When Silence Sighs...

You come to know a certain smile... It is fragile, more fragile than sleeping water... If you begin to think about it, it clouds over. So it is with creation. Thought always clings to what has been created. And in clinging, it is shackled. Brought down to earth. It knows neither the sweep nor the height of creation.

As with everything else, it is difficult to determine the being of creation. "Determination" and "being" do not tolerate one another. For being is not nimble, nor does it know decline. There is no "weak being," as some claim today, but only weakness before being. Being is and strives: that is its only meaning. It nourishes itself, builds itself, transforms, changes levels. It does not miss opportunities. We miss them. We overlook them, because we know only the logic of our own level. Armed with it, we want to draw from being, when the only thing at stake is that being draw from us. Whoever it exhausted, created. Labored drop by drop...

Here..., every drop can be counted... Drop by drop..., and a string of pearls... Or, if you prefer, this book as a diary, a calendar, of the soul! It turns the pages of an ancient truth according to its own time: the centers of existence are one! We see clearly: the connective tissue of history cannot touch them. That is why situating one's own intimacy in the space of memory, as the author does, is infinitely more significant than any "dating," and the movement of the soul, which this book is, more articulate than all historiography.

When I need to explain all this, a certain inclination toward silence settles in me. Explanations are good when they search through materials, but the contemplation of creation weighs heavily upon them. And so I give myself over to silence, hoping that my own word too might be granted permission. For truly, silence is a wonder.

Something there always overflows, something you cannot avoid and will never reach by mind. Something heavy... In heaviness there is an intimation of depth. Depth is silence without equal. It guards the incomprehensible. With it, it frames everything. It gives everything a face.

I know, it is vain today to speak of silence that frames. It cannot be read by separating things and analyzing samples. It is simple. Like the curve of a swan's neck. Only the heart happens upon it... The one it touches, it beautifies. In an instant, some compact meaning begins to play... The heart leaps... Its beats lose physiological meaning and gain metaphysical meaning. The heart discovers time, the heart that feels and thinks. Whoever does not have it does not know that time exists, and therefore lives in time without difficulty. Only mania, some madness of the heart, extracts one from time. And the heart goes mad when silence touches it, when it lets it know that this time is cramped, contracted, and small; when the heart feels that the tone of time is not its tone, when its cadence is noticeably deceptive. If the heart were not "extracted from time," the "feeling for time" would never drip into it. Can one then think at all, and not speak what lies upon the heart?

And everything that lies there has been consecrated by silence. Whoever neglects it, whoever loses its voice or its sigh, will find that everything he says becomes, inevitably, flagellum aeris: a "whip of air." Cramped and reduced to specialized frames of knowledge, denied the right to live.

To think truly, then, is to learn to build silence. To weave its halo in things, between things, above and below them. To make it "visible," to give it sound. Few know how to do this. Only a handful... like sentries..., always at the borders..., on the masts... Chosen. Exposed. An icy wind lashes them, evil burns and scorches, and they, despite everything, still row toward the day. Surely. Drawn by the strange light of silence... And clothed anew. From within. From the order of such builders and weavers comes our author.

He knows how to add silence even to stones, knowing that it will die every time the stones are separated. Like a possession added to sheep, mountains, and dwellings. If you separate them, the possession disappears.

Today people care only to master the calculation of things so they may know how to use them. But will calculation make you a person who lives through the feelings of others? What good is your father's house if you know only how to use it? Can you, through use, beneath the tear in things, discern their face?

However deeply you dive into silence, you will not find its bottom... It always eludes, remains... And when everything passes, it "remains to remain," beyond reach, beyond hope, for thought. Precisely because of that, it provokes thought, calls to it. Thus the beginning and end of thought are always the same: bottomless, unreachable. In the event of the abyssal lies its native ground. Thought owes its body to it. Toward it, thought also aligns itself. Thinking is possible only before the im-possible. When it returns to it, it breathes. It is alive, because it opens itself to what is more expansive than itself. And upon even the gloomiest thought, it draws a smile.

Reading the book, it seems to me that I reach silence in every sign. Everything breathes with the warp it stitches together.

