Of course, the state of I-couldn't-believe-my-eyes can last but a few seconds, just as you can't stare someone down for too long. The appearance of a harmony coming into being, or lacking totally, cannot be sustained for long, and not only because the relationship between emotion and intellect is disharmonious, even physiologically, but because the internal image we want to assimilate is not identical with the image our sense organs perceive in a neutral, unprocessed form. At the same time, the face as a whole reflects quite faithfully this complex triple relationship. We can confirm this phenomenon, too, by examining with the aid of a pocket mirror both our profiles, and then comparing them with the frontal view of our face.
The two profiles appear completely different. One of them expresses the emotional, the other the intellectual aspect of our character, and the greater the disparity, the smaller the likelihood that they will blend harmoniously in the frontal view. Yet blend they must, a natural necessity that excludes the possibility of the two being totally different from each other — just as they cannot be totally identical either.
Logically it should follow that we should consider a face in which emotion and intellect appear to be in radical imbalance just as beautiful as one in which the two are in perfect harmony. But this isn't so. Insofar as we can choose between two near-perfect forms, we always choose the near-perfectly-proportionate over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one.
If I were to take any of my grandfather's photographs showing him from the front, and with a pair of scissors cut it in two along the line between the cleft of his chin and the bridge of his nose, and then superimpose the pieces, one half of his face would cover the other near perfectly, like two geometric constructs. The reason for this unique trait must be that in individuals like him the two hemispheres of the brain developed evenly. Assessing the physical appearance of such people, one is tempted to conclude that neither emotion nor intellect predominates in them, pulling them in one direction or the other; and whoever looks at them cannot but be intrigued by the magical possibility of perfect symmetry.
If the brain's two hemispheres could indeed assimilate with a perfect blend of feeling and thought what the sense organs had already perceived as a neutral whole, if there were no differences between parts and the whole, if an individual's unique image were not formed in accordance with the brain's inevitable biases, if each individual could reproduce a perfect whole comprehensible to all, then it wouldn't even occur to us to differentiate between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, because there would be no difference between emotional and intellectual properties. This would be the ultimate symmetry we all strive for, which the man of ethics calls infinite goodness and the man of aesthetics calls beauty.
The only reason I've thought it necessary to explain all this is to demonstrate what an unbridgeable gap separates ethical thinking, which even in the absence of ultimate symmetries finds certainties, or aesthetic thinking, which cannot survive such an absence, from the kind of thinking I can also call my own. In my youth, because of my attractive physical appearance, people thought of me as exceptional and treated me accordingly. The advantages stemming from their admiration and devotion made up for the social disadvantages I had to endure on account of my family background. But in my thinking, perhaps for this very reason, I have remained the epitome of the average person. I did not become a believer like the ethical ones, or a doubter like many aesthetically sensitive people I know, because I never longed for the impossible but learned to make good use of the qualities I possess. Of course my own secret torments do enable me to empathize with the certainties of ethical believers and the uncertainties of skeptical aesthetes, with their happiness and tragedies, but my thinking is not directed at realizing hidden possibilities or at grasping metaphysical insights born of contemplating the impossible; my thinking deals only with real possibilities, things within reach of my two hands.
My activities don't touch on any systematic philosophy of life. I am guided by the conviction that whatever appears as debit on one side will show up as credit on the other. Despite my well-developed theoretical bent, I occupy myself only with the practical organization of my life. I draw on my credit, I make up my debit. And while doing so, I never forget that symmetries thus gained are valid only for the moment of their creation.
And if I said before that studying those photographs, whose allusion to ultimate symmetry filled me with such distaste, was one of my favorite pastimes as a child, then my statement is in need of further clarification.
As becomes evident from my friend's confessions, I wasn't a quiet, retiring child. As an adult, too, I am very active, although I'm tempted to consider my urge to keep busy, sometimes reaching the point of frenzy, to be one of my darker traits, even if others envy this seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy. What spurs me on is not a desire to win or to succeed but rather the indolence and inertia that thrust my immediate and not so immediate environment into a state of permanent defeat. And since there are so many more defeats than victories in one's life, I haven't had much opportunity to withdraw into a state of quiet contemplation. I don't like to use big words, but I'll say that our sorry national history, piling failure upon failure, defeat upon defeat, is partly to blame. For when confronted with seemingly impossible situations, tasks that are clearly beyond our resources, we don't even consider the possibility of regrouping our forces, but with a fool's defensive cautiousness we avoid the issues, put them off, pretend they don't exist, or with almost masochistic pleasure proceed to enumerate the reasons why rational solutions are simply not in the cards. This petty cunning irritates me no less than our fatalistic air of superiority. I believe that playing for time, lying low, waiting it out, is a justified tactic only in situations that hold out the prospect of solution; in the absence of such prospects the question of what can or cannot be done, and why, is futile, though it is as familiar to me as it is to the rest of my compatriots. When there is a solution, delay is superfluous, and when there isn't, talk is a sheer waste of time. But my annoyance and irritability seldom prove to be reliable counsel. In my feverish activity I myself pile error on error, stumble from defeat to defeat. And all the while, and not without a measure of arrogance, I keep telling myself that even a blind hen will find a seed if it keeps knocking around with its beak long enough.
But if between two erroneous decisions or two defeats I still manage to achieve some kind of breakthrough, then the feeling of surprise makes me retreat. At times like that I have to decide whether my success is the result of a correct decision or merely a stroke of luck. I observe, I weigh things, I distract myself and others, I become despondent and helpless and long for solitude. I look for something to read and, all of a sudden, softly lit corners in cozy, familiar rooms become very important.
In my childhood, during lulls in my fight for freedom, in my personal cold war, I studied photographs and military maps and browsed through dictionaries; as a young man I experienced in these periods, having grown timid with success, my casual conquests blossoming into tense love affairs, and I'd disappear for weeks and hole up in warm little nests with the unlikeliest girls; later, when I was a married man, the so-called periods of success got me started on quiet and carefully arranged but all the more persistent bouts of drinking.
My aversion to cowering and useless arguments, my propensity for acting recklessly, and my inability to handle success must all stem from my basic character makeup, which can balance feeling and thought so as to neutralize each other, but since I traveled a great deal and spent a lot of time in foreign countries, and therefore had a chance to realize that elsewhere I would probably have turned out differently, I feel that any attempt at discovering the character of a nation in something other than the particular traits of an individual is a very risky undertaking. We are all variants of the same thing. Variants determined by character, sex, family origin, religion, and upbringing. If someone, while still a child, wants to find his place in this community, he will select ancestors with the characteristics that seem most striking, but there is no personal characteristic that is not yet another version of the national character, and so, in reality, the child is selecting for himself only certain variants.