Eumeswil Quotes

The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I ‘ultimately’ do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer

Freedom is based on the anarch’s awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around; it accompanies him like a shadow that he can conjure up. “A leap from this bridge will set me free.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in.

The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.

The anarchist, as the born foe of authority, will be destroyed by it after damaging it more or less. The anarch, on the other hand, has appropriated authority; he is sovereign. He therefore behaves as a neutral power vis-à-vis state and society. He may like, dislike, or be indifferent to whatever occurs in them. That is what determines his conduct; he invests no emotional values.

Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.

The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plow while armies march across his fields.

Man is born violent but is kept in check by the people around him. If he nevertheless manages to throw off his fetters, he can count on applause, for everyone recognizes himself in him. Deeply ingrained, nay, buried dreams come true. The unlimited radiates its magic even upon crime, which, not coincidentally, is the main source of entertainment in Eumeswil. I, as an anarch, not uninterested but disinterested, can understand that. Freedom has a wide range and more facets than a diamond.

The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file

I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.

The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.

The anarch's study of the history of the caesars has more of a theoretical significance for him - it offers a sampling of how far rulers can go. In practice, self-discipline is the only kind of rule that suits the anarch. He, too, can kill anyone (this is deeply immured in the crypt of his consciousness) and, above all, extinguish himself if he finds himself inadequate.

Seen politically, systems follow one another, each consuming the previous one. They live on ever-bequeathed and ever-disappointed hope, which never entirely fades. Its spark is all that survives, as it eats its way along the blasting fuse. For this spark, history is merely an occasion, never a goal.

I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything.

As an anarch, who acknowledges neither law nor custom, I owe it to myself to get at the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect – by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.

The anarch, as I have expounded elsewhere, is the pendant to the monarch; he is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule.

The anarch nurtures no expectations. He stakes on no one but himself. Basically, people remain pied pipers, whatever melodies they play to introduce themselves. And as for the rats - that is a chapter unto itself.

I would like to repeat that I do not fancy myself as anything special for being an anarch. My emotions are no different from those of the average man. Perhaps I have pondered this relationship a bit more carefully and am conscious of a freedom to which “basically” everybody is entitled – a freedom that more or less dicates his actions.

The anarch is (I am simplifying) on the side of gold: it fascinates him, like everything that eludes society. Gold has its own immeasurable might. It need only show itself, and society with its law and order is in jeopardy. The anarch is on the side of gold : this is not to be construed as a lust for gold. He recognizes gold as the central and immobile power. He loves it, not like Cortez, but like Montezuma, not like Pizarro but like Atahualpa ....

Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his gold. He knows his freedom, and also what it is worth its weight in. The equation balances when he is offered something credible. The result is ONE. There can be no doubt that gods have appeared, not only in ancient times but even late in history; they feasted with us and fought at our sides. But what good is the splendor of bygone banquets to a starving man? What good is the clinking of gold that a poor man hears through the wall of time? The gods must be called. The anarch lets all this be; he can bide his time. He has his ethos, but not morals. He recognizes lawfulness, but not the law; he despises rules. Whenever ethos goes into shalts and shalt-nots, it is already corrupted. Still, it can harmonize with them, depending on location and circumstances, briefly or at length, just as I harmonize here with the tyrant for as long as I like. One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians ("God is goodness") castrate the Good Lord.

The hooting of the owl with its tender wing is more familiar to me than the crowing of the cock. I prefer the strings to the woodwinds. Intermission: that is the darkness. The light feels like a vague scratching; it is malaise rather than pain. I am glad to sink back into darkness.

The populace consists of individuals and free men, while the state is made up of numbers. When the state dominates, killing becomes abstract. Servitude began with the shepherds; in the river valleys it attained perfection with canals and dikes. Its model was the slavery in mines and mills. Since then, the ruses for concealing chains have been refined.

Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides.

The anarch differs from the anarchist in that he has a very pronounced sense of the rules. Insofar as and to the extent that he observes them, he feels exempt from thinking. This is consistent with normal behavior: everyone who boards a train rolls over bridges and through tunnels that engineers have devised for him and on which a hundred thousand hands have labored. This does not darken the passenger’s mood; settling in comfortably, he buries himself in his newspaper, has breakfast, or thinks about his business. Likewise, the anarch – except that he always remains aware of that relationship, never losing sight of his main theme, freedom, that which also flies outside, past hill and dale. He can get away at any time, not just from the train, but also from any demand made on him by state, society, or church, and also from existence. He is free to donate existence to Being, not for any pressing reason but just as he likes, whether out of exuberance or out of boredom. Why do so many people strive for the career of petty functionary? No doubt because they have a sensible notion of happiness. They know the rules and their taboos. Time flows by nonchalantly. You are already half-way to Tibet. Plus the security. No state can do without minor officials, no matter how high the waves may surge. Of course, you have to keep a low profile.

