Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

It was as though the dream of being able to find his father had suddenly been swept away by this diabolical brainwave. He turned around and began to walk slowly back toward the castle. Of course it was impossible that he would play a trick like that — but he was going to leave here anyway, on a journey. That was all he could do now. Why didn't he go to Italy? He'd never been there. To the Veneto. Finally see the architecture of Palladio with his own eyes. Plenty of money. Of course he must take his sketches and plans of the Citadel, the SOMNIUM QUINTI, with him. Who knows what he might be able to add to them!

De Profundis

— I thought we were never going to get there.

— I told you at the outset that the mission had been accomplished, didn't I?

— It's probably because of your compelling narrative. That's inevitable with a good story: you don't experience it as a report in retrospect; it happens in the telling, as it were.

— In my case there isn't that much difference.

— Yes, you are those people's destiny, and to tell you the truth, I've been really astounded on occasion. What a disaster! Take the end of Max Delius — wasn't that a very draconian step?

— What do you expect? He was on the point of discovering us!

— He was on the threshold; I won't deny it. He was peering through the keyhole, as it were — but he was drunk- The next morning, he would have dismissed the whole thing as colossal nonsense. He was a specialist, after all, not an inventor of science fiction!

— That's just the reason. I felt we couldn't take any risks. Suppose he had taken himself seriously and possessed the same persistence as his son. He didn't have a huge reputation to lose in astronomy; he might have been ready to go for broke at that turning point in his life. And after all, the last straw we cling to is people's belief; the moment our existence becomes a matter of knowledge, they'll abandon us completely. They'll shrug their shoulders and say "So what?" Besides, they always get dangerous when they discover different kinds of beings, or what they imagine to be. When they discovered the Indians, they were very enthusiastic about it for a while, but after that they lost interest and exterminated them. Or think of what they're doing with animals to this day.

— Stop it. They've virtually reached the "So what" stage anyway. And they've also been busy exterminating us for some considerable time, without realizing it — for about as long as those Indians. Did you really not suspect that Delius would present you with a surprise like that one day?

— Of course. After all, he was singled out to be the father of our agent, and given the laws of heredity it was obvious that he too would possess exceptional gifts. In a certain sense he owed them to his son.

— The triumph of the causa finalis over the causa efficiens.

— That's one way of putting it, although not everyone would immediately understand. Moreover, his death was necessary to get our man out of Holland at last. All that demolition was needed for that, too.

— Yes, Holland is a unique country, but even apart from our envoy, enough is enough at a certain moment. Sometimes I wonder if it's still part of reality. In the human year 1580 a certain Joannis Goropius published a book in which he demonstrated that Adam and Eve had spoken Dutch in the Garden of Eden — and certainly Holland is the world's ideal of paradise. Every country would love to be like it, so peaceful, so democratic, tolerant, prosperous and orderly, but also so uniform, provincial and dull — although that seems to be changing a bit in the last few years.

— Think of what happened to Onno Quist, for example.

— I always think of everything at once, my dear friend. Now, for example, I'm thinking of the fact that you made it happen to him of course. I even suspect that you allowed that rotten environment to emerge in Amsterdam that made what happened to Helga possible.

— You'll soon see the necessity for that. I only intervened when it was strictly necessary. I always use my resources as sparingly as possible, but I simply had to work with the tough rubber that people are made of. If it was still our habit to address them, everything would be a lot simpler — but you've already touched on that: since those dreamers have fooled themselves that it didn't come from on high but from their own depths, we've stopped.

— Reluctantly.

— You were talking just now about the causa finalis. We too started out of course from the simplest way in which our aim could be achieved in theory — namely, that our man would go where we wanted him to be and do what we wanted him to do. But as we calculated back, more and more new obstacles appeared, which made that aim more and more difficult to achieve — until, by improvising, we found the complicated route of efficient causalities, which turned out to be the only possible one. It was not nearly as complicated as our efforts to get him into the spirit and the flesh, but still complicated enough. In my department we sometimes compare it with the course of a river. The simplest way for the Rhine to go from its source in the Alps to the Hook of Holland is of course a straight line about four hundred miles long; but in reality it's twice as long, because the landscape forces it to be. In the same way, our man's route through the human landscape was strange and twisting and now and then quite violent — for example, exactly what happens in Schaffhausen; but — to change imagery — you can't appoint someone as a carpenter and at the same time forbid people to cut down trees. Wait a moment. We're not going to have the same conversation again, I hope?

— The same conversation about the necessity of evil in the world will be conducted forever and ever — that awesome question of the theodicy, on which mankind has been breaking its teeth for centuries. But yes, the grain simply has to be threshed, so that it can be changed into sacred bread.

— These days it's also done with combine harvesters. They're monsters, sometimes twenty feet wide, with six-cylinder diesel engines, which crawl across the fields like prehistoric grasshoppers. At the front of those combines the stalks are swallowed up, after which the grains are shaken loose in the revolving threshing drum; then a compressor separates the chaff from the corn with compressed air. It works pretty well.

— You've put your finger on it. But it's precisely the machine itself that represents the much greater, radical, evil. That technological Luciferian evil is not in the optimistic service of the Chief in the best of all possible worlds, like the providential havoc that you must wreak, but it feeds on it; it eats it away and takes its place, like a virus usurps control of the nucleus of a cell: a malicious putsch, an infamous coup d'état. Cancer! Royal assassination!

— Don't get so excited all the time. This is just how things are. We have failed. We underestimated human potential, both the strength of man's intellect and the weakness of his flesh, and therefore his receptivity to satanic inspiration — but ultimately he is our creature, and so what we've really underestimated is our own creativity. What we made has turned out to be more than what we thought that we had made. So ultimately in our failure there is a compliment to us: our creativity is greater than ourselves!