Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It only he could feel that in his academic work as well. It seemed strange to him, but he no longer knew if it had ever been so. If it had, it was a long time ago, in a time when he had not yet known the paralysis that had tormented him for so long. By now he had the feeling that he didn’t really know what it was like: doing academic work. It wasn’t writer’s block, he was sure of that. He had never experienced it, and even now he still had the capacity, he could feel it, for fluent, accurate and sometimes brilliant formulations. It was something else, something fundamentally much simpler and at the same time something that he couldn’t have explained, not to himself and even less to other people, particularly not to his colleagues: he had lost his faith in the importance of academic work – that belief that impelled him in the past, which had made daily discipline possible, and the associated failures appear significant.

It wasn’t through a process of reasoning that he had lost this faith, and the loss did not take the form of an internal discovery. He simply couldn’t find his way back to concentration, to the feeling of exclusiveness out of which his academic works had previously arisen. That did not mean that he would now have declared the unimportance of his research, or of research in general, as a statement of his world view. Except that he found his way to his desk less often. He spent more and more time looking out of the window. His new chair seemed to become more uncomfortable with each passing month, and the books on the big desktop increasingly struck him as being ungainly objects that disturbed the calming void.

Since this had been the case, he looked upon academic work as if through a wall of glass, which turned him into a mere spectator. Making an academic discovery: he simply had no need for it now. Methodical investigation, analysis and the development of theories, hitherto a constant, a given, self-evident element in his life and in a sense its center of gravity – he had utterly lost interest in it, and so completely that he was no longer sure he understood how it could once have been otherwise. If someone spoke of a new idea, the beginnings of a notion, he could sometimes still listen; but only for a short time, and its elaboration interested him not at all. It felt like wasted time.

Sometimes he tried to convince himself that it had all started on that clear, white, terrible day in January when he had seen Agnes for the last time, so shockingly, so irrevocably still. Then he could have seen himself as someone still in shock, someone only slowly recovering. That would have taken the edge off things.

But it wasn’t true. He admitted to himself with amazement and some unease that he had forgotten when exactly it had begun. It had been small changes in his emotional responses to things, which had to do with his profession, emotional nuances, tiny changes of tone which had over months and years added up into something incisive that had one day entered his consciousness with total clarity. The beginning lay at a time when he, seen from outside, was at the peak of his productivity, and it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that something was starting to crumble behind that facade, and silently collapsing.

He had started to forget. Not in such a way that it would have struck anyone else. There were no gaps in the structure of the academic routine. But he noticed increasingly that he was losing track of issues, especially those that weren’t yet fully entrenched, and which did not belong to the solid rhetorical stock of the subject – the new and interesting questions, then, which precisely because they were not yet all that well anchored, should have commanded his constant attention. He was, when he happened to flick through his papers, surprised by what he found there, and startled that he had simply forgotten it.

The worst thing was: he was sure that this wasn’t a passing thing, a crisis that one knew would pass, even though one couldn’t say when and how. It felt threatening, but he knew that what was happening to him was irreversible and inescapable. Behind the feeling of threat, he discovered only gradually, at good moments there was the liberating, almost cheering astonishment over the fact that something was developing within him, something in the center, at the core of his life. But this sensation which glimmered through from time to time did nothing to mitigate his anxiety. To a certain extent there was no contact between the two sensations; they ran unconnectedly side by side. And what struck him about that unsteady and unreliable feeling which he kept trying to grasp was this: he was never sure whether it was a genuine sensation or one that he conjured up within himself and, so to speak, invented in order to have something to cling to when the change that he sensed frightened him too much.

When he looked back at the book and tested himself, he found that he had retained only one Russian word for must . He gave up and reached for the other book that he had taken from the room when he had decided to spend his last free hours on the hotel terrace. It was Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten , a book which had suddenly seemed like the ideal companion, as it sat on the shelf the previous morning, even though he hadn’t picked it up for many years, and the memory of the titular character and the Institute Benjamenta had become pale and vague. On the journey he had been on the point of opening it, but every time he had felt a strange, inexplicable horror that got in the way of his curiosity. As if the book contained something about him that he would rather not know.

The first sentence took his breath away: We learn very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and we boys from the Institute Benjamenta will never come to much, that is, we will all be something very small and subordinate in later life . As if anaesthetized, Perlmann watched the waiter bringing a drink on a silver tray to the red-haired man by the pool. Minutes passed before he found the courage to go on reading, reluctantly and at the same time fascinated by those shattering sentences, the ghostly lightness of the prose. And then, after a few pages, there came a passage that felt like a slap in the face: Herr Benjamenta asked me what I wanted. I told him shyly that I wanted to be his pupil. At that he fell silent and read newspapers.

That last sentence – no, it couldn’t be allowed to stand. In all its innocuousness it was a sentence that could not be borne. Perlmann set the book aside. The throbbing of his blood subsided only slowly. He didn’t understand why, but young Jakob’s story seemed in a sense to be about himself. All of a sudden he was sure the text that would be produced if he managed to capture his own distress in sentences would have a similar tone. They would have to be sentences of equal intensity, and just as incisive, if they really wanted to grab their listeners as he had done for years when he entered the auditorium.

It wasn’t stage fright. It wasn’t the fear of suddenly staring into the audience or straight ahead at the lectern and having forgotten everything. He had suffered from that idea in the past, but it had been over a long time ago. It was something else, something that he had only recognized after a long time and with quiet horror: the very precise feeling that he had nothing to say. Fundamentally, he found it ridiculous walking down the center aisle of the lecture hall under the expectant eyes of the students. With almost every step the sensation grew that he was stealing their time from them.

Then he opened his notes and began to speak in his practiced, fluent way. He was well known for being able to speak apparently off the top of his head. The students liked him, often several of them came up to the lectern afterwards and wanted to know more. That was particularly bad. During the lecture the empty space between lectern and desks had protected him, had acted as a protecting screen behind which he was able to hide his lack of interest, that stigma. When the students sat in front of him he felt unprotected, and worried that they might see that he was no longer involved. He took refuge in solicitous eagerness, spoke far too verbosely, filled up another blackboard and promised to bring the appropriate books along the next time. In many cases they were his own, which he pressed into the students’ hands like bribes. They felt that they were being taken seriously, understood. A committed professor. They needed to know him personally, and invited him to join them at their table in the pub.