Read Online Life Sentences by William H. Gass - Free Book Online Page A

wheat without water; and we shall never know how many callow effusions we were spared by a cut throat; how many slanderous tongues were severed; what sentimental love songs were choked off as though in mid-note by the rope; the number of the statues of Jesus, Mary, or the pope, whose making was prevented by an opportune blindness or the breaking of the right bones; what canvases depicting mill wheels in moonlight, cattle at dawn, children and dogs, lay unexecuted on their easels because of the gas, talent thrown out as if it were the random pissing of paint intoa bedpan; so that, over all, and on sober balance, there could have been a decided gain; yet there is always the troublesome, the cowardly, midnight thought that a Milton might have been rendered mute and inglorious by an errant bullet through the womb; that some infant, who, as a precocious young man, might conceive a Sistine ceiling for the world, and humble us all with his genius, as he made us proud of our common humanity … well, there is always the fear that this not-yet youth has been halved like a peach; that Vermeer, Calderón, or Baudelaire, Frege or Fourier … could conceivably, oh yes, just might possibly … have … been … gently carried to his death between a pair of gray-haired arms, which, otherwise, were no longer even strong enough to disturb a clear soup.
    I wrote
The Tunnel
out of the conviction that no race or nation is better than any other, and that no nation or race is worse; that the evil men do every day far outweighs the good—the goods being great art and profound knowledge scientifically obtained.
    The poet who has been my unwitting companion in this enterprise, Rainer Maria Rilke, similarly wondered, as his own career grew to a close, whether mankind had justified its reign of terror with some offsetting achievements. He thought about the grandeur of cathedrals. But, really, was it enough? I quote from my translation of the Seventh Elegy:
                   Wasn’t it miraculous? O marvel, Angel, that we
did
it,
                   we, O great one, extol our achievements,
                   my breath is too short for such praise.
                   Because, after all, we haven’t failed to make use
                   of our sphere
—ours
—these generous spaces.
                   (How frightfully vast they must be,
                   not to have overflowed with our feelings
                   even after these thousands of years.)
                   But one tower was great, wasn’t it? O Angel, it was—
                   even compared to you? Chartres was great—
                   and music rose even higher, flew far beyond us.
                   Even a woman in love, alone at night by her window …
                   didn’t she reach your knee?
    That
but
—“but one tower was great, wasn’t it?”—that plaintive, despairing
but
—as if anything played or painted or built or composed or inscribed—or a little love, honest for a change, and felt by another—could weigh as much as a sigh in the balance against Dubno’s pit and its high pile of corpses, or any massacre, even if it is that of fish in a poisoned lake.
    I have taught philosophy, in one or other of its many modes, for fifty years—Plato my honey in every one of them—yet many of those years had to pass before I began to realize that evil actually
was
ignorance—ignorance chosen and cultivated—as he and Socrates had so passionately taught; that most beliefs were bunkum, and that the removal of bad belief was as important to a mind as a cancer’s excision was to the body it imperiled. To have a