The Quest (periodical)/Volume 11/The Land of the Time-Leeches
The Land of the Time-Leeches.
Gustav Meyrink.
In the churchyard of the secluded and out-of-the-world little town of Runkel my grandfather's body is laid 'to eternal rest.' His gravestone is thickly overgrown with moss and the date well-nigh obliterated; but below it, standing out in gilt[1] and as fresh as though they were cut yesterday, are four letters ranged round a cross, thus:
| V | I |
| V | O |
'VIVO'—'I live.' Such was the meaning I was told, when as a boy I read the inscription for the first time. The word at once impressed itself as deeply on my soul as if the dead had uttered it from underneath the sod.
'VIVO'—'I live,' a strange watch-word for a tombstone! Even to-day it re-echoes in my heart; whenever I think of it, I feel as I felt long since when first I stood before that grave. In my imagination I see my grandfather—though I had never known him in the flesh—lying there, untouched by decay, with folded hands, eyes open clear as crystal, motionless; like one who has escaped corruption in the midst of the realm of mould, with silent patience awaiting resurrection.
I have since visited many a churchyard of many a town; ever have my steps been directed there by a vague desire, for which I could not account, to read once more that word on some chance stone. Twice only have I found it—that oross-encirding 'VIVO'—once in Danzig, once in Nuremberg. In both cases Time's finger has rubbed out the name; in both the 'VIVO' shines out fresh and untouched as if instinct with life.
I had been told in my youth, and had always believed, that my grandfather had not left behind a single line in his own writing. All the more excited was I then when one day I discovered in a secret drawer of an old writing-desk—an ancient family heirloom—a packet of notes which had evidently been written by him. They were enclosed in a book-cover, on which I read the strange sentence:
"How shall man escape death if not by ceasing to wait and hope?"
At once I felt light up within me that mysterious 'VIVO,' which had ever throughout my life accompanied me with a faint shimmer, dying away a thousand times only to revive without any apparent outer cause in dreams or waking moments. If I had at times believed some chance had put that 'VIVO' on his tombstone—a parson's choice perhaps—now, with this sentence on the book-cover before me, I knew for sure and certain the 'VIVO' must have had a deeper meaning for him; must doubtless hint at something that filled the whole life of my father's father. And indeed, as I read on, page after page of his bequest to me confirmed my first intuition.
Most of the notes are of too private a nature to have their contents revealed to other eyes. It must suffice if I touch lightly on those details which led to my acquaintance with Johann Hermann Obereit.
It appeared from these memoirs that my grandfather was a member of a society called the 'Philadelphians,' an order claiming that its roots go back to ancient Egypt and hailing as its founder the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. Even the secret grips and signs of recognition were given. The name of Johann Hermann Obereit frequently occurred. He was a chemist and' apparently an intimate friend of my grandfather's; indeed he seemed to have lived in the same house with him at Runkel. I wished naturally to learn more about the life of my extraordinary ancestor and about that hidden world-renouncing philosophy the spirit of which spoke out of every line he had written. I accordingly decided to go to Runkel to find out whether by chance any descendants of Obereit were still there and if they had any family records.
One can scarcely imagine anything more dream-like than this tiny little town of Runkel, slumbering away in spite of the screams and cries of Time, like some forgotten relic of the Middle Ages, with its crooked streets and passages, silent as the dead, and grass-grown, rugged cobble-stones, beneath the shadow of the ancient rock-built castle of Runkelstein, the ancestral seat of the Princes of Wied.
The very first morning after my arrival I felt myself irresistibly drawn to the little churchyard. There the days of my youth woke again to memory, as I stepped from one flower-carpeted mound to another in the sweet sunshine and read mechanically from the stones the names of those who slumbered beneath. Already from afar I recognized my grandfather's with its glittering mystic inscription. But on drawing near I found I was no longer alone.
An old white-haired, clean-shaven man of cut features was sitting there, with his chin resting on the ivory handle of his walking-stick. As I approached he glanced at me with strangely vivid eyes, as of one in whom the likeness to a well-remembered face had awakened a host of memories. He was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, high collar and stock—one might almost have said like a family portrait in Louis Philippe or early Victorian style.
I was so astonished at a sight so out of keeping with present-day surroundings, moreover my brooding thoughts were so deeply sunk in what I had gathered from my grandfather's writings, that scarcely knowing what I did I uttered half-aloud the name 'Obereit.'
"Yes, my name is Johann Hermann Obereit," said the old gentleman without showing the least surprise. I nearly stopped breathing. And what I learned from the conversation that followed was even less calculated to diminish my astonishment.
It is indeed not an every-day experience to find oneself face to face with a man to all appearances not much older than oneself yet who had Jived so long—some century and a half, he said! I felt like a youth in spite of my already white hair, as we paced side by side, while he spoke of Napoleon and historic persons he had known long years ago, as one would speak of people who had died the other day.
"In Runkel," he said with a smile, "I am believed to be my own grandson." He pointed to a tomb we were passing and which bore the date 1798. "By right I should be lying there," he continued. "I had the date put on to avoid the curiosity of the crowd for a modern Methuselah. The 'VIVO,'" he added, as if divining my thought, "will be put on only when I am dead for good."
