VIII

But for Martin this was not life. For him it was a retreat, an asylum in which he had sought repose for a time, which he hoped to make short.

He read and thought. In books and in his own thoughts he searched for what one so often seeks in youth in order to forget in age that one has ever bothered about it: a faith to live by, a star to steer by, a concord in things, a meaning, and a goal.

Martin had been a Christian up to his sixteenth year. It is natural for a child to believe what his elders say is true. He had believed everything and had not doubted, and on Sundays he had gone to church with his parents. If the preacher was a good talker and a charlatan, he felt edified and moved and wished he could become such a preacher; but if it was an honest unassuming minister who preached as well as he could without making any fuss or gesticulations, he generally went to sleep.

But when he was sixteen he was confirmed. Up to then religion had been a detail of school work set side by side with other details; now it became all of a sudden the one essential, that which daily demanded his time and consideration. The question could not be appeased by the thought: “This is just a matter of the emotions,” since it was customary to weep when one “went forward.” It freely developed the claim to be the highest of all, the dominant force in life, the one thing that mattered. And Martin could not escape the discovery that if religion was the truth, then it was right in this claim, the claim to be above everything else, and he must devote all his powers and his whole soul to it; he must become religious. But if it was not the truth, then he must seek the truth wherever he could find it; he must become a freethinker. The course between, the Christianity of use and custom such as is professed and believed in by the multitude, was to him mere thoughtlessness and conventionality. This was an evasion which seemed natural to him in most of his comrades, but it never occurred to him to think that this was open to him. He stood at the parting of the ways and had to choose.

But one night when he lay awake pondering over this, unable to sleep, while the moon shone straight into his room and the thoughts crowded into his head, suddenly it stood clear to him that he did not believe. It seemed to him that he had long realized the Christian religion was something that no one could really believe if he wished to be honest with himself. It became evident to him that the problem as to the truth of Christianity was something which he had already gone past and that it was actually a quite different problem which now disturbed him: how was it possible that the others could believe in this when he could not? By “the others” he meant not only his comrades⁠—for they did not seem to concern themselves any further in such matters, and he knew besides that one could get them to believe in a little of everything⁠—but his parents, his teachers, all the grownups, who must know more of life and the world than he did. How was it possible that he, Martin Birck, who wasn’t sixteen yet and lay in a little iron bed in the home of his parents, could think differently about the highest and most important things than did old and experienced people, and how could he be right and they wrong? This seemed to him almost as wildly absurd as the faith he had just rejected. Here he was completely at a loss; he couldn’t come to any solution. He got up out of bed and went to the window. Snow was glittering white on the roofs, it was dark in the houses, and the street lay empty. The moon stood high in the heavens, but it was a gray-white winter moon, small and frostbitten and infinitely far away, and in the moon-haze the stars twinkled sleepily and dully. Martin stood tracing with his finger on the pane. “Give me a sign, God!” he whispered. Then he stood long at the window, getting chilly and staring at the moon; he saw it glide in and become hidden behind a black factory chimney and he saw it creep out again on the other side. But he received no sign.

In the depths of his heart he did not wish for a sign either, for he felt that a conviction was something that one could not and should not have as a gift by means of a miracle. To seek for truth and be honest with oneself in the search, that was the one clue he could find.

Martin supposed that confirmation and the first communion were duties prescribed by law which he could not evade. His father had no different conception, or if he had he did not say so, for he reverenced the proverb: Speech is silver, silence is golden. Martin therefore went to communion with the other neophytes. It was a spring day with sun and tender green in the old trees of the churchyard, and when Martin heard the bells roar and sing and the organ begin the processional hymn, his eyes filled with tears and he grieved in his heart that he was not as the others and could not believe and feel as they did. And when he saw the church full of serious folk and heard the voice of the preacher enjoining the young people from the pulpit to hold fast to the faith of their fathers, he felt unrest and confusion through his inmost soul, and again the question came to trouble him: “How is it possible that all these can believe, and not I? It’s mad to think that I alone can be right against all these and against all the dead who sleep in their graves out there, who lived and died in the faith I reject. It’s mad, it’s mad! I must conquer my reason and teach myself to believe.” But when he came to the actual ceremonies and saw the ministers in their surplices going back and forth before the altar, while they dispensed the bread and wine and carried napkins over their arms like waiters, he felt faint and disgusted and could not understand that he had let himself be fooled into such mummery. And although he knew or believed that these ministers who shuffled about there in the gloom were in everyday life about as honest as most people, they seemed to him at that moment shameless hypocrites.

Belief in a God and in a life after this was what Martin had left at this time of his childhood faith. But his god was no longer a fatherly god who listened to prayers and nodded approval if they were needful and intelligent, or shook his head if they were childish and stupid. His god had become cold as ice and remote as the moon he had stood staring at on the winter’s night, and Martin ceased saying his evening prayer, for he did not believe there was anyone who heard it. Then finally came the day when Martin realized that what he had been calling god these last days was something with which no human being could come into any relation either of love or obedience or opposition, something which could only have the name of god by a wanton play of words and a misuse of the incompleteness of language.

