Anarchistbanjo's World

Homo Sapiens: Under Way by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel

Well, soon more new senses will be found, such as for example a individual-sense that smells and hears what you yourself cannot smell or hear.

You don’t believe that?

Yes, then explain the following fact to me. I dream, the door is ripped open, a man steps in. I jump frightened from the bed: no person in the room. Only after about three minutes does my acquaintance really come. Now consider: the house I lived in then was 100 meters away from the next house.

In front of my house was a meadow that made all steps almost inaudible. And yet something in me heard my acquaintance’s steps at a distance of three minutes; therefore, sir, a distance at which a person in waking state can absolutely impossibly even vaguely hear anything.

So something hears in me that *I* do not hear. Right?

Yes, but the non-existence—please, please; I am quite impatient. Look, that you cannot prove to me; but comfort yourself, you are still a great man, you can calmly serve our dear Lord God as a shovel with which he shovels understanding into people’s heads.

Falk grew tired; in his brain everything began to confuse. He only repeated himself, repeated his own words and sentences.

Suddenly he saw the monastery before him.

Strange that he hadn’t seen the cemetery before. Marit! – Marit…

Good God, how did he now come to think of Marit?

He became nervous. Why did he suddenly remember Marit!

He thought, stopped, walked in a circle; noticed it, walked again, became angry; became more eager in thinking, sweat broke out on his forehead, suddenly he had it.

He was completely happy.

‘Look, Herr Editor, you all-knower, you third eye of our dear Lord God, just look at this case. I ask you, in what relation does Marit stand to this monastery?’

Yes, of course, she was raised in a monastery; I thought of that earlier, not today. But tell me, how did the relation now come into my soul?

You don’t know; well, I’ll tell you.

Look, I have a great rage against monasteries in general because a monastery botched my Marit for me. And now I only need to see a monastery, and immediately I think of Marit. And if I saw a hundred thousand monasteries, I would always and every time think of Marit.

There in that amazing wonder-sense an indissoluble connection was immediately formed. Understand?

And then I walked, as I thought about it, completely unconsciously in a circle here on the path, until I noticed it. Do you know why?

Because I am accustomed to walk around in the room when thinking, and I almost always think in the room.

Look, sir, go to the physiological laboratory and pay attention. I take a rat here, now I remove whole brain parts from it up to the bridge; naturally you don’t know again what bridge in the brain means. Yes, that must a person know who claims education. Now look, the rat is completely dumb; it feels nothing, hears nothing; it perceives nothing; it is simply mentally dead. Now you shall see a miracle. I take a cat and beat it: the cat meows. Look, look: how the rat becomes restless, how it wants to run away!

Now do you know what the amazing wonder-sense, the individual-sense, is?

By the way, you are the most indifferent person in the world to me, understand? That is, you are an ass!

But Falk could speak what he wanted, think what he wanted, to distract and intentionally scatter himself: through everything shimmered a hot undercurrent: Marit – Marit…

Suddenly he felt a violent jerk: Does a normal person think like that? He walked in fever shudders. Fear rose in him. It seemed to him as if he rolled

into a barren abyss and everything would be swept away from the world. Now thinking stopped, and only the terrible feverish fear-feeling became ever wilder. – Everything black, barren, desolate. Then light came again into his head; the life that now should come, with this unrest, this eternal torment and longing, unrolled before his eyes.

Yes, why then? why?

Why all that. Why do I torment myself. Why all this effort, this whole running back and forth, only to satisfy the ridiculous lust of sex?! He laughed scornfully.

Isn’t it idiotic?

But again he felt the fear, an unheard-of, mad fear such as he had never felt before, and with staring, wide-open eyes he gasped out:

Why? Why?

He jumped over the ditch with a sudden jerk, and came to his senses. It seemed to him as if he were hunted by beasts.

Now he had to think, quite rationally and logically think; that would calm him.

But always the terrible “Why?” grabbed through all his thinking.

He tried to imagine it to himself.

So he was an instrument in the hand of a thing that he didn’t know, that was active in him, that did what it wanted, and his brain was only a quite ordinary handyman.

If he now seduced Marit, it wouldn’t be his fault. No, absolutely not. He had to do it; it was his fixed idea.

Right, Herr Falk? There is a quite firmly ring by ring chained chain, to which always new rings necessarily attach.

Some psychic spiral spring, a psychic clockwork was wound up, wound up by a thousand external circumstances, and now the rings and wheels of my action must simply turn!

Good: I resist, I fight against it. But even this resistance is predetermined from the beginning. And since I succumb, I simply succumb. I must.

Yes: he was actor and spectator at once, was at once on the stage and sat in the orchestra. No: he sat above himself and noted with a kind of super-brain that something was happening in his ordinary brain.

A terrible sadness overcame Falk. No, why did he torment himself?

He couldn’t fight anyway, he had to fold his hands in his lap, he had to let everything go as it wanted, no, as it *must*.

Yes, *must*, *must*…

Falk was very exhausted.

Like a rainbow after a thunderstorm suddenly appeared to him the face of a boy. A feeling of longing overwhelmed him, a choking pity for himself, a longing for people.

So he came to the city. He had to pass the district commissioner’s house. Just then the editor and the young doctor stepped out the door.

“Where did you disappear to so suddenly?” Falk became a little confused.

“He had accompanied Fräulein Kauer home; for the coachman had namely been senselessly drunk, and so it wouldn’t have been advisable to entrust the young girl to him.”

“Wouldn’t he like to take a nightcap punch at Flaum’s?”

Falk considered. Again he felt the lurking fear. Only not be alone; no, for God’s sake not.

“Yes, I would very much like to.”