Almost at once we became intimate friends; and he soon insisted on my staying with him. A month thus passed; and we sat up many a night engaged in deep discourse. But always when I would have asked the purport of the sentence on the book-cover that contained my grandsire's papers, he deftly turned the conversation. "How shall a man escape death if not by ceasing to wait and hope?" What could it mean?
One evening—indeed the last we passed together—our talk had turned on the old witch-trials. I was contending that they must all have been highly hysterical women, when suddenly he said: "So you do not believe a man may leave his body and travel, say, to Blocksberg?" "Shall I show you now?" he asked, looking sharply at me.
I shook my head. "I admit only this much," I said, laughing. "The so-called witches got into a kind of trance by taking narcotic drugs, and were then firmly persuaded they rode through the air on broomsticks!"
He remained sunk in thought. "You will perhaps say that I too travelled only in imagination," he murmured half aloud, and relapsed again into meditation.
After a while he rose slowly, went to his desk and returned with a small book.
"Perhaps you may be interested in what I wrote down here when first I made the experiment many long years ago. I must tell you I was still very young and full of hopes."
I saw from his indrawn look that his memory was going back to far-off days.
"I believed in what men call life, till blow after blow fell on me. I lost whatever one may value most on earth—my wife, my children—all. Then fate brought about my meeting with your grandfather. It was he who taught me to understand what our desires are, what waiting is, what expectation, what hope is; how they are interlocked with one another; how one may tear the mask off the faces of those ghostly vampires. We called them the Time-leeches; for like blood-suckers they drain from our hearts Time, the very sap of life. It was here in this room that he taught me the first step on the way towards the conquest of death and how to strangle the vipers of hope. And then. . ."—he hesitated for a moment. "And then I became like a block of wood that does not feel whether it be touched gently or split asunder, plunged into water or thrown into fire. Since then there has been, as it were, a certain void within me. No more have I looked for consolation; no more have I needed it. Wherefore should I seek it? I know I am. Since then only is it that I live. There is a fundamental difference between 'I live' and 'I live.'"
"You say that so simply; and yet it is terrible," I interrupted, deeply moved.
"It only seems to be so," he assured me smilingly. "Out of this heart-stableness there streams a sense of beatitude of which you can scarcely dream. It is like a sweet melody that never ceases—this 'I am.' Once born it cannot die—neither in sleep, nor when the outer world wakes our senses for us again, nor even in death.
"Shall I tell you why men now die so early and no longer live for a thousand years as it is written of the patriarchs in the scriptures? They are like the green watery shoots of a tree. They have forgotten that they belong to the trunk, and so they wither away the first autumn. But I wanted to tell you how I first left my body.
"There is an old, old doctrine, as ancient as mankind itself. It has been handed on from mouth to ear until this day; but few know it. It teaches how to step over the threshold of death without losing consciousness. He who can rightly do so is henceforth master of himself. He has gained a new self, and what till then seemed his self becomes henceforth a tool just as now our hands and feet are organs for us.
"Heart-beat and breath are stilled as in a corpse when the newly rediscovered spirit goes forth,—when we go forth as once did Israel from the fleshpots of Egypt, and the waters of the Red Sea stood as walls on either side.
"Long and oft had I to practise, nameless and excruciating were the tortures I had to undergo, before I succeeded finally in freeing myself consciously from the body. At first I felt myself, as it were, hovering—just as we think ourselves able to fly in dreams—with knees drawn up yet moving quite easily.
"Suddenly I began gliding down. I found myself in a black stream running as it were from the south to the north. In our language we call it the flowing backwards of the Jordan. There was a roaring of waters, a buzzing of blood in the ears. In great excitement many voices—though I could not see their owners—cried out on me to turn back. A trembling seized upon me, and in dumb fear I swam towards a cliff that rose from the waters before me. Standing there in the moonlight was a naked child. But the signs of sex were absent, and in its forehead it had a third eye, like Polyphemus of old. It stood stock still, pointing with its hand to the interior of the island.
"I advanced through a wood on a smooth white road, but without feeling the ground beneath my feet. When I tried to touch the trees and shrubs around me I could not feel them. It was as though there were a thin layer of air between them and me which I could not penetrate. A phosphorescence as from decaying wood covered every object and made seeing possible. But their outlines seemed vague and loose and soft like molluscs, and all seemed strangely over-sized. Featherless birds, with round staring eyes, swollen like fattened geese and huddled together in a huge nest, hissed down at me. A fawn, scarce able to walk yet as big as a full-grown deer, lay in the moss and lazily turned its fat pug-dog-like head towards me.
"There was a toad-like sluggishness in every creature I happened to see.
