Do you believe in Ulm? asked Céline in the course of his flight across a devastated Germany. He was wondering (in a tone of caustic banter) whether Ulm still existed, whether the bombings had not obliterated it. When tangible fact is being erased by violence, then to imagine it becomes an act of faith. But all that is real is being erased each instant, even if luckily not always in the bloodstained theatre of phosphorous bombs. Little by little, however, things are imperceptibly erased, and one cannot do otherwise than believe that they nonetheless exist. A faith lived and forged into the very gestures of the body confers that unruffled confidence in life which enables one to go through the world without turbulence of heart. Count Helmuth James von Moltke, great-grandson of the Prussian field marshal, victor at Sédan, and philosopher of the battlefield, firmly believed in Jesus Christ; and when in 1945 the People’s Tribunal of the Third Reich put him to death for his opposition to Hitler, he went to his execution with the air of someone accepting a disagreeable, but unavoidable, invitation to dinner.
One does not need a faith in God. Sufficient is a faith in created things, that enables one to move among objects in the conviction that they exist, persuaded of the irrefutable reality of this chair, this umbrella, this cigarette, this friendship. He who doubts himself is lost, just as someone scared of failure in love-making fails indeed. We are happy in the company of people who make us feel the unquestionable presence of the world, just as the body of the beloved gives us the certainty of those shoulders, that bosom, that curve of the hips, the surge of these as incontestable as the sea. And one who is in despair, we are taught by Singer, can act as though he believed: faith will come afterwards.
I therefore believe in Ulm, while the train is to all appearances taking me there, and in the appointment with my friends, just as at school I believed in the existence of Cherrapunji, a town in India whose existence is attested by the geography book, which added that it was the rainiest place in the world, with 13 metres of rain per annum. Except, it mentioned elsewhere, that Honolulu got 14 metres. My friend Schultz protested, saying that if this was how things stood then Honolulu, not Cherrapunji, deserved the world record for rainfall. Others, on the other hand, raised in a less severe philosophy, managed to wriggle free by maintaining a rigorous distinction between the two propositions which, deprived of any link, were therefore immune to being contradiction, as the assertion “it was a fine sunset” contained in one novel does not contradict the assertion “it was a stormy sunset” contained in another.
Here the Danube is young, and Austria is still far off, but clearly the river is already a sinuous master of irony, of that irony which created the greatness of Central European culture, the art of outflanking one’s own barrenness and checkmating one’s own weakness; the sense of the duplicity of things, and at the same time the truth of them, hidden but single. Irony taught respect for the misunderstandings and contradictions of life, the disjunction between the recto and the verso of a page that never meet even though they are the selfsame thing between time and eternity, between language and reality, between the rainfall at Cherrapunji and that at Honolulu, and all the other rainfall statistics mentioned in the geography book. Tolerance of the imbalances and deformities of the world, of its parallel lines that never meet, does not diminish our faith that those parallels meet at infinity, but it does not force them into meeting any earlier.
I therefore expect that Ulm will not be merely the sign saying “Ulm” on the railway station of a flattened city, as it was for Céline when he finally got there. Behind me I have already left Riedling, the little town that was the first Hapsburg outpost on the Danube and is a favourite haunt of storks. On this train I am not threatened by the bombs that threatened Céline, nor by the wolves, ghosts and will-o’-the-wisps, instructions for the avoidance of which are contained in Fidus Achates or the Faithful Travelling Companion, a vademecum written in the mid-seventeenth century by one Martin Zeiller, by choice a citizen of Ulm. Maybe all the same it would be prudent to follow another of Zeiller’s counsels: make a will before setting out. Having made all one’s testamentary arrangements, legacies, bequests and codicils, one would travel as a free man, discharged from life, released from all obligations and functions, in that mysterious, happy, anarchic territory in which one sets foot only when one is already off stage, whatever stage it may be.