It’s enough to cross the threshold. The open door lets out the warmth of the house, the smell of cigarettes and food; the calm aroma of the last few hours enters the turmoil of the southern wind. In this way life combines with the rest of the world and the circle closes. It’s the same with other people. The ephemeral infusions of their presence pass through loose windows, old walls, rotten floorboards, and join with the primal kingdom of the elements. Oxygenium, Natrium, Hydrogenium, Nitrogenium, Ferrum . . . First comes the stale warmth of living rooms, then cold gusts along country lanes, air masses over Ubocze Mountain, the stratosphere, and the constellations; it makes my head spin as I inhale it all deep into my lungs a few minutes after midnight, while everyone else is sleeping and utterly indifferent to the fact that they’re circulating among states of concentration.
So then I cross the threshold, there’s a full moon and I can see all the way to Chełm Mountain, whose top looks like an animal moving at a steady trot, and I know that nothing extraordinary is circulating in my veins or settling in my bones. Ferrum, Calcium . . . The same as in the black skeletons of fences, the ruins of cellars out in the wasteland, in the river beneath the ice and in the ice itself, sliced up by the skates of children, who also contain the same thing; whichever way you turn, whatever mental somersault you perform, still everything returns to its primal form, which iridesces, turns shapes inside out, and pulls the mind by its hair to get it to reflect everything like a mirror.
So I go back, close the door, and sit at the table, but a quarter of an hour later uncertainty impels me out again and I go check whether this is really how things are.
The constellations are turning and sprinkling light on the houses. The sharp rooftops slice the glow in two, and it falls and soaks into the earth like rain. And there’s nothing else in this landscape except the light; I’m looking for evidence of my separateness, but in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep, it can’t be found. So I retreat one more time, in order with the aid of coffee and a cigarette—those indubitable signs of humanity—to get a grip on myself. And only two minutes later I’m ensconced in an armchair like the crown of creation, the ashtray within easy reach.
But the elements and the groups of stars were in cahoots, and they rubbed temptingly against the windowpane and the vast space above the village in an attempt to lure me out and deprive me of salvation, because it wasn’t about the beauty of the Gorlice region but about the existence of the soul as an insubstantial substance not included in the periodic table of the elements. It was about whether I would derive being from nonbeing, or if I would equal nonbeing with being and the cosmos would swallow the logos the way a goose swallows a noodle.
And I didn’t go out a third time, because I was overcome by fear. To put it differently: I’d lost my nerve. For how can the invisible be distilled from the visible except by a perilous experiment involving, with all due respect, the integrity of one’s own coherence?