The Absolute at Large/Chapter 13
Chapter XIII
The Chronicler's Apology
And now permit the chronicler of the Absolute to call your attention to his painful situation. First of all, he is in the act of writing Chapter XIII, well aware that this unlucky number will have a fatal influence on the clarity and completeness of his exposition. There is going to be a mix-up of some kind in this unfortunate chapter, you may be sure. Of course, the author could quite calmly head it Chapter XIV, but the observant reader would feel that he had been cheated out of Chapter XIII, and no one could blame him, since he has paid to have the whole narrative. Besides, if you are afraid of the number thirteen, you have only to skip this chapter. It will certainly not cause you to lose much light on the obscure affair of the Factory for the Absolute.
But the other embarrassments of the chronicler are much more serious. He has described as coherently as he could the origin of the factory and its prosperity. He has called your attention to the occurrences due to certain of the Karburator cylinders in Mr. Machat's buildings, at the Zivno Industrial Bank, in the textile works at Upice, aboard Kuzenda's dredge, and on Binder's merry-go-round. He has described the tragic experience of Blahous, the result of long-range infection, induced by the free and mobile Absolute, which had evidently begun to spread in a serious fashion, although after no definite plan.
But now you must remember that since the beginning of the whole affair countless thousands of Karburators of the most diverse types had been manufactured. Trains, flying-machines, automobiles, and ships driven by this most economical of all motors discharged along their routes whole clouds of the Absolute, just as in other days they used to leave a trail of dust, smoke, and smells. You must remember that thousands of factories all over the world had already scrapped their old boilers and equipped themselves with Karburators; that hundreds of Government departments and offices, hundreds of banks, exchanges, wholesale and export firms, as well as huge restaurants, hotels, military barracks, schools, theatres, tenements, thousands of newspaper offices and clubs, cabarets, and households were being heated by the latest M.E.C. Central-Heating Karburator. You must remember that the Stinnes interests with all their ramifications had amalgamated with the M.E.C., and that the American Ford works had flung themselves into mass-production which hurled thirty thousand finished Karburators out upon the world every day.
Well, bearing all this in mind, just recall what happened with each of those Karburators whose history has been presented to you. Multiply these incidents a hundred thousand times, and you will grasp at once the unhappy position of the present chronicler. How gladly he would journey with you after each new Karburator, see it loaded on the wagon, and offer a bit of hay or bread or a lump of sugar to the heavy draught-horses, with their broad and kingly backs, which drag the new copper cylinders on the rattling lorry to the factory! How gladly he would look on while they set it up, standing with his hands behind his back and giving the erectors his advice, and then wait until it was set in motion! How eagerly then he would peer into people's faces to note when "it" would begin to affect them, when the Absolute would creep into their being by the nose or ears or any other part, and begin to dissolve the hardness of their nature, overpower their personal tendencies, and cure their moral wounds; to watch the Absolute turn them up with its heavy plough, warm them, master them, and shape them anew; to see it lay open to them a world so marvellous and yet intrinsically so human, of wonders, ecstasy, enlightenment, inspiration and belief! For you must know that the chronicler admits that he is incapable of writing a history. Where the historian uses the press or pounder of his historical learning, documentary lore, abstracts, synthesis, statistics, and other professional devices, to squeeze thousands and hundreds of thousands of little vital personal incidents into a dense and arbitrary conglomerate known as "a historical fact," "a social phenomenon," "a mass movement," "evolution," "the mind of the race," or "historical truth" in general, the chronicler sees only the individual cases and even finds them pleasing in themselves.
Now suppose that he had to describe and explain, say, pragmatically, progressively, theoretically, and synthetically, the "religious wave" which swept over the whole world before the year 1950. Once he sees this grandiose task before him, he begins collecting the "religious phenomena" of his own time; and there, in the course of these researches, he comes, for example, upon Jan Binder, ex-variety artiste, wandering from place to place in his striped jersey with his atomic merry-go-round. Historical synthesis, of course, requires the chronicler to omit the striped jersey, the merry-go-round, even Jan Binder himself, and retain as the "historical nucleus" or scientific result, only the discovery that "these religious phenomena from the very outset affected the most diverse classes of society."
Well, then, the chronicler must here and now confess that he cannot cast aside Jan Binder, that he is fascinated by his merry-go-round, and that even that striped jersey of his interests him far more than any "synthetic outline" whatever. To be sure, this displays complete scientific incompetence, empty dilettantism, the narrowest historical outlook, or anything else you like; yet if the chronicler could give rein to his personal inclinations, he would go off on his travels with Jan Binder as far as Budejovice, then to Klatovy, Pilsen, Zlutice, and so on. It is with regret that he leaves him in Stechovice and waves his hand and cries, "Good-bye, Binder, you sturdy fellow, and good-bye, merry-go-round! We shall never meet again."
Bless my soul, it was with just the same feeling that I left Kuzenda and Brych on the Vltava dredge. I should have liked to spend many and many an evening with them, for I love the Vltava and all running water in general, and evenings on the water in particular, and I took an unusual liking to Mr. Kuzenda and Mr. Brych as well. As for Mr. Hudec, the baker, the postman, the gamekeeper, and the sweethearts from Stechovice, I believe that they, too, would be worth knowing intimately, as anyone is, as all of you are, as is every living human being. But I must push on, and I have hardly time enough to wave my hat to you. Good-bye, Mr. Kuzenda; good-night, Mr. Brych. My thanks for that one evening on board the dredge.
Of you, too, Dr. Blahous, I must take my leave. I should like to spend many a year with you and describe your whole career . . . for is not the life of a university lecturer rich and exciting, after its fashion? Give my regards to your landlady at least.
Everything there is, is worth observing.
And that is why I should like to accompany each new Karburator on its way. I should become acquainted with fresh people every day, and so would you, and that is always worth while. Just to peep through one's spyglass into their lives, to see their hearts, to watch their personal faith and personal salvation come into being, to linger amid the new marvels of human saintliness—that is what would lure me on! Just picture to yourself a beggar, a ruling chief, a bank-manager, an engine-driver, a waiter, a rabbi, a major, a writer on political economy, a cabaret comedian, men of every possible calling; and imagine a miser, a sensualist, a glutton, a sceptic, a hypocrite, a sneak, a career-hunter, men of every possible human passion—what diverse, endlessly varying, strange and surprising instances and phenomena of heavenly grace (or, if you like, poisoning with the Absolute) one could meet, and how absorbing it would be to study each one of them. What gradations of faith there would be, from the ordinary believer to the fanatic, from the penitent to the miracle-worker, from the convert to the fiery apostle. If one could only embrace it all! If one could only extend a hand to each of them! But it is useless; that great work will never be completed, and the chronicler, having renounced the honour of distilling scientifically all his historical material, turns away with sorrow from the individual cases which it is not permitted him to relate.
I wish I could stay a little longer with Saint Ellen! I wish I need not treacherously abandon our friend, R. Marek, undergoing a rest cure at Spindelmühl! I wish I could reveal the workings of the brain of that industrial strategist, G. H. Bondy. All in vain; the Absolute has already flooded the world, and has become a mass-phenomenon; and the chronicler, regretfully looking backward, must reconcile himself to a summary description of a few of the social and political events which inevitably ensued.
Come, then, let us enter upon a new range of facts.