Bruno Schulz: The Wanderings of a Sceptic

The Wanderings of a Sceptic

The strolls of a sceptic through the debris of culture — rubble and dust as far as the eye can see. The wanderer has found everything already in ruins, furrowed, down and across, by the plough of unremitting human thought. The wanderer puts forth his walking stick with caution, then he comes to a halt, leaning on it, and smiles. Despondently, he digs around in the rubble with that walking stick: problems, problems, and the remains, shards and fragments of problems. Here, a broken off head looks askance — there, a leg scrambles out, and hobbles over the rubbish heap on its own. Those remnants still have a weak pulse of life in them. Brought up close, they fuse together and revive. The wanderer likes to reconstruct them, to assemble them, although not always with the right head on the right body. Thus monstrosities arise. The wanderer is pleased, and breaks into quiet laughter when those anomalies argue between themselves over their swapped heads. He rubs his hands when he manages to stir up general confusion — a masquerade of misunderstandings, a Tower of Babel of ideas. He plays with enthusiasm the part of mediator, adjudicating the disputes between those apparitions of problems — he adjudicates them most unsuitaby, with an ill will, with the single intention of reducing all matters to absurdity. He seems to claim their stolen limbs in the service of some damaged idea — an ill-favoured idea: soon he will have choked it with a surfeit of reclaimed contents.
One human generation back, another sceptic wandered over the expanses of culture, an old man in a long dressing gown, with a grey beard. How much more human was his face than the face of that gnome. He too was affected a little; he carried the germs of the fever that has touched the other one — but his scepticism was a childhood illness, a kind of chicken pox that one does not die of. The world he believed in was only slightly weathered, just a little corroded on its surface, coarse with a fine deposit of unhealthy mould.
A kernel of pragmatic dogmata still remained intact. That wise old man did not know then about the insidiousness of the natural sciences; he harboured an ingenuous and naïve belief in atoms and matter. His cosmos had, in comparison with the cosmos of that gnome, relatively human proportions. It was measured in accordance with the categories of human thought. But since that good old man’s time, the world has passed through many sieves, with narrow openings, where it has gradually lost its consistency. Freudianism and psychoanalysis, the theory of relativivty and microphysics, quantum physics and non-Euclidean geometry. What has been filtered through those sieves is a world that no longer resembles the world — mucilaginous and ill-proportioned fauna, plankton with flowing and undulating outlines.
By what miracle did we come out alive? And are we now to be forever fish in a deep sea? And so, does this debris of problems lie on a sea bed, while our walker wends his way like a crab over the rubbish heap of the bottom, lighting his way with the phosphorescence of his brain? How was he able to survive the catastrophe? How did he arrive at that carefree symbiosis with an agnostic parasite? From where does he draw that lightness, that grim humour? How did he throw off gravity, weight and responsibility, to become the dancer of the bottom? Simply, perhaps — we shall reveal it in whispers — he is dead... Perhaps he survived the catastrophe as a corpse — the easiest form in which to survive it. That would explain everything: his lightness, his effortless acrobatics — his breakneck, but in fact risk-free, juggling. Such lightness falls freely into the lap of the dead — at no cost whatsoever.
Or could it be that he was a convalescent, returning from the borderlands of death? It is so difficult on that border to distinguish between a convalescent and a corpse. They might be as alike as two peas in a pod. For convalescents too have that same lightness, blitheness and irresponsibility. They have, after all, returned from the other side, where they have cast aside all of their burdens. Their limbs move recklessly, in fun, for a joke, as a game, for the sake of new and innate pleasure in the disporting of their body parts. They are still taunting, and flirting with death.
A new hunger for adventure, for the unknown and the untried, swells his breast with a strange sigh.
And perhaps it was all for the best that everything lay in ruins, that nothing anymore is sacred — pacts, laws and dogmata — that all things are permissible, that all things are possible, and that anyone may build what they like from the ruins — each according to his own caprice, according to an as yet unseen chimera.

(translated by John Curran Davis)