10 The Metaphysics of Youth
at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. Throughout his life the
VIII
Lan-
How did Sappho and her women-friends talk among themselves?—
th_e futl.!re. The
guage is veiled like the past; like silence it looks toward
es his wom-
speaker summons the past in it; veiled by language, he conceiv
as they may,
anly past in conversation—but the women remain silent. Listen
one
the words remain unspoken. They bring their bodies close and caress
another. Their conversation has freed itself from the subject and from
and
language. Despite this it marks out a terrain. For only among them,
part of the
when they are together, does the conversation come to rest as
past. Now, finally, it has come to itself: it has turned to greatness
beneath
Silent
their gaze, just as life had been greatness before the futile conversation.
women are the speakers of what has been spoken. They leave the circle;
they alone perceive the perfection of its roundness.
None of them complain; they gaze in wonderment. The love of their
bodies does not procreate, but their love is beautiful to see. And they venture
to gaze at one another. It makes them catch their breath, while the words
fade away in space. Silence and voluptuous delight—eternally divorced in
conversation—have become one. The silence of the conversations was future
delight; delight was bygone silence. Among the women, however, the con-
versations were perceived from the frontier of silent delight. In a great burst
of light, the youth of mysterious conversations arose. Essence was radiant.
The Diary
The next place might be so near at hand
That one could hear the cocks crowing in it, the dogs barking;
But the people would grow old and die
Without ever having been there.
—Lao Tau, trans. Archur Waley
1 it plunges. It is time after all. In this self, to which events occur and which
We wish to pay heed to the sources of the unnameable despair that flows
in every soul. The souls listen expectantly to the melody of their youth—a
youth that is guaranteed them a thousandfold. But the more they immerse
themselves in the uncertain decades and broach that part of their youth
which is most laden with future, the more orphaned they are in the empti-
ness of the present. One day they awake to despair: the first day of the diary.
With hopeless earnestness it poses the question: In what time does man
live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at
all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm
emptiness of time surrounds him, but not immortality. Devoured by the
countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium
in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The
fulfilled tranguillity in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from
him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance
occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful
time, immortal time, at which he did not even guess. Lurking even more
menacingly behind the everyday reality was death. Now it manifests itself
in little things, and kills daily so that life itself may go on. Until one day
the great death falls from the clouds, like a hand that forbids life to go on.
From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that
instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.
In despair, he thus recalls his childhood. In those days there was time
without flight and an “I” without death. He gazes down and down into the
current whence he had emerged and slowly, finally, he is redeemed by losing
his comprehension. Amid such obliviousness, not knowing what he thinks
and yet thinking himself redeemed, he begins the diary. It is the unfathom-
able document of a life never lived, the book of a life in whose time
everything that we experienced inadequately is transformed into experience
perfected.
A diary is an act of liberation, covert and unrestrained in its victory. No
unfree spirit will understand this book. When the self was devoured by
yearning for itself, devoured by its desire for youth, devoured by the lust
for power over the years to come, devoured by the yearning to pass calmly
through the days to come, darkly inflamed by the pleasures of idleness but
cursed and imprisoned in calendar time, clock time, and stock-exchange
time, and when no ray of immortality cast its light over the self—it began
to glow of its own accord. I am myself (it knows), a ray of light. Not the
murky inwardness of the self which calls me “I” and tortures me with its
intimacies, but the ray of light of that other self which appears to oppress
me but which is also myself: the ray of time. Trembling, an “I” that we
know only from our diaries stands on the brink of an immortality into which
encounters human beings—friends, enemies, and lovers—in this self courses
immortal time. The time of its greatness runs out in it; it is the glow that
radiates from time and nothing else.
This believer writes his diary. He writes it at intervals and will never
complete it, because he will die. What is an interval in a diary? It does not
occur in developmental time, for that has been abrogated. It does not occur
in time at all, for time has vanished. Instead it is a book of time: a book of
days. This transmits the rays of his knowledge through space. A diary does
not contain a chain of experiences, for then it would exist without intervals.
