Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Still, nuances of this kind could have no effect on the moral depravity of the person so labeled, especially since that person was a book publisher whom Kessler was intending to pillory in his fourth volume. Speaking of his own publisher, he said that this man would turn out to be his coffin nail. But that, too, strikes me as a matter of subtle nuance. Publishers, he explained, were a writer’s eternal gadflies. Having bad luck with a publisher meant that the writer could simply fail — and he was beginning to have bad luck. Or did he say “misfortune”? When I once asked him about such details, Kessler told me that when recording actual conversations it was not verbal but psychological accuracy that was important. This is what Bismarck must have said, given all that one knows about the man, or noted down after speaking with him, or has read in Bismarck’s own writings, or the like. An insight like this one from Kessler has reassured me while I write down these recollections of mine, in which a single publisher can at once embody verbal reality as a crook, psychological reality as a scamp, and historical reality as my coffin nail. It goes without saying that, besides, the publisher is a scoundrel.

Count Kessler recounted for us many episodes in his life that were meant for the later volumes of his memoirs. He explained the context of each event, and told us where it would fit in his personal narrative. If I had kept careful notes for my own “memoirs,” I could offer a little assistance to the world’s historical memory, now that everything is in the past and will no doubt soon be forgotten.

“What does Keyserling want from you? He is his own man as a philosopher and as a person, and in my opinion he doesn’t need anybody else to help him out. And besides, he lives in the Príncipe, where they idolize him as the establishment’s most effective advertisement. That’s what my brother-in-law Don Helvecio has told me.”

“It’s so distressing, my friend. He wants to rig one of his sessions and have me play the part of an anonymous member of the audience. It’s a hoax, and I just won’t have any part in it.”

The Wise Man of Darmstadt was once again staying at the Príncipe, where he was eating his way through the menu and drinking the vin à discrétion in such quantities that the management might have considered taking counter-measures if he weren’t the hotel’s greatest attraction. As often as he checked in, the No Vacancy sign went up. And ever since his South American Meditations was published, at Zwingli’s instigation the hotel offered him unlimited credit.

Don Joaquín Verdaguer once described for me the way Count Keyserling conducted his School of Wisdom in the pine grove of the Hotel Formentor, on the Formentor peninsula. He sat on the ground with his legs crossed. Seated around him, likewise with legs crossed, were his pupils and auditors from all over the world. On a certain fateful day, the famous-notorious Spanish writer and aphorist Don Ramón Gómez de la Serna, an intellectual acrobat and prestidigitator, joined the throng, hunkered down, crossed his own legs, and pretended to be a run-of-the-mill participant and not the “Ramón” he was known as by every Spaniard. His forte was his so-called greguerías , which means “bird chatter”: dazzling conceits that arise from his peculiar Donramonistic world-view. A regular visitor to Madrid’s rastro , the city’s central flea- and knickknack-market, Ramón studied the stuff offered for sale and, following intensive examination, deduced new aspects concerning those particular objects’ mode of existence. Then he began unfolding his existential philosophy. Ramón was practicing existentialism well before this sort of thing became a fad. It is likely that he busied himself with the God’s Eye in chamber pots, although I have yet to come across any aphorism of his concerning this branch of the ceramic arts. In addition, Ramón collected epitaphs, and when he made appearances as a lecturer he liked to balance on a rope stretched above the stage. But at Keyserling’s school on the Formentor peninsula he refrained from stretching a rope between the pine trees. Like every other mortal disciple, he took his seat amid the ants, eye-to-eye with the Darmstadt conveyor of wisdom.

The Sage asked his pupils to name a subject on which he could improvise. He would then (now there were smiles around the whole circle) end up by pronouncing a compelling judgment. Now any teacher knows how hard it is to think up a clever topic. And once you have found a topic, at least half of the solution to its problems will be obvious. Ramón knew this, too, and so he motioned to an expectant waiter standing at the edge of the Wisdom School — one must recall that the Hotel Formentor had the reputation as the best hotel in Spain — and asked him to fetch a coffee pot. The camerero rushed away and returned carrying a luxury article. Ramón handed it to the German philosopher saying, “Here’s your topic: The Coffee Pot.”

Keyserling — I am following Verdaguer’s account of the incident — had already imbibed a quantity of wine, and was now even more flushed than in his normal standing state. Thus no one noticed his embarrassment, which would have been all the greater had he realized that the man presenting him with his topic was none other than Gómez de la Serna. Well now, what might a profound German philosopher have to say about The Coffee Pot? Keyserling turned the pot around and around, meditating all the while. Finally, with a rapid gesture like a circus seal he placed it in front of his snout and started explaining what he, as a German philosopher in general, and as a Darmstadt Keyserling in particular, had to say about this utensil. He accomplished this brilliantly, deploying wit, paradoxes, scorn, and profundity, getting quickly to the heart of the matter so adroitly that everyone in the squatting circle was simply amazed. Who would have thought that so much wisdom could be derived from a simple coffee pot, from a Coffee Pot an sich?

Keyserling, who was himself surprised at how well he had done this trick, took a deep bow and placed the vessel on the ground on top of an ant hill. Then he, too, motioned to the waiter, asked him to bring over a porrón , and proceeded to pour the red liquid in an archaically measured arc into his eloquent gullet. This feat, too, he accomplished without staining his shirt. There was more applause. He was the hero of the pine grove, just as he loved to be the hero anywhere and everywhere. Then he casually inquired whether anyone else might have something to say on the subject of The Coffee Pot, while remaining convinced that no one could ever top him on a subject he had treated so exhaustively.

All those present who recognized Ramón — and who among the Spaniards here did not know him? — looked over at Ramón. He asked for the pot, blew away the ants, and started in. Our brilliant guest, he said, has discussed the brilliant surface of this brilliant object quite brilliantly, but nonetheless superficially. He, Ramón — and with the mention of the name, the Wise Man from Darmstadt underwent his initial shock — asked if he might be permitted to say a few words concerning the darker recesses of the topic at hand. Whereupon Ramón Gómez de la Serna began regaling the circle with his greguerías, proving two things at once: that German philosophy was lacking in depth, and that a coffee pot was an ultimately inexhaustible subject.

When the pupils arose from their squatting position and brushed the ants from their lower extremities, they noticed that the Sage was reeling slightly. Had his legs, too, gone to sleep? Or had he sat down in the middle of an anthill? He retired to his deluxe hotel suite as a vanquished philosopher, and as such he quickly departed from the hotel and the island.