Gargoyles

I had wanted to go into the castle to see the inside, but the prince had no intention of terminating his “walk” for any reason whatsoever. Usually he and my father walk on the outer or the inner walls for several hours, and my father is always the prince’s auditor. On this day my father wanted to be home early in the evening; he had given appointments to patients who, I thought, had probably been waiting for a very long time in his consulting room. But the prince held us. It was impossible for my father to leave. I myself, however, took the greatest interest in what the prince was saying. Moreover, it was not cold that evening. On the contrary, we could easily have taken off our jackets. But in the prince’s presence I did not want to take off my jacket.

“Freedom encloses my mind like a suit of armor,” the prince said, “the complete freedom that I have and that is stifling me. I am so constructed as to be entirely against reality,” he said. “Most of the time I find my consolation, laugh if you like, Doctor, in inconsolability. If I am alone I feel like being with people; if I am with people I feel like being alone. I go to the greatest pains to understand others as though they were myself and I am utterly unable to understand any mind but my own. Fundamentally I am impoverished. It is quite possible that I am dying from the madnesses of others, from the illnesses of others, not from my own madnesses, not from my own illnesses, or at least not only from my own, not only from those of others. You see, Doctor, nature takes up all my thoughts and I am suffocating from having all my thoughts taken up by nature. Reality always presents itself to me as a ghastly procession of every possible concept. Theatrical effects, I always think; trying to escape from thinking, I am always thinking. For of course we are all condemned to thinking that nothing at all is actually real. Let us try it philosophically, the early centuries say; let us try it practically, the later centuries say; let us try it practically philosophically, nature says. And of late,” the prince said, “people believe that progress is a matter of mathematical cumulation. No matter how we look at things, we can feel that the tendency is directed entirely toward death. Our teachers are dead and by always dying very early have escaped from responsibility. Our teachers have left us alone. There are no future teachers and the ones of the past are dead. You can see that everything about many people (and everything in them) is pure theory, while others are the products of neither theory nor practice. Then what? But no human being ever has the possibility of being practical. We live by the assumption that problems are insoluble at night, soluble by day. That makes philosophizing possible. If we start to think about how we walk, it is soon no longer possible to walk,” he said. “If we start to think about how we philosophize, it is soon no longer possible for us to philosophize. And if we start to think about how we exist, we disintegrate ourselves in the briefest time. We can also draw a boundary through a person any way we please,” the prince said. “We can then enter this person from one side of the boundary or the other and not cross the boundary and then go out of him again. Cultures,” the prince said, “make exorbitant demands upon us. The oldest cultures the greatest demands. But what destroys us is our own culture. Just as what destroys us is our own religions, though we assert that it is nature doing it. What is needed,” the prince said, “is for us to destroy the image of the world, no matter what it is like. We must always destroy all images. Reason,” he said, “is dictatorial. There is no such thing as republican reason. The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents. We all have no parents; we are never lonely but always alone. For a long time now we have been forming a world foreign legion of the mind, all of us together. And knowing that we cannot exist without being condemned, what we wish for ourselves is a constant, strict tribunal which we always understand and therefore tolerate. We always approach ourselves as if we were character traits, until we grow tired. Women naturally are not so adroit in their command of this technique. Would it be possible,” the prince said, “that the air here is metaphysical air?”

My father did not answer.