A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them. ‘It is strange,’ Sir William Parry wrote when describing the igloos on Winter Island, ‘it is strange to think that all these measure are taken against the cold – and in houses of ice.

The egalitarian mania of demagogues is even more dangerous than the brutality of men in gallooned coats. For the anarch, this remains theoretical, because he avoids both sides. Anyone who has been oppressed can get back on his feet if the oppression has not cost him his life. A man who has been equalized is physically and morally ruined. Anyone who is different is not equal; that is one of the reasons why the Jews are so often targeted. Equalization goes downward, like shaving, hedge trimming, or the pecking order of poultry. At times, the world spirit seems to change into monstrous Procrustes – a man has read Rousseau and starts practicing equality by chopping off heads or, as Mimie le Bon called it, 'making the apricots roll.' The guillotinings in Cambrai were an entertainment before dinner. Pygmies shortened the legs of tall Africans in order to cut them down to size; white Negroes flatten the literary languages.

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree. For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

If I love freedom above all else, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest fleer and the partisan:this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. The partisan moves within the social or national party structure, the anarch is outside of it. Of course, the anarch cannot elude the party structure, since he lives in society.

Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national ‘pretexts,’ led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.

One of the anarch’s emoluments is that he is distinguished for things that he has done on the side or that go against his grain.

The political trend is always to be observed, partly as a spectacle, partly for one’s own safety. The liberal is dissatisfied with regime; the anarch passes through their sequence – as inoffensively as possible – like a suite of rooms. This is the recipe for anyone who cares more about the substance of the world than its shadow – the philosopher, the artist, the believer.

The ship founders on a sandbank and then gets back afloat. Electric power stops; after a while, the machines start up again. During such recesses, the anarch measures his own strength and autonomy.

The anarch sticks to facts, not ideas. He suffers not for facts but because of them, and usually through his own fault, as in a traffic accident. Certainly, there are unforeseeable things – maltreatments. However, I believe I have attained a certain degree of self-distancing that allows me to regard this as an accident.

I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world. Compulsory schooling is essentially a means of curtailing natural strength and exploiting people. The same is true of military conscription, which developed within the same context. The anarch rejects both of them - just like obligatory vaccination and insurance of all kinds. He has reservations when swearing an oath. He is not a deserter, but a conscientious objector.

Why do people who leave nothing unchallenged still make de­mands of their own? They live off the fact that gods, fathers, and poets used to exist. The essence of words has been diluted into empty titles. In the animal kingdom, there are parasites that clandestinely hollow out a caterpillar. Eventually, a mere wasp emerges instead of a butterfly. And that is what those people do with their heri­tage, and with language in particular, as counterfeiters...

I begin with the respect that the anarch shows towards the rules. Respectare as an intensive of respicere means: ‘to look back, to think over, to take into account.’ These are traffic rules. The anarchist resembles a pedestrian who refuses to acknowledge them and is promptly run down. Even a passport check is disastrous for him. ‘I never saw a cheerful end,’ as far back as I can look into history. In contrast, I would assume that men who were blessed with happiness – Sulla, for example – were anarchs in disguise.

Incidentally, I notice that our professors, trying to show off to their students, rant and rail against the state and against law and order, while expecting that same state to punctually pay their salaries, pensions, and family allowances, so that they value at least this kind of law and order. Make a fist with the left hand and open the right hand receptively—that is how one gets through life.

Law and custom are becoming the subjects of a new field of learning. The anarch endeavors to judge them ethnographically, historically, and also – I will probably come back to this – morally. The State will be generally satisfied with him; it will scarcely notice him In this respect he bears a certain resemblance to the criminal – say, the master spy – whose gifts are concealed behind a run-of-the-mill occupation.

Dalin must have whiffed the anarch in me, a man with no ties to state or society. Still, he was unable to sense an autonomy that puts up with these forces as objective facts but without recognizing them. What he lacked was a grounding in history. Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity. The anarch, in contrast, not only recognizes society a priori as imperfect, he actually acknowledges it with that limitation. He is more or less repulsed by state and society, yet there are times and places in which the invisible harmony shimmers through the visible harmony. This is obviously chiefly in the work of art. In that case, one serves joyfully. But the anarchic nihilist thinks the exact opposite. The Temple of Artemis, to cite an example, would inspire him to commit arson. The anarch, however, would have no qualms about entering the temple in order to meditate and to participate with an offering. This is possible in any temple worthy of the name.

