by
Sándor Márai
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Life, you know, becomes increasingly mechanical. Things chill down. The rooms are as well heated as ever they were, your temperature remains normal, your blood pressure is exactly as it was, you still have money in the bank or in your business. Once a week you go to the opera or to the theater, preferably where they are playing something cheerful. You eat light meals at the restaurant; you mix your wine with sparkling water because you have taken note of all the healthy advice. Life presents no problems. Your local doctor—that is if he is only a good doctor not a true one; the two are not the same—shakes your hand after the half-yearly checkup and says you’re fine. But if he is a true doctor—that is to say, a doctor bred in the bone, in the way a pelican is nothing but a pelican and a general is a general even when he is not engaged in a battle and is simply trimming his hedge or doing the crossword—if he is a doctor of this sort, he will not be satisfied with shaking your hand after the half-yearly examination, because despite the fact that your heart, your lungs, your kidneys and liver are all in perfect working order, he recognizes your life is not so, and can sense the chill of loneliness as it works through you, exactly the way a ship’s delicate instruments can detect the mortal danger of the approaching iceberg even in warm waters. I can’t think of another analogy, that’s why I return to the iceberg. But maybe I could just add that the chill is of the kind you feel in the summer, in houses emptied of occupants who have departed for their holidays, having sprinkled camphor here and there and wrapped their furs and carpets up in newspapers, while outside it is summer, scorching hot summer, and behind the closed shutters the lonely furniture and the shadowed walls have soaked up all the cold and loneliness that even inanimate objects register, that everyone feels is there, that all who are lonely, objects as well as people, breathe in and radiate.
[...] If you live by the sea you are not always thinking that you could sail to India, or that you could drown yourself in it. Most of the time you just live there, read, and go in for a swim. But that afternoon I stood in the dimly lit room and gazed at Judit. She was wearing her black housemaid’s uniform, just as I was wearing my gray industrialist’s suit, preparing to go to my room and put on my black dinner suit evening uniform. That afternoon I stood in the twilit room, looked at the Christmas tree, the kneeling female figure, and suddenly understood all that had happened in the last three years. I understood that the decisive events of our lives are moments of stillness and silence, and that behind the visible, sensible events there lies another level, where something lazy is slumbering, a sleeping monster lodged under the sea or deep in the forest, in the heart of man, a dozy monster, some primeval creature, that rarely shifts itself, that yawns and stretches but rarely reaches for anything, and that this too is you, this monster, this otherness. And that there is a kind of order under the commonplace events in life, the kind you find in music or mathematics … a slightly romantic kind of order. Is that so hard to understand? It’s how I felt. As I said before, I am an artist without a medium, a musician without an instrument.
Look around you. There’s no escape from sexual tension: it’s there in literature, in paintings, on the stage, and out in the street … Go into a theater. There are men and women sitting in the auditorium watching men and women conspiring onstage, chatting, making promises, and taking vows. The audience coughs and croaks and is clearly bored … but let the words “I love you” be spoken by the actors, or “I want you,” or anything that refers to love, possession, parting, and to the happiness or misery associated with them, the auditorium immediately falls deathly silent: thousands upon thousands, all over the world, are holding their breath. Writers spend their lives cooking such things up: they use the emotion to blackmail the audience. And wherever you go, this whipped-up excitement continues unabated: perfumes, bright dresses, expensive furs, half-naked bodies, skin-colored stockings. It’s the same desire at work—the desire to show off a silk-stockinged knee or, in the summer, on the beach, to go practically naked, because this way the feminine presence becomes more teasing, more exciting, not to mention the makeup, the scarlet basque, the blue eye shadow, the blond highlights, all the cheap rubbish they apply and pamper themselves with—it’s all so unhealthy.
[...] But I am no longer jealous. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Look at me. No, old man, I am no longer jealous, because—at considerable cost—I overcame that vanity. Tolstoy still believed in some kind of balm for it, so he assigned to women a role that is half animal; they should give birth and dress in sackcloth. But that is the sickness, not the cure. The alternative, of course, is no better. It proposes women as bits of décor, masterpieces of emotion. How can I respect, how can I give my heart and mind to, someone who, from the moment of rising to the hour of lying down, does nothing but dress and preen herself as if to say, “Here I am …” Someone who apparently wishes to make herself attractive to me by means of feather, fur, and scent. But that is too simple. It’s more complicated than that. She wants to be attractive to everyone, you see; she wants to lodge the spore of desire in the whole world’s nervous system. Movies, theaters, the street, the café, the restaurant, the baths, the hills: everywhere it’s the same unhealthy excitement. Do you think nature really needs all this? No, dear boy! Not at all. Only one social arrangement, one mode of production, requires it: it’s the one in which women regard themselves as items for sale.
