Rilke, "Abend"

To Alexandra on her birthday, a work ("Evening") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

The evening slowly changes vests,
Held by old trees in serried strand; 
You look, and from you break these lands – 
One heaven-bound, and one that sets –

That leave you unbelonging now,     
Not quite as sure of endless time, 
Not quite as dark as dumbest house: 
The stuff of stars that each night climbs.

Unravel life upon its loom, 
So anxious, huge, and ripe it'll grow;
Soon limited, and soon you'll know
How both in stone and star you'll bloom. 

Goethe, "Unschuld"

A work ("Innocence") by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Most lovely virtue of a soul         
And purest font of tenderness, 
More rare than Pamela in bliss,              
And Byron's visions oft extolled!              
If then another fire burns hot,       
And weakens more your gentle light, 
Felt but by him who knows you not,
For he who knows shall feel but night.

O Goddess in this paradise,                
You ere lived here with us as one.      
And still you drift as meadows rise
Each morning with the shining sun.
But only poets sage and meek
Will see you garbed in foggy twists.
Then Phoebus comes to chase the mist,
And there amidst the clouds you'll yield. 

oldog születésnapot kíván Moszkva, Péter! remélem, minden rendben van!

Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (part 3)

The conclusion to a story ("In the building of the Great Wall of China") by this Czech man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Now the Empire definitely is one of our least clarified constructions.  Of course, in Peking among court society there is some clarity about it, however much this may be only in appearance rather than in reality.  Even the best schools' public law and history teachers pretend to have been instructed in these matters and, as it were, fully capable of conveying such knowledge to their students.  The lower one descends among the lesser schools, however, the more palpably recede the doubts about one's own learning, and a half-completed education towers over a few sentences rammed down one's throat over the centuries.  Even if these sentences have lost nothing of their eternal truth; even if they remain unacknowledged in this fog and mist.   

In my opinion it is precisely about the Empire that the people should be asked, since it is among the people that the Empire enjoys its last bastions of support.   Here I can only speak about my own homeland.  Apart from the field deities and their varied and fulfilling service, our thoughts belong solely to the Emperor.  But not to the present Emperor; rather, our thoughts would have belonged to the present Emperor had we known him, or at least known something about him.  We had, of course, always striven, with the only curiosity that ever beset us, to learn about Emperors.  And yet, however strange this may sound, it was hardly possible to learn a thing.  The ploughman who crossed over vast terrains could not tell us anything, either in the neighboring villages, or in the more distant ones; no more helpful were the mariners who rode over all our rivers, including our largest and holiest thoroughfares.  We heard many things, of course, but from these things could not really learn anything at all.   

So great is our land – no fairy tale could match its size, the sky itself barely encompasses it – and Peking is merely a dot, and the Emperor's castle an even smaller dot.  The Emperor as such is certainly great through all the levels of the world.  The living Emperor, however, a man like we are, lies like we do on a bed, which admittedly is more than enough for his size, even if it may be narrow and short.  He sometimes stretches out his limbs just like we do and is very tired, yawning with his gently drawn mouth.  How then are we supposed to know about this thousands of miles to the south, almost on the border of the Tibetan highlands?  Moreover, were a report ever to arrive, even if it actually reached us, it would be late and already long since dated. 

Around the Emperor swarms the glamorous and yet dark mass of the court: evil and enmity in the guise of servants and friends, the counterweight of the Empire, ever ready to shoot the Emperor down from his scale with poison arrows.  The Empire is immortal; but the individual Emperor falls and collapses; even whole dynasties in the end sink into the morass and choke on their own stertorousness.  The people will never know about these struggles and sorrows, just as Johnny-come-latelies and others foreign to the city stand at the end of the congested side streets peacefully gnawing on some food from their pocket, while in the middle of the marketplace in front of them the execution of their master proceeds.     

