The Comet ∗

Bruno Schulz

THE END OF WINTER stood that year under the banner of an es-
pecially favourable astronomical conjunction. The calendar's coloured
predictions blossomed redly on the snow that lay on the outskirts of
the mornings. From the ery red of the Sundays and the holidays, a
glow fell on to half of the week, and those days were consumed coldly
by a false re. For a moment, deluded hearts beat more rapidly, en-
thralled by that heralding redness, which heralded nothing, which was
merely a premature alarum, coloured calendar boasting painted on
to the week's binding in bright vermilion. Every night since Twelfth
Night we had been sitting over our table's white parade, gleaming
with candlesticks and silverware, and playing endless games of pa-
tience. The night outside the window grew brighter by the hour, all
iced and glistening, full of endlessly sprouting almonds and candies.
The moon, an inexhaustible transformist, utterly engrossed in its late
lunar practices, assumed its phases in turn  brighter and brighter,
it turned over all the court cards in a game of pr
ef
erence, then it
replicated all of their colours. In the daytime, it would often stand
to the side, awaiting its turn, ready in advance, brassy and without
radiance  a melancholy knave with his shining club. Entire skies of
∗
translated by John Curran Davis

1
cloudy wisps would pass through its solitary prole then, in a quiet,
white and immense motion, barely covering it with a shimmering and
piscine shell of mother-of-pearl, where toward evening the coloured
rmament would curdle. By then the day had already been vacantly
leafed through. A gale gusted noisily over the roofs; it blew the chim-
neys cold to their very hearths; it erected imaginary scaolding and
gantries over the town, then it knocked those clattering, lofty con-
structions down in a tumult of rafters and beams. Occasionally, a re
would break out in a distant suburb. The chimney sweeps ran about
the town on high roofs and little galleries, under a verdigris and torn
sky. In that aerial perspective, stepping from the eld of one roof to
the next among the pinnacles and pennants of the town, they dreamed
that the gale momentarily opened up for them the lids of roofs over
girls' alcoves, then slammed them shut again on the great billowing
book of the town  astonishing literature for many days and nights.
Then the breezes blew themselves out. The shop assistants put spring
fabrics on display in the shop window, and the weather soon abated,
from the soft hues of the wool; it was tinted with lavender and ushed
with pale mignonette. The snow dwindled, and was pleated into a
baby's blanket. It drifted drily away into the air, sucked up by cobalt
breezes, reabsorbed by an immense and concave sky without sun or
clouds. Here and there oleanders were already blossoming in people's
apartments; windows were thrown open, and in the aimless reverie of
a sky blue day the mindless chirruping of sparrows lled the room.
Vehement scues of chanches, bullnches and tomtits converged for
a moment above the empty squares, twittering dreadfully  they ew
o in all directions, blown away by the breeze, annihilated, blotted
out in empty blue. For a moment, coloured spots remained behind
them in the eye  a handful of confetti tossed blindly into the bright
expanse  and melted deep within the eye in neutral azure.
A premature spring season began. Lawyers' apprentices  the epit-
ome of elegance and chic  wore thin moustaches curled up in spirals,

2
and high, sti collars. On days scoured by the gale as if by a ood
 while the wind gusted clamorously, high above the town  they
doed their coloured bowler hats from afar to ladies of their acquain-
tance  they leaned with their backs against the wind, their coat tails
uttering, and looked away again, all denial and gentility, so as not to
expose their lady-loves to scandal. For a moment those ladies didn't
know where to look. They cried out in fright, beaten about by their
dresses, and then, recovering their composure, graciously returned a
smile of acknowledgement.
Often in the afternoon the wind would abate. On the porch, Adela
cleaned great copper pans, which rattled metalically under her touch.
The sky drew to a halt over the shingled roofs  exhausted, its blue
roads branching. The shop assistants, sent forth from the shop on
some errand, lingered near her for a long time on the threshold of
the kitchen, leaning against the balustrade of the porch, drunk on the
day-long wind, with a jumble of thoughts in their heads, stirred by
the strident chirruping of sparrows. A breeze carried the lost refrain
of a barrel organ from the distance. Their soft words were inaudible,
enunciated in hushed tones, as if in passing, and with an air of inno-
cence, although in truth they were calculated to scandalise Adela. Cut
to the quick, she reacted violently; she admonished them in utter rage
and exultation, and her face  grey and clouded by springtime dreams
 ushed redly with anger and amusement. They lowered their eyes
in despicable devotion, with inappropriate satisfaction that they had
succeeded in provoking her.
Days and afternoons went by; everyday events, seen from the height
of our porch, owed over the town in confusion, over the layrinth
of roofs and houses in the hazy glow of those grey weeks  tinkers
crowded them, proclaiming their services, and occasionally in the dis-
tance, Szloma's powerful sneeze lent comical emphasis to the town's
scattered, faraway tumult. On some far removed square, the mad girl,
Tluja, driven to despair by the teasing of boys, began to dance her wild

