In the end, the paper boats sink in the water and the candles descend to the bottom of the lake. The celebrants shake the dust from their kimonos and go home. And this too we won’t let anyone explain.
[147]
Once, in Mea She’arim, we ran into a demonstration against the practice of carrying out autopsies. Garbage bins were burning in all four corners of Sabbath Square. People shouting verses from the Psalms were shoving us up the slope on Strauss Street. The smoke from the burning plastic brought tears to our eyes and for a moment we imagined that we were weeping for the dead whose dignity had been violated.
In fact, we thought (like a wandering violinist who stumbles onto a string orchestra) — Why do we need to cut into the flesh of someone after they die? Finally, after a life of sorrow and trouble a man lies in absolute peace on his back. If one really wants to know what the cause of death is one could write on the relevant documents “Birth,” and if one really wants to know what the cause of birth is, one could write there “Death.” And even if we cut into the dead man’s tissue we’ll find more tissue beneath it and beneath that still more, whereas the secret is much more likely to be found in the open mouth of the dead man, out of which his spirit passed, or in the open mouth of the world, proof of which lies in the sun and stars.
[148]
We’re asking ourselves if, before the creation of the world, it was determined that the great novels (War and Peace or Crime and Punishment) would be written.
It’s clear that God didn’t conceive of them. He’s very sparing with words, and when he does speak the results are seismic (see for instance Genesis 1), but it may well be that these works were, as they say, within him, like civilization as a whole.
Sometimes writers say that they’re only vessels in the hands of God. Some French writers have even tried what’s called automatic writing. That is, they themselves didn’t interfere in what was written on the paper. One of them would write the word shutters maybe seventy times. Most likely at that very moment God felt a terrible sense of constriction.
My grandfather, Isaac Emerich, would sigh every so often and say, Ach, mein lieber gott (Oh, Good Lord), but if we ask ourselves if his complaint was predetermined as well, we’ll never find our way out of this maze, not even if we address the question to the Department of Philosophy, in writing.
[149]
Tonight is New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow’s January 1, 2009. We greet our readers (also those who don’t read our books) and wish them this: that in the coming year they should read only good books. Michael Rips’s The Face of a Naked Lady, for instance.
There’s no point in talking about wretched humanity that’s sending artillery shells in every direction tonight. God have mercy on everyone.
[150]
Now it’s below zero. Think about these words below zero. Less than nothing.
When we were in Japan we read in books by religious sages that it’s possible to get below zero and then to walk around above zero as though one were still beneath it. Something like abstracting the form from things and nevertheless leaving them as they are.
Once we knew a woman by the name of Rivkah who always said “It’s nothing,” and nevertheless bought herself blouses and dresses and the like.
As far as we’re concerned, we prefer the rabbis
a) because of their beards
b) because of their Yiddish
c) because they know that everything’s nothing but don’t say so, so as not to spread sorrow through the world.
[151]
Outside, everything’s frozen. We bring the dogs into the house. The cats go into the empty doghouses and warm themselves against each other’s bodies. But what do the wild boars in the brush do? The jackals? The birds?
Language too gets twisted. Entire words freeze in the mouth, and we need to stand beside the stove to thaw them out.
Which reminds us of the story that Wilhelm Busch wrote about Peter, who wouldn’t heed the warnings he’d received and went out to play one winter’s day and didn’t return. His father and mother sat at home and wept, but a hunter found him in the woods and brought him back, frozen as a block of ice, and his father and mother were very happy and led him toward the stove and watched with joy as he thawed out, but, alas, in the end, all that remained of him was a puddle of water and his broken-hearted parents gathered the water up into a jar and put it on the shelf between a jar labeled CUCUMBERS and another labeled SALT and wrote on it PETER.
[152]
We forgot to wish the psychologists a Happy New Year. No doubt the cold makes it harder for them to look into souls.
If only the New Year would bring about a condition in which their souls would melt (as one melts lead) into the great form of the soul of the world, and there’d no longer be any separation between their eyes (behind glasses) and the eyes of the people they’re looking into. And that the rule against hugging others might be dropped, and, above all, that someone would hug them.
Because there is no loneliness greater than that of the psychologist. His thought is always doubled, as he’s forced to consider thought upon thought, and sometimes thought upon thought upon thought.
And apropos thought upon thought: It goes without saying that we also greet the philosophers. But for them we need — above all — to pray that they get some sleep.
We (which is to say I) especially want to wish a Happy New Year to the women, because they so often go unloved. And of all of mankind’s crimes, this is the greatest.
[153]
The reader should always see the paper that’s behind the words. Not what was there before the words were written, but what resurfaces after they’re read.
Don’t believe the physicists who talk about specific density. Things that you see, even if they seem heavy, are all the stuff of dreams. And don’t believe that either. The dream itself is a dream.
But wait. When you see large things like a hippopotamus or a Sumo wrestler you’re tempted to credit them with an exaggerated degree of actuality. My stepmother Francesca, for instance, was very hard to doubt. But once we knew a very fragile woman, who appeared and then vanished like a hologram. It was very easy to doubt her, but the longing for her was painful.
[154]
Because of this longing, which is in fact hard to bear, novels of some three hundred and even six hundred pages are written and countless numbers of people who fill them come and go, like a medicine cabinet full of Tylenol.
You need to put things beside one another, a novel like this one and a crow. Or, if you’d rather, a turtle.
Once a crow came in through the front door and stood on the kitchen table. At first it pecked at breadcrumbs and then it froze there and stared at us.
That’s why we’re writing what we write. If only we knew what he saw when he stared we would tell the reader (instead of this book). But because we don’t, we keep on writing.
[155]
Now we’re reminded that a son was born to Uncle Shamu and his Muslim wife, and he was called Moshe. Maybe because both the Jews and the Muslims believe in the biblical Moses and maybe because his grandfather, which is to say, Uncle Shamu’s father, was called Sandor Moshe Farkash.