This relationship is expressed quite well in one of our legends.  The Emperor, as it goes, sent You – You the lonely, You the pitifully oppressed and cursed shadow so tiny in the farthest distance against the Emperor's sun – the Emperor from his deathbed sent You a message.  He had made the messenger kneel before his bed and whispered the message in his ear, and was so interested in the message that he had the messenger whisper it back to him.  The correctness of what was repeated to him was confirmed by a nod, and before all the witnesses to his death – all the obstructive walls were torn down and the dimensions of the Empire formed upon the stairs swinging high and wide in a ring – before all this he briefed and dispatched the messenger.  The messenger set out immediately.  He was a powerful and tireless man of the kind who sticks his arm out and clears a path through a crowd; whenever he meets with resistance, he indicates the sign of the sun on his chest.  In short, he moves forth as easily as no other.  And yet the crowd is enormous; there seems to be no end to their homes and hovels.  Were an open field laid bare, he would flee!  And soon you would hear the magnificent pounding of fists on your door.  Instead, how uselessly does he tire himself!  He forces his way through the chambers of the innermost part of the palace; he will never overcome them; and if he succeeded, nothing would have been gained; he would have to struggle down the steps; and if he succeeded, nothing would have been gained; the courtyards would have to be traversed; and after the courtyards, the second, surrounding palace; then more steps and courtyards; then another palace; and so forth and so on through the millennia; and in the end he would fall out of the outermost door – yet never, never could this happen – and only then would the seat of power lie before him, the middle of the world, overflowing with its sediment.  No one comes through here, much less with a message from a dead man.  And yet you sit by your window as the evening comes and dream up precisely such a legend.

And just as hopelessly and hopefully do our people regard the Emperor.  They do not known which Emperor is currently in power; there are even doubts as to the name of the dynasty.   In school a gamut of such information is inculcated, but the general uncertainty in this regard remains so large that even the best pupil will be caught in its undertow.  In our villages long-dead Emperors are placed on the throne, and that Emperor who lives on only in song recently made a proclamation which our priest left before the altar.  Battles from our most ancient history are only now being fought and, his face glowing, your neighbor falls over your threshold with such a message.  And the imperial women, overfed on their silken cushions, estranged from the sly courtiers of noble mores, swelling up in imperiousness, irritable in their greed, oozing with lust, commit their filthy deeds anew.  The more time passes, the more horrifyingly bright seem the colors, and in a loud wail of anguish, the village at last learns how thousands of years ago an Empress drank the blood of her husband in long draughts.           

Thus the people proceed with the past and present rulers, yet confuse them with the dead.  If ever once – just once – an imperial official were to visit our village by chance on his trip through the province, and impose some demands in the name of the ruler, verify the tax lists, sit in on classes at the school, ask the priest about our doings, and then, before he climbed into his palanquin, summarize everything in drawn-out warnings to the local authorities, then all our faces would be coated with the same smile and a stolen look at one another, and everyone would bend over their children so that the official could not observe them.  The thinking is as follows: he may speak of a dead man just as he may speak of someone alive, but this Emperor is surely long since dead, this dynasty destroyed, and this official is just making fun of us.  Yet so as not to hurt his feelings we will pretend as if we didn't notice.  Only to our present master will we pay any heed, for anything else would be sinful.  And in the dust of the official's rapidly departing palanquin, someone will rise from a broken urn and stamp out this dust as the new master of the village.     

Similarly, people here are as a rule hardly affected by national revolutions or contemporary wars.  I remember one incident from my youth.  An uprising broke out in a neighboring, and yet very distant province.  I cannot recall the reasons for the rebellion, nor are they particularly important for our context: new reasons for uprisings are produced every blessed morning; ours is an excitable nation. Then a flier from the rebels landed in the house of my father.  The flier had been brought by a beggar who had traversed that province.  It was a holiday, I recall, and guests filled our rooms.  In their midst sat a priest studying the flier.  Suddenly everyone began to laugh, the flier was ripped into little pieces, and the beggar – who, by this point, had eaten and drunk his fill – was shoved and chased out the room, scattering everything in his wake, and then went out into the fine day again.  Why?  The dialect of the neighboring province is markedly different from our own, and this is also evident in certain forms of the written language which for us have something of an old-fashioned character about them.  Hardly had the priest read two pages of such stuff when the matter was decided.  Old things, long since heard, long since overcome.  And although cruel life irrefutably spoke through this beggar – at least such is my memory – one shook one's head and laughed, not wanting to hear anything more.  So ready are we to extinguish the present.