We encounter the same atmosphere wherever there is thought. Let us remember: philosophy is not everything, but only a word in the text. Just as even the most complete symphony is, for the composer, only a note of an inexhaustible melody, so for Socrates philosophy is a passage into what is better than itself. The hour comes when he leaves knowledge at the door, so that he may step onto the mysterious and nocturnal paths of eros. He must, because where he now goes, knowledge does not go, cannot go, not because it is weak, but because it is inadequate. It stops and renounces itself. And Socrates knows: where knowledge stops, the enigmatic realm of assent and participation opens. Then philosophizing does not mean only clearing away, analyzing, and interpreting something, but also absorbing oneself by soul into the rarity of the mystery that shines from it. Not everything is grasped through conceptual breadth; there is something in nearness too... Not everything is thought as an object found in the mind; there is also that in which the mind finds itself... They say that thought begins only at the end of experience. Perhaps precisely when a person notices that he has been noticed. Only then is he enriched in spirit.

The author is such a wealthy man. He does not boast of what is comprehended, because he senses that he understands only the bursting forth of incomprehensible meanings. He does not strive for greater cognition, but presses close to what surpasses the comprehensible. He moves toward the incomprehensible.

I know, one should not play with this word, especially not in philosophy. But I introduce it not for the sake of play, but of seriousness... The incomprehensible should not be understood, as Heidegger says, "as some tangled twilight and diffuse confusion, but as an evident boundary and concealment." After all, toward the incomprehensible goes "the one who sees, not the muddler and the one who makes a principle of the irrational, a place of refuge." Whoever understands the nature of the rational will be led by it to the boundary. When thought becomes pregnant with the boundary, it gives birth.

And whoever gives birth knows that he does not know. He does not know Truth, yet somehow knows of Truth, because the soul suffers it. Whoever knows of it feels poverty, unworthiness, knows his own nothingness. This does not shackle him in the nihilism he finds, but opens him and raises him toward gratitude. That is why such a one is dear to the gods. Nothingness has made him fit to transmit a truth greater than his own.

In the manner of the old masters, the author demonstrates that to think does not mean only to analyze by reason, but also to illuminate by wonder. If reason adapts the world to the concept, wonder adapts the mind to the world. Reason is finite, wonder eternal. Truly, there will never be an answer to human wonder, because wonder never leaves questioning. It is not aesthetic enjoyment, but the endless tension of existence. Like a pledge placed before the ultimate question, which then terrifies its own insufficient reverence and too-weak horror. Through wonder we are placed before the question..., but now the unsayable asks. That is how receptivity to transcendence springs from the soul. I do not understand its meaning when rumor spreads it and doctrine imposes it; I notice it when it flashes like a spark from the anvil of the mind.

Walled up in concepts, modern man may mock this, ridicule it, and despise it to his heart's content, but it is enough for him once to stand between Heaven and Earth and look: the look itself will silence that loudmouth.

In order truly to be, a person must affirm the being of the Logos. And when that happens, as it has happened here, one may say with Thomas Aquinas: through thought, man is what he is. Man is when he reads the Other. When he communes with the essential, he too becomes essential. He draws himself out of superficiality, noncommittalness, restlessness, wandering, clever quips, and becomes aware of deficiencies in consistency, turning his back on the deceptive glitter of time (Goethe). Feeling his own insufficiency, he searches for completeness. He seeks an exit. Salvation.

Of course, all this hurts. But without pain, Dostoevsky says, there would be no consciousness. And he says it well, because only pain is capable of urging a person to seek himself. The search for the self is therefore never theoretical, but always dramatic: it springs from the longing of a living human being for truth, for what will make unbearable life bearable. And there, as this book masterfully shows, a loving embrace teaches more, and better, than any doctrine, because it turns one toward overabundant life, not toward service to a tyrannical idol. Gifts come even in scarcity. To a wise person, when the hour strikes, show the reflection of a single bee, and he cries out gratitude and love.

