Hyperion to Bellarmin
It chanced that the vessel due to take me to Calauria delayed until the evening, Alabanda having already gone his way that morning.
I stayed on the shore, weary with the pains of parting, stilly gazing into the sea from one hour to another. My spirit told over the sorrowful days of slowly dwindling youth, and adrift like the beautiful dove, it hovered over the future. I wished to give myself strength, I took out my long-forgotten lute to sing myself a song of fate that I’d once, in blithely innocent youth, repeated after my Adamas.
You wander high in the light On gentle ground, you blissful genii! Heavenly radiant airs Touching you soft, As the hand of the harpist her
Hallowing strings.
Fatelessly, like the slumbering
Suckling, breathe the celestials; Chaste preserved In the modest bud, Blossoms ever
For them the spirit, And the blissful eyes
Gaze in eternal
Tranquil glory.
But to us it is given In no place to rest, They dwindle, they fall, The suffering mortals Blindling from one Hour to another, Like water from rock To rock hurled down,
Year long into confusion below.
So I sang to the strings. I’d hardly finished when a boat came in and I immediately recognized my servant who brought me a letter from Diotima.
‘So you're still on earth?’ she wrote, ‘and see the daylight still? I’d thought to find you elsewhere, my love! The letter you wrote before the battle of Chesma I received earlier than you afterwards wished, and so for a week I lived in the belief you’d thrown yourself into the arms of death, until your servant arrived with the joyful news that you're still alive. Besides, I’d heard a few days after the battle that the ship on which I knew you to be had blown up with all hands lost.
‘But O sweet voice! once again I heard you, the language of the beloved touched me once more like a May breeze, and for a moment your beautiful hopeful joy, the lovely phantom of our future happiness deluded me too.
‘Dear dreamer, why must I wake you? why can’t I say, “come and make true the beautiful days you promised me!” But it’s too late, Hyperion, it’s too late. Your maiden has withered since you went away, a fire within has gently consumed me and there’s only a small rest remaining. Don’t be dismayed! All that is natural purges itself, and everywhere life’s blossom winds itself freer and freer of coarser stuff.
‘Dearest Hyperion! little did you think to hear this year my swansong.
‘It began soon after you'd left, and even in the days before our parting. A force of spirit before which I took fright, an inner life before which the life of the earth paled and dwindled like lamps of the night in the glow of morning — shall I say it? I could have gone to Delphi and built the god of inspiration a temple beneath the cliffs of ancient Parnassus, and, a modern Pythia, kindled the flagging peoples with divine utterance, and my soul knows that my maidenly mouth would have opened the eyes of all the godforsaken and smoothed their dulled brows, so powerful was the spirit of life in me! Yet ever more weary grew my mortal limbs and dread weight pulled me relentlessly down. Oh! often in the stillness of my bower I have wept for the roses of youth! they withered and withered, and only from tears did your maiden’s cheek redden. They were still the trees of old, it was the bower of old — there once stood your Diotima, your child, Hyperion, before your joyful eyes, a flower
among flowers, and the powers of earth and heaven came peacefully together in her; now she walked a stranger among the buds of May, and her familiars, the lovely plants, nodded to her amiably, but she could only grieve; yet I passed none by, yet one after another I bade farewell to all the playmates of my youth, the groves and springs and whispering hills.
‘Oh! as long as I still was able I would often make my sweet and weary way up to the heights where you’d stayed with Notara, and speak about you with our friend, as lightsomely as possible, so that he shouldn’t write to you about me; but soon, when her heart grew too loud, the hypocrite stole out into the garden, and then there I was at the rail above the cliff where I once gazed down with you and out into open nature, oh! where I stood, held by your hands, caressed by your watchful eyes, in the first shuddering warming of love and wished to pour out my overflowing soul like sacrificial wine into life’s abyss; there Inow lurched around and cried my sorrow to the wind, and like a timid bird my glance flitted about and barely dared look at the beautiful earth from which I was to part.