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Instead time is overcome, and overcome, too, is the self that acts in time: I
am entirely transposed into time; it irradiates me. Nothing further can
happen to this self, this creation of time. Everything else on which time
exerts its effect yields to it. For in the diary our self, as time, impinges on
everything else, the “I” befalls all things, they gravitate toward our self. But
time no longer impinges on this self, which is now the birth of immortal
time. The self experiences timelessness, all things are assembled in it. It lives
all-powerful in the interval; in the interval (the diary’s silence), the
experiences its own time, pure time. It gathers itself in the interval; no thing
pushes its way into its immortal juxtaposition of events. Here it draws the
strength to impinge on things, to absorb them, to misrecognize its own fate.
The interval is safe and secure, and where there is silence, nothing can befall.
No catastrophe finds its way into the lines of this book. That is why we do
not believe in derivations and sources; we never remember what has befallen
us. Time, which shines forth as the self that we are, impinges on all things
around us as they become our fate. That time, our essence, is the immortality
in which others die. What kills them lets us feel our essential nature in death
(the final interval).
n sends a single thought in their direction. Permeated by time, the landscape
Inclining her head, the beloved of the landscape shines in time,
But the enemy broods darkly above the center.
His wings are poised in slumber. The black redeemer of the lands
Breathes out his crystal No, and decides our death.
On rare occasions the diary emerges hesitantly from the immortality of its
intervals and writes itself. Silently it rejoices and surveys the fates that lie
within it, clearly entailed by its time. Thirsting for definition, things draw
near in the expectation of receiving their fate at its hands. In their impotence
they approach its sovereign majesty; their amorphousness seeks definition.
They give limits to humanity through their questioning existence and lend
depth to time. And as time at its extremity collides with things, it quivers
with a hint of insecurity, and, questioning, replies to the questions posed by
those things. In the interchange of such vibrations, the self has its life. This
is the content of our diaries: our destiny declares its faith in us because we
have long since ceased to relate it to oursclves—we who have died and who
are resurrected in what happens to us.
There is, however, a place reserved for the resurrections of the self, even
when time disperses it in ever widening waves. That is the landscape. As
landscape all events surround us, for we, the time of things, know no time.
Nothing but the leaning of the trees, the horizon, the silhouetted mountain
ridges, which suddenly awake full of meaning because they have placed us
in their midst. The landscape transports us into their midst, the trembling
treetops assail us with questions, the valleys envelop us with mist, incom-
prehensible houses oppress us with their shapes. We, their midpoint, impinge
on them. But from all the time when we stand there quivering, one question
remains: Are we time? Arrogance tempts us to answer yes—and then the
landscape would vanish. We would be citizens. But the spell of the book
bids us be silent. The only answer is that we set out on a path. As we
“I” advance, the same surroundings sanctify us. Knowing no answers but form-
ing the center, we define things with the movement of our bodies. By
drawing nigh and distancing ourselves once again on our wanderings, we
single out trees and fields from their like and flood them with the time of
our existence. We give firm definition to fields and mountains in their
arbitrariness: they are our past existence—that was the prophecy of child-
hood. We are their future. Naked in this futurity, the landscape welcomes
us, the grownups. Exposed, it responds to the shudder of temporality with
which we assault the landscape. Here we wake up and partake of the
morning repast of youth. Things perceive us; their gaze propels us into the
future, since we do not respond to them but instead step among them.
Around us is the landscape where we rejected their appeal. Spirituality’s
thousand cries of glee storm around the landscape—so with a smile the diary
breathes before us, deeply stirred. We are safe in each other’s care, the
landscape and 1. We plunge from nakedness to nakedness. Gathered to-
gether, we come to ourselves.
The landscape sends us our beloved. We encounter nothing that is not in
landscape, and in it we find nothing but future. It knows but one girl, and
she is already a woman. She enters the diary along with the history of her
future. Together we have already died once. We were once entirely identical
with that story. If we impinge on it in death, it impinges on us in life,
countless times. From the vantage point of death, every girl is the beloved
woman who encounters us sleepers in our diary. And her awakening takes
place at night—invisibly, to the diary. This is the shape of love in a diary;
it meets us in the landscape, beneath a very bright sky. Passion has slept its
fill between us, and the woman is a girl, since she girlishly gives us back our
unused time that she has collected in her death. The plunging nakedness
which overwhelms us in the landscape is counterbalanced by the naked
beloved.
