Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

— Your optimism is indestructible too, just like Leibniz's. What you are despite all your competence is obviously ultimately an irresponsible bohemian, an artistic rake, who thinks Here goes! But you might ask yourself whether it isn't precisely the reflection of the Chief that makes our creativity greater than ourselves.

— Ha ha! But if that's the case, then our successful failure isn't our responsibility either, but the Chief's — including man's susceptibility to the devil and hence the downfall of the Chief himself, as you have just so eloquently outlined to me. Then with mankind he has dug his own grave.

— This conversation is starting to take a turn I don't like at all. I very much hope that your closeness to human beings and your manipulation with evil hasn't also brought you closer to Lucifer-Satan.

— I wouldn't be making such efforts in that case. But if I can be honest: I do feel a bit sorry for him. Ultimately he's a poor sucker too, who can't be any different than he is. The fact of the matter is that we are playing with white, and he with black. If there is anyone who is condemned to hell for infinity, then it's him.

— He'd like nothing better!

— Yes, that too. That's hell within hell.

— Come on. It's as though someone on earth were to claim that he whose name I won't mention was also a poor sucker and himself actually his most pitiable victim.

— It isn't for people to claim that kind of thing. Them least of all.

— I'm glad that you are saying it, because your post was suddenly hanging by a thread.

— I had the feeling it might be.

— Let's leave it at that, before things get out of hand. Of course it's sad that things had to reach this stage, but at the same time I'm dying of curiosity to hear how you finally managed it. Go on. I'm listening.

In order to make the decisive event possible, it was necessary to mellow Onno Quist's frame of mind after all those years of solitude — and so I sent to him a stray young raven from the hills. One sunny day around noon it suddenly descended into the open window, shook its feathers, folded its wings, turned once around its axis, and walked in as though it lived there.

Onno looked up from his notes, perplexed.

"What do you want?" he asked. Not having said anything the whole morning, he cleared his throat.

The raven fixed him with one eye and croaked.

"Cras?" repeated Onno. "Yes, of course you're speaking Latin. 'Tomorrow'? What about tomorrow?"

The bird jumped off the windowsill onto the table, stirred through the chaos of papers a few times with its tail feathers, left some droppings, and then went over to a plate on which there were a few remnants of bread. With a loud tapping of its beak, as blue-black as fountain-pen ink, it devoured them and again looked at Onno, as if wanting to know if that was all. After it had eaten its fill, it jumped onto the windowsill, spread its wings, and disappeared — but the following afternoon it was back, at the same time.

In this way something resembling a friendship had begun. Onno had never had anything to do with animals before; they did not feature in his thinking. He had been brought up to believe that they had no souls, but after just a few days he found himself becoming anxious when the bird was late. Although he had not worn a watch since leaving Holland, he always knew what time it was thanks to the church bells. When on one occasion the raven missed a day, he could no longer concentrate. He looked mournfully at the untouched plate of birdseed and leaned outside every ten minutes to scan the sky.

"You don't treat people like this, Edgar," he said the following day with a reproachfully wagging index finger. "Not even as a bird. You don't stand your host up with the food. I trust it won't happen again."

While his pitch-black visitor scratched about around the room, over the chairs, among the rubbish under the bed, it constantly croaked and squawked, and Onno had the impression that it stayed longer if he himself talked a lot, too. From then on he made a habit of speaking while it was there. At the beginning he found it difficult; except for a few words in a shop, a restaurant, or in his bank, he had said nothing for four years. But one can no more forget how to speak than how to ride a bike or swim, and he of all people would be more likely to forget how to ride a bike than how to speak; he could not swim.

"Of course you're wondering what I'm doing here, Edgar. I'll tell you. I'm working on a letter to my father. But it's a rather strange kind of letter, because even when I get it down on paper I won't be able to send it. Kafka wrote a letter to his father too — Max read it to me once, long ago, in far-off innocent days — but poor Royal and Imperial Franz-Josef never dared mail it. My own problem is more serious, because what's the address of a dead person? Perhaps you know, being a black bird; unfortunately you won't be able to tell me. But I want to do it precisely because it's absurd. Since everything is ultimately absurd, the whole of life and the whole world, conversely only the absurd makes any kind of sense. Can you understand that? If everything's absurd, then within that absurdity only the absurd is not absurd! True or not? Have you ever heard of Camus? He was the philosopher of the absurd, and he died in an absurd car accident. For many people that was a confirmation of his thesis that everything is absurd. But for the philosopher of the absurd, an absurd death is of course an extremely meaningful end! Think hard about that. Everything is far more absurd than even he thought. Now of course you're curious about what I'm trying to tell my dead father in my absurd way. It's about the nature of power. In the last few years I've thought of a few things, on which I want his impossible judgment. It's rather sinister, and in political terms you must translate the word sinister not by 'left,' but rather by 'right': then you get dexter. Another difference with Kafka is that I'm not able to get my ideas into order. They're not in an orderly succession; they're still chaotically juxtaposed. In the past when I wrote an article or a speech, academic or political, it was always as if my thoughts were numbered in some way and I immediately knew the sequence of the sentences. But I've lost that priceless ability. Now I feel as if I have to complete a jigsaw puzzle as big as the room, while all the pieces are plain white — or, rather, as black as you, Edgar. Look over there. Thousands of notes. Very personal, about Koos and Dorus and Bart Bork, but also very general ones, about the question of how power is possible and heaven knows what else. The mountain grows higher every day, but do you think that means I'm any closer to my goal? Each note takes me farther away from it! This stuff is like a tree, constantly branching, sprouting, growing, precisely when I'm trying to locate the trunk and the point where it comes out of the ground. Each time I start on my letter, I have to go through all those notes again, to build up momentum, but it never leads to a first sentence, just to new notes. In the meantime many of them have become illegible — because they've lain in the sun, or because I've spilled coffee or cola over them, or because they're stuck together with jam, or because you've relieved yourself on them with your leaching excreta, which are as white as you are black. I don't mind. Don't worry about it — that's nature."

A few weeks later the situation had reversed itself: Edgar no longer came to visit once a day, but occasionally left the house. Changed from a guest into a lodger, he generally slept in a corner of the room among the clothes lying on the floor. The first time the tame animal fluttered onto his shoulder and held onto his ear with its beak, Onno's reflex was to try to push it off, but he was glad that he hadn't, because there would have been no second opportunity. And now Edgar was given fragments to hear every day, sometimes these, sometimes those — and suddenly Onno had the feeling that reading them aloud was bringing him close to a structure, enabling him to make a start on sifting and organizing.