Kaddish for an Unborn Child Read Free

philosopher, just to myself), there is no need to fear emotional sclerosis, one should accept it, if not positively welcome it, like a helping hand extended towards us which, for all that it is undoubtedly helping us towards the trench, is still helping nonetheless; because, Mr. Kappus,
the
world is not against us . . . if dangers are at hand, we must
try to love them
; but then, I interject (though I do not address this to the philosopher, nor even to Mr. Kappus, the lucky dog to have got so many letters from Rainer Maria Rilke, I just say it to myself) that I am already at the point where
I love these dangers to the exclusion of all else
, though I suppose that is not quite right either, it too carries a false note that I perpetually pick out, just like an orchestral conductor who immediately detects from the tutti if, let us say, the cor anglais tootles a note a semitone sharp on account, let us say, of a misprint that has crept into the score. And I perpetually pick out this sour note, not just within me but also around me, within my more immediate and my broader, what I might call cosmic surrounds, like here, in this lap of shifty Nature, within the surrounds of the sickly oaks (or beeches), the stinking brook and the mucky-hued canopy glimmering through the consumptive foliage, where I, my dear Mr. Kappus, never feel an intimation of any “thought of being a creator, of procreating, of making”—a thought that, wouldn’t you agree,
is nothing without its continuous great
confirmation and realization in the world, nothing without
the thousandfold concordance from things and animals
. . . Yes, because for all that they have put a dampener on us or jaded our spirits (to say no more about it than that), surreptitiously, if we pay quiet and close attention to the circulation of our blood and our alarming dreams, surreptitiously—and only in this do I sense a thousandfold concordance which rings out from everything and everybody—we still, always and unwaveringly, wish to live, this lethargically, this dispiritedly, this sickly, yes, even like this and even if we are unaware of even that much and unable to live even that much . . . For that very reason, and also in order to avoid becoming bogged down in this sentimental mood, in which, as in almost everything, by the way, or at least everything in which
I
too play a part, I yet again clearly heard the sour note of the cor anglais, I posed him a question that very much pertained to his professional domain, a question that though philosophical was perhaps not the slightest bit sophisticated, as to Why this is the way it is, all this decrepitude? Where and when had we finally “got rid of our rights”? Why is it no longer possible to know so inexorably and so definitively what we know? and so on and so forth, as if I didn’t know what I know, but driven by my irrepressible compulsion to speak, by some dread, some
horror vacui
; and on Dr. Obláth’s face there now resettled the countenance of a professional philosopher and professional intellectual, middle-aged, of medium build, middling means, middling talents and middling prospects professing middling views on a mediocre mid-Hungarian hill range, and the wrinkles of his cynical, happy smile completely engulfed the slits of his eyes. His voice too immediately recovered its objectivity, even objectivism, that well-oiled, habitually hair-splitting and in fact self-assured voice, which had merely faltered momentarily just beforehand at the threatening proximity of real-life things; and so we strolled homewards, two, in point of fact, well-dressed, well-fed, well-preserved, middle-aged, mediocre intellectuals professing middling views, two survivors (each of us in his own different way), two still living, two half-dead individuals, and we discussed, quite superfluously, the sorts of things that can still be discussed between two intellectuals. We discussed, peaceably and desultorily, why it