oof
The story is about jealousy. Tolstoy cursed women, fashion, music—all the bewitchments of social life. The one thing he fails to mention is that inner peace is not to be achieved by changes in social order, or by changing the means of production, but by ourselves alone. How? By overcoming vanity and desire. Is that possible? … It’s all but impossible. Maybe later, at some stage in the future, it may happen. Time does not diminish desire; but fury, jealousy, greed, the hopeless excitement and disgust that are key elements in desire and its satisfaction, might gradually fall away or wear away. One simply grows tired, you see. There are times even now when I am glad to feel old age knocking at the door. What I sometimes desire now are rainy days when I can sit by the fire with a glass of red wine and an old book that speaks of past desires and disappointments.
[...] Once, a long time ago, I tried the experiment of taking her away to Merano. It was on the way there I discovered it was hopeless, that there would not be an accommodation. My life—what I had made of it—was certainly tolerable but almost entirely without meaning. A great artist might be able to cope with such loneliness. He’d pay a terrible price for it, but his work might offer him some compensation. No one else could do his work for him, after all. His work would offer something simple and lasting: people would regard it as something miraculous. That’s what they say. It was what I imagined. I spoke to Lázár about it once and he was of a different opinion. He said that the sense of loneliness is bound to lead to premature defeat. There was no escape. Those were the rules. Do you imagine that is so? I myself don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t an artist, so I felt all the more alone, both in my life and in my work. My work was of no vital importance to humanity. I was a manufacturer of utilitarian goods, my job being to provide certain necessities of a civilized life on a production line. Production was a perfectly honorable enterprise, but it was machines, not I myself, that produced the goods: it was what my workforce was employed to do; what they were tamed, taught, and disciplined to achieve; it was their purpose. What was it I did in this factory my father had built up and which his engineers had constructed? [...]
And I? What did I do? I was the boss. I sat there like a sentry. I took great trouble to be dignified, humane, and just. At the same time, of course, I also made sure that the factory and my staff provided me with what befitted, and was required by, my position. I was very punctilious in working the proper hours at the factory: to put it more precisely, I worked as hard as those I employed. I strove to serve capital and profit in the appropriate manner. But I felt absolutely hollow inside. What was my sphere of action in the factory? I was free to accept or reject ideas, I was free to change working practice, I was free to seek new markets for our products. Did I take pleasure in the handsome profits? “Pleasure” is the wrong word. I took satisfaction at having fulfilled my public obligations, and the money enabled me to live a blameless, fashionable, generous, and disinterested kind of life. At the factory, and in business generally, people regarded me as the very model of a respectable businessman. I could afford to be liberal, to offer a living wage, and more than a living wage, to a good many … It’s nice being able to give. It was just I myself who took no real joy in it. I lived in comfort, but my days were spent doing honest work. My hands were not idle; at least the world did not regard me as either indolent or a waste of space. I was the good boss: that’s what they said in the factory.
But all this meant nothing; it was just a tiresome, careful, conscientious way of filling time. Life remains hollow if you don’t fill it up with something exciting, some project with a hint of danger. That project can only be work, of course. It is the other kind of work, the invisible work of the soul, the intelligence and talent, whose productions enrich and humanize the world and lend it the air of truth. I read a great deal. But you know how it is with reading too … you only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work. One day I noticed that the books I read had ceased to have anything properly to do with me. I read as I might in some foreign city, to fill the time, the way you go to visit a museum, gazing at the exhibits with a kind of courteous disinterest. I read as if I were fulfilling an obligation: a new book appeared that everyone was talking about, so I read it. Or there was some old classic I had missed reading and so felt my education was incomplete, that something was missing. That was the way I read … There had been a time when reading was an experience. I grabbed new books by well-known authors with my heart in my mouth; a new book was like meeting someone new, an encounter fraught with risk, that might result in happiness and general benefit, but was also potentially threatening: it might produce unwelcome consequences. By now I was reading the way I worked in the factory, the way I went to social occasions two or three times a week, the way I went to the theater, the way I lived at home with my wife, courteously, considerately, with the ever more pressing, ever more upsetting, ever louder, ever more urgently demanding questions pounding at my heart that led me to wonder if I was seriously ill, in great danger, sick unto death, or the subject of some developing plot or cabal, certain of nothing, fearing that one day I might wake to find everything I had worked for, this whole painstaking, careful, orderly enterprise—the respectability, the good manners, and the culminating masterpiece, our polite coexistence—collapsing around me … [...]
[...] 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.