Were one to conclude from such memories that we fundamentally have no Emperor at all, one would not be far from the truth.  Over and over again I am obliged to say: there is perhaps no nation in the south more faithful to the Emperor than ours, but this faith does the Emperor no good.  It is true that the holy dragon has stood there obeisantly since time immemorial on his small socle at the edge of our village, blowing his fiery breath towards Peking – and yet Peking itself is more alien to the people in the village than is the afterlife.  Is there really supposed to be a village in which house after house would stand together covering the fields wider than the view possible from our hill, with people clustered together between these houses day and night?  It is harder for us to imagine such a town than to believe that Peking and its Emperor could be one being, perhaps a cloud, transforming itself gradually beneath the sun during the grand course of time.

The consequence of such opinions is a relatively free and unrestrained existence.  Yet in no way without its customs and morals.  In all my travels I have never encountered such purity in this regard as in my homeland.  And yet it is a life not subject to any present-day laws, only heeding orders and warnings handed down to us from ancient times.

I refrain from generalizations and do not claim that this is the case in all the tens of thousands of villages in our province, much less in all five hundred provinces of China.  Yet I may say, on the basis of the many written works that I happen to have read on the subject, as well as on the basis of my own observations – especially during the construction of the Wall there was much human material available to the sensitive mind, as if he were surveying the souls of almost all the provinces – on the basis of all this perhaps I may say that the reigning conception regarding the Emperor indicates again and again and everywhere a certain, general commonality with the conception prevalent in my homeland.  Now this conception should not be classified as a virtue – quite the opposite, in fact.  Yet it is mainly imputable to the government, which in the earth's oldest realm until the present day has still not been able to develop the institution of the Empire with such clarity, or at least has neglected this in favor of other projects, so that the farthest reaches of this realm seemed immediate and unceasing.  On the other hand, there is certainly some weakness in the imaginative powers of a nation who does not wish to draw the Empire from its Pekinese morass to its tributary bosom with all livelihood and presence.  A bosom that wants nothing more than to touch the Empire this once and then to pass on by.    

Thus this conception is no virtue whatsoever.  All the more remarkable is that precisely this weakness seems to be one of the most important means of uniting our nation; indeed, one might even venture to say that this is the foundation upon which we live.  The thorough justification of a reprimand means not to jar our conscience, but, which is much more annoying, our legs.  And for this reason I wish to go no further in the examination of this question.

Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (part 2)

The second part to a story ("In the building of the Great Wall of China") by this Czech man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Thus the system of partial construction becomes understandable, and yet there are surely other reasons.  It is no coincidence that I consecrate so much time to this question because, however unimportant it may seem initially, this is one of the questions essential to the Wall's entire construction.  If I wanted to convey the thoughts and experiences of this time and make them comprehensible, I could not delve deeply enough into this question.

First of all it must be said that, at the time, efforts were made which did not lag far behind those exerted for the Tower of Babel – certainly in righteousness before God, at least by human reckoning – representing precisely the opposite of this construction.  I mention this because during the first years of construction a teacher wrote a book in which he drew in exact detail this very comparison.  He then sought to prove that the construction of the Tower of Babel in no way led to its end for the reasons normally adduced, or at least that these well-known reasons were not of primary significance. His evidence consisted not only of manuscripts and reports; he also claimed to have conducted onsite investigations himself and discovered that the construction was doomed to fail – and did in fact fail – owing to the weakness of the foundation.  In this respect our era was vastly superior to that past epoch.  Nearly every educated contemporary was an engineer by education and infallible when it came to foundation.  This was not the aim of the teacher, of course: he was merely insisting that for the first time in human history a solid and secure foundation would be provided for a new Tower of Babel.  That is to say, first the Wall then the Tower. 

