Thus Eric Falk soars and Przybyszewski shows the sorry mechanics of his wings, laughing, chuckling, for they are his own. Thus toward the middle of the book you begin wondering. Falk is going to pieces, Falk the immutable, the all knowing, the transcender, the ... the ... the ... the Homo Sapiens. What is the matter? When he betrays a woman and causes her death a hideous vapor suddenly envelopes his soul and befouls it. Przybyszewski thrusts his radiant leer from behind Zarathustra’s mask and hisses, “Conscience, ha!”
And thus it goes its merry way. To the edge of the precipice this mad Pole pushes his whirling Falk, to the utter edge of known reason, known psychology and known Passions.
And then suddenly the soarer falls. The mechanism comes clattering to earth—to the bottom of the precipice. The lugubrious Stanislaw has led his creation—himself—to the limits.
He has finished his book.
Piled on the desk lies the heap of glowing sentences, the history of rhapsodic vivisection.
Przybyszewski has expressed himself.
He has uttered his most internal cry, the cry of a poet, a weaver of plots, an anatomical expert, of an introspective vulture-minded Disbeliever.
And now I call your attention to Mr. Przybyszewski at his desk—too tired to rise. Gone are the golden thrills that quivered in him, gone everything but the thin sardonic grin that lights the face of Eric Falk—on the last page. And only Eric Falk’s last cry, “Vive L’Humanité” is left him. So our Stanislaw, the idol of Bohemia, the tortured demon, sits chuckling, a glass of cognac trembling in his fingers.
“Homo Sapiens,” he sighs with his inevitable sneer, that pierces through his pity and pain like the point of a rapier, “behold thyself. Thou, Eric, art man. Thou art the creaking vehicle for the golden theories, the rainbow fantasies which have sifted out of the mental mists of the century. And behold, thou creakest, thou groanest, thou breakest under this lightest of burdens.”
The tired Przybyszewski quivers. His lips, mocking their way through the delirious poison of thought and passion have kissed the intangible. He has stripped his brain to its last cell and looked at it. And the cry that rises out of the book comes condensed from his lips now—after it is done. Nowhere is it written, nowhere is it heard except at Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s desk—in Bohemia.