The direction of the apothecary’s research began to change, it seems,around February of 1940, when OTTO BRIG [q.v.] met him for the first time in the streets of the ghetto, licking the boots of two Waffen SS men. Otto remembers that. Otto: “He smiled, I tell you, under their very noses, as happy as if he’d just stolen a peach from the priest’s garden! So I knew, of course, that he was for us!” Otto paid much money to release him from the two SS men who had humiliated him, and took him to the zoo. On the way there, Marcus explained the essence of his experiments to Otto, and the meaning of his beatific smile while being so abused became clear now as well. “There’s no time,” he told Otto. “And I want to enjoy myself in the few remaining months, and so, now—happiness.” Wasserman supposed that in those gloomy days in the ghetto Aaron Marcus had wandered the streets, and using only his psychic powers managed to “balance the scales of suffering and happiness, because unless they are balanced, we are lost.” It should be noted, however, that the apothecary was exposed to a great many dangers in the course of his experiments. Wasserman: “Like his tremulous, hasty journey into the feeling of compassion, nu well, and his almost irresponsible self-abandon there, Marcus my friend! And hope, yes, particularly in those times he wanted to explore hope … What terrible sufferings he endured! But he was not put off and made his way, step by step, through the hostile jungle of our sentimental life. Armed with the sense of introspection, a sense which became as fine as a butterfly’s antenna and as sharp as a razor, Marcus cleared the way, separated the dense undergrowth into trunks, branches, twigs, fibers, and filaments, and gave them names, like the first man in the Garden of Eden, and I swear to you, Herr Neigel, I will never understand how he kept his sanity! His face, always fine and soft, the face of a tranquil baby, aged so! At first it darkened like a cauldron, and then it brightened again, and we saw what had happened: every experiment, it seems, every psychic immersion had left its mark on him, a trace, a scar. Ai, the fate of the lonely artist who has no one to share the dangers with, you understand; all alone, he was compelled to try out each new shade of sentiment before he would consider himself entitled to enter it on his list and give it a name.” Marcus: “With great excitement I note the following: Between ‘anxiety’ and ‘terror’ I have discovered and classified by name another six shades of feeling, more or less acute, all of them definitely ‘primary.’” Marcus’s experiments did not end here: his daring brought him to the stage where he had no choice but to go furtherstill. There was no turning back, nor did he even consider turning back. Wasserman: “He understood that he must now conduct deeper experiments, ever crueler, of a kind I shudder to recall even now, Herr Neigel, with seven shades of disgust, for he now began to devote his sacred time to breeding …” Aaron Marcus began to crossbreed feelings hitherto considered alien and even inimical to each other. The man who privately called himself “an astronomer of feeling,” with modest conceit, attempted, for example, to breed anxiety with hope, or melancholy with longing; in this, it seems, he sought a way to implant every unpleasant, harmful, and destructive feeling with a seed of transcendence, of redemption. The most fascinating hybrid of