As I have said, I have nothing to do with the partisans. As an anarch, I wish to defy society not in order to improve it, but to hold it at bay no matter what. I suspend my achievements – but also my demands. As for the do-gooders, I am familiar with the horrors that were perpetrated in the name of humanity, Christianity, progress. I have studied them. I do not know whether I am correctly quoting a Gallic thinker: ‘Man is neither an animal nor an angel; but he becomes a devil when he tries to be an angel.

It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time. The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure.

When society involves the anarch in a conflict which in which he does not participate inwardly, it challenges him to launch an opposition. He will try to turn the lever with which society moves him. Society is then at his disposal, say, as a stage for grand spectacles that are devised for him. Everything changes; the fetter becomes fascinating, danger an adventure, a suspenseful task.

For the anarch, things are not so simple, especially when he has a background in history. If he remains free of being ruled, whether by sovereigns or by society, this does not mean that he refuses to serve in any way. In general, he serves no worse than anyone else, and sometimes even better, if he likes the game. He only holds back from the pledge, the sacrifice, the ultimate devotion. These are issues of metaphysical integrity, which have little clout in Eumeswil. By the same token, one does not chitchat with men who actually think there is plenty of room for improvement here or who actually promise you a heaven on earth. I serve in the Casbah; if, while doing so, I died for the Condor, it would be an accident, perhaps even an obliging gesture, but nothing more.

I could not bank on the phlegmatic Chinese; I would have to take care of it myself. This would be safer and also consistent with my own responsibility. The latter is the anarch’s ultimate authority.

A general is a specialist insofar as he has master his craft. Beyond that and outside the arbitrary pro and con, he keeps a third possibility intact and in reserve: his own substance. He knows more than what he embodies and teaches, has other skills along with the ones for which he is paid. He keeps all that to himself; it is his property. It is set aside for his leisure, his soliloquies, his nights. At a propitious moment, he will put it into action, tear off his mask. So far, he has been racing well; within sight is the finish line, his final reserves start pouring in. Fate challenges him; he responds. The dream, even in an erotic encounter, comes true. But causally, even here; every goal is a transition for him. The bow should snap rather than aiming the arrow at a finite target.

General" stands here for the individual who goes into action, whether freely or forcedly. Since anarchy offers him an especially favorable charge, this type is permanent today. Thus, "general" has a universal rather than a special meaning. It can be replaced ad libitum. It refers not to a profession but to a condition. The latter may also crop up in a coolie, in which case it is particularly effective.

At times I see them as if I were walking through the streets of Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. This is one of the historian's delights and, even more, his sorrow. If we see someone doing something for the last time, even just eating a piece of bread, this activity becomes wondrously profound. We participate in the transmutation of the ephemeral into the sacramental. We have inklings of eras during which such a sight was an everyday occurrence.

I mention my indifference because it illuminates the gap between positions. The anarchist, as the born foe of authority, will be destroyed by it after damaging it more or less. The anarch, on the other hand, has appropriated authority; he is sovereign. He therefore behaves as a neutral power vis-à-vis state and society. He may like, dislike, or be indifferent to whatever occurs in them. That is what determines his conduct; he invests no emotional values.

I assume that in great men whose names I dare not mention, the anarchic element was very powerful. You see, when fundamental changes are to occur in law, custom, and society, they presuppose a great distancing from established principles. And the anarch, should he take any action, is capable of working this lever…. ‘Greatness’ is secondary for the anarch, often fortuitous. This explains why these great men considered their own achievements inadequate or even repugnant. Last words: ‘And so much to do.

The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.' That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and the he is already a patriarchal prejudice. A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses ten with the Many Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high level soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods.

The forest rebel and the partisan are not, as I have said, to be confused with each other; the partisan fights in society, the forest rebel alone. Nor, on the other hand, is the forest rebel to be confused with the anarch, although the two of them grow very similar for a while and are barely to be distinguished in existential terms. The difference is that the forest rebel has been expelled from society, while the anarch has expelled society from himself. He is and remains his own master in all circumstances. When he decides to flee to the forest, his decision is less an issue of justice and conscience for him than a traffic accident. He changes camouflage; of course, his alien status is more obvious in the forest passage thereby making it the weaker form, though perhaps indispensable.

Two reefs tower in front of the anarchist. The first, the state, must be overcome, especially in a hurricane, when the waves soar. He ineluctably runs aground on the second one, society, the very image that flickered before him. There is a brief intermezzo between the fall of the legitimate powers and the new legality. Two weeks after Kropotkin’s funeral cortege, in which his corpse had followed the Black Banners, the sailors of Kronstadt were liquidated. This is not to say that nothing had happened in between—Merlino, one of the disillusioned, hit the nail on the head: ‘Anarchism is an experiment.