When our time expelled us from our isolation into the landscape and our
beloved strode toward us on the protected path of thought, we could feel
how time, which sent us forth, flooded back toward us. This rhythm of time,
which returns home to us from all corners of the earth, lulls us to sleep.
Anyone who reads a diary falls asleep over it and fulfills the fate of its writer.
Again and again the diary conjures up the death of its writer, if only in the
14 The Metaphysics of Youth
Once upon a time the things fell across his path, instead of coming to meet
sleep of the reader: our diary acknowledges only one reader, and he becomes him; they assailed him from all sides while he took flight. Never did the
the redeemer as he is mastered by the book. We ourselves are the reader, or
noble spirit taste the love of the defeated. He felt mistrust about whether
our own enemy. He has found no entry into the kingdom that flowered he was meant by the things. “Do you mean me?” he asked of the victory
around us. He is none other than the expelled, purified “L” dwelling that had fallen to him. “Do you mean me?” to the girl who has cuddled up
invisibly in the unnameable center of time. He has not abandoned himself
to him. Thus did he tear himself away from his consummation. He had
to the current of fate that washed around us. As the landscape rose up
appeared as victor to his victory, as the beloved to the woman who loves
toward us, strangely invigorated by us, as our beloved flew past us, she him. But love had come to him and victory had fallen at his feet while he
whom we had once wooed, the enemy stands in the middle of the stream,
was sacrificing to the Penates of his privacy. He ran past his fate, unable
as upright as she. But more powerful. He sends landscape and beloved
ever to encounter it.
toward us and is the indefatigable thinker of the thoughts that come only
But when, in the diary, the sovereignty of the self withdrew and the raging
to us. He comes to meet us in total clarity, and while time conceals itself in
against the way things happen fell silent, events showed themselves to be
the silent melody of the diary intervals, he is busily at work. He suddenly
undecided. The ever more distant visibility of this self that relates nothing
rears up in an interval like a fanfare, and sends us off on an adventure. He
more to itself weaves the ever more imminent myth of things that storm
is no less a manifestation of time than we are, but he is also the most
on, endlessly attracted to the self, as a restless questioning, thirsting for
powerful reflector of ourselves. Dazzling us with the knowledge of love and
of distant lands, he returns, bursting in on us, inciting our definition.
the vision
The new storm rages in the agitated self. Dispatched in the shape of time,
immortality to ever more distant missions. He knows the empires of the
things storm on within it, responding to it in their humble, distancing
hundred deaths that surround time, and wishes to drown them in immor-
movement toward the center of the interval, toward the womb of time,
tality. After every sight and every flight from death, we return home to
whence the self radiates outward. And fate is: this countermovement of
ourselves as our enemy. The diary never speaks of any other enemy, since
things in the time of the self. And that time of the self in which the things
every enemy fades away when confronted by the hostility of our illustrious
befall us—that is greatness. To it all future is past. The past of things is the
knowledge; for he is an incompetent compared to us, who never catch up
future of the “I”-time. But past things have futurity. They dispatch the time
with our own time, who are always lagging behind it or precociously
overtaking it. We are always putting our immortality at risk and losing it. of the self anew when they have entered into the diary interval. With the
Our enemy knows this; he is the courageous, indefatigable conscience which events our diary writes the history of our future existence. And thereby
prophesies our past fate. The diary writes the story of our greatness from
spurs us on. Our diary writes what it must, while he remains active when
the vantage point of our death. For once, the time of things is really
it breaks off at intervals. In his hand rest the scales of our time and of
overcome in the time of the self; fate is overcome in greatness; and intervals
immortal time. When will they come to rest? We shall befall ourselves.
in the interval. One day the rejuvenated enemy will confront us with his
boundless love, he who has gathered together all our dazzled weakness in
I his strength, bedded down all our nakedness in his bodilessness, and
The cowardice of the living, whose manifold self is present in every adven- drowned out all our silence with his speechlessness. He brings all things
ture and constantly hides its features in the garments of its dignity— home and puts an end to all men, since he is the great interval: death. In
death we befall ourselves; our deadness releases itself from things. And the
this cowardice must ultimately become unbearable. For every step we took
time of death is our own. Redeemed, we become aware of the fulfillment
into the kingdom of fate, we also kept looking back—to see whether we
were truthful even when unobserved. So the infinitely humiliated sover- of the game; the time of death was the time of our diary; death was the last
eign will in us finally became weary; it turned away, full of endless contempt
interval, the first loving enemy, death which bears us with all greatness and
for the self that had been given to it. It mounted a throne in the imagina- the manifold fate of our wide plain into the unnameable centerpoint of time.