3
sarabande, kicking high her skirts to the delight of the crowd. A pu of
wind smoothed and levelled those outbursts, distributed them amid
the monotonous and grey tumult, dragged them around incessantly
on a shore of shingled roofs in the milky, smoky air of the afternoon.
Resting her hands on the balustrade, leaning over that distant, tem-
pestuous roaring of the town, Adela caught all of its louder emphases
 smiling, she arranged those lost syllables, trying to connect them,
to read something meaningful in that great and grey, rising and falling
monotony of the day.
The epoch stood under the banner of mechanics and electricity.
From under the wings of human genius a whole swarm of inventions
was showered upon the world. Cigar boxes tted with electric lighters
appeared in bourgeois homes. A switch was thrown, and a swarm of
electric sparks ignited a petrol-soaked wick. Stupendous hopes were
founded on this. A musical box in the shape of a Chinese pagoda,
wound up with a key, immediately began to play a miniature rondo,
rotating like a carousel. Tiny bells trilled at its edges; wings of tiny
doors opened on its opposite sides to reveal its revolving, barrel-organ
core, playing its snubox triolet. Electric doorbells were installed in
every home. Domestic life stood under the banner of galvanism. A
coil of insulated wire became the symbol of the times. Fashionably
dressed young men in salons demonstrated Galvani's phenomenon, and
received radiant looks from ladies  an electrical conductor opened the
door to women's hearts. The experiment succesfully concluded, those
heroes of the day blew kisses amid the applause of those salons.
Before long, the town was overrun by velocipedes of all shapes
and sizes. A philosophical view of the world had become obliga-
tory. Whoever acknowledged the notion of progress had to accept
the consequences and mount a velocipede. First, of course, came the
lawyers' apprentices, the herald of new ideas, with their their curled
up moustaches and coloured bowler hats, the hope and ower of our
youth. Scattering the raucous crowd, they ploughed into its throng

4
on enormous bicycles or tricycles, their wire spokes chiming. Holding
tight to the handlebars, they manoeuvred their enormous lofty front
wheels, cutting their way through the amused rabble in a winding,
wobbling line. Some were seized with apostolic frenzy. Rising up on
their whirring pedals, like stirrups, they addressed the people from on
high, foretelling a new, happy era for mankind  salvation through
the bicycle... And they rode on amid the cheers of their audience,
dong their hats in all directions.
And yet there was something woefully compromising in those mag-
nicent and triumphal excursions, some painful and unpleasant grind-
ing that caused them to incline dangerously at the height of their
triumph and fall headlong into self-parody. Surely they felt it them-
selves  suspended spider-like in their ligree apparatus, straddling
their pedals like great hopping frogs, as they executed, amid widely
rolling wheels, their duck-like movements. A mere step away from the
ridiculous, they lurched desperately forward, leaning over the han-
dlebars and pedalling ever faster  a gymnastic cloud of vehement
contortions, ying into a somersault. Is it any wonder? Mankind was
encroaching, on the strength of this illicit practical joke, on a realm of
stupendous facilitation, bought too cheaply, below cost price, almost
for nothing, and that disproportion between cause and eect, that
blatant fraud on nature, that excessive reward for a brilliant trick,
was oset by self-parody. They rode on amid elemental outbursts of
laughter  pitiful victors, the martyrs of their own genius  so great
was the comedic power of those miracles of technology.
When my brother rst brought an electromagnet home from school,
when, with a shudder inside, we all experienced the secretly vibrating
life locked up inside an electric circuit, Father smiled condescendingly.
A far reaching thought had taken shape in his mind. It concentrated
and connected suspicions that had beset him long ago. Why did Father
smile to himself? Why did his eyes, watering, revolve into the backs of
their orbits in comical mock-sincerity? Who knows? Did he have some

