An Imaginary Life

Must it all be like this from now on? Will I have to learn everything all over again like a child? Discovering the world as a small child does, through the senses, but with all things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue?

I stood silent in the center of the plain and [the horsemen] began to wheel in great circles about me, uttering cries—not of malice I thought, but of mourning. Let us into your world, they seemed to be saying. Let us cross into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe.

After a century of war in which whole families had destroyed one another in the name of patriotism, we were at peace. I stepped right into it—an age of soft, self-indulgent muddle, of sophisticated impudence, when we all seemed to have broken out of bounds at last into an enlightenment so great that there was no longer any need for belief.

Do you think Italy—or whatever land it is you now inhabit—is a place given you by the gods, readymade in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place.

My life has been so frivolous. Brought up to believe in my own nerves, in restlessness, variety, change; educated entirely out of books, living always in a state of soft security, able to pamper myself, to drift about in a cloud of tender feelings, and with comfortable notions of my own intelligence, sociability, kindness, good breeding; moved by nothing I couldn’t give a name to, believing in nothing I couldn’t see.

Of the the two of us it is my brother who should have survived. I am the frivolous one, who will achieve nothing in the world. It is my brother who would have saved the last of our lands, won important public office, done all a good son can be expected to do in the way of piety toward his family gods. I know this is true and feel my life, my whole body’s weight in the saddle, as a burden.

Does the boy watch all this, I wonder? And what does he make of it? What species does he think he might belong to? Does he recognize his own?

As a Roman citizen of the knightly order, the descendant of a whole line of warriors, with the law and the flower of Roman civilization to protect against barbarians, I scoffed at such old-fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world.

The old man’s stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that explains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it […] I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic.

I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leads toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished.

I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation.

For these people it is a new concept, play. How can I make them understand that till I came here it was the only thing I knew? Everything I ever valued before this was valuable only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists, I think, in their language.

He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own.

All that will tie him to us, a new life, is invisibly there, he must feel it: the web of feeling that is this room, the strings—curiosity, a need to find out the usefulness to him of all these objects that surround him, and the way they define and illuminate the uses of his own body—these are the threads that hold him now, and along which his mind must travel to discover how he is connected to us.

I too know all the boundary stones of our land, but to me they mean something different. They are where the world begins. Beyond them lies Rome and all the known world that we Romans have power over. Out there, beyond the boundary stones, the mystery begins.

All this world is alive for [the Child]. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read.

Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves.

The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.

All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my own will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate.

If I thought we might find [the Child] in the spring, I would let him go. But that is impossible. Having brought him in among us there is no way back. Already, in the warmth of the room, he is losing his capacity to withstand cold. […] Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it from him.

What else should life be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful setting out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become […] What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?

The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us. […] I no longer ask myself what we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond measurable time.

From here I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods.