting on the floor, and became aware that I must lead the discussion, must deliver a lecture, I knew that now I could no longer turn back. Now I can no longer return to my thinking, isolated as it is in my thousands of principles. I cannot simply return to my own brain. I must think aloud, must publicly establish clarity about so completely linear a matter as the problem of the antibody in nature. For it is linear, even though it is highly complicated and possibly insoluble. But along with this, Doctor, I must, as an artificial human sacrifice, balance upon a rope stretched across the entire world of the mind, across all sciences and arts, causes and effects, must pass through past and future millennia, through all the innumerable concepts of nature, with my brain presumably already far out in the universal atmosphere, and must move, balancing on my rope, toward a goal lying in uttermost darkness, a goal from which an icy chill already wafted toward me.”

We stood still.

“Such a night as the night after the play, the play was good, Doctor, it was a very good play,” the prince said, “such a tranquil night, this calm before the flood, Doctor (because of the play), one of those quiet nights which have become very rare in Hochgobernitz — you can imagine how rare these quiet nights have become in Hochgobernitz since my son has been gone — because the quiet is perfect in Hochgobernitz, because it is really all there is, there is not quiet any more.… There simply is no more quiet, no peace, no tranquility in Hochgobernitz. That night and that cold morning among us and among the books, in this icy cold daybreak atmosphere in which feelings freely are transmuted into thoughts and thoughts freely transmuted into feelings, and that is the ideal magic suddenly to be together and find one another bearable — that night, in which the self-destructive and self-disintegrating elements of the family were so cleverly muted, whether from weariness after the play or from madness before the dawn, or from madness and weariness after the play and before the dawn, so that suddenly in truth everything was able to exist and everything was justified in existing — imagine, suddenly everybody in the house felt the prevailing quiet in the house merely as a quiet prevailing in the house; the dreadfulness of it, the uncanniness of it, had suddenly been taken away. A suddenly uninstrumental society constituted directly for evil, quite in the nature of this house, a society in which a day shaken by the play was transformed from philosophical and unbearable to nonphilosophical and bearable (perhaps a brilliant compound!). On this morning in which the autumn for the first time became palpable in me, in me and, differently, in the others — we suddenly were able to look within ourselves into this year’s autumn (each of us into his own autumn), look in because of our excitement before the play and during the play, look into the tranquility of the autumn after the play, by means of our inner geometry look into the perishing of outer nature.”