5
inkling of a crude trick, a vulgar intrigue  transparent machinations
behind the stupendous revelations of mysterious power? That moment
marked Father's return to his laboratory experiments.
Father's laboratory was rather basic: a few lengths of coiled wire
and some jars of acid, zinc, lead and coal  such was the entire work-
shop of that bizarre esotericist. `Matter,' he said, stiing a cough
and modestly lowering his eyes. `Matter, good sirs...' But he didn't
nish the sentence, although he let it be understood that he was on
the trail of some crude deception, which we, even as we were sitting
there, had all been taken in by. His eyes downcast, Father quietly
mocked that age old fetish. `Panta rei!' he cried, and demonstrated
with movements of his hands the eternal circulation of substance. For
a long time he had wanted to mobilise the hidden power circulating
within it, to melt its rigidity and clear its path to thorough pene-
tration, transfusion, and universal circulation  its only true nature.
`Principium individuationis be damned,' he said, thus expressing his
boundless contempt for that primal human principle. He threw this in
incidentally, in passing, running his ngers along a length of wire. He
closed his eyes and felt with his sensitive touch dierent places in the
circuit, discerning faint dierences in potentials. He made cuts in the
wire, and, listening intently, leaned forward  and suddenly he would
be o again, repeating this activity at another place in the circuit. He
seemed to have ten hands and twenty senses. His divided attention
was turned in a hundred directions at once. No point in space evaded
his suspicion. He leaned forward, tapping the wire at some point, and,
suddenly stepping back, shot like a cat to the place he had been look-
ing for  and missed his target, a little embarrassed. `Excuse me,' he
said, suddenly turning to an amazed spectator who had been scruti-
nising his actions. `Excuse me, I was concerned with this little space
here, which you yourself, sir, are occupying. If you would kindly move
aside for a moment...' And he made his brief measurements hurriedly,
as agile and nimble as a canary blithely hopping in convultions of its

6
somatic system.
Metals dipped in acid solutions, saline and corroding in that piti-
ful bath, now became conductive in the dark. Roused from their
numb lifelessness in the unending twilight of those funereal and late
days, they buzzed monotonously, sang metallically and glowed inter-
molecularly. Invisible cargoes amassed at their poles, and superceded
them, emptying into the whirling dartkness. A barely perceptible itch-
iness coursed through space  blind, teeming currents polarised into
concentric lines of power, the circulations and spirals of a magnetic
eld. Now here, now there, pieces of apparatus signalled from their
slumber and replied to one another belatedly, too late, in despondent
monosyllables  a line, a dot, in muted lethargy at intervals. Father
stood in the midst of those wandering currents with a pained smile,
shocked by that stuttering articulation, that once and for all closed and
inescapable distress signaling monotonously in crippled half-syllables
from its unliberated depths.
Father reached stupendous conclusions on the basis of these inves-
tigations. He proved, for example, that an electric bell, based on the
principle of the so-called Neef's hammer, is a commonplace mystica-
tion. Man had not broken into this place, into nature's laboratory; it
was Nature that had drawn him into its own machinations, achieving
through his experiments its own ends, heading who can say where.
During lunch my father touched the handle of his spoon, dipped in his
soup, with the nail of his index nger, and, lo and behold, Neef's bell
began to rattle in the lamp. The whole apparatus was an unnecessary
pretext. It meant nothing. Neef's bell was just the meeting place of
certain impulses of substance nding their way through human inge-
nuity. What Nature wanted, Nature produced  man was merely an
oscillating arrow, a shuttle from a weaver's workshop, soaring here,
soaring there in accordance with its will  he was a mere element, a
component of Neef's hammer.
Someone proposed the term `mesmerism', and Father eagerly picked

