Elizabeth Costello полностью

Inwardness. Can we be one with a god profoundly enough to apprehend, to get a sense of, a god's being? A question that no one seems to ask any more, except to an extent her new find Susan Mitchell, who is not a philosopher either; a question that went out of fashion during her lifetime (she remembers it happening, remembers her surprise), just as it came into fashion not too long before her lifetime commenced. Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations? She does not know much about Kant, but it sounds to her a Kantian kind of question. If her ear is right, then inwardness started its run with the man from Königsberg and ended, more or less, with Wittgenstein the Viennese destroyer.

'Gods do exist,' 'writes Friedrich Hölderlin, who had read his Kant, 'but they carry on their lives somewhere up above us in another realm, not much interested, it would seem, in whether we exist or not.' In bygone times those gods bestrode the earth, walked among men. But to us modern folk it is no longer given to catch a glimpse of them, much less suffer their love. 'We come too late.'

She reads less and less widely as she grows older. A not uncommon phenomenon. For Hölderlin, however, she always has time. Great-souled Hölderlin she would call him if she were Greek. Nevertheless, about Hölderlin on the gods she has her doubts. Too innocent, she thinks, too ready to take things at face value; not alert enough to the cunning of history. Things are rarely as they seem to be, she would like to instruct him. When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring. The gods have not retreated: they cannot afford to.

Odd that the man who put his finger on the divine apatheia, the inability of the gods to feel, and their consequent need to have others do their feeling for them, should have failed to see the effects of apatheia on their erotic life.

Love and death. The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves. That is why they are so curious about us, so endlessly inquisitive. We call Psyche a silly, prying girl, but what was a god doing in her bed in the first place? In marking us down for death, the gods gave us an edge over them. Of the two, gods and mortals, it is we who live the more urgently, feel the more intensely. That is why they cannot put us out of their minds, cannot get by without us, ceaselessly watch us and prey on us. That, finally, is why they do not declare a ban on sex with us, merely make up rules about where and in what form and how often. Inventors of death; inventors of sex tourism too. In the sexual ecstasies of mortals, the frisson of death, its contortions, its relaxings: they talk about it endlessly when they have had too much to drink – who they first got to experience it with, what it felt like. They wish they had that inimitable little quiver in their own erotic repertoire, to spice up their couplings with each other. But the price is one they are not prepared to pay. Death, annihilation: what if there is no resurrection, they wonder misgivingly?

We think of them as omniscient, these gods, but the truth is they know very little, and what they know know only in the most general of ways. No body of learning they can call their own, no philosophy, properly speaking. Their cosmology an assortment of commonplaces. Their sole expertise in astral flight, their sole homegrown science anthropology They specialize in humankind because of what we have and they lack; they study us because they are envious.

As for us, do they guess (what irony!) that what makes our embraces so intense, so unforgettable, is the glimpse they give us of a life we imagine as theirs, a life we call (since our language has no word for it) the beyond? I do not like that other world, writes Martha Clifford to her pen pal Leopold Bloom, but she lies: why would she write at all if she did not want to be swept off to another world by a demon lover?

Leopold, meanwhile, strolls around the Dublin Public Library peeking, when no one is looking, between the legs of the statues of goddesses. If Apollo has a marble cock and balls, does Artemis, he wonders, have an orifice to match? Investigations in aesthetics, that is what he likes to tell himself he is engaged in: how far does the artist's duty to nature extend? What he really wants to know, however, had he only the words for it, is whether congress is possible with the divine.