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.
XIV
THE LAND OF PLENTY
It has often happened to the chronicler (and surely to many of his readers) that when for any reason whatever he has gazed at the night sky and the stars, and realized with mute amazement their prodigious number and their inconceivable distance and dimensions, and told himself that each of those glittering dots was a gigantic flaming world or a whole living planetary system, and that there were possibly billions, say, of such dots; or when he has looked down to a far horizon from a high mountain (it happened to me in the Tatras), and has seen beneath him fields and woods and mountains, and right in front of him dense forest and grass lands, all of it more than luxuriant, running riot, life exuberant and alarming in its richness—and when he has noted in the grass myriads of blossoms, tiny beetles, and butterflies, and has mentally multiplied this mad profusion by the vast expanses stretching away before him to Heaven knows where, and has added to these expanses the millions of other expanses equally crowded and luxuriant, which compose the surface of our earth; at such a moment it has often happened that the chronicler has bethought him of the Creator, and has said to himself: “If someone made or created all this, then we must admit that it is a terrible waste. If anyone wanted to show his power as a Creator, there was no need to create such an insane quantity of things. Excess is chaos, and chaos is something like insanity or drunkenness. Yes, the human intellect is staggered by the over-profusion of this creative achievement. There is simply too much of it. It’s boundlessness gone mad. Of course, He who is Infinite from His very birth is accustomed to huge proportions in everything, and has no proper standard (for every standard implies finiteness) or, rather, has no standard whatsoever.”
I beg you not to regard this as blasphemy; I am only endeavouring to set forth the disproportion between human ideas and this cosmic superabundance. This wanton, purposeless, well-nigh feverish excess of everything that exists appears to the sober human eye more like creativeness run wild than conscientious and methodical creation. That is what I wish to say, with all due respect, before we return to our story.
You