‘That’s the way it’s gone with your maiden, Hyperion. Don’t ask how? don’t explain this death to yourself! Whoever thinks to fathom such a fate will end by cursing himself and the world, and yet there’s not a soul to blame.
‘Shall I say it’s grief for you that’s killed me? oh no! oh no! it was welcome to me, this grief, it gave the death I bore within me form and grace; it’s in honour of your darling that you’re dying, I could now tell myself. —
‘Or did my soul become too ripe for me in all the raptures of our love, and is that why, like a headstrong youth, it will be held no more in its humble home? tell me! was it my heart’s luxuriance that estranged me from mortal life? is nature in me become through you, you glorious man! too proud to put up with it any longer on this mediocre star? But if you taught my soul to fly, why won’t you also teach it to return to you? If you kindled the aether-loving fire, why wouldn’t you tend it for me? — Hear me, my love! for the sake of your beautiful soul! don’t you blame yourself for my death!
‘Could you hold me back when your fate pointed you on the selfsame path? and if you had, in your heart’s heroic struggle, preached to me — “be content, my child! and come to terms with the times” — would you not have been the vainest of all the vain?
‘T will tell you plainly what I think. Your fire was alive in me, your spirit had passed into me; but that would scarce have harmed, and only your fate has made my new life deadly to me. Too mighty for me had my soul become through you, it would through you have also stilled again. You drew my life away from earth, you would have also had the power to fetter me to earth, you would have bound my soul as in a magic circle into your embracing arms; oh! just one of your heartfelt glances would have held me fast, just one love speech of yours would have turned me back into a happy wholesome child; yet when your own fate drove you into spiritual solitude, like floodwater onto a mountain peak, oh, only when I fully believed the storm of battle had burst open the dungeon and my Hyperion had flown up into ancient freedom, that was the turning point for me and soon it will be over.
‘T’ve made many words, and yet the great Roman perished silently when her Brutus and the fatherland were writhing in their death throes. But what better could I do in the best of my last days of life? — And there are many things I still feel driven to say. Mute was my life; my death is eloquent. Enough!
‘There’s just one thing more I must say to you.
‘You would have to go under, you'd have to despair, yet the spirit will save you. No laurel will comfort you, and no wreath of myrtle; Olympus will, the living and present, that eternally youthful blossoms around all your senses. The beautiful world is my Olympus; in this you will live, and with the holy beings of the world, the gods of nature, with them you will be joyful.
‘Oh, be welcome, you good, you faithful! you deeply missed and misjudged! children and elders! sun and earth and aether with all the living souls that play about you, as you play about them, in eternal
love! Oh, take all-venturing men, take back the fugitives into the family of gods, take them up into the home of nature from which they absconded! —
‘You know this word, Hyperion! You began it in me. You will fulfil it in yourself, and only then rest.
‘That’s enough for me to die in joy as a Greek maiden.
‘Those poor souls who know nothing but their own sorry handiwork, who are merely slaves of need and scorn genius, and who do not honour you, childlike life of nature! let them fear death. Their yoke is become their world; they know nothing better than their bondage; dread the freedom of the gods that death gives us?
‘But I don’t! I have gone beyond the patchwork made by hand of man, I have felt the life of nature that passes all thought — even if I became a plant, would the harm be so great? — I shall be. How should I be lost from the sphere of life where the love eternal, that is common to all, holds all natures together? How should I depart from the covenant that binds all beings? This is not so easily broken as the loose bonds of our age. It’s not like a market day when folk flock together and make a great bustle and then disperse. No! by the spirit that unites us, by the god’s spirit that is proper to each and common to all! no! no! in nature’s covenant troth is no dream. We part to be only more inwardly one, more divinely at peace with all, with ourselves. We die in order to live.