7
it up. The range of his theory narrowed until it had found its funda-
mental cell. Man, according to this theory, was a mere transit station,
a momentary knot of mesmeric currents, entwined here and there in
the womb of eternal matter. All the inventions he had gloried in were
nothing other than the snares that Nature had drawn him into  the
mantraps of the unknown. Father's experiments began to take on a
character of magic and prestidigitation, with a faint tinge of parodistic
jugglery. I shall say nothing of the various experiments with doves,
which, as he waved a wand, he arranged into twos and threes, into
dozens  and which then, with a show of eort, he reincorporated
one by one into the wand. He tipped his hat, and out they ew in a
uttering stream, their full compliment returning to reality, lling the
table-top in a swaying, bustling and cooing cluster. At times he came
to a halt at an unexpected point in the experiment; he stood uncer-
tainly, his eyes closed; and, after a moment's pause, ran with tripping
steps to the hallway, and there he thrust his head into the chimney
shaft. Deadened by soot, it was dark and blissful there, like the very
core of nothingness; warm currents trailed up and down. Father shut
his eyes and remained a while in that warm, black nothingness. We
all considered this incident to mean nothing; it extended, as it were,
behind the scenes of aairs, and we inwardly turned a blind eye to
that extramarginal fact, part of an entirely dierent order of things.
My father had some dispiriting tricks indeed in his repertoire, to
pierce the heart with true melancholy. The chairs in our dining room
had high, beautifully carved backrests. These were ower and leaf
girlands in a realistic style, but Father had only to ick these carvings
and suddenly they took on an unusually comical physiognimy, a vague
suggestion. They began to icker and twinkle knowingly  which was
extremely, almost unbearably embarrassing  until at last that twin-
kling began to take a quite denite course, an irresistible compulsion,
and someone or other who was there began to exclaim: `Aunt Wanda,
by God! It's Aunt Wanda!' And the ladies began to squeal, for indeed,

8
it was Aunt Wanda, true to life  no, she herself was actually paying
us a visit, actually sitting and conducting her endless discourse, not
leaving anyone else a chance to speak. Father's miracles had cancelled
themselves out, for this was not an apparition; it was the real Aunt
Wanda, in all of her ordinariness and commonness, which precluded
all thoughts of the miraculous.
Before considering the further events of that memorable winter, I
ought to mention briey a certain incident, which is always hushed
up ruefully in the chronicle of our family. What did happen to Uncle
Edward? He came to visit us then, unsuspecting and bursting with
health and enterprise. He had left his wife and daughter in the coun-
try, dutifully awaiting his return, and arrived in the best of spirits, to
take a break from his family and have some fun. And what happened?
Father's experiments made an electrifying impression on him. After
the rst few examples of his accomplishments he immediately stood
up, took o his overcoat, and placed himself entirely at Father's dis-
posal. `Unreservedly!' He proclaimed this with a steadfast look and a
rm shake of the hand. My Father understood. He began by ensur-
ing that Uncle had none of the traditional prejudices concerning the
principium individuationis. It appeared he didn't  none whatsoever.
Uncle was broad-minded and unsuperstitious. His one passion was to
serve Science.
At rst Father still allowed him a certain latitude. He was laying
the foundations of a radical experiment. Uncle Edward made use of
this freedom by exploring the town. He purchased a velocipede of
impressive size, and circuited the market square atop its enormous
front wheel, looking in at rst-oor windows from the heights of its
saddle. Passing by our house he elegantly tipped his hat to the ladies
standing at the window. He had a moustache curled up in spirals, and
a small, pointed beard. He soon became convinced, however, that a
velocopede could never lead him to the deeper secrets of mechanics,
that so brilliant an apparatus was nonetheless incapable of providing

9
lasting metaphysical shudders. And then the experiments began, to
which Uncle's lack of prejudices concerning the principium individua-
tionis were so indispensable. Uncle Edward had no qualms at all about
submitting, for the benet of science, to being physically reduced to
the bare principal of Neef's hammer. He agreed ungrudgingly to the
progressive paring away of all of his characteristics, with the aim of
laying bare his deepest essence, identical, as he had long felt, to the
aforementioned principle.
Father, shutting himself away in his study, began the gradual dis-
assemblement of Uncle Edward's convoluted essence, an exhausting
process of psychoanalysis extending over days and nights. The table
in his study began to ll with the scattered complexes of Uncle's ego.
To begin with, Uncle Edward would still turn up at mealtimes; dras-
tically reduced, he attempted to take part in our conversations. He
took one last ride on his velocipede, and then, seeing himself more
and more dismantled, gave it up. There was a kind of shame in him,
characteristic of the stage he had reached. He avoided people. Father,
meanwhile, was drawing ever nearer to the goal of his eorts. He had
reduced Uncle to the indispensable minimum, removing all the inessen-
tials one by one. He placed him high up in a niche in the staircase wall,
arranging his elements on the basis of the Leclanch
e cell. The wall was
mouldly in that spot; mildew had spread its whitish pleating there.
Without scruples, Father availed himself of all the capital of Uncle's
enthusiasm, and pulled him out in a thread along the whole length of
the hallway and the left wing of the house. Advancing on his steplad-
ders, along the wall of the dark corridor, he drove little nails into the
wall, all along the path of Uncle's inherent being. Those smoky yellow
afternoons were almost completely dark. Father held a lighted candle
close to the rotting wall, to illuminate it inch by inch. Accounts vary,
but it appears that Uncle Edward, so heroically self-possessed until
that point, at the last moment betrayed a certain impatience. It is
even said that this culminated in a violent, if belated, outburst, which

