The dream image made me very happy and warmed me for a long time afterward while I stood on the cold loading ramp and supervised the work.
March to Sars-Poteries; billeted there. I was assigned to two old ladies. One was eighty-two years old and had already seen three wars. I was able to contribute a bit of sausage to their evening meal, but it was still little better than meager. It consisted essentially of three large potatoes that had stood on the stovetop under a clay dome. This little device was called an étouffoir, probably because the food inside is steamed by closing off its air supply.
Strolled near the railroad station. In the ceramics factory, I inquired about the source of the clay that gave the town its reputation. A little beyond the tracks, I reached the pits and saw that these had been excavated from the lovely brown and white sand. I did not discover any of the fossils I was hoping to find. At the bottom of one old abandoned excavation, there were puddles that must occasionally flood with water. There I came upon willows growing at the bottom of one of the pits, taller than a man and covered with tiny, hairy roots. These sprouted like moss from the trunk and branches—a nice example demonstrating that each individual part of a plant can reproduce others. The whole organism is suffused with concentrated powers of generation. We humans have lost this art, and once our cultures display leaves and blossoms, we will never again see roots. Yet, when danger mounts in moments of sacrifice, we send out different, more spiritual organs, aerial roots, into the void—naturally at the expense of individual lives. All of us benefit from this new growth.
As I walked back, a storm of heavy wet snow dappled the landscape. Yet in the gardens, I could still see hazel and laurel blossoms covering the bare branches like swollen lilac blooms. In protected places, I noticed clusters of snowdrops. These seemed quite early, especially after the harsh winter. Here they are called fleurs de Saint Joseph [Saint Joseph’s flowers], whose day is celebrated on 19 March.
During my early morning sleep, I was in a little pharmacy where I was buying various things. Then Rehm woke me up. Before my eyes were open, I briefly noticed a paper bag labeled Braunschweiger Rubber Cement. It is always strange how we focus on such details.
Currently reading Reine [Queen] by Julius [recte Jules] Lermina, a book lent to me by the lady who owns my living quarters; it rather amusingly describes the factionalism around 1815 in the style of The Three Musketeers. Here you come across passages like the following that surpass the quality of the popular noveclass="underline" “There is something childlike to be found in every conspirator.” I can confirm that judgment from personal experience.
Dozed in the early morning hours and pondered exotic books like Die Geheimnisse des Roten Meeres [The Secrets of the Red Sea] by Henry de Monfreid. The work is bathed in the gleam of coral and mother of pearl and the delicate breath of the sea. Also pondered Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices [The Garden of Torments]. This garden, with its paths paved in red brick dust, is filled with green vegetation and great masses of blazing peonies. It draws its luxuriance from the countless corpses of coolies who created it under conditions of murderous toil and have moldered anonymously in its depths. This book deserves praise for clearly delineating the beauty and savagery of the world—as the two forces whose combination and interplay remind us of sea monsters. Veiled in iridescence, these camouflage the terrifying dangers of their weaponry with alluring hues. In such intense coalescing of hells and heavens, the eye cannot differentiate the details of desire and suffering any more than it can the tangled chaos of a jungle island. Here our planet reveals a most incredible drama to our spirit.
Then about Wagner, who appeared to me in a new, more meaningful light for our age. I thought I spotted the error of Baudelaire, who possessed an authentic relationship to the ancient, eternal verities. Thoughts about the mighty mind of the dramatist who breathes artificial breath into past ages and dead cultures so that they move like corpses we can quote. A sorcerer of the highest order who conjures with real blood at the gates of the underworld.[1]
Things assume colors that make it hard for even the sharpest eye to distinguish truth from illusion. The actor steps into reality, becomes a historical person, achieves triumphs, garners laurels as green as real ones. What good does it do to contradict or debate with him? He has arrived because his time has come. In this alone lies his guilt, which runs deeper than any guilt based on individual action. Art as a hothouse of past ages—it is like a promenade through winter gardens or salons where palm trees bloom. It is hard to take issue with this, for the terrors of destruction are so great, so horrifying, that the will to rescue a single shade is all too understandable. Nietzsche presents a contrast that stands and falls in wintery tempests. These are the exemplars that our youth, like Heracles, beheld at the crossroads.
The case of Nietzsche contra Wagner[2] reminds me of those little toy houses we used to have with their different figures that would emerge depending on the weather conditions. One little figure would stand outside and forecast the weather, prophetically correct but out of step with the moment. The other showed the prevailing climate conditions, whether or not signs of a downturn could be sensed. For that reason, this figure waits in safety, away from the bright light. And yet they both were attached to one and the same little strip of wood fashioned by the carver of the little weather house.
Departed from Sars-Poteries, in particular from my eighty-two-year-old maiden lady, whom I thanked before dawn while she was still in bed. Then marched to new quarters near Saint-Michel, at first in a light frost and then through damp snow. The numerous destroyed or abandoned houses make the town a forbidding place. A tank juts out of the little river that flows through it. Myths are already being created: people say the driver plunged off the bridge to deprive the Germans of their prize. Wherever the inhabitants have moved back again, they have attached strips of white linen to the doors of their houses to signal their presence. They give an impression of being poorer and more famished than the people of Sars-Poteries. Swarms of children with bare legs frozen blue huddle at the field kitchens. Rats can be heard scampering in the houses; cats stare from the empty windows.
I am living with Rehm in the house of a landlady whose husband is a prisoner of war in Germany. She is probably around forty but is still attractive, lively, and hospitable and likes to talk about her husband, whom she provides for diligently. Still, I’d like to think of her as available; she is filled with high spirits stimulated by fresh and vibrant experiences. Such things often dwell in one and the same heart, for the moral world cannot be called to account or dissected as neatly as the physical world. By the same token, most men do not behave like Othello (something I never understood before) but know how to forgive, especially in long-lasting marriages.
1
E. J. applies to Wagner categories from Nietzsche, which include a caricature of the composer as sorcerer.
2
Nietzsche