At the same time, the author wants to hide nothing, to sweep nothing under the rug. He shows clearly: man is a hiatus gaping in the world. Everything passes, but only in him is transience experienced as such. Then nothingness enters the game, the nothingness that exists in consciousness and not outside, in the world. Who am I, then, when I am already poisoning myself with consciousness? How can one escape this? And upon whom can one rely?

Asking in this way, perhaps we are already answering grace without even being aware of it. Perhaps in the testing of the mystery of existence we are already being carried by grace, though we do not know how to call it by name. What if it is precisely for this reason that our lips no longer bloom and our word no longer takes flight? What imposes the urgency of thought in every age is not departure into some otherworldly hell, but falling into mud and a narrowed view in this world...

It seems the author knows this well... and so he throws himself into the furnace of the present day. Like Plato once, by logos he descends into the "immeasurable and unsayable of time," into the "unadorned of world and man." He tests; he does not flee. He goes to the end, asks no matter where the question leads. Here and now he takes up the ancient task of thought. He repeats it, whatever may presently be said and thought about the possibility of such an act.

Times have prepared a welcome for no one, and they will not for us either. All of them are dark. Tearful with their wounds and with the pain that lashes them. It is naive to reduce "pain and wounds" to the surface of "this day," because in them there is something far older, deeper, and more significant. It is difficult even to sense it unless one suffers and bleeds from the wound. Only one who bears witness in such a way is capable of wholly grasping "the bundle of darkness of his time" (G. Agamben). And whoever can do that, like our author, becomes a contemporary, regardless of the time.

Down to every nerve ending, he feels the truth of the age. And he bears witness to it honorably. One might say that he sets Benjamin's little hunchback, whom Benjamin summons from his memories and who, in various forms, inhabits the imagination of each of us, as the image of the age. That inhabitant of "distorted life" is not only a sign of childish clumsiness, not only a buffoon who steals the glass from the one who wants to drink and the prayer from the one who wants to pray, but a sign of what has been forgotten. Distortion, hump, deformity: all these are forms that things assume in oblivion. Truly, our times are hunchbacked, built from forgetting. And first of all we forgot the Kingdom..., we who live as if we were not the Kingdom. We hunchbacked ones... And precisely as we are, as nothing, we are the authentic sign of our time. In it, signs are no longer traces of anything. And when they are no longer traces of anything, nothing has already left its trace in them. Freed from idea, concept, essence, they enter an infinite discursive space of endless self-reproduction. They wander without purpose. They recite themselves. That is why they ring for no one. Entirely in keeping with a time that understands itself as violent wandering without clear aim or result. Here and now everything is proud precisely of being lost. In a world resembling a lie, a satanic abyss. In a light from which one rots. Our day is wrapped in unbroken night: "not one, not two, but a thousand and one nights" (L. Shestov).

We forgot God... Did he ever even exist?

I do not know, but I clearly hear his music fading and receding. It plays farewell... What if that farewell is the only true one? The fundamental experience of the age; an enormous sign that, in a strange way, gathers all the signs of the time, illuminating them from within. God is absent, and that means: the era of self-forgetting, constant falling, and alienation begins. And it will last long. Until the end of time. This is more certain than everything certain.

Truly, where is God? Where did he disappear? They say: he is dead. Well then, let us be done with him; let us finally put a full stop.

But, "I will tell you this too: we have killed him. And how did we do it? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we unchained the Earth from the Sun?... Are we not wandering through an infinite nothing? Does empty space not breathe in our face?... Is night not coming, more and more night?... Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?"

The sky that could not occupy hearts, it seems, will not stop falling on our heads.

The cry of the madman: was it truly ours? Did we hear it, actually hear it? It was recorded, yes; we all know it, but only so it might pass by. Such is the calculation of the day: when the cry passes by, the desperate rapture and lostness from which it grows are veiled, and then that "strange" and deeply modern enthusiasm does not show itself in its obvious unreason and madness, but always in one of the self-stylizations in which people then deeply and resolutely believe, and which they madly use in the discourses of this day. By lowering it into a secular perspective, the cry is disciplined and then easily translated into some Promethean appeal to humanity to gather upon its "own foundation." And now we see that this was the same as calling it to gather on the point of a needle.

