Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"I told you about that, Ada, but you weren't listening. You thought: yes, yes, I'm sure that's true. That's what we're celebrating here; the silent, holy night of Van der Lubbe, the most influential Dutch politician who ever lived."

While they studied the menu, he told her again — and he described the occasion on which Max had worked it out for him. "Mrs. Hartman, can Onno come out to play?" Max had already almost forgotten. It was a year ago, but it seemed something from the distant past.

"How is Helga?" he asked. "Have you seen her again?"

"Never. She's sitting dutifully at the Art Historical Institute keeping the catalog up to date."

They ate wild boar, and Onno expanded on his domestic political adventures, while Max and Ada listened politely. A Great Leap Forward was being made, he said, in which what his father and his friends had prevented in 1945 was finally being achieved — that was, going hand in hand with a rabid wave of democratization, which was not devoid of plebian features: no one was allowed to achieve any more than anyone else — and if you simply promoted that and meanwhile you yourself aristocratically achieved what no one else achieved, then you were assured of power to the end of the century.

"Machiavelli did not live in vain," said Max.

"Oh, Machiavelli!" cried Onno. "A name that is mentioned too rarely!" After coffee Onno asked for the check, but the waiter said that everything had been settled.

"You're my guests," said Max, getting up. "I'll have a meal on you sometime in Amsterdam."

It was still pouring rain, and now there was a strong wind. They rushed to the car. Driving down the dark, abandoned roads they reached the observatory in ten minutes. The lights were still on everywhere. Observations were still being made, and the Antipodean was still sitting at the dining table in the guest suite. It was ten-thirty and Max asked if they wanted to go to bed yet — if not, he still had some wine and rum-and-Coke in the kitchen. Ada said that she would have a glass of cola, even if it might not be a good idea for a pregnant woman; but Onno thought alcohol was deadly to harmful bacteria and therefore extremely good for growing embryos. It was as though Max could see the colorful pile of books on pregnancy and childbirth that was of course at Ada's bedside.

Outside, the storm was getting worse and worse and they sat comfortably around the open hearth, in which there was no fire. Onno now made a distinction between "large weather" and "small weather": the weather could be so bad that it fell below zero and became good again. Thunder and lightning, breached dikes, floods — you couldn't say that they were "bad weather"; Max then told them that Dickens gave a dinner for his friends every Christmas Eve, in which a hired tramp had to stand outside in the snowstorm under the window and shout every few minutes, "Brr! How cold it is!" — so that the people inside enjoyed the warmth and the goose even more.

"What a bastard," said Ada.

"Not at all," said Onno. "That's perfectly all right dialectically. It shows that in his way of living, he was a great writer."

"You two have strange ideas of greatness."

"So what is the mark of greatness according to you?"

"Modesty."

"Ada!" cried Onno, grabbing his head in despair. "Anything but that!"

"I mean it. If you ask me, Bach felt very small compared with music."

"But meanwhile he did write one masterpiece after the other. Very modest. Anyway, what is 'music'? Without Bach and the other composers music would not even exist. Or do you think that 'music' is something that is simply floating up in the sky somewhere?"

"Perhaps, yes."

"All women are Platonists," said Onno, shaking his head.

"And what about Max, then, with that telescope here?" asked Ada, turning to him. "Don't you feel small when you look at that enormous universe?"

"I think," said Max cautiously, "that you're confusing two different things. Einstein was also a modest man, you always read, but meanwhile he did tell us how the universe is made. Onno's right: how modest is that, actually? You may say that he didn't brag about it in his everyday life, but it wasn't necessary. But then you are seeing modesty only as a psychological category—"

"And psychology is always uninteresting," interrupted Onno. "Anyway, how modest was Freud? Read the documents and tremble."

"To be honest," said Max, "as a boy I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few other things besides — and that means he is not small! The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness. The amazing thing is rather that this insignificant being can contain the whole universe in the tiny space under his skull — and, what's more, can reflect on it, as we are doing now. That makes him in a certain sense even greater than the universe."

"Yes," said Onno to Ada with a smile. "You should listen to that closely."

The flue of the open hearth was humming like an out-of-tune organ pipe in the storm.

"Of course you can imagine," said Max, pouring another glass, "someone saying that man must feel small compared with his own greatness, since he has it from God."

"But that makes him a masochist," interrupted Onno. "And he's overlooking the fact that God is a product of mankind."

Max studied the deep red color of his wine and was silent. The Ego and His Own. He was occupied with extragalactic research — the signals of cosmic events that had occurred billions of years ago in the young universe; but those paled into insignificance alongside the event that perhaps awaited him, on a small planet in an insignificant solar system, on the periphery of one of the scores of billions of galaxies. But that awareness did not lead him in any sense to something like "a sense of relativity." On the contrary, the birth of a human being was not an insignificant event in the measured immeasurability of the universe but rather an event of metacosmic proportions — even without God. Especially without God.

Floris came in dripping wet, and with disheveled hair.

"We shall have to secure the telescope, Max, otherwise we'll have to hunt for it on the heath tomorrow. It's gale-force ten, and according to the meteorologists in De Bilt, it's going to get worse — they're expecting gusts of wind of nearly a hundred miles an hour. It appears to be the last remnant of a hurricane from the Caribbean that's been roaming the ocean for a couple of months. Can you come and lend a hand? We've already positioned it with its back to the wind."

Onno and the Australian put their coats on too. Ada said that she was going to bed; she had her score of Das Lied von der Erde with her and was going to work on it for a bit.

"Right!" cried Onno when they got outside.

In the howling storm trees were waving and swishing, as if wanting finally to shake themselves loose of their chains.

The rain pelted in their faces, and they bent forward as they walked down the path toward the telescope, where the beams of flashlights were moving about and ten or twenty people were at work. The mirror was slowly turning into the horizontal position. Blocks were being lugged up and clamped to the wheels; someone shouted that the azimuth motor must be turned off; someone else screamed that Floris must now go up top to turn off the elevation motors. The whole procedure went by the book, which provided for such contingencies — and half an hour later people looked with satisfaction at the reflector, pointing immovably at the zenith, like a majestic sacrificial bowl.

Everyone assembled in the laboratory, drenched to the skin, to talk things over and to listen to the director's speech of thanks.