10
all but wrecked the work in its nal stages of completion. But the
installation was ready now, and Uncle Edward, just as he had been a
model husband, father and businessman all his life, also, in the end,
of higher necessity, submitted to his nal role.
Uncle functioned splendidly. On no occasion did he refuse obe-
dience. Having left his embroiled complications behind, in which so
often before he had been lost and etangled, he had nally discovered
the purity of a uniform and straightforward principal, to which he
would remain subordinate from that time onward. At the cost of his
barely manageable multifacetedness he had now acquired simple, un-
complicated immortality. Was he happy? There's no point in asking.
Such a question has meaning only in the case of beings replete with
a wealth of alternatives and possibilities, so that actual reality can
stand in opposition to possibilities incompletely real, and be reected
in them. But uncle Edward had no alternatives  there was no such
thing as the dichotomy of happy and unhappy for him, since he was
fully integrated, entirely self-identical. One could not suppress a cer-
tain admiration at seeing him functioning so punctually, so precisely.
Even his wife, aunt Teresa, who came looking for her husband some-
time later, could not restrain herself from pressing the button every
once in a while, to hear that sonorous, clamorous voice, in which she
recognised the former timbre of his voice at times of irritation. As
for his daughter, Edza, one might say that she admired her Father's
career. Later, it is true, she did take a certain revenge on me for my
father's deed, but that is part of another story now.

11
 II

DAYS PASSED; the afternoons grew longer. There was nothing

to be done with them. A surfeit of still raw, still vain and useless time
lengthened the evenings into empty twilights. Adela, having washed
the dishes early and cleaned the kitchen, was standing bemused on
the porch, gazing vacantly into the reddening pale evening distance.
Her beautiful eyes, so expressive at other times, were frozen in blank
contemplation  large, convex and shining. Her complexion, clouded
and greyed at the end of winter from the fumes of the kitchen, was now
rejuvenated under the inuence of that month's springtime gravitation
 waxing quarter-moon by quarter-moon  and imbued with milky
reections, opal shades and enamel sparkles. She had prevailed over
the shop assistants now, they having lost face under her dark looks.
They had abandoned their role of jaded frequenters of taverns and
bordellos, and, shaken by her new beauty, sought another basis on
which to approach her, ready to concede to relations on new terms, to
acknowledge empirically established facts.
Despite all expectations, Father's experiments produced no up-
heaval in everyday life. The grafting of mesmerism on to the body of
modern physics had not proved fertile. Not that there was no grain
of legitimacy inherent in Father's discoveries, but it is not truth that
determines the success of an idea. Our metaphysical hunger is limited
and quickly sated. Father was standing on the very threshold of new
and sensational discoveries when disinclination and anarchy began to
sneak into all of us, the ranks of his supporters and neophytes. Signs
of impatience came ever more frequently, building up to open protest.
Our natures rebelled against the relaxation of fundamental laws; we
could take no more new wonders. We wanted a return to the old, solid
and reliable prose of the eternal order. And Father understood this.
He understood that he had gone too far, and curtailed the ight of his
ideas. The circle of his elegant disciples  men with twirled up mous-