No salvation comes from exhumed gods; we must penetrate deeper into substance. If I take a fossil, say, a trilobite, in my hand (marvelously preserved specimens are found in the quarries at the foot of the Casbah), I am transfixed by the impact of mathematical harmony. Purpose and beauty, as fresh as on the first day, are still seamlessly united in a medal engraved by a master's hand. The bios must have discovered the secret of tripartition in this primordial crab. Tripartition then frequently recurs, even without any natural kinship; figures, in transversal symmetry, dwell in the triptych. How many millions of years ago might this creature have animated an ocean that no longer exists? I hold its impression, a seal of imperishable beauty, in my hand. Some day, this seal, too, will decay or else burn out in cosmic conflagrations of the future. The matrix that formed it remains concealed in and operative from the law, untouched by death or fire.

Religio", as we know, harks back to a word (re-ligio) meaning "bond" and that is precisely what the anarch rejects. He does not go in for Moses with the Ten Commandments or, indeed, for any prophets. Nor does he wish to hear anything concerning gods or rumors about them, except as a historian - or unless they appear to him. That is when the conflicts begin. So, if I state, "in order to pray," I am following an innate instinct that is no weaker than the sexual drive - in fact, even stronger. The two are alike insofar as foul things can happen when they are suppressed.

Der Bildhauer steht zunächst dem rohen Block, der puren Materie gegenüber, die jede Möglichkeit umschließt. Sie antworten dem Meißel; er kann zerstören oder Wasser des Lebens geistige Macht aus ihr befreien.

To start, the sculptor stands before the unwrought block, the pure material which comprises every possibility. The material answers to the chisel; it can destroy, or deliver the spiritual power of life-giving water from out of the rock. “Der Bildhauer steht zunächst dem rohen Block, der puren Materie gegenüber, die jede Möglichkeit umschließt. Sie antworten dem Meißel; er kann zerstören oder Wasser des Lebens geistige Macht aus ihr befreien.

The anarch learns how to read and write if and when it pleases him. Many children are drawn to a book by innate curiosity. Charlemagne was still illiterate after many years of ruling his tremendous empire. Even when associating with scholars like Alcuin and Peter of Pisa, he had not gotten very far with writing; after all, he had more and better things to do. It is unlikely that Homer knew how to write; the letter inhibits free singing. At any rate, caution is indicated when a boat leaves the sea and glides into the canals—the most dangerous thing of all is numbers. As a historian, I depend on the written word; as an anarch, I can do without it.

It makes no difference to me whether Eumeswil is ruled by tyrants or demagogues. Any man who swears allegiance to a political change is a fool, a facchino for services that are not his business. The most rudimentary step toward freedom is to free oneself from all that. Basically each person senses it, and yet he keeps voting.

Our city teems with sons who have escaped their fathers in a similar way. Usually, this remains obscure. The Oedipal relation­ship is reduced to a malaise between individuals. The loss of esteem is inevitable, but people get along with one another. Moreover, I am troubled less by my background than by the respect that my old man demands on the basis of his paternity. He cites a credit that is not his due: the fact that fathers, rulers, professors once lived and deserved this name. Nowadays, that is nothing but a rumor. When he swaggers, I sometimes feel like reminding him of the map room and the tricks he harassed my mother with. She shel­tered me from him in her cavern just as Rhea shielded her Zeus against the gluttonous Cronus. Naturally, I avoid making this chess move; I am aware, here too, of imperfection, which torments me. There are truths that we must hush if we are to live together; but you cannot knock over the chessboard. I owe my restraint partly to Bruno, whose course also covers magical and even practical conduct. He said: "If the words are about to flee your lips, then reach toward the left side of your chest for your wallet. You will then save your joke; it will accrue to your capital. You will feel your heart." That is how I act with my dad. At such times, I am even over­come with benevolence. This is also my advice to Vigo when he wants to parry hateful criticism by giving tit for tat.

Dalin will not get very far. Such types try to hoist a boulder that is much too heavy for them. They are crushed when it slides back. Moreover, they draw attention; often they fall victim to the first cleansings. They do not know the rules, they even scorn them. They are like people who deliberately drive on the wrong side of the road and want to be applauded for doing so. The anarch, in contrast, knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves. Thus, Dalin's liquidation would presumably be consistent with the system that he defied. But that is not the basis for my legitimation. One might erroneously assume that I take bloodshed lightly. Not by along shot! I simply stay free of moral judgments. Blood has its own laws; it is as untamable as the sea.

