Read Online The Buddha's Return by Gaito Gazdánov - Free Book Online
Authors: Gaito Gazdánov
Ads: Link
said that she would work until the day she died—“
jusqu’au jour où je vais crever, parce que je suis poitrinaire.”
¶
I withdrew from the window. The pianola mercilessly went on playing one aria after the next. I felt as if I were venturing deeper and deeper into some vague mental fog. I tried to envisage everything my mind could envelop in the most comprehensive terms possible—the world as it was right now: the dark sky above Paris, its enormous expanse, thousands upon thousands of kilometres of ocean, the dawn over Melbourne, late evening in Moscow, the rushing of sea foam along the shores of Greece, the midday heat in the Bay of Bengal, the diaphanous movement of air across the earth, and time’s unstoppablemarch into the past. How many people had died while I had been standing there by the window, how many were now in their last agony as I had this very thought, how many bodies were writhing about in the throes of death—those for whom the inexorable final day of their lives had already dawned? I closed my eyes and before me appeared Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement,
and for whatever reason I immediately recalled his final epistle, in which he stated that he could write no more. As I remembered these lines I felt a chill run down my spine: this hand that was now incapable of writing had carved
David
and
Moses
from marble—and yet his genius was dissolving into that very same nothingness from which it had come; each of his works was an apparent victory over death and time. So that these concepts—time and death—appeared to me in all their finality, I had to tread the long path of gradual immersion, and conquer the aural inadequacy of this series of letters, “t”, “m”, “d”, “h”, and only then did the infinite perspective of my own journey towards death come into view. Those lines in Michelangelo’s letter rang in my ears, and I saw the printed page plainly before my eyes: the date, “Rome, 28 December 1563”, and the address, “Lionardo di Buonarroto Simoni, Florence”. “I have received many letters from thee of late to which I have not replied because my hand no longer submits to my will.” Two months later, in February 1564, he died. Did he still recall the tragic grandeur of that swell of musclesand bodies that his relentless inspiration had so imperiously cast down into hell—with the countless, unerring movements of that truly unique hand, the very one that would later refuse to serve him—in the days when the illusion of his superhuman might and the earthly vanity of his singular genius became so apparent? I sat in my armchair and with cold rage pondered the fundamental bankruptcy of everything, in particular any abstract morality and even the unattainable spiritual loftiness of Christianity—because of the limitations imposed on us by time, and because of the existence of death. Of course, none of these thoughts were revelatory; I had known them my whole life, just as millions of others had known them before me, but only rarely did they cross from a theoretical understanding into something tangible, and whenever they made this transition I experienced a peculiar and incomparable terror. My entire world and everything that surrounded me would lose all meaning and sense of reality. Later I developed a strange and abiding desire—to vanish into thin air, like a phantom in a dream, like a patch of morning mist, like someone’s distant memory. I wanted to forget everything, everything that constituted me, beyond which it seemed impossible to imagine my own existence, this aggregate of absurd, random conventions—as though I desired to prove to myself that I had not one life, but many, and consequently that the conditions in which I found myself in no way limited my options. I observed,from a theoretical and conceptual standpoint, the whole sequence of my gradual metamorphoses, and among the multitude of images to appear before me was the hope of some illusory immortality. I saw
jusqu’au jour où je vais crever, parce que je suis poitrinaire.”
¶
I withdrew from the window. The pianola mercilessly went on playing one aria after the next. I felt as if I were venturing deeper and deeper into some vague mental fog. I tried to envisage everything my mind could envelop in the most comprehensive terms possible—the world as it was right now: the dark sky above Paris, its enormous expanse, thousands upon thousands of kilometres of ocean, the dawn over Melbourne, late evening in Moscow, the rushing of sea foam along the shores of Greece, the midday heat in the Bay of Bengal, the diaphanous movement of air across the earth, and time’s unstoppablemarch into the past. How many people had died while I had been standing there by the window, how many were now in their last agony as I had this very thought, how many bodies were writhing about in the throes of death—those for whom the inexorable final day of their lives had already dawned? I closed my eyes and before me appeared Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement,
and for whatever reason I immediately recalled his final epistle, in which he stated that he could write no more. As I remembered these lines I felt a chill run down my spine: this hand that was now incapable of writing had carved
David
and
Moses
from marble—and yet his genius was dissolving into that very same nothingness from which it had come; each of his works was an apparent victory over death and time. So that these concepts—time and death—appeared to me in all their finality, I had to tread the long path of gradual immersion, and conquer the aural inadequacy of this series of letters, “t”, “m”, “d”, “h”, and only then did the infinite perspective of my own journey towards death come into view. Those lines in Michelangelo’s letter rang in my ears, and I saw the printed page plainly before my eyes: the date, “Rome, 28 December 1563”, and the address, “Lionardo di Buonarroto Simoni, Florence”. “I have received many letters from thee of late to which I have not replied because my hand no longer submits to my will.” Two months later, in February 1564, he died. Did he still recall the tragic grandeur of that swell of musclesand bodies that his relentless inspiration had so imperiously cast down into hell—with the countless, unerring movements of that truly unique hand, the very one that would later refuse to serve him—in the days when the illusion of his superhuman might and the earthly vanity of his singular genius became so apparent? I sat in my armchair and with cold rage pondered the fundamental bankruptcy of everything, in particular any abstract morality and even the unattainable spiritual loftiness of Christianity—because of the limitations imposed on us by time, and because of the existence of death. Of course, none of these thoughts were revelatory; I had known them my whole life, just as millions of others had known them before me, but only rarely did they cross from a theoretical understanding into something tangible, and whenever they made this transition I experienced a peculiar and incomparable terror. My entire world and everything that surrounded me would lose all meaning and sense of reality. Later I developed a strange and abiding desire—to vanish into thin air, like a phantom in a dream, like a patch of morning mist, like someone’s distant memory. I wanted to forget everything, everything that constituted me, beyond which it seemed impossible to imagine my own existence, this aggregate of absurd, random conventions—as though I desired to prove to myself that I had not one life, but many, and consequently that the conditions in which I found myself in no way limited my options. I observed,from a theoretical and conceptual standpoint, the whole sequence of my gradual metamorphoses, and among the multitude of images to appear before me was the hope of some illusory immortality. I saw
Similar Books