12
taches and their ladyfriends  began to melt away by the day. Father,
hoping to withdraw with honour, was about to deliver his last, his de-
cisive lecture, when a new event suddenly turned everyone's attention
in a completely unexpected direction.
One day, my brother, returning home from school, brought the im-
probable but true news of the impending end of the world. We made
him repeat it, sure that we must have misheard. But no. Here is how
we received that incredible, that utterly incomprehensible news. Just
so, just as it stood, unready and unnished, at a chance point in time
and space, without ever closing its accounts or reaching any goal, in
mid-sentence with no full stop or exclamation mark, without God's
judgement or wrath  on the friendliest of terms, as it were, dutifully
and according to common consent and mutually acknowledged princi-
ples  the world was simply and irrevocably about to come to grief.
No, it was not to be the eschatological, tragical End predicted long ago
by prophets, no last act of The Divine Comedy. No, rather it was to
be a trick cyclist's hoopla-prestidigitatory, magnicently hocus-pocus
and tyro-experimental end of the world  amid the applause of all the
spirits of Progress. Almost no one was left unconvinced. The terri-
ed and the protesting were immediately shouted down. For why did
they not understand that this was a simply stupendous chance, the
most progressive, free thinking end of the world, betting the times,
plainly honourable, and a credit to the Highest Wisdom? There was
fervent conviction  sketches were made ad oculos on pages torn from
notebooks; irrefutable demonstrations were performed; the opponents
and sceptics were defeated. Full-page drawings appeared in illustrated
magazines, images anticipating the disaster in spectacular staging. In
these, populous cities were portrayed, in nocturnal panic under a sky
resplendent with glowing signs and astral phenomena. The astounding
motion of a distant bolide was portrayed, its parabolic course, levelled
unwaveringly at the terrestrial globe, hanging in the sky in motionless
ight, approaching at a speed of many miles per second. Like in a

13
circus farce, top hats and bowler hats ew into the air, hair stood on
end, umbrellas opened by themselves, and bald patches were uncov-
ered under wigs that ew away  all under a huge black sky and the
ickering, simultaneous alarum of all the stars.
Something festive was infused in our lives  a kind of enthusi-
asm, an eagerness. A kind of ponderousness and solemnity entered
our movements, swelled our breasts with cosmic sighs. At night the
terrestrial globe was ebullient with ceremonial uproar, the unanimous
ecstasy of the thousands. Black and enormous nights came. Neb-
ulae of stars amassed in untold swarms around the Earth. Those
variously arranged swarms were xed in the black interplanetary ex-
panses, sprinkling meteor dust from abyss to abyss. Lost in the innite
spaces, we all but abandoned the terrestrial globe beneath our feet.
Disoriented, losing our way, we hung over the inverted zenith with
our heads downward, like antipodeans, and we followed in the wake of
the astral throng, running a licked nger along all the light years be-
tween star and star. Thus we meandered in the sky, in an incoherent,
chaotic line-formation, dispersed in all directions on the endless rungs
of the night, emigrants from a globe left behind, plundering the vast
multitude of the stars. The last barricades were broached, and cy-
clists, standing upright on their velocipedes, rode into the black astral
space, the perpetual opening up of ever newer constellations  they
hung in motionless ight in the interplanetary vacuum, and, ying
down a siding, blazed their trails of sleepless cosmography, while in
truth they were caught up in interplanetary lethargy, blackened with
soot as if they had thrust their heads into a stove's ventilator shaft 
their ultimate goal, the nishing line of all those blind ights.
At the end of one short, incoherent and half slept through day,
the night opened like a great, teeming homeland. Crowds turned out
into the streets and spilled on to the squares  a mass of heads,
like a barrelful of shining caviar pouring out in streams of glistenisng
scattershot, owing in rivers under a night sky as black as pitch and

