J. B. Thompson

“He went out,” I reported to Titmarsh.

“Out?”

“Yes, he went to the streets, mask on, fist raised.”

“Good lord.”

We were speaking of our friend, Johannes de Silentio, who had grown quieter and quieter of late, and was self-isolating to a fault. He was silent no longer.

“He told me he had to join the protest. Couldn’t just sit around.”

“And how did that go?”

“Never felt better in his life. Transformed anxiety, depression, no motivation to write or do anything, into action. Positive action. Not just silently know that the system is biased and oppressive but speak it out loud and ask for change.”

“Risk, though, with the virus.”

“Well, outdoors at least. And the mask. Sani-wipes in his pocket. Crazy but clean.”

“And other risks.”

“You’re thinking of Martin Gugino?”

“Yes, among others. And now? Back to isolation, quarantine?”

“I don’t know. He’s at more ease with risk. He’s connected online with groups. Expanding his bubble. Keeping the momentum going.”

“Reminds me of our friend K.”

“Oh?”

“You remember. He described that woman he knew in her Czech apartment during the virus lockdown: no balcony, only view a parking lot, walls. She was going mad.”

“Turned into a giant cockroach?” I chuckled.

“So K. would tell it.”

“Thinking of Rilke’s Duino Elegies too.”

“Ah. Your friend Zweig again.”

“Yes. The World of Yesterday. Zweig describes the time during WWI. The early days when most intellectuals had either tuned out or signed onto the war effort, lending their talent to demonizing the Other, the Enemy. They’d be Republican senators today, or in PR, or Fox News today, Breibart, Russian bots. The enemy within.

“Zweig did not sign on. He mentions one who did, a Jewish poet in Berlin, ‘the most Prussian, or Prussian-assimilated Jew I had ever known.’ This was Ernst Lissauer. The German propaganda told Lissauer his country had been attacked by the nefarious English. He rushed to enlist but was rejected as too short and fat. Instead he fought his fight with poetry, specifically his Hymn of Hate. Never forgive, the theme. The mad Kaiser ‘was enraptured and bestowed the Order of the Red Eagle upon Lissauer.’

“When the war ended no one would print any of Lissauer’s poems or even talk to him. Later Hitler threw him out of the country ‘to which he was attached with every fibre of his heart,’ and he died forgotten.

“Hard going in the early WWI days. Zweig’s friends Romain Rolland, others who gave their all to pacifism, building bridges. Zweig retreated first to Vienna where he could converse with Rilke. Intellectuals spread across the old Habsburg and German empires and beyond were keenly aware of each other before the war, Zweig’s golden age of security, notwithstanding its underlying festering issues.

“Rilke was someone he could talk to. The Elegies were . . . are . . . a protest against being kept in, physically and metaphorically. In his introduction to Stephen Mitchell’s excellent translation of Rilke’s works, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Vintage International, 1989): Robert Hass states ‘The Duino Elegies are an argument against our lived, ordinary lives.’ They are a wake-up call, a call to be aware of what lies beneath the surface of our selves. Rilke began series in 1912 and finished it in 1922.

“Anyway, he turned up at Zweig’s door one day in uniform – at forty years of age! Badly fitting. Said he hated this one even more than his old military academy uniform.”

“He went to war?”

“No, he was protected.”

“Ah.”

“Zweig moved to a rural suburb of Vienna, ‘to escape this dangerous mass psychosis’, and ‘to commence my personal war in the midst of war, the struggle against the betrayal of Reason by the current mad passion.’ He had discovered his mission. He wrote a play, Jeremiah, about a critic of the established order. Thought it would never get staged.”

“But it did.”

“Yes, in Switzerland, that hotspot of dissent and spies. Lenin, James Joyce, all of them there. Anyway, it played to good reviews. And by then, 1917, I think, the war was turning. People were waking up if only for a while. He received a tsunami of fan mail.”

“A tipping point.”

“Maybe one now?”

“We can hope. Turn the tide. As that fellow Harari says, one way you can try to distinguish between reality and fiction, real news and fakes news, is by asking yourself whether the source can suffer.”

“Gugino and Preposterous Pump.”

“Exactly. To suffer is to be human. And when we share it, share the suffering with others, others with us, work to mitigate suffering rather than inflame it, we are more human, human at our best and we all benefit.”

“Johannes. All sentient beings, as the Buddha said.”

“Dukkha.”

“That’s the word.”

“And eternal vigilance.”

“Yes, we cannot forget Zweig’s fate. Much worldwide success as writer after WWI. But when Hitler came, Zweig lost everything; and his suicide in 1942, with Hitler still alive and that most congenial and international pacifistic of men dying perhaps without hope or perhaps just too tired.”