Death, which for one instant bestows immortality upon us. Simple and
tion and waited. In large letters the stylus of its sleeping spirit wrote the
multifold, this is the content of our diaries. The vocation that we proudly
diary. dismissed in our youth takes us by surprise. Yet it is nothing but a call to
These books, then, are concerned with the accession to the throne of an
immortality. We enter into the time that was in the diary, the symbol of
abdicating self. Abdicating from the experience for which he holds his self
yearning, the rite of purification. With us things sink toward the center, with
to be neither worthy nor capable, and from which he ultimately retreats.
16 1ne MELaAPANyYSICS or 10ULD AL AYTAVLAIIOIVO UM LUUUIL 4/

us they await the new radiance. For immortality can be found only in death, house without windows, a ballroom without world. Flights of stairs lead
and time rises up at the end of time. up and down, marble. Here time is captured. It sometimes resists, moves its
weary breath in us, and makes us restless. But a word, uttered in the night,
summons someone to us; we walk together, we did not really need the music
but could lie together in the dark, even though our eyes would flash, just
The Ball
like a sword between people. We know that all the merciless realities that
For the sake of what prelude do we cheat ourselves of our dreams? With a have been expelled still flutter round this house. The poets with their bitter
wave of the hand we push them aside into the pillows, leave them behind, smiles, the saints and the policemen, and the waiting cars. From time to
while some of them flutter silently about our heads. How do we dare carry time, music penetrates to the outside world and submerges them.
them into the brightness of day, as we awake? Oh, into the brightness! All
Whritten in 1913-1914; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Translated by Rodney Living-
of us carry invisible dreams around with us; how deeply veiled the girls’ stone.
faces are, their eyes are secret [beimliche] nests of the uncanny [der Unheim-
lichen), of dreams, quite inaccessible, luminous from sheer perfection. The
music elevates us all to the level of that bright strip of light—you have all
seen it—that shines from beneath the curtain when the violins tune up in
the orchestra. The dance begins. Our hands slide off one another; our
glances meet, laden, emptying themselves out and smiling from the ultimate
heaven. Our bodies make careful contact; we do not arouse each other from
our dreams, or call each other homeward into the darkness—out of the
night of nights which is not day. How we love cach other! How we safeguard
our nakedness! We have bound everything in gay colors, masks, alternately
withholding and promising naked flesh. In everything there is something
monstrous that we have to keep quiet about. But we hurl ourselves into the
rhythm of the violins; never was a night more ethereal, more uncanny, more
chaste than this.
Where we stand alone, on a cartload of fanfares, alone in the bright night
of nights which we conjured up, our fleeing soul invites a woman to come—a
girl who stands at the end of a distant room.
She walks regally across the parquet floor that lies so smoothly between
the dancers, as if it reflected the music; for this smooth floor to which people
do not belong creates a space for Elysium, the paradise that joins the isolated
into a round dance. Her stately step creates order among the dancers; she
presses some to leave; they break into fragments at the tables where the din
of the lonely holds sway, or where people move along corridors, as if on
tightropes through the night.
When did night ever attain brightness and become radiant, if not here?
When was time ever overcome? Who knows whom we will meet at this
hour? Otherwise (were there an “otherwise”) we would be just here, but
already complete; otherwise we would perhaps just pour away the dregs of
the day and start to taste the new one. But now we pour the foaming day
over into the purple crystal of the night; it becomes peaceful and sparkling.
The music transports our thoughts; our eyes reflect our friends around
us, how they all move, surrounded by the flowing night. We are truly in a