When the cry becomes a slogan, when it is no longer either existential tornness or cultural givenness, it is no longer possible to meet its true problem, or rather its scandal and anxiety. Today we do not see what there would even be to meet there. The dogma of modernity embroidered a character for us, clothed it in sworn faith: everything before the modern hiatus is childishness, not even worth mentioning; only afterward does dawn break. And once we step into the light, we have already settled accounts with what came before. And now we are calm...

But here is this book to rebuke us: how can one be calm when God is dead? And what kind of peace would that be? The peace of the speechless. Do you hear it: God is dead and we have killed him.

Will we ever begin to awaken into consciousness of the terrible fate fulfilled because of the death of God? And still being fulfilled..., reaching its peak precisely now?

A new world, a new man, a new city... if any of that can still come to consciousness, does it not testify only to bankruptcy? The safes are empty... There is nothing, in man, in the world, in the city..., nothing of value. And trash in abundance. One must live there, work there, leave soul and heart there... With a plugged nose. Watch the reflections of the crystal palace at sunset... And what will be seen? What can be seen, except what Zarathustra too saw: "only a rag of a devil!"

Did the bullet intended for God pierce man's soul and blow apart his world? And the mallet we made for Him, this machine of modernity, has it not bludgeoned itself? Modernity killed itself with modernity.

The disappearance of God delivers man to his egoistic hollowness. Horror. But this horrible thing is what we wanted. And still want, with all our strength. Thus in our mouths too the saying "God is dead" becomes an act, like the murderer's. Man is the killer of God, all of us. In his mad obsession the murderer does not see: "the brightest and mightiest thing the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wash this blood from us?" With God everything departs, loses weight, dissolves, even man himself. How long, then, can such a blow be endured? A blow from this side, from that side, blows after which only total deprivation remains.

What vertigo!

Christian history is legend, and Christian dogmatics mere mythology. Plato prepared it for Europe, to Europe's misfortune (F. Nietzsche). One must be cured of this. And let nothing remain, because the time of decision has come. In place of the cross they put forward paganism. The author joins them, but not so fast... there is some torment in this. As if he feels: these insights are not the result of knowledge, but simply a matter of decision, of caprice, that takes the form of an order, a strict order. If God is a conjecture, the sons of the earth have drunk all the torment of that conjecture. But can it be drunk without man immediately perishing?

No... the torment will not pass... it cannot...

In this book it is felt vividly... Perhaps that is its true value. It offers no answers. After all, why should wisdom be "our answer"? Is it not first of all an extraction from the conceit and depravity of knowledge? An extraction as existential stretching, extending, self-opening, so that some other Order may pass through. And this book is such a passage. In its very announcement, already a revelation: a revelation of suicide, of the theoretical kind.

Does suicide not shake us more deeply than some proper life? "How did it happen to that person precisely... what did we do so that..., what did we not do? Is grace between the water and the bridge, between the blast and the spilled brain..., the opening of veins and the closing of a coffin? A book that is like suicide can produce resurrection in us, because it has disturbed us... And a book that makes us happy is, in fact, a misfortune."

The author does not intend to establish "something firm and constant in the sciences," but to uncover the deep and incurable split in our all too unstable heart. That is why he does not answer expectations. He cannot. But he does not want to either. After all, what is answered when expectations are answered? Is the "author of expectations" not known? Is it not discourse? Answering the expectations of some anonymous force, the force of discourse, may bring some benefit, but how can a person remain faithful to that without losing himself?

Finally, how can one recognize the effort of thought that equates concepts with the movements of the world if we do not "turn our backs" on expectations, or "turn expectations onto their backs"? How can we descend into the unadorned of the world and of ourselves if we are guided by expected methodological ornaments? How can one think at all if one reckons exclusively with "certainties" while doing so? Finally, what is the point of letters if in them one does not assume a certain peril? Does writing not bring us into some alliance? Is that an alliance of signs, of letters, discourse, or an alliance of spirit? Perhaps the alliance demands that we ourselves become writing.

In closing, I cannot help but remember Kafka: a book must be like an axe that cuts the frozen sea within us. The author seems to have known this when he gave us this book.