a wonderful balancing organ

[Guest guest]

Mankind:

a wonderful balancing organ on the

boundary between Nothing and Everything

 

from: De ingewijden by Hella Haasse (a Dutch novel)

 

 

Using six main characters a story is told about unavoidable

confrontations with the meaning of life.

The thread of the story is told in six chapters using a different

character each time. In this way you see the truth constantly being

changed and made acceptable. But you also see how fluid and elastic

the dualistic truth is.

The motto is a beautiful initiation to the book:

 

Happy is he who is initiated before he goes into the ground, because

he knows the end of life and the beginning sent by Zeus.

 

[Pindarus]

 

 

 

 

[...] 'This can't,' he suddenly said. 'This just cannot exist.'

'What?'

'Now, everything, the whole situation, this house, and thou, you I

mean.'

'Why can't it exist?'

'I don't know. Such things simply don't happen'.

'You have to get off that. We would like it if everything coming out

of us were explainable as so-called rational and logical. It is good

that we are reminded now and then that we are also part of the

pattern.'

'But I can only see things out of myself?'

'I believe that there are moments, maybe strange situations, that

your normal understanding plainly resists to your becoming conscious,

to say it like that, of another connection. Becoming conscious is

expressing it too strongly. You don't see through it. You don't

understand it. Just something in you that sits deep, out of reach of

your thinking and acting 'I' feels it. If you knew how to weave you

would understand what I am saying. The underside where all the

threads are wound and twisted around each other, is no less real than

the side we habitually call good that has neat figures stitch by

stitch, color next to color... Sometimes we suddenly get a glimpse of

the backside of...ach... '. She shook her head and hit herself

lightly on the cheek.

'What is it, why do you do that?' asked Marten.

'Yesterday I told you that I am someone who is trying to become a

person, and I challenged you by throwing the accusation at your feet

that you don't dare that. Do you remember? But I couldn't tell you

what that is, a person. I can't rest with that. It makes no sense

that I talk about keeping up your courage and having the will to

become a person, when I can't even give you an answer to what I mean

by 'a person'. I don't know if I can make that clear to you now. But

I'll give you what lies within my reach. Sometimes I think that the

person is a wonderful balancing organ on the boundary between Nothing

and Everything, chaos and cosmos. Our entire existence on earth, as a

sort and as individuals is a long fight to hold the middle between

blind animalism and a just as absolute surrender to what we, with

help from our deceitful intellect and our deceitful emotions, call

believable... Being a person; that is for me: always, everywhere,

exerting all our power and never slacking wakefulness, towards this

balance. Being a person: an organ in existence that can preserve

balance thanks to inborn properties of reason and intuition. And all

that overcomes us in our life, day and night, without pause, from

within and without, is a call towards functioning...

'Do I understand what she means?' thought Marten. Sometimes he

thought he did, and then again he thought he didn't... [...]

 

[from: De ingewijden by Hella Haasse. publisher Querido. 1957]