Mulling it over that evening, I had to agree with him. Dalin embodied the anarchic nihilist, a type that is not all that rare. What was special about him was that he not only reacted with a general malaise, he also thought about it. Of course it made a difference whether he shot someone from the front or from the back—a difference not in the effect, but in the self-affirmation. I have noticed that a cat will turn up her nose at a piece of meat if I hand it to her, but she will devour it with gusto if she has "stolen" it. The meat is the same, but the difference lies in the predator's delight in recognizing itself. The anarchic nihilist is not to be confused with the socialist revolutionary. His aversion is not toward one person or another but toward order per se. Asocial and apolitical, he represents the destructive workings of nature. He would like to accelerate them. Compared with even the modest methods of our tyranny, Dalin seems like a kind of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. What was accomplished when a train derailed, a bridge exploded, a depart­ment store burned to the ground? True, one has to see this in different terms—say, as a paltry sacrifice to the delight of the powerful Shiva. A chemist seldom knows precisely what he is doing.

They found no mischief in me. I remained normal, however deeply they probed. And also straight as an arrow. To be sure, normality seldom coincides with straightness. Normalcy is the human constitution; straightness is logical reasoning. With its help, I could answer satisfactorily. In contrast, the human element is at once so general and so intricately encoded that they fail to perceive it, like the air that they breathe. Thus they were unable to penetrate my fundamental structure, which is anarchic. That sounds complicated, but it is simple, for everyone is anarchic; this is precisely what is normal about us. Of course, the anarch is hemmed in from the first day by father and mother, by state and society. Those are prunings, tappings of the primordial strength, and nobody escapes them. One has to resign oneself. But the anarchic remains, at the very bottom, as a mystery, usually unknown even to its bearer. It can erupt from him as lava, can destroy him, liberate him. Distinctions must be made here: love is anarchic, marriage is not. The warrior is anarchic, the soldier is not. Manslaughter is anarchic, murder is not. Christ is anarchic, Saint Paul is not. Since, of course, the anarchic is normal, it is also present in Saint Paul, and sometimes it erupts mightily from him. Those are not antitheses but degrees. The history of the world is moved by anarchy. In sum: the free human being is anarchic, the anarchist is not.

The carnivorous man recognizes the existence of the world of slaughterhouses, warfare, bloodshed. If he denies them, then he is sitting on the wrong horse. He must give up either his beefsteak or his thinking. On the other hand, the world lives on erroneous ideas. Here in Eumeswil, one sees tremendously potbellied sheiks who would not hurt a fly. Yet someone somewhere is slaughtering and thinking for them, too.

The fact that I forgo having a father precisely because I do not recognize him as my genitor is an altogether different matter. I seek a man for whom I can feel respect. This is possible even in Eumeswil, albeit exceptional. One finds spiritual foster fathers. The bonds one forms with them are stronger than those of blood. Of course, such a statement must be handled with care, for a material substratum will always be present. In this respect, one owes one's father the link to an infinite network. In the act of procreation, he celebrates a mystery that is unknown even to him. His intrinsic nature might perish in it. Thus, we could be more closely related to an uncle or a distant forebear than to him. Genealogists and also biologists are familiar with such surprises; they often shatter their system. The genetic burden is endless; it reaches all the way into the inanimate world. It can bring forth creatures that died out long ago. This digression may indicate why I prefer adoption to natural kinship. The fatherhood becomes spiritual; we are chosen rela­tives and not natural ones. Thus, Eros must also prevail in spiri­tual kinship; adoption is a more sublime repetition of godfather­ing. We pick the godfather, the pater spiritualis; and he recognizes himself in us—he accepts us. That is a contact to which we owe life, albeit in a different, an—I dare say—immortal manner. I do not wish to speak of the heart; this is not the right place. My birth and the surroundings in which I was put may explain why I felt this kinship with three academic teachers, three profes­sors. If I had had a vocation for craft, art, religion, war, I would have had different models—and different ones again had I opted for a criminal career. During the tuna fishing, I watch the rais and his fishermen performing the drudgery; their obedience is simply the equip­ment of the trust that binds them to him; he is their leader, they have elected him. More fatherhood is to be felt here—even when he treats them severely—than when I sit with my old man, who swims in stagnant waters.

In my genitor’s home, too, there were meetings of people who, like him, hoped that the tribunes would hold out and who more or less had reasons for their hopes. They tried to raise each other’s spirits; they heard more or less sensible things. I could judge them from my perspective as an anarch, who, although personally indifferent to the whole business, found it fascinating as a historic issue. Moreover, I may have been the only person who was not afraid. I relished what I was listening to, like Stendhal on such an occasion. I appreciate him also as a historian. Now I am not putting down fear. It is a foundation of physicality, indeed of physics. If the ground wobbles or if the house so much as threatens to collapse, one looks for the door. This, too, creates a selection – say, of those people who did not fall into the trap.

