Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Freud and Einstein, too?" asked Quinten. At home he had always heard those names in that kind of list.

"It wouldn't surprise me. The last few years I've felt like a champion of the Gothic must have felt at the rise of classicism. All those magnificent cathedrals had suddenly become old-fashioned. Are you still interested in that kind of thing?"

Quinten had the feeling that Themaat was not quite sure who he was talking to. It was though he were regarding Quinten as a retired professor, like he himself was.

"I've never been interested in that way."

"In what way, then?"

Quinten thought for a moment. Should he tell him about the Citadel of his dreams? But how could you really tell someone about a dream? When you told someone about a dream, it always sounded stupid, but while you were dreaming it, it wasn't stupid at all — so when you tell a dream precisely, you are still not telling the person what you dreamed. Telling someone about a dream was impossible.

"Well, I was just interested," he said. "I don't know. I think you've told me everything that I wanted to know."

Themaat looked at him for a while, then turned his legs laboriously off the sofa and sat up, with his back bent, two flat white hands next to his thighs.

He closed his eyes and opened them again. "Shall I tell you one thing that you may not know yet?"

"Yes, please."

"Perhaps you'll think it's nonsense, just the chatter of a sick old man, but I want to tell you anyway. Look, how is it that that ideal Greco-Roman architecture and that of the Renaissance could turn into the inhuman gigantism of someone like Boullee? And how could it later, with Speer, even degenerate into the expression of genocide?"

"You once said that it had something to do with Egypt. With the pyramids. With death."

"That's right, but how could it have had anything to do with that?"

"Do you know, then?"

"I think I know, QuQu. And you must know too. It comes from the loss of music."

Quinten looked at him in astonishment. Music? What did music suddenly have to do with architecture? It seemed to him as though a vague smile crossed the mask of Mr. Themaat's face.

The humanist architects, like Palladio, he said, were guided in their designs not only by Vitruvius's discovery of the squared circle, which determined the proportions of the divine human body, but also by a discovery of Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ: that the relationship between the harmonic intervals was the same as that between prime numbers. If you plucked a string and then wanted to hear the octave of that note, then you simply had to halve its length — the harmony of a note and its octave was therefore determined by the simplest ratio, 1:2. With fifths, it was 2:3 and with fourths, 3:4. The fact that the fantastic notion 1:2:3:4, which was as simple as it was inexpressible, was the basis of musical harmony, and that the whole of musical theory could be derived from it, gave Plato such a shock 150 years later that in his Dialogue "Timaeus" he had a demiurge create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul.

Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions — namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concern. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. In Palladio that developed into an extremely sophisticated system. And subsequently that Greek divine world harmony also became connected with the Old Testament Jahweh, who had ordered Moses to build the tabernacle according to carefully prescribed measurements — but he could no longer remember the details. He'd forgotten.

"The tabernacle?" asked Quinten.

"That was a tent in which the Jews displayed their relics on their journey through the desert."

"Did it have to be square or round?"

"Yes, you've put your finger on it. That was precisely the obstacle to reconciling Plato and the Bible. There were also squares involved, if I remember correctly, but nothing round. The whole tent must be oblong."

"Oblong? Greek and Egyptian temples were oblong too, weren't they— like beds?" Quinten's eyes widened for a moment, but he wasn't given the opportunity to pursue his thoughts, because Themaat came to a conclusion.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he said, at the birth of the new age, when modern science originated, it had all been lost. The view that musical theory should be the metaphysical foundation of the world, of body and soul and architecture, was rejected as obscurantist nonsense — and that led directly to Boullee and Speer. The harmonic relationships of course did not automatically change when the elements were enlarged a hundredfold; but the dimensions of the human body, as the measure of all things, remained unchanged — that is: it became proportionately a hundred times smaller, thus ultimately disturbing all harmony and eliminating the human soul in an Egyptian way.

Slowly, as though he were lifting something heavy, Mr. Themaat raised an index finger. "And what you see at the moment, QuQu, is the unexpected return of all those classical motifs, all those stylobates and shafts and capitals and friezes and architraves — fortunately on a human scale again, but also in a totally crazy way. It's just as though somewhere high in space the classical ideal exploded and the fragments and splinters are now falling back to earth, all confused, distorted, broken and out of their equilibrium. Here," he said, and took hold of a large, thick book, which he had obviously laid out ready. "Catalog of the Biennale in Venice. Four years ago there was an architecture exhibition there, which made me first see what was brewing. 'The Presence of the Past' was the theme. Look," he said, and opened the book where he had laid a bookmark. "The Acropolis in a distorting mirror." With half-closed lids, he handed the book to Quinten.

Was it a view of the Citadel? Quinten's eyes began to shine. How splendid! They were photos of a fantastic street, indoors, consisting of a covered hallway: huge pieces of scenery consisting of gables, designed by different architects, all the gables differing totally from each other and yet belonging together, while each gable also consisted of elements that didn't belong together and yet formed a whole. While Themaat said that Vitruvius would have a heart attack if he saw that and that Palladio would kill himself laughing, Quinten looked at a paradoxical portico with four standing columns very close together: the first was a bare tree trunk, the second stood on a model of a house, the third was only half built — the upper half, which floated in the air and still pretended to support the architrave — the fourth was a hedge cut in a form of the column; the architrave was indicated by a curved strip of blue neon. Everything had a fairy-tale paradoxical quality, the disharmony as harmony. Mr. Themaat might meanwhile maintain that it was classical language, but with all the words wrongly spelled and the syntax turned into an Augean stable, such as toddlers wrote, it gave him an overwhelming feeling of happiness.

"I thought you'd like it, QuQu," said Mr. Themaat, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. "For me it's an end, a kind of fireworks to conclude the great banquet, which once began in Greece. But then you had the balanced world view of Ptolemy, with the earth resting in the center of the universe; according to humanism you got that from Copernicus, with the sun resting in the middle; afterward you got the infinite universe of Giordiano Bruno, which no longer had any center at all. All those universes were eternal and unchanging, but recently we have been living in the explosive, violent universe of your foster father, which suddenly has a beginning. Then you get a postmodern sort of spectacle; then everything bursts into pieces and fragments. Everything's exploding at the moment, up to and including the world population, and that's all because of the crazy development of technology. Suddenly a whole new age has dawned, which fortunately I won't have to experience."