And his report bore the heading “The Has-Beens, or” (like contemporary headline-writers for newspapers and advertisements, he had a proclivity for verbal paradoxes and wordplay): “The Mountain Castaways.”
What was accurate in his report, or whatever his testymonial (pun!) was — which is not to say that it was “true”—was that the closer to the bottom of the depression, with its lake, the people there lived or “resided,” the more “down and out” they appeared. Observers, and not only the observation teams flown in, could not escape the impression that of the mixtures and crosses of all the human races (if that word was still appropriate), the ugliest and most profoundly neglected, as well as most savagely, unsalvageably, and hopelessly battered representatives, individually or in pairs, had dragged themselves to this spot in the high Sierra and had tumbled headfirst into this enormous, rocky, prehistoric glacial pit.
Yes, that was correct: the figures in the settlement down there at the bottom corresponded to the image one had, although one should know better, of humans from prehistoric times. Were they even human beings like us, today, in the present? Did they even possess consciousness, a mental awareness as sharp and alert as ours, and our richly developed modern emotional life? Or wasn’t the sight that met our eyes at the bottom of the depression actually something we had shaken off once and for all, a deposit, the “dregs”?—even the observer would probably have been appalled at such an expression?
Yet it was only from the threshold of the dwellings down there in the valley that the people of Hondareda appeared this way to her. (Yes, it was a valley, with meadows along the outflow of the lake, and a stretch of forest, although the trees were hardly as tall as a man, along one section of the lakeshore.)
Once she had arrived and entered the settlement down there, the people became recognizable as close relatives of the unmistakably contemporary young people she had seen all over the steep slopes: their parents? More likely their grandparents, and not old at all, as well as uncles and aunts, all of whom had something foster-parent-like about them.
And if the goings-on, the doings among those dwellings, did seem odd for this day and age — again the observer had observed accurately — and were not entirely up-to-date, this hardly indicated that they had “turned their back on the present.”
It must be conceded that along with, or in addition to, the unusual surface and spatial conditions in Hondareda, something like a different kind of time was in effect. Yet it did not prevail or hold sway, but rather accompanied and undergirded normal time, as a melody and a rhythm — like everywhere else, when a person did not know what time it was by the clock, the next person would know.
The presence of a secondary type of time simply came from the fact that with every few steps down into the granite basin one encountered a different microclimate, a wind that was wintry, then warmer and vernally mild, then hot and summery, suddenly bitter cold again for a bit, until down at the bottom all these climate zones and winds were jumbled together.
And she acknowledged later that the reporter was right to some extent — when the two of them, since he, too, was out there all alone, crossed each other’s paths at some unspecified time in the wilderness beyond his observation post, close to the Candeleda Pass, and fell into conversation: it was not completely inaccurate to call the Hondareda population the “has-beens.”
The very ambiguity of the term has something to recommend it. Didn’t each of the new settlers remind one of an athlete whom an opposing player had sidelined once and for all, while this opponent had long since gone away, vanished, was no longer there to be challenged, continuing to play somewhere else? As if the has-been were not even benched but merely left shaking his fist impotently in the air?
But the inhabitants of Hondareda, as she urged the outside observer to consider at the end of her stay there, appeared to be has-beens even more, and infinitely more lastingly, in a different respect: as if of their own accord and free will they had decided, in rank and file (they who never lined up anywhere), not to play anymore, or at least not to play games in which one played, either openly or surreptitiously, primarily against another person or persons — not to play even a single one of those games known as “grown-up games.”
“So that means voluntarily renouncing all games with winners and losers, and certainly all games of annihilation? Forever? Such games are played out for good down in the pit?” (A playful question on the part of her partner in conversation.)
Her response: “Played out for the time being, in this period of transition, until perhaps, no, necessarily, a new and entirely different kind of play crops up. In this transitional period at least, your has-beens have decided to cultivate the greatest possible seriousness, each in his dealings with himself and likewise with his fellow settlers — which by no means manifests itself — why did you not see it that way as well? — in gravity but rather in a special gracefulness (‘Latinate words’). Where you may have observed, or rather wanted to observe, wild shaking of fists in the air, someone else might have noticed lunging and hopping steps, of a sort seen nowhere else, or maybe that peculiar clumsiness of someone dedicated to total seriousness, but what a lovely clumsiness, not all that different from floating.”
A question from her opponent: “The clumsy seriousness of the has-beens and castaways, in which the rudiments and elements of a new form of play can be discerned?”
She: “That is right. Yes. To be discerned and ferreted out. And there is another way, a third way, to read your ‘has-beens’: apparently they have lost all the images, ideas, ideals, rituals, dreams, laws, and, finally, also the first and last images that made it possible for them to picture a world, communal life on the planet, and prefigured it for them, prescribed it, lent it a rhythm, or perhaps merely feigned or conjured it up. And being stranded in this fashion is by no means voluntary. The loss of images is something that befell the people of Hondareda. The images, laws, rhythms, and so on that give the world meaning were violently destroyed for them, for each of them in his seemingly inherited place, by all sorts of external events — war, the death of loved ones, betrayal, crime, including crimes they committed themselves, and so on — generally at one blow.
“From one moment to the next, something ceased to mean anything at all to them: the image or the idea, for instance, that the Olympic flame is carried every four or however many years across the continents to the site of the next games, or the previously always valid rhythmic and predictable image of belonging to a country, a culture, even a people; or the images of Mars transmitted to Earth — and these are only the most harmless and tolerable losses of images. All the others — and the loss of images is total for those who found their way to Hondareda, or rather washed up there — are far more grave, infinitely more grave! A person stricken with such a loss can think only one thought: endgame! It is all up with me and with the world. Except that those who are affected, instead of drowning or hanging themselves or running amok against the rest of the world, have made their way here.
“To find a new image? Among this horde of castaways high in the mountains? To which you also belong? When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”
While she, the adventurer, and he, the transcontinental observer, were thus engaged in conversation, they were standing, by now on the other side of the meanwhile legendary “Great Depression of Hondareda,” on an almost glass-smooth granite outcropping in the midst of the mountain wilderness, far from the colony down below, but also far from the newly graded Candeleda Pass road.