The Condor feels like, and presents himself as, a tyrant; this entails fewer lies. For me, nothing basic has changed; my character, that of an anarch, remains intact. For the historian, the yield is actually richer in that it becomes more vivid. The political trend is always to be observed, partly as a spectacle, partly for one’s own safety. The liberal is dissatisfied with regime; the anarch passes through their sequence – as inoffensively as possible like a suite of rooms. This is the recipe for anyone who cares more about the substance of the world than its shadow – the philosopher, the artist, the believer.

The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch, but his antipode, untouched by him though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant. After all, the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the anarch, only himself. This gives him an attitude both objective and skeptical towards the powers that be; he has their figures go past him – and he is untouched, no doubt, yet inwardly not unmoved, not without historical passion. Every born historian is more or less an anarch; if he has greatness, then on this basis he rises without partisanship to the judge’s bench. This concerns my profession, which I take seriously. I am also the night steward at the Casbah; now, I am not saying that I take this job less seriously. Here I am directly involved in the events, I deal with the living. My anarchic principle is not detrimental to my work. Rather it substantiates it as something I have in common with everyone else, except that I am more conscious if this. I serve the Condor, who is a tyrant – that is his function, just as mine is to be his steward; both of us can retreat to substance: to human nature in its nameless condition.

If I were an anarchist and nothing further, they would have easily exposed me. They are particularly geared towards detecting anyone who tries to approach the powerful with mischievous intent, ‘with a dagger in his cloak.’ The anarch can lead a lonesome existence; the anarchist is sociable and must get together with peers.

When in the course of my work at the luminar, I was reviewing public law, from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond, I thought of an Anglo Saxon's axiom about human equality. He seeks it not in the ever-changing distribution of power and means, but in a constant: the fact that anyone can kill anyone else. This is a platitude, albeit reduced to a striking formula. The possibility of killing someone else is part of the potential of the anarch whom everyone carries around inside himself, even though he is seldom aware of that possibility. It always slumbers in the underground, even when two people exchange greetings in the street or avoid each other. When one stands atop a tower or in front of an oncoming train, that possibility is already drawing closer. Aside from the technological dangers, we also register the nearness of the Other. He can even be my brother. An old poet, Edgar Allen Poe, grasped this possibility in ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’. In any case, we watch our backs. Then comes the thronging in the catastrophe, the raft of the Méduse, the starving in the lifeboat. I want to indicate this only insofar as it concerns my service. In any event, I brought this knowledge into the Condor’s range, into the inner sanctum that Monseigneur described as his ‘Parvulo.’ I can kill him, dramatically or discreetly. His beverages – he especially likes a light red wine – ultimately pass through my hands. Now granted, it is unlikely that I would kill him, albeit not impossible. Who can tell what astrological conjunctions one may get involved in? So, for now, my knowledge is merely theoretical, though important insofar as it puts me in his level. Not only can I kill him; I can also grant him amnesty. This is in my hands. Naturally, I would not try to strike him just because he is tyrant – I am too well versed in history, especially the model that we have attained in Eumeswil. An immoderate tyrant settles his own hash. The execution can be left to the anarchists; that is all they think about.

I sidestep, as I have said, any affection, any personal sympathy. As an anarch, I have to steer clear of such feelings. Working somewhere is unavoidable; in this respect, I behave like a condottiere, who makes his energy available at a given moment, but, in his heart of hearts, remains uncommitted. Furthermore, as here in the night bar, work is a part of my studies – the practical part…. As a historian, I am skeptical; as an anarch, I am on my guard. This contributes to my well-being, even to my sense of humor. Thus I keep my property together – albeit not for myself as the only one. My personal freedom is a perquisite. Beyond that, I stand ready for the Great Encounter – the irruption of the absolute into time. That is where history and science end.

I tend to distinguish between other people’s opinions of me and my own self-assessment. Others determine my social status, which I take seriously, albeit within certain limits. Nor am I dissatisfied with it. In this respect, I differ from most Eumeswilers, who are dissatisfied with their positions or their standings. I could just as easily say that I neither am satisfied with my position nor take it seriously. That would obtain for the overall situation of the city, the absence of any center, which puts every office under obligation and gives meaning to every action. Here, neither oath nor sacrifice counts any longer. Nevertheless, when anything is possible, one can also take any liberty. I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in. On this point, I am like a bride in her chamber: she listens for the softest step.