The book was on every lap and under every arm, and yet I confess that still today I have yet to understand how he imagined the construction of such a tower.  A wall which did not even form a circle, perhaps only a kind of quarter or semicircle, was supposed to become the foundation for a tower?  That could only be meant in the intellectual sense.  But what purpose did this Wall serve, this Wall which was something real, the result of effort and the lives of hundreds of thousands?  And why then were there drawings of such a tower in the plans, albeit foggy plans, and proposals made down to the last detail as to how the workers were supposed to be assembled to build this mighty new edifice? 

There was – this book is but one example – a great deal of confusion at that time, perhaps precisely because as many people as possible sought to join forces in the pursuit of a single aim.  Man, frivolous in his reasons, would soon begin to rattle his chains and rip the Wall, his chains and himself in every direction.

It is possible that even these considerations on the part of leadership contrary to the building of the Wall were not ignored when the plan of partial construction was formulated.  We – and here truly I speak for very many – only got to know one another when we spelled out the directives of the highest leadership and found that, without such management, neither our book smartness nor our understanding of human nature would have been sufficient for the modest post we held within the large whole.  Leadership's meeting room – where that room was and who sat in on meetings – this information is and was known by no one that I asked.  One could say that in this room circulated all human thoughts and wishes, and in the opposite direction all human aims and achievements.  Through the window, however, the glistening of the divine worlds fell upon our leaders' hands as they drew up the plans.

And for that reason I will not suggest to the incorruptible observer that leadership, should it have seriously wished to do so, could even have overcome those difficulties which would typically arise in the construction of a unified Wall.  So we are left with the conclusion that leadership wholly intended to carry out the partial construction.  And yet partial construction was merely makeshift and aimless.  And so we are left with the conclusion that leadership wanted something that was aimless.  A strange conclusion indeed!  And yet there is much to justify it; today we may even speak of it without danger or forethought.  At the time it was the secret commandment of many, even many of the best: Try with all your power to understand leadership's directives, if only to a certain limit, then forsake its consideration.  A very reasonable commandment which, as it were, yielded yet another interpretation in an oft-repeated contrast:  Do not stop thinking because it can hurt you; no one knows for sure whether it can hurt you.  And really, this is not a matter of hurting or not hurting.  It will happen to you as it happens to the river in Spring.   The river will rise and become more powerful; it will approach the long shores gaining in momentum and might; it will retain its strength further out at sea and become more indigenous and welcome in that open space.  This is the degree to which you should consider the leadership's directives.  It is then, however, that the river overflows its banks, loses contour and form, slows its retreat, attempts in the face of destiny itself to assemble small inland seas, damages the farmland, and yet cannot maintain this expansion for long.  Rather, it will recoil upon itself, return to its former shores and spend half of the next, warmer season drying out.  This is the degree to which you should not consider the leadership's directives.   

Now this contrast might have been remarkably appropriate during the construction of the Wall, even if for my current report at least, it is of limited value.  My examination is solely historical; no more lightning from the long-fled storm peoples; therefore I must look for an explanation for the partial construction which goes further than what satisfied the curiosity of others back then.  The limits imposed by my intellectual capacity are, of course, narrow enough; the area that would need to be covered, however, is the endless.

