Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [8]
I like them, these Caspars or Balthazars; I like their deep seriousness, their funereal decorativeness; I like those magnificent male specimens with beautiful glossy eyes like burnt coffee beans; I like the noble lack of vitality in their overblown and spongy bodies, the morbidezza of decadence, the wheezing breath that comes from their powerful lungs, and even the smell of valerian emanating from their beards.
Like angels of the Presence, they sometimes appear suddenly in the door of our kitchen, enormous and short of breath, and, quickly tired, they wipe off perspiration from their damp brows while rolling the bluish whites of their eyes; for a moment they forget the object of their mission, and, astonished, looking for an excuse, a pretext for their arrival, they stretch out a hand and beg for alms.
Let's return to the Authentic. We have never forsaken it. And here we must stress a strange characteristic of the script, which by now no doubt has become clear to the reader: it unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations.
Now, for instance, no one is offering goldfinches from the Harz Mountains, for from the barrel organs of those dark men the feathery little singers fly out at irregular intervals, and the market square is covered with them as with colored twigs. Ah, what a multiplication of shimmering chattering birds! ... On all the cornices and flagpoles, colorful bottlenecks are formed by birds fluttering and fighting for position. If you push out of the window the crook of a walking stick, it will be covered with a chirping, heavy bunch of birds before you can draw it back into your room.
We are now quickly approaching the magnificent and catastrophic part of our story, which in our biography is known as the Age of Genius.
Here we must for a moment go completely esoteric, like Signor Bosco of Milan, and lower our voice to a penetrating whisper. By meaningful smiles we must give point to our exposition and grind the delicate substance of imponderables between the tips of our fingers. It won't be our fault if sometimes we shall look like those merchants of invisible fabrics, who display their fake goods with elaborate gestures.
Well then, did the Age of Genius ever occur? It is difficult to answer this question. Yes and no. There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography— scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days—while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.
And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one's eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.
Thus we shall collect these allusions, these earthly approximations, these stations and stages on the paths of our life, like the fragments of a broken mirror. We shall recreate