People say I thrive on my work, and I do live up to this reputation. My day flows by agreeably; I have plenty of time for my studies. But when the waves surge high, as during the Yellow Khan’s visits or at the banquets, I volunteer for cabin service, and I also wait tables, which is not normally part of my job. My efforts are rewarded and known to everyone all the way up to the Domo. This provides me with leisure when Emanuelo turns into Martin at the luminar. My about-face is not as simple as it may look at first glance. For one thing, I have to succeed in treating my work as a game that I both watch and play. This gives even dangerous places like the duck shack [his assigned defensive post in case of an insurrection] a charm of their own. It presumes that one can scrutinize oneself as from a certain distance like a chess figure – in a word, that one sees historical classification as more important than personal classification. This may sound exacting; but it used to be required of any soldier. The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I ‘ultimately’ do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer.

When I, as a historian, view us en familie, it strikes me that I dwell one story higher than my father and my brother: in rooms where one lives more unabashedly. I could come down at any time. That would be the historian's descent into politics – a change that might have good and even noble reasons, yet would in any case entail a loss of freedom. Such is the role of the anarch, who remains free of all commitments yet can turn in any direction.

I ponder my mission from three points of view: first as the Condor’s night steward, then as an historian, and finally as an anarch.

The forest passage confirms the independence of the anarch, who is basically a forest rebel anywhere, any time, whether in the thicket, in the metropolis, whether inside or outside society. One must distinguish not only between the forest rebel and the partisan but also between the anarch and the criminal; the difference lies in the relationship to the law. The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly. When it is hot, you doff your hat; in the rain, you open your umbrella; during an earthquake, you leave your house. Law and custom are becoming the subjects of a new field of learning. The anarch endeavors to judge them ethnographically, historically, and also – I will probably come back to this – morally. The state will be generally satisfied with him; it will scarcely notice him In this respect he bears a certain resemblance to the criminal – say, the master spy – whose gifts are concealed behind a run-of-the-mill occupation.

They found no mischief in me. I remained normal, however deeply they probed. And also straight as an arrow. To be sure, normality seldom coincides with straightness. Normalcy is the human constitution; straightness is logical reasoning. With its help, I could answer satisfactorily. In contrast, the human element is at once so general and so intricately encoded that they fail to perceive it, like the air that they breathe. Thus they were unable to penetrate my fundamental structure, which is anarchic. That sounds complicated, but it is simple, for everyone is anarchic; this is precisely what is normal about us. Of course, the anarch is hemmed in from the first day by father and mother, by state and society. Those are prunings, tappings of the primordial strength, and nobody escapes them. One has to resign oneself. But the anarchic remains, at the very bottom, as a mystery, usually unknown even to its bearer. It can erupt from him as lava, can destroy him, liberate him. Distinctions must be made here: love is anarchic, marriage is not. The warrior is anarchic, the soldier is not. Manslaughter is anarchic, murder is not. Christ is anarchic, Saint Paul is not. Since, of course, the anarchic is normal, it is also present in Saint Paul, and sometimes it erupts mightily from him. Those are not antitheses but degrees. The history of the world is moved by anarchy. In sum: the free human being is anarchic, the anarchist is not.

In the analysis of history, two main perspectives crystallize, one of which is directed at men, the other at might. This also corresponds to a rhythm in politics. Monarchies, oligarchies, dictatorships, tyranny as opposed to democracies, republics, the okhlos, anarchy. The captain as opposed to the crew; the great leader as opposed to the collective. For insiders, needless to say, these antitheses are necessary yet also illusory; they are motives serving to wind up the clock of history. Only seldom does a Great Noon shine, making the antitheses dissolve in happiness.

When I began my job, my genitor behaved like a true liberal: on the one hand, he was embarrassed by my working as a waiter; on the other hand, he felt politically strengthened in his security. For Cadmo – that is my brother’s name – I am simply the ruler's menial. The old man is a speechifier, the boy a permanent anarchist, albeit only so long as things do not get hot. Degrees of freedom in which one can commit or omit everything are alien to both men.

In any case, I am willing to acknowledge that my genitor, in going after me, was behaving naturally [Manuel’s father wanted to have him aborted, as he was conceived in an accidental encounter, but his mother refused]. As an anarch, I have to admit that he was protecting his rights. To be sure, this is based on reciprocity. Our city teems with sons who have escaped their fathers in a similar way. Usually, this remains obscure. The Oedipal relationship is reduced to a malaise between individuals. The loss of esteem is inevitable, but people get along with one another. Moreover, I am troubled less by my background than by the respect that my old man demands on the basis of his paternity. He cites a credit that is not his due: the fact that fathers, rulers, professors once lived and deserved this name. Nowadays, that is nothing but a rumor.

