Homo Sapiens: In the Maelstrom by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
Sacrifice was ridiculed because it is so infinitely hard to sacrifice oneself, because it costs so much struggle and despair. You say: I! But what is your I? Is it not perhaps an antidote against a bad conscience? Your I is only there so that you can transgress the small law that regulates your small desires… You, you, Falk, you are despite your self-glorifying individualism a small person. In what has your life exhausted itself if not in debauchery and sexual desire… Well, I do you wrong, you have done much, but was it not because you found a kind of atonement in it, tell me Falk, was it not to calm your bad conscience?
He stood almost threateningly before him, but sat down again immediately. “Why I you concerned about me?. I have nothing to do with you. I sit here ten hours and think that I have nothing more to do with you all. I have nothing personal about me anymore. My soul has widened, infinitely widened… You naturally don’t know what humanity is, because your lying brain, this flexible instrument in the service of your digestion, has made a concept of humanity, yes a concept, to be able to conveniently dissect, unravel and dispute it away. I don’t know this concept, but I know humanity as the root of my soul, I feel it with every beat of my heart, as the basic feeling that the sacrifice I bring to millions from my self is something else than the crawling and sweating and running after a woman. But now go Falk, I want to be alone before my departure. Just think that you are a small person, and you should have been one of the greatest. You, yes, you; you should have become one.”
Falk felt deeply shaken. But in the same moment a cynical shame overcame him that he let himself be shaken, it seemed to him as if his brain grinned at his helplessness.
“Do you eat opium?” he asked half unconsciously. Czerski looked at him seriously.
“Your brain is shameless,” he said slowly and almost solemnly. “Shameless!” Falk ducked under this look and these words. He stared at Czerski ashamed, he clearly felt two souls stretching up against each other.
“Yes, my brain is shameless.”
But immediately he regained his superiority. The cynical soul triumphed. He adjusted himself, smiled scornfully and said:
“It is very beautiful what you said there. Your criticism of our society was very good, although you did not go beyond what Nietzsche says in his *Zarathustra*, yes, the Nietzsche you so despise.”
He was silent for a moment to see how that would affect Czerski.
But Czerski seemed not to listen to him at all. He turned his back to him and looked out the window.
Falk was not surprised at all about it, he even brooded that he was not upset about it. He suddenly became sad and serious.
When he began to speak again, it was only to hear himself speak.
“You are right, my brain is shameless because it cannot grasp that your feeling ‘humanity’ has no causes, no causes that are not grounded in some experience. But that is how my brain is, it takes your soul state under the magnifying glass and analyzes it. You sat in prison. The woman you loved treacherously forgot you. Your loneliness, your bitterness, your pain and your despair finally produced this selfless surrender. So is your humanity not a lie, a great lie to save yourself from despair, is that not a lie to break the pain that caused these terrible torments, a lie of your physique in need of rest and recovery? You are now happy with your great lie and I am unhappy because my lie is small. But what does great mean? What small? My God, the concepts are lost to me, I usually don’t judge from a logical standpoint either. I know very well that the soul does not follow logical principles… But what did I want to say?… Yes, right…
Czerski suddenly turned around. “Do you want tea?”
“Yes, give tea, much tea… Yes! You condemn me, you called me a scoundrel. Isn’t that so, you did it? Why did you call me that? Because in my destructions sex was a motive. I speak destructions because the case with Janina is not the first. No…
He drank the tea hastily. The fever began to dominate him.
“Sex was the motive. Good! But—” again he lost the thread of thought; he thought long, then suddenly started triumphantly.
“Look at Napoleon. He is a classic example for all such cases.”
His face shone.
“You smile! No, I don’t want to compare myself with Napoleon at all. I only weigh motives against each other. What were his motives?… He, he: some say he was like the thunderstorm that cleans the air. But it is a ridiculous comparison. That the thunderstorm cleans is only accidental, if it weren’t, we would have to assume a providence, a pre-established harmony. He, he… those are only false conclusions. Give me another glass of tea.
Napoleon had to have motives though. Well: ambition for example. But what is ambition? You don’t believe that ambition is a fact… but—does that interest you?
“Speak only, that seems to calm you.”
“Yes, you have a splendid psychological eye. It actually calms me. So ambition is something enormously composite. A thousandfold parallelogram of forces, if you want. It is no basic drive like hunger and sex are. It is something that has developed from the basic drives. All these motives have the common root in the basic drives. They are only derivations, development and differentiation phenomena…
Falk laughs nervously.
“So see, see: all emotional motives have biologically and psychologically the same value because they come from the same root. He, he… those are special theories, they don’t have to be correct at all. I only wanted to prove to you that my action motives do not lag behind Napoleon’s in value at all.
In most cases, however, the motives are unknown, one doesn’t know why one does this or that… Well yes…
Falk had great difficulty concentrating. He literally suffered from thought flight.
Yes, so, the motives from which Napoleon destroyed can also only be derived sex drives… Isn’t that so? We can assume that as probable. But then you will say there is a great difference, to conquer a world and to make a girl unhappy… He, he, he… So you reproach me that I am too small a criminal? For to conquer a world one must destroy a world, and I have only destroyed a few girls. Now you will naturally say: Napoleon made a world happy. But in his thoughts, God knows, there was no intention to make a world happy. He did everything because he had to do it. In the psychic fact there is no purpose of consciousness at all. The brain only lies that in afterwards…
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