H. Adler - The Wall

Oh, what escape was there? Only to there, only to there! Why was I shamefully hiding from myself that I was changed as a result of what I had been through — Away from here, away! — someone whose past was nothing more than a graveyard, a place of rest (oh, how I felt it to be a place of rest without rest), and who had to separate himself from others, unable to join in, his perceptions different from those of others, his life one of waiting without arriving, bestowed with a different measure and grounding. He has left behind all of his dwellings, knows nothing more than the meager trove of memory, but cannot grasp anything that was once his, though he comes to understand that a remembrance exists when thought, and that it should not be remembered, but thus is a remembrance welling up, out of which something is said. I have seen what wells up inside me, not having fled it; I was there, on the spot, having reported. And thus one is no longer a part of the world that he once took to be his own. He has not fled in order to be, to be there! But, rather, that he remembers, that he exists, where he is and to see what has welled up, and by which the world still suffers.

Often, I feel like someone who has been left behind, shaking with astonishment and almost buckling before the fact that, despite everything, “I am” and “I was” are the same, the same and yet etched by time, by the tides of time, and by time’s lessons. That is simply unthinkable, and nothing can change it, for not only are things missing, the cellar empty, the prayers having erupted, there was also no call that said “Hear Me!” anymore, everything unheard, no one heard any longer, no subject and no object by which I am able to recognize myself, though they still say remember, remember! Not only my family from back then — Away from here; oh, remember, was it a family? — but almost everything else is missing. What a cabinet full of harm is shut here, and almost everything missing, whereby generally people open up their gaping chasms and, however faintheartedly, still bridge them. The wall is too high and too wide, but no shoring up of memory that, out of the need to bear witness, rises up shakily, no people from back then who would also be people I know today. Sure, I know some here and there — what is taking Anna so long? — which poor memory still links to my past, but that is poor memory, the links becoming far too shaky for me to travel along. What good can it do, for example, if I find someone today who knows the city of my earlier life and even comes from it, when he is not a part of the circle in which I grew up and which held me, So-and-So, and so and so, already having left. Or, once again, I happen to meet someone I once knew in passing, but she doesn’t remember anything, or she recalls everything differently than do I and can’t remember anything that could mean anything to me. Such people, whom I both fear and am amazed at, make me uneasy; when I’m around them, I feel completely exposed.

Why is Anna taking so long?

No matter how well things go with people, soon a threshold is reached at which we must separate, there being no way for me to get away, and a gap in the unfolding of our already distant relations betrays what seems at first to be seamless, this being the years in which we were not together, in which nothing happened that could allow us to feel something shared. Then there is something missing between us, and I am indeed satisfied that, through careful explanation, we can dispense with every last experience we might have shared. The lack of such connections, which I mourn, is the continuity of life that separates me from my postwar colleagues. Certainly there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who feel the same, but these loners cannot find one another, since they suffer the same life on their own. They come from many races and many places, and they have experienced different fates and must seek different partings of the ways until all are stamped by a different coin, strangers to themselves and certainly strangers to one another, and, most of all, strangers to and alienated by the millions for whom the continuity of life was never broken, because they were not hurt as badly or could save something, the possibility of visiting familiar places not out of the question, the nearness of a relative or that of a sympathetic friend, a little box of family pictures, a bundle of sacred letters, a chest of tantalizing books that were sent out — not stolen and not rotting — a childhood diary filled with sprawling script, propelled by the hope of a horizon that is arrived at.

But when all of this is gone, unreachably far away, in part no longer possible, in part no longer perceivable, then only halting memory holds them, compelling me now to remember, it becoming clear to me that man cannot live by intellect alone. In fact, intellect has been overvalued, because man too crudely engages with the sensory and drowns in it. Man beheld everything in abundance — things, devices, and the infinite set of possessions that he got lost in. Then man got used to it and knew the treasures that he observed in his mind, no longer needing to savor them, although he often desired more from them or, worse yet, longed for other things. That’s when it became clear that man did not appreciate what intellect is and what comes from it. Then avid admonishers appeared who warned against such supposed plunder, saying that it was fleeting, wanting to make the precious riches seem foolish, the truth being that they were despicable, meanwhile showering the intellect with lavish praise. Many were uncomfortable with this, beginning to feel hunger amid the amplitude of their disappearing possessions, their self-awareness crumbling to nothing, as then they praised intellect with faces enraptured. Though the people themselves, however, were bereft of earthly goods they could number, they were nonetheless always taken care of, the beneficiaries of manifest actual property they had inherited, earned, and never entirely forsaken amid their meager misery. None of them were robbed of their last threads, managing to get through much that was terrible, horribly stripped of so much, denied their human rights, yet still finding a way to remain, somehow sustained, returning to vouchsafed goods, once owned, and again bestowed upon them, and yet not wanting any overabundance, no longer everything, only a little allowed again, and certainly not everything as it used to be but nonetheless welcoming something of it, having indeed inherited something. If this was not allowed, then they were no less shrewd at bartering, scoring something they longed for. When they remembered, the past and the present blended together, there being no essential difference between the two. If they preferred not to remember, or not much at all, things went badly for them, revitalized only by the knowledge of the wrong done them and comforted, they being the bridge over which they walked, striking out on a new beginning and prepared for a new order.

That’s not what happened to me. I cannot and may not return; the bridge has collapsed, there is no ground beneath my feet, and I have no means to exist other than through the intellect. Since then, I know that intellect alone cannot encompass all of reality, which is why it is no means to exist; it is only a dangerous enticement, certainly worthwhile if one has a means to exist, but a torrid fire that dries out all your wits when you lack sustenance. Desires, memories, and hopes — they all enhance life. But life does not consist of them, nor can they alone ever amount to life, and certainly they don’t contain it. It’s true — I can’t deny it — that I once again have so much, much more than I could ever have expected to have, or even wished for, just a few years ago, though it has all run together as one and has been tossed together into this building, which is hardly suited to it.