But I still did not know what I should write. I ought to have seen that as a suspicious symptom in itself. To tell the truth, in not one of my lessons that might be counted as such did I manage to sense that significance — what one might call the necessity which sweeps every sober consideration before it — in the way that I did then in that novel; but that, I knew, albeit with a certain sorrow, was by now behind me, once and for all.
In the end, the spur was given by a trifling street incident. I have always been a believer in long walks, since they allow me to organize my thoughts as I go along. For these purposes I favour cheerful, meditative surroundings such as the banks of the Danube or the hilltops of Buda, where I can yield in delight to the enchantment of each unexpectedly unfolded panorama that brings me to a halt. Before me a hazy blue vista: the built-up flat terrain of the Pest side; here and there a high-rise building, a dome, a glinting roof, or row of windows; in the mid-ground the gleaming ribbon of the river with the arches of the bridges over it. Behind me the grey-green compactness of a hillside, villas, building blocks, the contentment of tranquil homes, the distant television tower. The day in question, as I recall, was humid and stifling hot, the sun beating down viciously on the back of my head out of a white sky. I was bathed in sweat by the time I had crested a highway with a strip of grass running down the middle. The exasperation I felt from the heat, a dull headache, and my indecisiveness had been wound to exploding point by a thousand little things en route: the abrupt switching-on of a screeching siren just as an ambulance had drawn alongside me; the inexplicable outburst of rage from a dog which unexpectedly hurled itself at the railings as I passed by, its demented, hoarse, rancorous barking, which unremittingly accompanied my steps; a half-wit in a boater, short-sleeved shirt, and, dangling on a leather strap that reached from his neck to his belly, a pocket radio which appeared to be equipped with every gadget that a modern radar-detector vessel might need, the crackling howl from which I didn’t seem able to get rid of; my choking and sneezing and my eyes stinging in the dense, black exhaust cloud from a truck that rattled past — in short, the sort of impressions which are inconsequential of themselves but which collectively, and coupled with a degree of mental turmoil, take such a hold on people in big cities as to drive them to unpredictable excesses, individual perversions, anarchistic thoughts, bomb throwing. I had just cut obliquely across the street — quite against the regulations, as a matter of fact. I could hear a bus at my heels, but having got the worst of so many indignities already, I was overcome with an unusual fit of obstinacy: “Screw you! Either pull out or just run over me,” I thought to myself. A blast of the horn, a screeching of brakes: I leapt like a grasshopper which is just about to be trampled on. A torrent of curses broke over my head from the door which opened next to the driver’s cabin. I screamed back. We filled the impartial air with an unproductive cacophony of foul language. I suspect it did us both good: it gave us a chance to vent our accumulated impersonal venoms.
Once I had been left to myself by the roadside, I came to the cheerily satisfying conclusion that I was a cheat, as I had only dared to take the risk because I had complete trust in the driver.
Of course, he could have run me over — through a mechanical fault, let’s say. But I fully appreciate that bus drivers have excellent road skills. He might also have run me over because the law would have been on his side: I was crossing the road illegally. On the other hand, without being personally acquainted with this particular one, I am well aware that bus drivers are loath to kill people under certain circumstances. Driving over a limp body — that is the privilege of tanks. Murder is something else, and mass murder something different again. In that way I was reminded again of an earlier idea of mine: a plan for a dissertation, on a not too ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence.
“Now we’re talking,” the old boy nodded.
“It was stupid of me …”
… on a not too ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence …
“For Christ’s sake!”
“You ought to get out for a bit.”
“I shall,” the old boy replied, placing back in the filing cabinet the grey file, and on top of that the likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, lump of stone that served as a paperweight, so to say.
At the same time, he took out the cylindrical glass phial from the front of the third drawer down in the filing cabinet and loosened the pliable wax plugs from his ears.
Oglütz.
“That …,” the old boy started to say.
“It’s not worth it, I’m going out anyway,” he reflected. In the series of the various stations of torture the old boy had passed beyond that transitional state when a person attempts to rise above his situation by propounding universal theories. At one time he had decided that Oglütz (and the old boy’s starting to call Oglütz Oglütz may have dated from this decision) embodied a qualitatively new form of being, namely, a visual (or auditory) (or audio-visual) being (which differed radically from, for instance, the) (nowadays in any case barely realisable) (art-loving being, in that Oglütz’s watching) (or listening) (or watching and listening) (habits both in prose and music were confined exclusively to the products, so to speak, of the light-entertainment genre, quiz and game shows, gala evenings, current-affairs programmes, advertisements, or at most, natural history documentaries); and if it is questionable whether this form of existence is satisfying in every respect, there can be no doubt that it is extremely comfortable, because instead of our having to live a many-sided life, it constantly swarms before our eyes — true, only on a screen, and all we can do is be diverted or angered by it, but not influence it, guide it, intervene in it or accept its consequences — yet in that respect, and in that respect alone (not in what happens on the screen), does it not resemble some of our lives? and as a last resort the old boy would even have been able to imagine a pure visual (or auditory) (or audio-visual) being in the shape of someone who has spent decades in front of the screen, so that even in its last moments, when death arrives to summon it, it does not question that it leaves behind a rich, action-packed and varied life …
“Did you get any work done?”
“Of course.”
“Did you make any progress?”
“I pushed on a bit.”
“There was something else I meant to tell you.”
“What was that?” the old boy paused.
“It’s slipped my mind for the moment.”
“Next time write it down so that you won’t forget.”
“Did anyone call?”
“Who would have called?”
“True.”
… As a matter of fact — and this was my point of departure — the composite notion of blood, lust and the demon has always upset me in the form that one encounters it in certain works of art. The image that these works of art present, in connection with certain historical periods and events, of some sort of extraordinary, unbroken witches’ Sabbath, incompatible with human nature in general and dolled up, so to say, with a festive character, simply does not tally at all with my own experiences. Murder in some degree, over a certain time span and beyond a given number, is after all tiring, systematic, and harrowing work, whose daily continuity is not vouchsafed by the participants’ likes or dislikes, bursts of ardour or onsets of disgust, enthusiasm, or antipathy — in short, the momentary mood, or even cast of mind, of single individuals, but by organisation, an assembly-line operation, a self-contained mechanism which does not permit so much as a moment’s time to draw breath. In another respect, there can be no doubt about it, that is what put paid to tragic representation. Where would personalities who are grandiose, exceptional, and extraordinary even in their awfulness fit in? Richard III wagers that he will be evil; the mass murderers of a totalitarian regime, by contrast, take an oath on the common good.