14
raucous with stars. Ladders broke under the weight of the thousands;
anguished gurines appeared at every window, and matchstick people,
standing on shifting kindling, jumped in somnambulant fervor over
parapets. They formed living chains, moving clusters and columns,
like ants, each on another's shoulders  streaming from the windows
on to the platforms of the squares, illuminated by a glow of burning
tar barrels.
Please forgive me if, in describing these scenes full of enormous
congregation and tumult, I fall into exaggeration, unintentionally fol-
lowing the example of certain old engravings in the great book of
the calamities and catastrophies of the human race. Why, they all
incline toward a single proto-image  and that megalomaniacal exag-
geration, the enormous pathos of those scenes, tells us that here we
have smashed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories  some
proto-barrel of myth  and broken into a prehuman night lled with
the babbling of the elements, the bubbling of anamnesis, and we can
no longer hold back the rising of the deluge. Ah, those piscine and
teeming nights, stocked with a spry of stars, glistening with scales!
Ah, those shoals of mouths tirelessly swallowing, in small gulps, hun-
gry mouthfuls, all the swelling, un-drunk streams of those black and
torrential nights! What fatal traps, what woeful dragnets were those
dark, thousandfold propagated generations drawing toward?
O skies of those days, all in illuminated signals and meteors, de-
lineated by astronomers' calculations, traced a thousandfold, enumer-
ated, and covered with watery algebraic markings. We wandered in
the wake of heavens pulsating with explosions of distant suns, in side-
real dazzlements, our faces lit by the cerulean glory of those nights
 human swarms drifting in a broad trail across a Milky Way spilled
on to the whole sky, a human stream with cyclists arcing above it on
their spider-like apparatus. O starry arena of night, inscribed to your
furthest ends by the acrobatics, spirals, lariats and nooses of those
elastic rides. O cycloids and epicycloids, inspiredly executed along the

15
sky's diagonals, losing the wire spokes, unconcerned at discarding the
glimmering wheels, and now reaching  to a truly illuminating degree!
 the bare, pure and singular principle of cycling. Why, a new con-
stellation dates from those days, a thirteenth gure ranked now and
forever among the zodiacal number, resplendent in our night sky from
that time onward: `The Cyclist'.
Apartments, open on all sides during those nights, stood empty
in the light of insistently smoking lamps. Their curtains blew, cast
far out into the night, and thus those enlades stood in an unending,
all-embracing draught, which weaved through them in one incessant,
insistent alarum. Uncle Edward sounded the alert. He had nally lost
his patience; it was as simple as that. He had broken his bonds. He
had trampled on his categorical imperative, broke loose from the rigors
of his lofty morality  and sounded the alert. He was hastily rendered
speechless with the aid of a long washing pole; his insistent outburst
was strenuously stied with kitchen rags. But even gagged in this way
he went on wildly insisting, frantically rattling, unrestrainedly rattling
 he was past caring now, and life drained out of him along with that
rattle; he bled openly in the sight of all, in terrible vehemence, with
no rescue at hand.
Occasionally someone would fall for a moment into an empty room
pierced by that vehement alarum, amid lamps burning with tall ames;
he would take a few steps from the threshold on tiptoe and come to a
hesitant halt as if looking for something. Without a word, the mirrors
would take him into their transparent depths, divide that taciturn soul
among themselves. Through all of those bright and empty rooms, Un-
cle Edward would be insisting at the top of his voice, and the lonely
deserter of the stars, lled with bad conscience, as if he were there to
commit some indecent act, would furtively withdraw from the apart-
ment, make his way to the door, marched out by the vigilant mirrors,
which opened their gleaming lane for him, while in their depths a
swarm of doubles, also frightened away, would disperse on tiptoe in

16
dierent directions, holding their ngers to their lips.
The sky opened above us once more, its immensities strewn with
stardust. In that sky, night after night at an early hour, that terrible,
obliquely tilting bolide would appear, suspended at the apex of its
parabola, levelled motionlessly at the Earth, swallowing, to no eect,
some or other number of thousands of miles per second. All gazes were
levelled at it, while it, cylindrical in shape and glowing metalically,
somewhat brighter at its rounded core, fullled its daily quota with
mathematical precision. How dicult it was to believe that that tiny
maggot, shining innocently among innumerable swarms of stars, was
Balthazar's ery nger writing the destruction of our globe on the
tablet of the sky. But every child knew by heart that fatal formula
bracketed by a multiple integral symbol, which, having delimited its
domain, had given rise to our inevitable perdition. What could save
us now?
While the mob was running hither and thither in the great night,
ever more lost among starry splendours and phenomena, Father stayed
furtively at home. He alone knew the secret way out of this predica-
ment, the stage door of cosmology, and he smiled mysteriously. As
uncle Edward desperately sounded the alert, stied by rags, Father
quietly put his head into the ventilator shaft of the stove. It was
mued there, and black as pitch. It smelled of warm air and soot 
a refuge and a harbour. Father settled down comfortably; he closed
his eyes in bliss. In that black diving bell of the house, raised above
the roof into the starlit night, the dim ray of a star fell, and, bent
as if in the lenses of a telescope, sprouted with light in the hearth,
germinated at the bottom of the dark alembic of the chimney. Father
cautiously turned the screw of his micrometer, and there, in the visual
eld of that telescope, that dreadful manifestation slowly came into
view, as bright as the moon, brought within hand's reach by magni-
cation, in chalky relief, plastic and glowing in the silent blackness of
the planetary emptiness. It was somewhat scrofulous, pockmarked, a