"By and by the knowledge of where I was dawned on me—in a land as real as our own world and yet but a reflection of it, in the realm of those unseen doubles that thrive upon the marrow of their terrestrial counterparts, that exploit their originals and grow into ever huger shapes, the more the latter eat themselves up in vain hoping and waiting for happiness and joy. If the mothers of young animals are shot off and their little ones waste and waste away longing in faith for their food until they die in the tortures of starvation, spectral doubles grow up in this accursed spirit-land, and like spiders suck up the life that trickles from the creatures of our world. The life-powers of all that thus wane away in vain hopes, become gross shapes and luxurious weeds in this Leech-land, the very soil of which is impregnated by the fattening breath of time spent in vain waiting and wasting.
"As I wandered on I came to a town full of people. Many of them I knew on earth. I reminded myself of their countless vain and abortive hopes; how they walked more and more bowed down year after year, yet could not drive out of their hearts the vampires—their own demonic selves that devoured their Life and their Time. Here I saw them staggering about swollen into spongy monsters with huge bellies, bulging eyes and cheeks puffed with fat.
"First I noticed a bank which displayed in its windows the announcement:
|
Fortuna |
Out of it came thronging a grinning crowd carrying sacks of gold, smacking their puffed lips in greasy contentment—phantoms in fat and jelly of all who waste their lives on earth in the insatiable hunger for a gambler's gains.
"I entered a vast hall; it seemed like a colossal temple whose columns reached the sky. There, on a throne of coagulated blood, sat a monstrous four-armed figure. Its body was human but its head a brute's—hyæna-like, with foam-flecked jaws and snout. It was the war-god of the still savage superstitious nations who offer it their prayers for victory over their foes.
"Filled with horror and loathing I fled out of the atmosphere of decay and corruption which filled the place, back into the streets, but only to be dumb-founded again at the sight of a palace which surpassed in splendour any I had ever seen. And yet every stone, every gable, mullion, ornament, seemed strangely familiar; it was as if I had once built it all up in fancy for myself. I mounted the broad white marble steps, On the door-plate before me I read . . . my own name—Johann H. Obereit! I entered. Inside I saw myself clad in purple sitting at a table groaning with luxuries and waited on by thousands of fair women slaves. Immediately I recognized them as the women who had pleased my senses in life, though most of them but as a passing moment's whim.
"A feeling of indescribable hatred filled me when I realized that this foul double of mine had wallowed and revelled here in lust and luxury my whole life; that it was I myself who had called him into being and lavished riches on him by the outflow of the magic power of my own self, drained from me by the vain hopes and lusts and expectations of my soul.
"With terror I saw that my whole life had been spent in waiting and in waiting only—as it were an unstaunchable bleeding to death; that the time left me for feeling the present amounted to only a few hours.
"Like a bubble burst before me whatever I had hitherto thought to be the content of my life. I tell you that whatever we seem to finish on earth ever generates new waiting and hoping. The whole world is pervaded by the pestiferous breath of the decay of a scarcely-born present. Who has not felt the enervating weakness that seizes on one when sitting in the waiting-room of a doctor or lawyer or official? What we call life is the waiting-room of death!
"Suddenly I realized then and there what Time is. We ourselves are forms made out of Time—bodies that seem to be matter, but are no more than coagulated Time. And our daily withering away towards the grave—what is it but our returning unto Time again, waiting and hoping being but the symptoms of this process, even as ice on a stove hisses away as it changes back to water again?
"I now saw that, as this knowledge woke in my mind, trembling seized upon my double, and that his face was contorted with terror. Then I knew what I had to do; to fight unto the death with every weapon against those phantoms that suck our life away like vampires.
"Oh! they know full well why they remain invisible for man, why they hide themselves from our eyes—those parasites of our life!—even as it is the devil's most foul device to act as if he did not exist. Since then I have for ever rooted out of my life the two ideas of hoping and waiting."
"I am sure," I said, when the old gentleman fell to silence, "I should break down at the first step, if I tried to tread the terrible way along which you have walked. I can well believe that by incessant labour a man may benumb the feeling of waiting and hoping in his soul; but . . .
"Yes, but only benumb it," he interrupted. "Within you the waiting still remains alive. You must put the axe to the root. Become as an automaton in this world, as one dead though seemingly alive. Never reach out after a tempting fruit, if there is to be the shortest waiting for it. Do not stir a hand; and all will fall ripe into your lap. At the beginning, and for long perchance, it may be like a wandering through desert plains void of all consolation; but suddenly there will be a brightness round you and you will see all things—beautiful and ugly—in a new and unexpected splendour. Then will there be no more 'importance' and 'unimportance' for you; every event will be equally 'important' and 'unimportant.' You will become 'horned' by drinking the dragon's blood, and be able to say of yourself: I fare forth into the shoreless sea of an unending life with snow-white sails." **** These were the last words Johann Hermann Obereit spoke to me. I have not seen him again.
Many years have passed since then and I have tried as well as I could to follow his doctrine; but waiting and hoping will not wane from my heart.
I am too weak, alas! to root out these weeds; and so I no longer wonder that on the countless gravestones so very seldom does one find the legend:
| V | I |
| V | O |
(Rendered from the Original.)
- ↑ Cp. the Golden Gate of the Osiric Garden, end of Der Golem.