by
Sándor Márai
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[...] But there comes the point when your soul overflows with the desire for solitude, when all you want is, quietly, with a proper human dignity, to prepare yourself for the end, for the last human task of all: for death. When you get to that point you must be careful not to cheat, because if you do, you lose your right to act. As long as you are acting out of selfishness, out of a desire for comfort or a sense of grievance; as long as desiring solitude is a form of vanity, you are still in hock to the world and to all those who represent the world for you. But there comes a day when the soul completely fills with desire for solitude, when you want nothing but to cast from your soul everything superfluous, false, or secondary. When a man sets out on a long, dangerous journey, he is very careful what he packs. He examines every item from every possible point of view. He measures and judges the worth of everything, and only then does he find a place for it in his modest pack. Only when he is sure he is certain to need it. Chinese hermits, who leave their families when they reach roughly sixty, take leave of them like this. All they take is one small pack. They leave the house at dawn, silently, with a smile. It is not a change that they want; no, they are heading for the mountains to find solitude and death. It’s the last human journey. That is what you have a right to. The pack you take with you for such a journey must be light—something you can carry with one hand. It will contain nothing unnecessary, not a single item of vanity. It is a very powerful desire at a certain age. Once you hear the lapping sound of loneliness you immediately recognize it as something familiar. It is as if you had been born by the sea, then spent the rest of your life in noisy cities; but one night you hear it again in your dreams: the sea. And you want to live alone, to live without a purpose, to render up everything to those who have a right to it, and then to leave; to wash your soul clear and wait.
Solitude is hard at first: it’s like being sentenced. There are times when you find it unbearable. And perhaps that severe sentence might seem lighter if you could, after all, share it with someone, it doesn’t matter who: with rough companions, anonymous women. There are such times, times of weakness. But they pass, because slowly the loneliness enfolds you, takes personal possession of you, like a mysterious force of life—like time, time in which everything happens. Suddenly you understand that everything that has happened has happened according to its own timetable. First came curiosity, then desire, then work, and finally, here comes loneliness. There’s nothing you want now: you have no hope of consolation in a new woman, no hope of a friend whose wise counsel might heal your soul. You find all human talk vanity, even the wisest. There is so much selfishness in every human feeling. It’s all empty promises, refined forms of blackmail: all helpless, hopeless attachment! Once you know this, you no longer hope for anything from people; you don’t expect women to be of help, you recognize the price and terrifying consequences of money, power, and success, and you no longer want anything of life but to huddle up in some mean corner, without companionship, assistance, and comfort, and listen to the silence that slowly begins to lap at your soul as it does at the shores of time … Then, and only then, you have the right to leave: because leaving is something you do have a perfect right to.
Maybe it was not against me, not personally. It was just that I embodied a world for which she felt an infinite longing, a world she so desperately, so feverishly envied, and tried, in a cold fury, with such unfortunate results, to enter, so that when at last she found a repository for these longings—that is to say, in me—she quite lost her equilibrium. At first she was anxious and fussy. She sent back her food. Then, to my quiet surprise, she started changing hotel rooms. She exchanged the little en suite apartment overlooking the park for a bigger one that had a view of the river, with separate bedroom and dressing room. “It’s quieter here,” she said, like a fussy traveling diva. I listened to her complaints with a smile. Naturally I paid her bills and said nothing. I gave her a checkbook and asked her to pay for everything herself. After only three months, the bank informed me—with surprising speed—that the sizable account I had opened for Judit had nothing left in it. How, and on what, had she spent the money, which for her would have represented a substantial sum, a small fortune? It wasn’t a question I ever addressed to her, of course: quite likely she would not have been able to answer. The harness of her soul had snapped, that’s all. Her wardrobe overflowed with expensive clothes selected, surprisingly, according to the best of taste, mostly entirely superfluous feminine fripperies. She shopped in the best stores, without a thought, paying by check: hats, dresses, furs, fashionable novelties, first smaller, then bigger items of jewelry. She craved these things with an extraordinary hunger, a hunger somewhat unnatural in her position. Most of the things she never wore. She was like a starved creature set in front of a laid table, who doesn’t care that nature very quickly sets a limit to our desires or that surfeit might lead to sickness.
What effect did this news have on me? I’d like to be honest with you, so I am trying to recall, to look into my heart, to check my recollection, and can only answer in a single word: none. It is hard for people to understand the true significance of actions and relationships. Someone dies, for example. You don’t understand it. The person is already buried, and you still feel nothing. You go about in mourning with a ceremonial solemnity, you look straight ahead of you when you are in society, but then, when you’re at home, alone, you yawn, you scratch your nose, you read a book and think of everything except the dead man you are supposedly mourning. On the outside you behave one way, properly somber and funereal; but inside, you are astonished to note, you feel absolutely nothing, at most a kind of guilty satisfaction and relief. And indifference: a deep indifference. This lasts a while, for days, perhaps for months. You cheat the world: you are indifferent on the sly. Then one day, much later, maybe after a year, when the dead one has long decomposed, you are just walking along and suddenly you feel dizzy and have to lean against the wall because the event has finally gotten through to you: the feeling that had tied you to the dead one. The meaning of death. The fact, the reality of it, the knowledge that it is useless to scrape away the earth with your fingers and uncover what is left of him: you will never again see that smile, and all the wisdom and power in the world is incapable of raising the dead man to make him walk down the street toward you with a smile on his face. You can lead an army and occupy every corner of the globe, but it’s still useless. And then you cry out. Or maybe not even that. You just stand in the street, pale, aware of a loss so great it seems the world has lost all meaning. It is as if you were left totally alone, the only man on earth.
