When we descend into the earth, however, no more can we stretch our arms skywards. No longer can we create the symbol of redemption, the sign of the Cross, with our bodies while we stand.
The Cross is not just the instrument of torture upon which the Redeemer of mankind suffered. It is first and foremost the simplest depiction of man with his arms outstretched, his feet planted on the earth, his head towards the sky. Every person on earth who stretches out his arms in distress forms a cross. He redeems himself, as it were, from his afflictions through the sign of the Cross, which he does not make but himself depicts.
Eight hundred metres under the earth, however, one cannot stand upright or stretch out one’s arms. One creeps around like an animal, on all fours, through narrow, gloomy passageways. Water drips from the walls. Water and slime coat the hands and feet. The damp air paralyses the lungs and shortens the breath.
And one can plainly see that we were not made to be without the sky. Yes, when first we descend below the surface of the earth we understand that we cannot really live without the dome of the heavens over our heads.
It is because of this that miners refer to the heavy earthen ceiling that weighs down upon them, eight hundred metres deep, as the sky.
Men are so dependent on the sky that they would call a layer of earth eight hundred metres thick ‘the sky’.
The word alone consoles them over the loss of the actual heavens.
It is the same as when emigrants who leave their old home and seek a new one in far-away lands give the names of their old cities and villages to the new cities and villages they found.
Our true home is the sky, and we are but guests upon this earth.
Under the earth itself, even when we descend eight hundred metres below, we never cease to feel that the heavens are our home, and that is why miners call the black ceiling above their heads the sky. Into this word they place all the blue sweetness of the true sky, as many people who have left their home sing to themselves a tune of their country, and all the sweetness of the homeland lives within this song.
But the men who call the ceiling above their heads the sky must work at it with hammers, picks and drills. They lie flat upon their backs and drill holes in their pitiful sky from which they collect coal. Sometimes this sky over them falls upon them and buries them beneath its black weight. Nevertheless, they still call it ‘sky’.
It is not merciful to them. It is the most unmerciful sky one might imagine. It is a black sky.
The man who took me underground showed me his house. It was a Sunday. The man was old. For thirty years he had been descending into the bowels of the earth every day, eight hundred metres and even deeper. Each Sunday he spent at home, attending to his garden and his children. He had six sons. Five times he had been buried alive by a fall of coal and then rescued. Of all the companions of his youth none was still alive. They had all been crushed and killed by the black and merciless sky.
‘And what are your six sons doing?’ I asked.
‘They are all miners,’ he replied. ‘My grandfather suffocated in the mine, my father also. I suppose I’ll suffocate there, and perhaps also my children. But maybe they’ll live to see the day when larger and safer tunnels are built. In that case, it will no longer pay to produce coal, as the prices are too low. Engineers are expensive. Once the safest tunnels are constructed, mining coal will no longer pay. Then the pits will be closed, and we’ll have nothing to eat.’
‘What leads you,’ I asked him, ‘to figure the lives of your fore-bears, your own and that of your children into the price of the coal that you don’t even sell? Why do you think coal is more important than life?’
‘I’m not saying that,’ answered the man. ‘The coal itself says so. We are prisoners of the coal. If it isn’t sold, we all must die. If, however, it’s sold for a good price, only one or another of us will die, but not all of us. That is why we reckon the price of our lives into the price of the coal, exactly as our masters, our breadgivers do. Just as they reckon, so do we.’
‘Don’t you love life?’ I asked the man.
‘I once came across a book,’ he said, ‘in which I read about and saw pictures of the ships of antiquity that were called triremes. These ships were rowed by slaves, each of whom was chained to his seat and had only one arm free — but it was the one with which he rowed. From time to time an overseer with a whip walked among the ranks of rowing slaves. And when one of them grew tired and didn’t stroke the oar with enough energy he received a lash from the whip.
‘Yet these rowers loved their lives anyway, just as the captain of the ship did or perhaps even more so. And they rowed with every last bit of strength to avoid a cliff, a rock or a storm, although they would have had nothing to lose if they had guided the boat against a rock or a cliff or into the middle of a storm.
‘There was, kind sir, first of all the overseer’s whip, and then the whip of the will to live, and the whip of the fear of death — three whips.
‘Thus the slaves saved the ship and the lives both of their masters and of themselves. They did it because the ship’s life was their own life.
‘I, too-we, too-love life.’
And I took leave of the miner.
MANKIND IN CAGES
The Master of a Thousand Tongues also sent me to factories, to schools, to all locations where unrest might appear, to report on everything that was new and uneasy by investigating the origin of its unnaturalness.
I thus saw houses made out of glass and steel and chromium metal, not out of brick and stone. And I saw how each type of man built himself the house that fitted his own particular nature. In studying this phenomenon I realized that people change much more rapidly than other creatures.
Since the creation of the world birds have built their nests, spiders their webs, hamsters their holes, foxes their lairs and ants their hills, always in the same fashion. But men lived first in caves, then in huts, later in houses, and now they live in cages. In cages of glass and steel.
‘Let the sun shine in!’ they say. A saying that is as foolish as the sayings of which I have already spoken — Religion is the opium of the people and Education is power.
In a cave, in a hut or in a house one is not imprisoned. But in a cage one is imprisoned. It seems that at about the time that we began to rise up into the air like birds and to feel that we had shaken off the chains that bound us to the earth, we were just then punished with the longing to experience the unhappiness that birds sometimes suffer, namely to live in cages.
In a cave, a hut or a house of stone and brick a man is sheltered, but in a cage he is imprisoned.
The modern man, that is to say the man in whom the Antichrist has begun to work, says: ‘Let the sun shine in!’ — as if he were no longer capable of leaving his house to savour the sun whenever he wished.
Cages are made out of glass and metal bars because imprisoned animals cannot enjoy sun and air whenever they need it.
If man willingly builds himself a cage, he must feel like he is truly a prisoner. And even though he has the key to his modern cage he is still a prisoner.
But who is it that holds him captive and causes him to shut himself up in a cage apparently of his own free will?
The Antichrist holds him prisoner.
The cave, the hut, the house of brick and stone, they provide shelter and protection against storms, lightning and the fiery sun, enemies and dangers of all types. But the new houses of glass and metal are open, even when the doors and windows are closed. They are open and closed at the same time, as only cages can be.