Against whom is the Great Wall supposed to protect us?  Against the northern nations.  I hail from southeastern China.  No northern nation can menace us there.  We read about the northern nations in our forefathers' books, and the horrors they commit in accordance with their nature make us sigh in the shelter of our peaceful foliage.  In our artists' veridical  renderings we see these faces of perdition: their mouths gaping like an abyss, their jaws lined with teeth like spikes, their slanted eyes that already seem to be leering at your loot, all the better to crush you and rip you to shreds.   Whenever our children are naughty we show them these pictures and they immediately run and throw their arms around our necks in tears.  About these northern nations we know nothing more; we have never seen them.  And we will never see them should we remain in our village, even if they were to hunt us down and chase us on their wild horses.  Our country is far too large and would never let them approach us; instead, they will simply ride themselves lost in the empty air.    

Why then it is so, if we were to leave our homeland, our river, our bridges, our mother, our father, our sobbing wife, our children so in need of guidance and learning, and move far away to a school beyond the distant city, why then are our thoughts still squarely fixated on the Wall in the north?  Why?  A question of leadership.  It knows us.  Leadership, which overcomes enormous worries and concerns, knows about us, knows our minor industry, sees us all sitting together in our lowly hut while the father says an evening prayer amidst a circle of his family and friends.  This aspect leadership either likes or dislikes.  And if I may, I shall entertain such thoughts regarding our leadership: if in my opinion the leadership had not come about earlier, had not come together like some high-level mandarins awoken by some lovely morning dream immediately call a meeting and make some decisions then, in the evening, have the population drag themselves out of bed to carry out these decisions, it would simply be like organizing an illumination in the honor of a god who had shown himself, yesterday at least, to be favorably inclined towards the leaders; if only the next day, with all the torches extinguished, to beat them in a dark corner.  Rather, it was our leadership who emerged at that time, along with the decision to build the Wall.  Innocent northern nations that thought themselves the reason for the construction; the Kaiser, worthy of our adoration as well as innocent, who thought that he had caused it all.  We of the construction of the Wall know otherwise and keep silent.

During the construction of the Wall and afterwards until the current day, I have busied myself almost exclusively with the contrasting folk tales – there are certain questions whose essence one can really only approach in this way.  In so doing I have found that that we Chinese possess unique clarity as to certain folk and state institutions, and a distinct lack of clarity with regard to others.  Tracing the reasons, especially pertaining to the latter phenomenon, has always thrilled me, and still thrills me, and even the construction of the Wall itself is significantly impacted by these questions. 

Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (part 1)

First part to a story ("In the building of the Great Wall of China") by this Czech man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The Great Wall of China was completed on its northern side.  Advancements were made in construction on the southeastern and southwestern sides, which were in turn linked to the northern.  This system of partial construction was also maintained in the smaller sections within the two large workforces, that of the east and that of the west.  It so happened that groups were formed of about twenty laborers who were then tasked with the construction of wall sections of roughly five hundred meters in length; a facing wall of the same length was subsequently built by a neighboring group.  Once the unification of the sections was completed, construction at the end of these thousand meters did not proceed; rather, the laborers were dispatched to distant areas to work on other sections.  In this way, of course, many broad gaps arose that only gradually came to be filled; many were even filled only after the Great Wall had already been declared complete.  Yes, there are said to be gaps which have never yet been obstructed – a claim, in any case, that may belong amidst the many legends that have arisen about the building of the Wall.  Legends which, given the prolific extension of the Wall, are unverifiable, at least for the individual man equipped with his own eyes and measuring stick.          

Now one would not hesitate to believe it more advantageous in every sense of the word to have unified the Wall, or at least connected it within its two main sections.  As is widely known, the Wall was conceived of to protect against the northern nations.  And yet how can an unconnected wall offer any protection?  Not only can such a wall fail as a means of defense, further construction can also be imperiled.   The pieces of the Wall left standing in some deserted region could easily be destroyed by nomadic tribes.  All the more since, at the time, the nomads, terrified by the construction of the Wall, shifted their encampments with the incomprehensible stealth of locusts, which may have afforded them a better overview over the construction's progress than was available even to us, the builders.  Nevertheless, the Wall could not have been built in any other way.  To understand this one should keep the following in mind: the Wall was intended as protection that would last for centuries.  The most meticulous construction, the exploitation of all known theories of construction from all ages and nations, the persistent feeling of personal responsibility on the part of the builders – all these were indispensable prerequisites for the project.  For some of the piece-work unknowing day laborers from our nation could be used, men, women and children who had their eye on some good money.  But a man trained in construction would have to be responsible for every four day laborers that were hired; a man, as it were, capable of enormous empathy given the matter at hand.  And the greater the contribution, the more demanding the work became.  And many such men were in fact available, if not perhaps in the quantity that this work would have required.    