But as I say, one day she had had enough of her new life. She was sick of it. Maybe she had recalled something. Maybe she understood that she couldn’t be compensated for all that had happened to her and the others, to countless millions of people, by rushing round the shops: that there was no solution to be found on the individual level. Great matters are not settled by personal means. The personal is hopeless, superfluous. There is no personal recompense for what has happened and goes on happening to people at large, for what happens now and has happened for a thousand years. And all those who break free for a moment, emerge from the shadows, and bathe in the light: even in their happiest moments they harbor the guilty memory of their betrayal. It is as if they had committed their souls for eternity to those left behind. Did she know all this? She never talked about it. People don’t talk about the reasons for their poverty. She remembered poverty as one of the natural world’s natural phenomena. She never blamed the rich. If anything, she blamed the poor, recalling them and everything that constituted poverty in slightly mocking fashion. As if the poor could somehow help it. As if poverty were a form of sickness, and all those who suffered with it might have somehow avoided it. Maybe they didn’t look after themselves properly; maybe they overate or didn’t wear the right clothes in the evening when it was cold. It was the accusing way close family speak of the chronically sick, as if the dying man suffering from acute anemia with only weeks to live might have done something about it. “He should have started taking his medicine earlier,” “He should have let someone open the window,” “He shouldn’t have stuffed himself with poppy-seed cake!” If only the poor man had done all this, he might have escaped the anemia that was killing him! That was something like the way Judit regarded the poor and poverty. It was as if she had said: “Someone should have done something about it.” But she never blamed the rich. She was too worldly-wise for that.
[...] For a long time she did not dare see me as I was. People are always scared of seeing on an ordinary human scale things they have intensely desired or have raised into an ideal. We were living together by this time, and the intolerable tension that had infected our earlier, more feverish years had gone: now we perceived each other as people, as man and woman, complete with physical weaknesses demanding simple human cures … and yet she still liked to regard me in a way I never saw myself. It was as if I were the priest of a strange religion or the scion of some aristocratic family. I saw myself merely as a lonely man nursing a few hopes.
[...] Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting—though maybe it’s not exactly romantic love when just a few cinders remain unconsumed by the purgatorial fires of waiting—hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself. Neither Judit nor I was exactly a youngster by then, but we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words. We reach an age when it is not purely sexual satisfaction we desire of each other, not full-blown happiness or release, but a simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from us, hidden from us even when we were in love: it is the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share a common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think. Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it.
It must have been a terrible time, you say? Wait, let me think about that. I think it was a time of discovery. Questions we never really consider, that we wave away with a gesture, became all too real. What kinds of things? Well, the fact that life is without meaning or purpose, for example—but much else too. We quickly got used to the fear: you can sweat fear out the way you do a fever. It was just that everything changed. The family was no longer the family; a job no longer counted for anything. Lovers made love in a hurry, like children gobbling their food, keen to grab as many sweets as they can, stuffing their cheeks with them when the adults aren’t looking … then the children skip off to go play in the street, out in the chaos. Everything broke down: apartments, relationships. There were moments we could still believe our homes, our jobs, people at large had something to do with us, if only in a psychological way, but come the first bombing raid we suddenly discovered we had nothing at all to do with whatever was important before.
[...] When I first arrived in this enormous gut of a country, I didn’t have a nickel. And today? Take a good look at me, look me up and down—believe it or not, I swear to God I am in debt to the tune of eight thousand greenback dollars! Go out and do it yourself, sucker! And don’t leave your mouth hanging open, I can see you don’t believe me. Ask anyone in the neighborhood, they’ll all tell you. Just hang round awhile and you too can have a lawn mower and an electric cooker with a red light to fry your burgers in a proper scientific manner. And everything is there on tap, because your middle-class middleman is waiting there, his tongue hanging out, just dying to make a lord out of your bottom-line prole. You too will get consumer fever, the way I did, the way a sheep gets fleas.
lol
[...] You and I saw the Commies up close, didn’t we? They can do their song and dance about what it will be like when everything belongs to the masses, the people. The union guys here have worked it out that they get a better deal here with Count Rockefeller and Prince Ford than they’d get from the fruits of their socialist labor. The pay’s better. We know by now that it’s all talk and big words. Is it possible, then, that the class war is still not over? Is there anything the bourgeois has tucked away from us? And should a prole lose his hair over that?