17
full brother of the moon, its lost double returning after a thousand
year journey to its maternal globe. My father brought it close to his
protruding eye; it was thoroughly riddled with holes, like a slice of
Swiss cheese, pale yellow and sharply lit, covered with pimples and as
white as leprosy. With his hand on the screw of the micrometer, his
eye dazzled by the light of the eyepiece, Father cast a cold glance over
that calcareous globe, and saw on its surface the convoluted picture of
the sickness eating away at it from the inside, the winding channels of
a bookworm, tunnelling through its cheesy, maggoty surface. Father
gave a start; he realised his mistake. No, it wasn't Swiss cheese; it
was obviously a human brain, an anatomical preparation of a brain
in its whole complicated structure. Father distinctly saw the edges of
its layers, its rolls of grey matter. Straining his eyes further, he could
even read the faint letters of inscriptions running in dierent direc-
tions on the convoluted map of that hemisphere. The brain seemed to
have been chloroformed, fast asleep, and smiling in its sleep. Reaching
the core of that smile, Father caught a glimpse, through the compli-
cated surface picture, of the essence of the phenomenon, and he too
smiled to himself. For what might we not nd in our own, trusted
chimney, as black as snu, in the corner! Through the rolls of grey
matter, through its minute granulation of swellings, Father perceived
the distinctly visible contours of an embryo in its typical head over
heels position, its tiny sts in front of its face, sleeping upside down
its blissful sleep in the clear water of the amnion. Father left it in that
position. He rose with relief and closed the ap of the chimney shaft.
Thus far and no further. How so  and what had happened to
the end of the world? What had become of that magnicent nale,
after such a magnicently expounded introduction? Downcast eyes
and a smile. Had an error crept into the calculations, a tiny error
of addition, a misprint in the transcription of the gures? Nothing
of the sort. The calculations were exact; no error had crept into the
column of digits. So what had happened? Please listen. The bolide

18
was advancing dauntlessly, coming at a gallop, like an ambitious horse
in order to nish rst. And the fashion of the season kept pace with it.
For a time it ew at the head of the epoch, to which it lent its form and
its name. Then those two bold courses came into alignment, and ran
in parallel at a powerful gallop, and our hearts beat in time with them.
But then fashion drew ahead by a nose, and slowly began to overtake
the indefatigable bolide. That millimetre had decided the comet's
fate. It was doomed now, outdistanced once and for all. Our hearts
now beat in time with fashion, and slowly left the magnicent bolide
behind. We watched indierently as it grew pale, receded, and in the
end stood in resignation on the horizon, tilted to the side, attempting
in vain the last bend on its curving path, distant and blue, harmless
now forever. It was unplaced in the race; the power of the news was
exhausted  nobody cares about the loser. Left to its own devices, it
withered quietly amid universal indierence.
We returned to our daily tasks with our heads bowed, richer by
one disappointment. The cosmic perspectives were hurriedly rolled
up; life returned to its usual paths. We slept incessantly in those
days, by day and by night, making up for time of lost sleep. We lay
side by side in already dark apartments, overcome by sleep, carried
down a siding of starless dreams by our own breathing. Drifting thus,
we undulated, squeaking bellies, bagpipes and banduras, making our
way by melodious snoring over all the bumpy terrain of the now closed
and starless night. Uncle Edward fell silent for the ages. An echo of his
alaruming despair still hung in the air, but he himself was dead now.
Life had escaped from him along with that rattling paroxysm. The
circuit had opened, and he himself had stepped out unhindered on to
ever higher rungs of immortality. In the dark apartment, Father kept
solitary watch, silently wandering through rooms lled with melodious
sleep. He occasionally opened the chimney ventilator and peeked with
a smile into the dark chasm, where a smiling Homunculus slept its
illuminated sleep for the ages, enclosed in a glass ampule, a plenitude

19
of neon-like light owing around it  doomed now, crossed out and
led away, an archival entry in the great record-oce of the sky.

20