The Golem Read Free

BIBLIOGRAPHY
     
    Y. Caroutch (ed.) Gustav Meyrink = Cahiers de l’Herne , vol. 30 (1976)
     
    E. Frank, Gustav Meyrink (1957)
     
    P. Mariel (ed.) Dictionnaire des Sociétés Secrètes en Occident (1971)
     
    L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (1963)
     
    P. Raabe, The Era of Expressionism (1974)
     
    G. Scholem, Kabbalah (1974)
     
    J. Webb, The Occult Establishment (1981)
     
    L. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (1969)

SLEEP
     
    The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone.
    Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither – like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled first – that is the time when at night I am seized by a dark and agonising restlessness. I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.
    I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept on running through my mind in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:
    “A crow flew to a stone which looked like a lump of fat, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow found that it was not good to eat, it flew off. Like the crow that went to the stone, so do we – we, the tempters – leave Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our pleasure in him.”
    And the image of the stone that looked like a lump of fat grew in my mind to enormous dimensions:
    I am walking along a dried-up river-bed, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulphurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.
    I want to throw them away, these pebbles, far away from me, but they keep just falling out of my hand, and I cannot banish them from my sight.
    All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me. Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-coloured crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, in order to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message.
    At times I emerge with a start from the half-light of this reverie and see again for a moment the moonlight lying on the humped cover at the bottom of the bed like a large, bright, flat stone, only to grope my way blindly once more after my departing consciousness, restlessly searching for the stone which is tormenting me, the one which must lie hidden somewhere in the debris of my memory and which looks like a lump of fat.
    The end of a rainwater pipe must once have reached the ground beside it, I imagine, bent at an obtuse angle, its rim eaten away by rust, and I furiously try to force such an image into my mind in order to beguile my startled thoughts and lull them back to sleep.
    I do not succeed.
    Again and again, again and again, with idiotic persistence, tireless as a shutter blown by the wind against the wall at regular intervals, an obstinate voice inside me keeps insisting, ‘That is something else, something quite different, that is not the stone that looks like a lump of fat.’
    There is no escape from the voice.
    A hundred times I object that that is all beside the point, but, although it goes silent for a little while, it starts up again, imperceptibly at first, with its stubborn ‘Yes, yes, you may be right, but it’s still not the stone that looks like a lump of fat’.
    I am slowly filled with an unbearable sense of my own powerlessness.
    I do not know what happened after that. Did I voluntarily give up all resistance, or did my thoughts overpower me and