EMIL STRAUSS
* * * * * *
[MARA] (1909)
TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD
Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University
It was in a Brazilian city. One morning I awoke early and felt my heart so full of repugnance to all life that I shut my eyes again and wondered what sort of dream could have left me in this feverish state of mind. But I could not recollect that I had had any dream; in the middle of the night, aroused by a creaking casement, I had started up out of a dreamless slumber. Whence came, then, for the second and the third time this darkness in me, this torturing feeling of oppression at every breath, this piteous longing never to have waked up and never again to have to wake up? I had gone contentedly to bed, and had slept a deep and peaceful sleep.
Confidingly and unguardedly you yield to fatigue and give yourself over to rest--what demon is it that then enters through the open portal, inoculates your heart with a black drop, stirs up and discolors and poisons with it all your blood until, foul and heavy as lead, it forces its way through your heart?
Or is it I--I who am that demon! As the dark bottom of a deep well is lighted up and revealed by the perpendicular rays of the sun only when the water above is quiet and clear as crystal--is it thus that the true color of my being stands forth from deep sleep when the will-o'-the-wisps of waking and dreaming are banished, and that color irradiates and fills its domain, and is just grazed by the abrupt ray of suddenly awaking consciousness?
There it is once for all, and there is no escaping it! What is this darkness? Is it a phantom and a weakness? Is it only an enemy who challenges you and vanishes away in proportion as your own self enlarges? Is it death slowly developing in you?
It is intolerable. If this pillow were saturated with mortal poison, you would take the corner between your lips as the infant takes his mother's breast, and would drink release from your troubles. But if the poison stood over there in the other corner of the room, the mere ten paces to reach it would carry you too far back into life again! And yet tomorrow, or a few days hence, there will be moments when this darkness will suddenly surge up in you and consume you as though it were fire, so that you shrivel up within yourself and cannot excuse in your own eyes the shame of living. Yes, even though you can calmly look back upon this thing, smile at it like a reasonable man and joke about it, even then there is a secret fibre in your being which yearns for that darkness, which shudders in pride and awe of it, which has a premonition that in it there is something purer than all light and all joy.
In search of protection from such worrying phantasms I finally opened my eyes and turned toward the open window. But what I saw outside was so surprising that I closed my eyes again and cried, "What the devil is that?"