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his starting point, that was the foundation of his deepest intellectual experiences, and though he had never spoken of this to anyone before he simply had to tell the young lady stewardess that it was to Hermes he had been ultimately led, having time after time attempted to discover that hermetically-sealed beginning, had time after time attempted to understand it, to solve it, to get to the bottom of it, and not least of all, to recount it to those people that fate had so far brought him into contact with, to tell them how it was that he realized that he was not intended to be an ordinary archivist, not that he didn’t want to be an archivist, for indeed he was most sincerely an archivist, but not an ordinary one, and what he sought to discover, what he constantly sought the answer to, was the reason why he wasn’t ordinary; and so he kept going over and over things that had happened, extending his explorations ever further back in time, and there was always something there, something new about his past that made him think, this is it, I’ve got it, or rather he searched and searched for the source, the
origo
of this revolution in his life which eventually, some thirty or forty hours ago, had led him here, and to ever newer potential sources and origos, ever newer starting points and beginnings, until he reached the conclusion, he was pleased to say, the actual conclusion he had been seeking and the name of that conclusion was Hermes; for truly, he said, Hermes, for him, was that absolute origo, it was that encounter with the hermetic, the day, the hour he first encountered Hermes, when—if he might so put it—he became acquainted with the world of the hermetic and was afforded a glimpse into it, into that which Hermes presented as a world, the world of which Hermes was the ruler, Hermes, this Greek god, the twelfth of twelve, with his mystery, his lack of fixity, his copiously multifaceted existence, his secret forms, the dark side of his being shrouded in a deeply suggestive silence, who had had such a mesmerizing effect on his imagination, or, more precisely, had completely captured his imaginative faculties and made him restless, had drawn him into a sphere from which there was no escape, for it was like being under a spell or a curse or an incantation, since this is what Hermes was to him, not a god who led but one who misled, swept him off course, destabilized him, called him, drew him aside, seduced him from below, whispered to him from the wings; but why him, him in particular, why this archivist working some two hundred and twenty kilometers from Budapest, he could not tell, nor should he seek after reasons, he felt, but simply accept that that was the way it was; it was the way he had learned of Hermes, possibly through the Homeric Hymns, or maybe from the psychoanalyst Kerényi, possibly from the marvelous Graves, who the hell knew or cared how, said Korin, this being, if he might so put it that way, the induction phase which was quickly followed by the next phase, the phase of deeper exploration in which the towering, unrivalled work of Walter F. Otto, that is to say his
Die Götter Griechenlands,
was the sole guide, and in that book, exclusively one specific chapter in the Hungarian edition, which he read and reread until it came to pieces in his hands, which was the point at which restlessness and anxiety entered his life, when things were no longer as they were, the day after which everything looked different, had changed, when the world showed him its most terrifying face, bringing on a sense of dissociation, offering the most terrifying aspect of absolute freedom, since knowledge of Hermes, said Korin, entails the loss of one’s sense of being at home in this world, of the sense of belonging, of dependence, of certainty, and this means that suddenly there is an uncertainty factor in the totality of things, because, just as suddenly, it becomes clear that this uncertainty is the only, the sole factor,