Gargoyles

Turning to me the prince said that my father should some day take me along on one of the Saurau hunts, which he held two or three times a year. “The Saurau hunts are famous. I personally am no longer interested in them, but to my family they are supremely necessary. We are continually trying out on others what we do not try out on ourselves,” the prince said. “We repeatedly kill people and observe this process and its result. Man constantly practices horror upon others, least of all on (or in) himself. We always try out all possible diseases on others; we continually kill others for purposes of study. This morning,” the prince said, “I suddenly felt the need to lie flat on the floor, stark naked. I undressed and lay down stark naked on the floor. At breakfast I told the others about it, but nobody laughed.” All his life, he said, his thoughts and actions had sprung from his estates, had grown out of Hochgobernitz. “Even what seems utterly remote has come out of my estates, out of Hochgobernitz,” he said. “The horizon is the handiest kind of nonsense. This morning,” he said, “I made an unusual remark to my elder sister. I said to her: The poetic is suspect to me because in the world it arouses the impression that the poetic is poetry, and vice versa, that poetry is the poetic. The only poetry, I said, is nature, the only nature is poetry. The only consistent concept, Doctor.”

Suddenly, that morning, he had felt the need to read aloud to the women a section from Goethe’s The Elective Affinities. But when they were all assembled in the library, he suddenly had the feeling that it was pointless to read to them from The Elective Affinities, and instead he had read to them from an old Times. “I wanted to read to the women the chapter beginning The scaffolding stood ready …,” he said, “and instead I read to them how potatoes are stored for the winter in England. As soon as I had finished reading them how potatoes are stored in England, I bowed them out of the library and called: To work! To work! To work, idiots! Shortly afterward I went down into the yard and read the chapter The scaffolding stood ready … to myself. Undisturbed. Untainted. Unfeminized!

“I very often see my son somewhere on a London street that I am familiar with from my own days of studying in London. Trees. People. People as trees. Trees as people. My son is wearing the same suit I wore when I was in London. Sometimes he walks across Trafalgar Square or through Hyde Park with my thoughts. With my problems. And I think: He is crossing Trafalgar Square and walking through Hyde Park with your problems. My son sits with my thoughts on the very bench in Hyde Park where I sat. And he thinks, while he is sitting on my Hyde Park bench, of Hochgobernitz, just as I thought of Hochgobernitz when I was there. When you think of Hochgobernitz while you are in London,” the prince said, “you imagine that Hochgobernitz is an entirely unchanged Hochgobernitz, just as in Hochgobernitz when you think of London you think that London has not changed, has remained unchanged although Hochgobernitz at every moment is a completely changed Hochgobernitz. And I think: He is sitting on the Hyde Park bench or walking through the Tate Gallery and thinking about me, because when I was in London going through the Tate Gallery to see the Blakes, I thought of my father. I think: My son in London thinks of his father in Hochgobernitz just as the father thinks of his son in London. Constantly seeing Hochgobernitz in London makes you as sick and demented, I imagine, as constantly seeing London in Hochgobernitz. And I see and hear London,” the prince said, “just as my son in London sees and hears Hochgobernitz. But it is always a different London and always a different Hochgobernitz.”

Only in London, the prince said, did his son think his mind could develop in all directions, but he, his son’s father, was convinced that his son’s mind could develop in all directions only in Hochgobernitz. “Of course,” the prince said, “the mind is not limited by being in London. But it is also not limited by being in Hochgobernitz.”