THUNDER underground began to boom at midnight on the ninth of January 1784 like a hundred batteries of cannon beneath the silver city of Guanaxuato in Mexico, continuing like a ripening summer storm, clap and drum roll, like the hoofbeats of Visigoth cavalry under Alaric coming upon Rome when a havoc of light in midday blue had signaled Vortumna and the Arvals that the hill gods were turning their shoulders from Roman flour and Roman flower, an angry, angled slender crack of fire and a sizzling split through the air and Rome was no longer under the ax and stick pack and eagle and wolf but under the Crow, a sound like high promontories breaking away from a headland and falling into a raging sea. Which awful noise lasted until the middle of February. When, after the third day, no earthquake followed the persistent subterranean thunder, el cabildo kept the people inside the city, ringing it with militia, for fear that thieves would come and steal their silver, not an ingot of which shivered in that incongruous stillness and steadfastly detonating tumult.
Yet it was a land where a tall cathedral might suddenly ring all its bells and sink out of sight into a crevice open so briefly that, having swallowed an orchard, a mule train, the church, a sleeping hog, and the local astrologer, it could close again neatly enough to catch a hen by both feet in the pavement of the Calle San Domingo.
Der Graf Rufzeichen sat listening to these details from von Humboldt’s Cosmos with glassy eyes.
— Avenues of trees, I went on, become displaced in an earthquake without being uprooted. Fragments of cultivated ground of very different kinds mutually displace each other.
— Erstaunlich!
— A still more remarkable and complicated phenomenon is the discovery of utensils belonging to one house in the ruins of another at a great distance, a circumstance that has given rise to lawsuits.
— Earthquakes, is it, you’re reading me about? asked the Count. My God. I once came all over dizzy while out riding, for no cause except perhaps the game I’d had at old Fuchtel’s might have been a touch high, and saw two of everything, and keeled over out of the saddle, stars everywhere. Do you think that was earthquake?
— Did anyone else note a tremor? I asked him.
— How could they? said the Count with some indignation. They weren’t there.
— Earthquakes are fairly extensive. They cover quite an area, I believe.
— Couldn’t have been a small one there under my horse?
The Count milked his moustache and stared into the corner of the room.
ONCE UPON A TIME, in a Swiss valley, there was born to an honest couple a baby that had a jack-o’-lantern for a head. The parents were sure their grief and horror were the greatest ever felt, and yet the infant suckled and cried, slept and burbled, like any other. Its eyelets were elfin in outline, the neat small triangular nostrils were not really repulsive, and the round hole of a mouth took in its mother’s milk with a will and let out boisterous cries that for timbre and volume were the equal of any baby in Switzerland.
For months it was kept hidden. Its parents had come to adore it, as a child sees the greatest winsomeness and charm in a doll that has buttons for eyes, whose mouth is stitched onto cheesecloth, and whose hair is thread. They ventured to show it to its grandparents, who collapsed in fear and loathing, but who eventually were won over, and loved to dandle little Klaus on their knees.
One by one the neighbors fell down breathless, their eyes rolled back in their heads, at the sight of the little chap and his pumpkin grin, and one by one they got used to him. In no time at all the whole village thought nothing at all of Klaus, and in due course he became a model little boy, quick to learn in school, gratifyingly pious in church, and a fine fellow to all his friends, of whom he had many.
It was then only the rare tinker or traveler who, passing through, caught sight of him and fell screaming into a fit or froze as still as stone and had to be revived with slaps and brandy.
Kafka stole his cockroach from that story. He has, I admit, improved upon it, and seen it from a dark angle. I meant that we are all monsters: by fate and by character. Fate and character are bow and string. What happens to us is what our character invites, guides in, challenges. All that ought to matter is that we are alive, which turns out, I’ve found, to be our last consideration. What does a banker care whether he is living or dead, so long as he has a shilling to kiss, a franc to lick?
And of life we can ask but continuity. That, as I explain to my doctors, is my neurosis. I have been, I am, I shall be, for awhile, but off and on, like a firefly.
I confuse my doctors. When they say I am mistaken about reality it is they who are mistaken. They say I cannot distinguish, cannot sort fact from fiction.
How solemnly their empty chairs listened to them, and the portraits of Freud and Jung on the wall! The lamps, and especially the fire in the grate, listened to these strange words with dismay. To think that the custodians of the spirit should have prepared for me a categorical prison.
— Consider! I said.
They looked at