‘I shall be; I do not ask what I shall become. To be, to live, that is enough, that is the glory of the gods; and that is why all that is life is equal in the divine world, and there are there no masters and menials. Natures live together like lovers; they have all in common, spirit, joy and eternal youth.
‘Permanence is the choice of the stars, in silent fullness of life they constantly wheel, knowing no age. We embody perfection in change, splitting the great chords of joy into wandering melodies. Like harpers around the thrones of the elders, we live, ourselves divine, around the silent gods of the world, with life’s fleeting song we soften the blissful earnest of the sun-god and the others.
‘Look up into the world! is it not like a wandering triumphal pageant where nature celebrates its eternal victory over all corruption? and does not life for its greater glory take with it death in golden chains, as once the general would take with him captive kings? and we, we're like the
virgins and youths who with dance and song, in shifting shapes and sounds, accompany the majestic procession.
‘Now let me be still. To say more would be too much. We shall likely meet again. —
‘Grieving youth! soon, soon you will be happier. Your laurel failed to ripen and your myrtles faded, for priest you shall be of divine nature, and your poetic days burgeon already. Oh, could I only see you in your future beauty! Farewell.’
At the same time I received a letter from Notara in which he wrote:
‘The day after she’d written to you for the last time she grew quite still, spoke only a few more words, and then said that she would rather part in fire from the earth than be buried, and we should gather her ashes in an urn and set it in the woods at the spot where you, my dear friend! had first met her. Soon after, when it began to grow dark, she said goodnight to us as if she wished to sleep, and wrapped her arms around her lovely head; until toward morning we heard her breathing. As it then became wholly still and I heard nothing more, I went over to her and listened.
‘O Hyperion! what more shall I say? It was finished and our plaints awakened her no more.
‘It isa terrible mystery that such a life should die, and I have to confess to you that I myself have neither sense nor faith since I witnessed this.
‘Yet better always a beautiful death, Hyperion! than such a torpid life as ours now is.
‘Warding off flies, that’s our work in the future, and gnawing on the things of the world like children on dried orris root, that’s our joy in the end. Growing old amongst youthful peoples seems to me a delight, but growing old where all is old seems to me worse than anything. —
‘I'm tempted to advise you, my Hyperion! not to come here. I know you. It would rob you of your senses. Besides, you're not safe here. My dear friend! think of Diotima’s mother, think of me and spare yourself!
‘I have to confess, I shudder when I ponder your fate. But then I also believe, it’s not the deeper springs that searing summer dries up, only the shallow rain-stream. I’ve seen you at moments, Hyperion! when you seemed to me a higher being. Now you're put to the test, and that’s going to show who you are. Farewell.’
So Notara wrote; and you ask, my Bellarmin! how I feel now, telling you this?
My dearest friend! I’m at peace, for I want no better than the gods. Must not everything suffer? And the nobler it is, the more deeply. Does not holy nature suffer? O my godhead! that you could grieve as you are blissful is something I long failed to grasp. But the bliss that does not suffer is sleep, and without death there is no life. Should you be, like a child, eternal and slumber as nothingness? forego the victory? not pass through all the perfections? Yes! yes! worthy is pain to lie at men’s hearts and be your familiar, O nature! For it alone leads from one bliss to the next, and there can be no other companion. —
Once Id begun to revive again, I wrote to Notara from Sicily where I'd first been brought by ship from Paros:
‘I’ve obeyed you, dear friend! I’m already far away from you all, and want to give you my news now; but words come hard to me; you won’t mind my confessing that. The blessed, among whom Diotima is now, do not speak much; in my night, in the depths of the grieving, speech too is at an end.
‘My Diotima died a beautiful death; you're right; and it’s this that rouses me and gives me back my soul.
‘But it’s no longer the same world I return to. I’m a stranger, like the unburied when they come up from Acheron, and were I even on my home island, in the gardens of my youth that are barred to me by my father, oh! still, still I should be a stranger in the earth and no god can any longer link me to the past.
