The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

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"I have often leaned against the cushion of my medical carriage and represented and prefigured to myself, when I should one day have gray eyebrows and gray hair, or none at all; when all seasons should appear to me to grow shorter and all nights longer and longer, which is a symptom of the approach of the longest--if, then, I should go out in the first days of spring into the Still Land, to sun my cold, interpolated body--and I should then see in the outer world the clinging, forth-putting buds, beneath which lies a whole summer, and feel within me the eternal leaf-dropping and drooping, which no earthly spring can cure--then when I should still remember my own youth, my promenades and gallopades around Scheerau, and those in Pavia, and the people who went with me--then when I naturally looked round after those who might still be left standing as lofty ruins of the fallen temple of my youth--and then when, as I turned about to see, whether out of woods, across meadows, down from mountains, on so fair a day, no one would come to meet me, the thought should come upon me like a heart-beat, that in all the four corners of the world, toward which my sight was directed, lay church-yards and churches, in which they, who should now console and companion me, were lying under the opaque earth-crust and its flower-work, hid and imprisoned, with their arms laid straight by their side, and that I alone remained in this upper world and here in the spring-time carried round the autumn in my breast:--then I should not go at all into the Still Land, but go home all lonely and shut myself up and lay my head and bury my eyes on my arm, and wish my heart would break, as had those of my dear ones; I mean, I should wish it were all over. Then, beloved son, beloved friend, (thou who, as the youngest of my friends, wilt long survive me), then will thy form come before my sated and weary eyes; then will I wipe them dry and remind myself of all the past, and thy hand shall still conduct me into the Still Land. I shall enjoy the earthly spring so long as I can see it, and with a pressure of the hand I shall say to thy face: It does my heart good to-day, that I many years ago adopted thee as a son....

"To-morrow I will come to take my friend with me on a journey for some days to come, that we may go out of the way of those that are past."--The next morning it was done.

THIRTY-SECOND, OR SIXTEENTH OF NOVEMBER, SECTION.

Consumption.--Funeral Sermon in the Church of the Still Land.--Ottomar.

It were perhaps even better for me, if I should endeavor to overtake the two travelers less with the pen than on foot. The reading world can now feast and junket on my things, while I await, with a cough, the Easter fair, because while at work upon these things as I sat crooked up at the writing-desk, I have written a fine, full-formed hectic case into the two lobes of my lungs. Not one of the whole public says to me, Thank you! that I have by thought and emotion deprived myself of my healthy breathing and my sedes: almost everything about me is shut up, and by reason of the double blockade little can in either of two opposite directions pass through me. I trudge along behind the plough-shares of the Auenthalers, in order to inhale the steam of the furrows, as the best British hectic patients do,[^[73]] as a remedy for my air-stoppage and other stoppages. Nevertheless the simple public, in whose service I have made myself so miserable, would laugh at me if they should see me stalking like a crow after the ploughing oxen. Is that justice?--Must I not besides sleep all night between the arms of two poodles, whom I propose to infect with my consumption, like a married man of rank? But am I then, when I have by morning-and-evening-presents endowed the two bedfellows with my malady, myself rid of the malum, or does not rather M. Nadan de la Richebaudiere tell me I must buy and infect new dogs, because half a canine menagerie is needed as the lighter of a single man? In this way I may spend my whole pay upon mere dogs. I will even worry down the injury which my honesty suffers in the matter, because I must show myself as friendly toward the poor sucking dogs, whose lungs I propose to lame and cripple, as great folks do toward the victims of their salvation.

Meanwhile this is still the most annoying scandal, that I am at this present in a--cow-barn: for this (according to modern Swedish books) is said to furnish a dispensary and seaport against short breath. Mine has not yet, however, shown a disposition to grow longer, though I have been sitting here for three Trinities and given the world three long sections (as if so many Joseph's-children) at the birthplace of much stupider beings. One must himself have labored at such a place for consumption's sake in the juristic or æsthetic departments (and I am both belles-lettrist and counsellor at law) to know from experience, that there, oftentimes, the most tolerable ideas have much stronger voices against them than those of the literary and legal judges, and are thereby consigned to the devil.

While Fenk and Gustavus were working off in their journey more sorrow than money, although they did not stay away so long as all my filed papers, Oefel also went on, namely in his romantic Grand Sultan, and painted in with the greatest delight the affliction of his friend. Oefel thanked God for every misfortune, which would go into a verse, and he wished that, in order to the flourishing of polite literature, pestilence, famine and other horrors occurred oftener in Nature, so that the poet might work after these models, and thereby secure a greater illusion, as already the painters, who would paint beheaded people or blown up vessels, have had the archetypes fly to their assistance. As it was, however, he often had to be, for want of Academies, his own Academy, and was once compelled, for a whole day, to have virtuous emotions, because the like were to be depicted in his work--nay, often, he was compelled, for the sake of a single chapter, to go several times into B----, [Baireuth] which annoyed him exceedingly.

With other people also it fares just so; the object of knowledge remains no longer an object of feeling. The injuries under which the man of honor overflows and boils, are to the jurist a proof, a gloss, an illustration for the Pandect-title of injuries. The hospital physician calmly repeats, at the bedside of the patient over whom the flames of fever are raging and roaring, the few clippings from his clinic which may suit the case. The officer who, on the battle-field--the butcher's-block of humanity--strides away over mangled men, is thinking only of the evolutions and quarter-wheelings of his school of cadets, who were needed to cut out whole generations into physiognomic fragments. The battle-painter, who goes behind him, thinks and looks, indeed, upon the mangled men and upon every wound exposed to view there; but he is bent upon copying all for the Dusseldorf gallery, and the purely human feeling of this misery he only awakens by and by, through his battle-piece, in others and perhaps also in--himself. Thus does every kind of science spread a stony crust over our hearts, not the philosophic alone.

Beata almost sacrificed her eyes to the intense interest which she felt in no one else (as she thought) than the one who had gone hence. Her heavy looks were often turned toward the hermitage-mountain; at evening she herself visited it, and brought to the sleeper the last offering which friendship has then to give, in overmeasure. Thus, then, do the fangs of misfortune strike into tender hearts the most deeply; thus are the tears which man sheds so much the greater and swifter the less the earth can give him and the higher he stands above it, as the cloud which hangs higher than others over the earth, sends down the biggest drops. Nothing raised Beata up but the redoubling of the alms which she gave certain poor people weekly or after every pleasure, and her solitary intercourse with the Resident Lady, with her Laura and the two children of the gardener.