Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

But he, the Antichrist, is therefore worse than such a tyrannical ruler because a dictator can be seen, heard, felt and hated, whereas the Antichrist has the power to transform a thriving country into waste land and, in doing so, to dupe us into believing that the waste land is flourishing. And, when he destroys, we think he is creating. When he gives us a stone we believe he has given us bread. The poison from his glass tastes like the elixir of life. We think that he himself, the Prince of Darkness, is a son of both Heaven and earth; so long as we live, this seems to us more than being the son of Heaven alone. He enters thusly; he speaks thusly: ‘You were promised Heaven, but I give you the earth. You were supposed to believe in an unfathomable God, but I turn you yourselves into gods. You thought that Heaven was more than earth, but earth itself is really a heaven!’

And since it is in our innate nature to yearn eternally to become God — because we never forget our origins and are reflections that are always searching for their prototype — we are seduced by the Antichrist. He can easily transform our most noble longings into lowly envy. For longing and jealousy are twin sisters, the one beautiful and the other ugly, who can nevertheless be mistaken for one another. It is inherent in our nature to want to be gods. The Antichrist, however, tells us we are already gods. And, as it is inherent in our imperfect nature that we grow tired and permit our senses to be tricked, he exploits our weaknesses and changes the milestones on our long path into goals. And we believe him. We are always searching, as long as we live, for our eternal home. But long before we have reached it we think that we are already there, thanks to the tricks of the Antichrist. And because our feet become weary, we believe him. Our home is still infinitely far away. But by no means do we go towards it. We halt by the wayside. We remain in the desert and imagine that we have reached our eternal home.

When a poor man tires of his poverty, how soon he stops fighting it and begins to see it as wealth! A prisoner who is serving out a life sentence in gaol believes after ten years of solitary confinement that the prison yard is actually freedom. And thus we, who can separate our shadows from our bodies so they act independently, as though they were human, believe that we already possess the divine power to bring something to life that does not exist. What an illusion! We have, in fact, brought nothing to life!

We have instead granted the greater part of the short life that was gifted us to our shadows! We have not created life; we have lost it! We have not created; we have squandered! And we have squandered sinfully.

It is not possible to talk about the Antichrist if one has not met him; and by this I mean if one has not met him actually and in the flesh. As for me, I have met him in many forms. Since my early youth our paths have crossed. I spoke before in such detail about the theatre of shadows because it was there that I first encountered him.

My first contact with the Antichrist happened many years ago, when I was still a boy and saw the wonder of the living shadow for the first time. There came a large vehicle, powered by unseen forces, which stopped at an open plaza outside of town and sent forth a large machine that was covered with a small canvas tent. Then a large tent, also of canvas, was pitched, spread and domed, and one could see upon entry that the interior of the dome was a blue sky with numerous gold and silver stars scattered about. And it was as real as the firmament. The human eye is not capable of seeing more of the actual heavens than can be shown on the spacious dome of a marquee, and the spectators’ eyes therefore saw just as much or as little as they can see of the heavens when they look up at night. Blue was the dome, and the stars were just as unreachable and just as distant as real stars. Since we are not tall enough even to reach the roof of a circus tent erected by men, it was all the same to the people who sat under this roof if the sky was real or a reproduction. Neither one of them was within reach of their hands.

Consequently, they were quite willing to believe that the fake was real. And as it was very dark below and within this canvas tent the people inside believed that they were sitting under a bright and starry summer-night’s sky. We heard an unfamiliar rattling and a humming and buzzing and chattering and thundering from some strange origin. And above and below we saw some kind of four-sided cone that was born from a minuscule square hole, the brightness of which was enveloped by black walls. This cone grew slowly and symmetrically over the spectators’ heads, ever fuller, ever clearer, with its edges becoming more clearly visible in the pale light until it reached and filled the screen, as though a river of pale light were to pour itself into a sea of pallor, illuminating the latter through its own brightened pallor, so that it became visible as a four-sided sea. And we could see the vertical and horizontal threads stretched out on the four-sided sea. The four-sided cone that whirred above our heads made an incredible noise, and when we looked at it we were led to believe that the ruckus came from the billions of dust particles within rubbing against one another. Our ears were shocked that such minuscule molecules of dust and nothingness, even though there were billions of them, might be able to emit such an audible whir. So that we could no longer hear the sound of the dust molecules, an orchestra below the screen began to play marches and waltzes. And this, indeed, drowned out the whir of the dust molecules.

When the first shadows came to life on the rectangular screen and the marches and waltzes played up from the orchestra, the drums beating and the cymbals clashing, we could no longer hear the whirring of the dust particles. But we felt that the little square hole above our heads at the back of the crowd, the birthplace of the dust-laden cone, was the place where the life-sized shadows acquired their lives. Clearly, they sprang from the tiny four-sided hole and could remain unseen throughout their travels along the swelling cone until they made themselves visible on the screen in their deceptively large size. Yet they were shadows! They were less than the molecules of dust whose tiny bodies whirred so loudly in the cone of light. These shadows travelled unnoticed within the billions of dust particles, from the tiny, four-sided hole in the apparatus behind our backs to the four-sided sea that took form before our eyes.

There I saw naked women for the first time, that is to say, the shadows of naked women.

It is not my intention to suggest that this is a means of temptation used by the Antichrist.

For it was God who created naked people and not the Antichrist. And as we do not inherently see sin in nakedness, thus does the Antichrist want to seduce us by nakedness alone. No, not through nakedness does he reveal and betray himself but, rather, through the purpose for which he uses our nakedness and also our clothing.

On the screen they showed an Egyptian princess. She was bathing naked in the Nile with some naked playmates. She fished out a little box, daubed with pitch inside and out. In this box lay Moses, the future leader of the Jews, the lawgiver of the world.

Very small, infinitesimally small, was the box in which lay Moses, the leader of the Jews and lawgiver of the world.

But large and pretty were the breasts and thighs of the princess and her bathing friends, and, although the lawgiver of the world amounts to much more than a woman’s breast, the box in which he lay immediately disappeared as though swallowed up by the cone of light, and the princess splashed towards the shore, and we saw her back as before we had seen her breasts.