Under This Blazing Light Read Free Page A

one young Jew relates to his own tattered soul.
    So even in the writings of Bialik, Brenner and Yizhar, which are alleged to have a strong, straightforward connection to the realm of events, the link between words and events is neither straightforward nor direct. Words are connected to a place from which our captious witness contemplates events. This secret foreign agent is such a traitor that in his heart of hearts he is not looking for a formula that will remove suffering, but the right words to describe it.
    Is my aim to proclaim over the whole world of literature that
    I tell of myself, that is all I can tell of,
    My world is as small as the world of an ant?
    No. Not always. Not in every sense. True, while the caravan is passing these men of words merely bark or howl. But sometimes the caravan loses its way or its strength and comes to a weary halt. Then the blind man may be able to lead the sighted. The wordsmith’s anguish, his mockery, his darkness, suddenly become a landmark. Reality itself, the realm of decision and achievement, has moments when it tries to get back to its original source, to the darkness of desires and fears and dreams from which it comes. At such times the blind man, the sniper of stragglers, the man of words, can take events by the arm and say ‘Here. This way.’ Or ‘Look out: a chasm.’ Or ‘Stop. Rest.’ And thus he can lead the way through agony, loneliness and darkness, which he knows backwards, with his mental map of the pathways. May we only need these books to broaden our minds. May all our actions succeed. Even so, it is good to have them there, in the comer, on the shelf, against a rainy day.
    (First published in 1966)
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Under this blazing light
    For Nurit Gertz
    Do not expect me to reveal all sorts of creative secrets, or to work alchemy, or take you on a guided tour of the kitchen, or whatever. On the contrary. My aim here is to express some very simple thoughts about one or two things to do with contemporary Israeli writing.
    On the threshold
    You’ve guessed: having said ‘contemporary Israeli’ I am actually going to lead ofF with totally other places and times. I believe the greatest creations in world literature have almost always been achieved in twilight periods. This is a rather curious phenomenon, that may be out of line with every social or national ideology. All ideologies like to boast that the arts flourish under their aegis. No ideology can be pleased to acknowledge that it is its decline and fall that favours the growth of literature. It is nevertheless true that, in the lives of nations, faiths and cultures, periods of flourishing success, of dynamic creativity, periods when things are getting bigger and stronger, are not propitious to storytellers. (They themselves may well be drawn into such an embrace, but their stories will wend their way to other times and places.) The greatest creations in world literature have generally been produced in the twilight, or in relation to a period of twilight, when a centuries-old civilisation has passed its zenith and is on the decline, whether under external pressure or under its own weight when an ageing culture is beginning to smell of decay.
    The authors of some of the best works of world literature are people who have had divided minds in their own time. On the one hand, the author is himself the product of the decaying civilisation. Its lifestyle, its ways of thinking, its linguistic structures, its social relationships, its private or family or tribal or national memories, all affect him to the roots of his being. Like his contemporaries, and perhaps a little more than others, he is linked by his thoughts, feelings and habits to that complex nexus of emotions, social reflexes, table manners, old wives’ tales, terms of endearment and abuse, trivial beliefs, lullabies, boasts and shames and vanities that are shared by every tribe, in short everything that makes up the swarming mass of a centuries-old