Planning of the project was not taken lightly.  Fifty years before construction began, the art and knowledge of building, in particular of masonry, had been declared all over China to be the most important of all sciences.  China, after all, was to be surrounded by a wall, and all other disciplines were acknowledged only as they pertained to this goal.  I remember clearly how we were little, still wobbly children standing about our teacher's garden and tasked with building a sort of wall out of pebbles.  I also remember how our teacher, using his frock as a shield, would then ram into the wall – scattering the pieces, of course – and then upbraid us so harshly for the weakness of our wall that we would all  run off howling to our parents.  A minor event, but indicative of the spirit of the times.   

Fortunately the construction of the Wall began just when I, twenty years old at the time, had passed the top-level exam of the lowest school.  I say fortunate because many who had previously reached the top level available to them had not known what to do with their education.  Mulling over the most grandiose building plans, they had idled about uselessly for years and gone to rack and ruin.  Yet those who ultimately became engineers and builders, even of the lowest rank, were quite deserving of such positions.  These were masons who had long thought about the construction and never ceased to imagine how, upon the placement of the first stone in the ground, they were not cut out for the task.  Naturally such masons were driven by not only the desire to carry out the most thorough work possible, but also the impatience of seeing the construction rise in its complete and perfect form.  The day laborer has no such impatience; he is motivated only by wage.  And the upper-level foremen (even, I would say, the middle-level foremen) see enough of the multifariousness of the construction to keep their spirits high.  Yet for the lower ranks, men whose intellect dwarfs the minor projects they are assigned, other measures must be taken.  They could not, for example, be asked to lay stone after stone for months or even years in some uninhabited mountain region, hundreds of miles from their home.  The hopelessness of such diligent if aimless work, aimless even in the course of a long life, would bring them to despair and, more importantly, render their work worthless. 

This is why the system of partial construction was devised.  Five hundred meters could be completed in roughly five years; by that time, of course, all the engineers and foremen were usually exhausted, having lost all faith in themselves, in the construction, in the world.  For that reason, then, were they dispatched, often to very, very distant locations, while still drunk on the image of the unification of their thousand meters.  On their journey to these places they would cast their eyes upon the completed pieces of the Wall jutting out here and there, pass quarters of the top engineers and foremen who appeared to pay their respects, hear the rousing cheers of newly arrived workforces streaming in from the heartland of their nation, see how forests were felled for the sake of Wall equipment and supplies, watch mountains be smashed into building stones, and catch the songs of the Pious Completion of the Building invoked at the holy sites.  Spending some time amidst the peaceful life of their homeland strengthened them: the notion of respect for all of the building, the believer's humility with which their reports were received, and the trust the simple, quiet citizen placed in the eventual completion of the Wall all tugged on the heartstrings.   Like ever-hopeful children they bid their homes farewell, as the desire to return to this national project was unconquerable.  They left their houses earlier than would have been necessary and were accompanied for a long stretch by practically half their village.  And all along these paths were groups of men, pennants, flags: never before had they noticed how great and rich and beautiful and lovely their land really was.  Every compatriot was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall and this brother would be grateful, in all that he had and in all that he was, his whole life long.  Unity!  Unity!  Chest to chest, a circle dance of the nation, blood, no longer trapped in the meager circulation of the body, and now instead rolling sweetly through, and then back through, endless China.