And when he examined his belief in immortality, he soon found that he had got far away from the blue heaven of his childhood. He had observed that all who on any ground other than that of revelation preserved their belief in a life after this also assumed a life before this, and he found such an assumption both natural and logical. Only that is eternal which has always existed. What has come into being will sometime cease to be: such was the law for everything existent. But Martin had no memory of any earlier existence, nor had he either read or heard tell of anyone who had with any gleam of probability given it out that he remembered any such state. There were, to be sure, people who asserted that they recalled their preexistence, but they regularly maintained that they had been some historic personage of whom they had read in books during their present life: e.g., Julius Caesar or Gregory VII. Only rarely could anyone remember having been a slave or a waiter or a shop-clerk. This circumstance appeared peculiar. In any event it was clear that the great majority of people, and Martin among them, had not the slightest recollection of any previous existence. He concluded from this that neither in a future life would he be able to remember anything of the present, that indeed he would not be able to verify his own identity; and he found that if one called such an existence immortality, it was again⁠—as in the question of God⁠—a weakness of thought, a play with the imperfection of language, and nothing else. And it struck him as even more bizarre to give such a name to the passage of the dead body into living nature, into plants and animals and air and water. He had no mind for such kinds of wordplay.

Things went on in this way so that Martin set out in life without any other belief than that he would grow up, get old and die like a tree in the ground, as his forefathers had done, and that the green earth which he saw with his eyes was his only home in the world and the only space in which it was given him to live and act. And among the many dreams he composed about his life was that in which he was to become like a great and beautiful tree by the wayside with rich foliage, giving coolness and shelter to many. He wished to create happiness and beauty around him and to clear away illusions; he meant to speak and write so that all would have to perceive at once that he was right. To be sure he was not quite certain that truth in itself could produce happiness, but history had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime. Like pestilences the various religions had passed over the world, and he was astounded when he thought of all the desolation with which Christianity had marked its way through times and peoples. But he believed in full confidence that its days were reckoned, that he lived at the dawn of a new time, and he wanted to play his part in thought and poetry toward breaking the road for what was to come.

At the time when Martin believed and thought thus it still occurred to him that life, no matter how short and unstable it was, had nevertheless a sort of meaning. He felt himself to be in a state of development and growth; every day new truths arose before his mind and new beauty before his senses during his long lonely wanderings to the edge of the city or in the woods when spring had begun. And spring.⁠ ⁠… At that time spring was still a real spring⁠—not a disease, an intoxication, a fever in the blood, in which all old half-forgotten yearning and regret rises to the surface and says: “Look, here I am! Do you recognize me? I have slept long but I am not dead.” Nothing of that sort, but an awakening, a morning, a murmur in the air, and a resounding song. And at that time the thousand unsatisfied desires which he bore within him were like so many shimmering hopes and half-uttered promises, for no long years of emptiness and disappointment had yet managed to sharpen them into cutting knives which wounded and tore at the soul. And if he did not believe that all these obligations, or even most of them, would be redeemed by life, they were still like bribing possibilities, like a lever for dreams without goal or bounds; and even at the moment when the book he held in his hand or the experience he had had in the course of the day whispered warnings in his ear and advised him not to believe in happiness, these dreams were woven into a longing without bitterness and a melancholy as luminous as a spring twilight.

Nevertheless these warnings came ever more closely together, and ever more often it happened that in the midst of the dreams youthful blood conjured up he caught himself listening to the other voice, the voice that welled up from the depths of the oldest times and was echoed in the newest books of the day, the strange voice that none of the hundred new gospels which periodically as equinoctial storms had blown through the minds of men could silence for more than a brief moment, the voice which said: “All is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Why was he alive, and what was the meaning of it all? He did not cease to ask himself these questions, for he still continuously demanded of the life which he saw with his eyes that there should be something behind it, something which could be called life’s meaning. For most of the happiness which he saw men possess and that which he saw them strive for seemed to him like the fairy gold in the story, to be withered leaves, or it appeared to him like nice playthings, something not to be taken seriously. If he turned his gaze to his own life as he lived it from day to day, he could not escape the thought that in itself it was miserable and empty and that its only worth lay in the uncertain hope that it would not remain as it was. But what he hoped for was not something that one could approach step by step with work and patience and a hundred small sacrifices⁠—competence and respect and that sort of thing⁠—what he hoped for was something indefinite and indescribable: a sunrise, a breakup of the ice, an awakening from a painful and purposeless dream.

For it was like a painful and purposeless dream that his life appeared when he looked at it with waking eyes and found it filled with shabby joy, with vulgar sorrow and ignoble anxiety. Now and then he wrote some poems and stories to earn a little money and to prove how far his words could follow his thoughts, but with every new year all he had written in the old seemed to him childish and worthless, and he felt that nothing would amount to anything which could not fill him completely with the joy of creation. Beyond this he fulfilled almost automatically the sum of actions, or more properly gestures, which usually characterize a young man in a government office or to which other circumstances may lead. He went to his work as late in the day as possible and left as early as propriety allowed. He made acquaintance with his fellow employees and shared in their amusements. He drank punch, ate suppers, and visited cheap girls of the streets; he loved music and often sat at the opera among the blackamoors and musical enthusiasts of the upper gallery, and he sang quartettes and took his reward in double file when an old school superintendent hung the gilded tin funnel on a rose-colored ribbon around his neck with paternal hands.

And he said to himself: “No, I’m dreaming. This is not life.”