Men in Dark Times

Only slowly did it dawn upon me that he did not want to belong among “the happy few, who grow fewer and unhappier day by day,” for the simple reason that he was a democrat at heart with “a scientific education and a radical youth,” who was “old-fashioned enough to believe, like Goethe, in Progress.”

(Chesterton it seems was another one, and I suspect that much of his great insight into, not so much the philosophy, but the person of St. Thomas sprang from the sheer sympathy of one very awkward and very fat man with another.)

As he grew older, it was only natural that the number of dead friends should increase; and although I never saw him violently stricken with grief, I was aware of the almost calculated carefulness with which he kept mentioning their names as though he were afraid that through some fault of his they would slip away altogether from the company of the living.

His erudition, on the contrary, was only another form of his enormous capacity for loyalty.

The majesty of the law demands that we be equal—that only our acts count, and not the person who committed them. The act of forgiving, on the contrary, takes the person into account; no pardon pardons murder or theft but only the murderer or the thief. We always forgive somebody, never someihing, and this is the reason people think that only love can forgive.

Therefore we shall now put you against a wall. But in consideration of your merits and virtues, it will be a good wall, and we shall shoot you with good bullets from good guns, and we shall bury you with a good shovel in good soil”

Now reality overwhelmed him to the point where he could no longer be its voice; he had succeeded in being in the thick of it—and had proved that this is no good place for a poet to be.

What set him apart was that he realized how deadly ridiculous it would be to measure the flood of events with the yardstick of individual aspirations—to meet, for instance, the international catastrophe of unemployment with a desire to make a career and with reflections on one’s own success and failure, or to confront the catastrophe of the war with the ideal of a well-rounded personality, or to go into exile, as so many of his colleagues did, with complaints about lost fame or a broken-up life.

denied what Friedrich Hebbel once called “die ruhige reine Entwicklung”— the quiet, pure unfolding of all their faculties—and they reacted with bitterness.

Not that he had wanted to settle down there; from December, 1947, until Fall, 1949, he had waited in Zürich for permission to settle in Munich,14 and only when he had to give up all hope of getting it did he decide to go home as best he could—well provided against all hazards with a Czech passport soon to be exchanged for an Austrian one, a Swiss bank account, and a West German publisher.