‘Yes! it’s all over. I just must tell myself that time and again, have the thought bind my soul so that it stay calm and not become inflamed through senseless childish efforts.
‘It’s all over; and even could I weep, beautiful divinity, as once you wept for Adonis, my Diotima will still not return to me and my heart’s word has lost its power, for the winds alone hear me.
‘Oh, God! and that I myself am nothing, and the meanest workman can say he’s achieved more than I! that they may comfort themselves, the poor in spirit, and smile and chide me as a dreamer because my deeds failed to ripen, because my arms are not free, because my times are like the raging Procrustes who cast the men he captured into a child’s cradle and, so that they'd fit into the little bed, would hack off their limbs.
‘If only it weren’t too utterly dreary to fling oneself into the foolish mob and be torn to pieces by it! or if only noble blood could feel no shame at mingling with the blood of slaves! oh, if there were a banner, gods! that my Alabanda might serve under, a Thermopylae where I could bleed it out with honour, all the lonely love I'll never more need! To be sure it would be better if I could live, live, and in the new temples, in the newly assembled agora of our people, still the great grief with great joy; but on that I shall be silent, for Ill merely weep my strength wholly away if I think upon it all.
‘Oh, Notara! with me too it’s over; my own soul has grown hateful to me because I must blame it for Diotima’s being dead, and the ideas of my youth I deemed so grand mean nothing to me any more. They poisoned my Diotima, didn’t they!
‘And now tell me, where is there still a refuge? — Yesterday I was up on Etna. There came to my mind the great Sicilian who once, wearied with counting the hours and intimate with the soul of the world, plunged himself down in his bold lust for life, into the glorious flames; for the frigid poet had needed the fire to warm himself by, as someone mockingly said of him.
‘Oh, how gladly would I have drawn such mockery upon myself! but one must think more highly of oneself than I do to fly thus uncalled into the heart of nature, or whatever else you like to call it, for truly! the way Iam now, I have no name for things and all is confusion.
‘Notara! and now tell me, where is there still a refuge?
‘In the woods of Calauria? — Yes! in the verdant darkness there, where stand our trees, confidants of our love, where like the red glow of sunset their dying leaves fall upon Diotima’s urn, and their lovely heads bend above Diotima’s urn, gently growing old until they too sink down over the beloved ashes, — there, there I might dwell as I would wish!
‘But you counsel me to stay away, think I’m not safe in Calauria, and it may be so.
‘T know full well you'll point me to Alabanda. But just hear this! he’s destroyed! even that firm and limber stem is blasted, and the boys will pick up the splinters to make themselves a jolly fire. He’s gone; he’s got certain good friends who will ease things for him, who have quite special skills in relieving anyone on whom life lies somewhat heavy; he’s paying them a visit, and why? because there’s nothing else for him
to do, or, if you would know it all, because there’s a passion gnawing at his heart, and do you know for whom? for Diotima; he thinks she’s still alive, wedded to me and happy — poor Alabanda! and now she belongs to you and me both!
‘He headed out to the east, and as for me, I’m taking ship northwestward, since chance will have it so. —
‘And now farewell to you all! all you dear ones who've lain close to my heart, friends of my youth and you parents and all you dear Greeks, you who suffer!
‘You winds that nourished me in tender childhood, and you dark laurel woods and you cliffs of the coast and you majestic waters that taught my spirit to sense great things — and oh! you monuments of mourning, where my melancholy began, you holy walls that girdled heroes’ cities, and you ancient gates that many a beautiful wanderer passed through, you temple pillars and you rubble of the gods! and you, O Diotima! and you valleys of my love, and you streams that once witnessed the blissful figure, you trees where she would gladden, you springtimes where she the lovely lived, together with her flowers, don’t, don’t part from me! yet if it must be, you sweet memories! then you too fade away and leave me, for man can change nothing and the light of life comes and goes as it will.’