Equality is based, as we have seen, on the possibility that anyone can kill anyone else. This awareness alone is enough to help us see through the swaggering of the superpowers – or, as here in Eumeswil, to help the historian study human behavior ….. So much for equality. Freedom is based in the expansion of that maxim: on the anarch's awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around; it accompanies him like a shadow that he can conjure up. ‘A leap from this bridge will set me free.’ That is more or less how I regard the care I am taking in the acacia forest [Manuel’s secret refuge in case he needs to flee]. The anarch, as I have expounded elsewhere, is the pendant to the monarch; he is as sovereign as the monarch, and also freer since he does not have to rule. The hilltop bulwark is the chapel of my freedom, whether or not I enter it. It will serve as my stronghold when I change into a warring power and obtain my freedom against the demands of society – my exact courage against their exactions.

Freedom of the press’ and ‘capital punishment' – I usually give these phrases a wide berth at the family table, for were I to voice even the slightest criticism, the game could be up for me altogether. He would never get it into his head that freedom begins where freedom of the press ends. ‘Freedom of thought’ – this means he would never test his ideas in a state of primeval freedom. I am willing to grant that he is rooted in liberal traditions, although they are more diluted and mitigated than in my genitor. Even good ideas have their time. Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.

A mine is anonymous, a crude weapon. Partisans like using mines because of the peculiar nature of their struggle, which makes the landscape uncertain. The anarch is not tempted by them, if only because he is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plough while armies march across his fields. The anarch is a forest rebel, the partisans are a collective. I have observed their quarrels as both a historian and a contemporary. Stuffy air, unclear ideas, lethal energy, which ultimately puts abdicated monarchs and retired generals back in the saddle – and they then show their gratitude by liquidating those selfsame partisans. I had to love certain ones, because they loved freedom, even though the cause did not deserve their sacrifice; this made me sad. If I love freedom above all else, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest rebel and the partisan: this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. The partisan moves within the social or national party structure, the anarch is outside of it. Of course, the anarch cannot elude the party structure, since he lives in society. The difference will be obvious when I go to my forest shack while my Lebanese joins the partisans. I will then not only hold on to my essential freedom, but also gain its full and visible enjoyment. The Lebanese, by contrast, will shift only within society; he will become dependent on a different group, which will get an even tighter hold on him. Naturally, I could just as well or just as badly serve the partisans rather than the Condor – a notion I have toyed with. Either way, I remain the same, inwardly untouched. It makes no difference that it is more dangerous siding with the partisans than with the tyrant; I love danger. But as a historian, I want danger to stand out sharply. Murder and treason, pillage and fire, and vendetta are of scant interest for the historian; they render long stretches of history – say, Corsican – unfruitful. Tribal history becomes significant only when, as in the Teutoburger Wald, it manifests itself as world history. Then names and dates shine. The partisan operates on the margins; he serves the great powers, which arm him with weapons and slogans. Soon after the victory, he becomes a nuisance. Should he decide to maintain the role of idealist, he is made to see reason. In Eumeswil, where ideas vegetate, the process is even more wretched. As soon as a group has coalesced, ‘one of Twelve’ is bound to consider betrayal. He is then killed, often merely on suspicion. At the night bar, I heard the Domo mention such a case to the Condor. ‘He could have gotten off more cheaply with us,’ he commented. ‘Muddle heads – I’ll take the gangsters anytime: they know their business.’ I entered this in my notebook. In conclusion, I would like to repeat that I do not fancy myself as anything special for being an anarch. My emotions are no different from those of the average man. Perhaps I have pondered this relationship a bit more carefully and am conscious of a freedom to which ‘basically’ everybody is entitled – a freedom that more or less dictates his actions.

Up in the bunker [a secret refuge that Manuel has selected and prepared for a potentially necessary escape from society], I will also have time for fishing and hunting. There will even be notes for Rosner. During my first exploratory outing, I had noticed an acacia; it grew in the type of clearing that emerges when a tree collapses. The bush, like a gallows, was hung with skeletons. Although the skeletons were small, I recoiled at first glance. This sometimes happens when we unexpectedly stumble on nature’s cruelty. Rosner views this as resentment. He compares nature to a festive kitchen where everyone both consumes and is consumed. Nothing perishes; the equation works out. ‘Everything fertilizes everything else,’ as the farmers say. If I am to believe Rosner, we live partly on the beings that we produce in our innards in order to digest them. That is how one might picture the demiurge: up there as a world spirit, with Olympian serenity, delighting in the raging of animals and the warring of men; down here as a pot-bellied man, who benefits from every consuming and being consumed. This of course releases me from pain as little as it does the grenadier whose leg is shot off for the greater glory of the king. As an anarch, I also have to steer clear of martyrdom. And for the historian, the issue of pain is fundamental.