Gargoyles

The last time my father had visited him, the prince had kept repeating the phrase “tangle of lines,” the prince recalled. Everything had been appearing to him as a “tangle of lines.” He had said to my father then: “There is a tangle of lines in my head.” Once, when the two of them, after the steward’s death, had called on the tenant farmers, he had repeatedly remarked that the tenants were “corporeals” with whom he had to “settle accounts.” One had to settle accounts with the corporeals, he had said several times, and likewise: “One had to settle accounts with corporeality. Everything is a matter of settling with corporeality.” He was rapidly wearing himself out in frightful privations, he now said. He had been born into Hochgobernitz as into a vacuum, by an unsuspecting mother. And he was always speaking in words that really no longer existed. “The words we speak really no longer exist,” the prince said. “The whole instrumentation of words that we use no longer exists. Still it is not possible to fall utterly silent. No,” he said. “The employment of life as a science, a science of political administration,” he said. “Among the special abilities I was early able to observe in myself,” he said, “is the ruthlessness to lead anyone I choose through his own brain until he is nauseated by this cerebral mechanism. For it’s fatal in any case, Doctor, in any case. My son blames me for my age,” he said, “and I him for his youth. My age is in itself naïve, but my son’s youth is not in itself naïve.”

The prince said he was forever compelled to make a stupid society realize it was stupid, and that he was always doing everything in his power to prove to this stupid society how stupid it was. But sometimes this stupid society would say that he was stupid. “That’s their only way out,” he said. “Of course, for a long period in my life I always had a friend, but my son has not had that. Why? The science on which he is engaged excludes a friend. This science destroys everything, everything there is, Doctor. One of these days this science will have destroyed everything. And because this science must destroy everything, it is naïve. We deal only with naïve sciences. For me it has never been difficult to share my brain with others at times, but my son can never share his brain with anyone else.

“The modernity in a brain refreshes me,” he said, “the inner modernity. The other modernity repels me. The modernity we don’t see refreshes me,” he said, “the invisible sort that propels everything onward, not the visible kind that propels nothing.” Last night, he said, he had got up and gone down into the library and had said to the books: My food! “But now this food is all poisoned,” he said. “Deadly.”