Cassandra

It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.

I can no longer view Cassandra as a tragic figure. I do not think she saw herself that way. Does her contemporaneity lie in the way she learns to deal with pain? So, is pain the point at which I assimilate her, a particular kind of pain, the pain of becoming a knowing subject?

The Homeridae, through their accounts of heroic deeds of long ago, may have united and structured the masses who listened to them, above and beyond prevailing social structures. The classical Greek dramatist helped create, by aesthetic means, the political-ethical attitude of the free, adult, male citizen of the polis. The hymns, mystery plays, and saints’ legends of the Christian medieval poet also served to promote a bond whose two terms, God and man, were both responsive. The courtly epic has a fixed set of characters to whom it relates by praising them. The early middle-class poet addresses his prince in burning protest, and at the same time addresses the prince’s subjects, stirring them to rebellion. The proletariat, the socialist movements with their revolutionary class-struggle goals, inspire the literature that accompanies them to concrete partisanship. But in the face of modern-day phenomena, awareness of the incongruousness of words keeps growing. The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe what we see. We cannot express what we already believe.

The Homeridae, through their accounts of heroic deeds of long ago, may have united and structured the masses who listened to them, above and beyond prevailing social structures. The classical Greek dramatist helped create, by aesthetic means, the political-ethical attitude of the free, adult, male citizen of the polis. The hymns, mystery plays, and saints’ legends of the Christian medieval poet also served to promote a bond whose two terms, God and man, were both responsive. The courtly epic has a fixed set of characters to whom it relates by praising them. The early middle-class poet addresses his prince in burning protest, and at the same time addresses the prince’s subjects, stirring them to rebellion. The proletariat, the socialist movements with their revolutionary class-struggle goals, inspire the literature that accompanies them to concrete partisanship. But in the face of modern-day phenomena, awareness of the incongruousness of words keeps growing. The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe what we see. We cannot express what we already believe.

With my eyes I trace the route the tourist buses take at brief intervals to the car park, where they then wait at the foot of the mountain fortress, parked in a row twenty or thirty deep, until their human cargo clamber up the mountain like ants, obtain some form of gratification, return exhausted, swiftly refresh themselves with ice cream and Coca-Cola, and disappear again, relieved, into their mobile retreat.

‘To learn through suffering’ – this seems to be the law of the new gods, and likewise the way of masculine thought.

here, at one of the southernmost tips of Europe, that I would be overwhelmed by that sense of forlornness that signals the loss of all the coordinates where we embed ourselves, to which we cling. Forlorn, standing at the farthest outlying point of the pier that extends far into the sea, I watched the early, triumphal sunset behind the fortress of Burdzi and behind the mountain chain that shields the port on the west. Forlorn, I roamed through the queer streets of the Venetian Old Town. A malady which I did not want to call homesickness severed the tie between me and these little streets, this plump round moon, this polished sky.

But recently I have come to understand the source of the passion that drove Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans, and my understanding is destined to grow until it borders on a passion that will drive me to an immoderate bout of reading and stand in the way of a sensible, rational work plan. The steps of the ancient forum where the apostle Paul may well have preached to the Corinthians, with the pillars of the far more ancient temple of Apollo in the background: this picture affords more insight than books can into the way various strata of belief are linked to various strata of rocks. What kind of faith will the people of the future (assuming there are people in the future) read out of our stone, steel, and concrete ruins? How will they account for the hubris of the gigantic metropolises, in which people cannot live without paying the penalty? Of the maze of themes which we, its contemporaries, perceive in our civilisation, will only a few remain? Power. Wealth. Delusions of grandeur?

we are aware that a reverence cordoned off into preserves cannot be reverence but is nothing but calculation, and that it would surely be more ‘honest’ – how words lose their meanings! – if at the end of its days our civilisation were to dredge under the shrines of its origin, along with everything else.

But at the same time he is also slightly irritated by our inability to defend ourselves against cheats. As if certain powers had failed to develop which, though they were never used, still are part of a human being.