A Conjecture in Honor of Ernst Bloch
Old men read few novels. Histories of the Republic of Venice, botanical treatises, memoirs, political tracts, or metaphysics; books in which the content and matter of life are argued direct. But few novels, or only those which are “classics,” having entered by force of time or authority of imagination into the corona of truth, of historical record. Novels such as those of Stendhal and Tolstoy which address us in the voice of history rather than through the individual, contingent fiat of fictional invention. Perhaps old men have less time, and have grown to be master taxonomists, seeking the excitement and economy of order, the rich bone-spareness of the documentary statement, the nucleus of the fact. As if novels were, in some important sense, uninteresting and wasteful.
The notion (or, as Ernst Bloch would say, “category”) of waste is pertinent. An undermining puritanism nags at the history of fiction: the idea, advanced first by the calvinist rebuke to all license of feeling, then by the bourgeois stress on utility and parsimony of emotional commitment, that fiction was not an adult or serious thing. That the reading of novels was an uneconomic, ultimately insidious use of time. More, perhaps, than any other literary genre, the modern prose novel developed in a context of demeaning analogues: the children’s tale, the roman rose, on the one hand; the immense spate of trash-fiction, erotic, melodramatic, or merely sentimental, on the other. Hence the strenuous plea which Flaubert, Turgenev, and Henry James put forward either in explicit argument or by example of scrupulous virtuosity, that fiction is a mode of supreme seriousness, that it exacts from its readers energies of intelligence and sensibility as full, as mature as are required by any other high literary form. A plea the more urgent as there presses against it in so many novelists-Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Zola, Kafka—the old, unsilenced query: is fiction really a serious pursuit? Should a man not use his talent, his resources of language and insight toward a more open critique of life (art is, even at its most formal remove, a critique of values, a counterproposal to life in the name of freer, deeper possibility)?
The cogency of this challenge, the fact that so many novelists registered its discomforts, may account for the realistic format and particular ambitions of fiction between Balzac and Joyce—the brief century of the major novel. As if aware that the act of fiction was, in a literal sense, eccentric to the ruling historicism and positivism of the modern age, the novel sought to make itself master and inventory of the sum of life. Crucial to the secular commedia of Balzac, to Dickens’ exhaustive mythology of urban and rural England, to Zola’s catalogues of the real, to Joyce, is the ideal of the encompassing record, of the organization of the totality of social, psychological data inside a fictional framework. Nihil humani alienum: driven by a fierce energy of observation, the realistic novel reached out to absorb every new quality and locus of experience. From Scott and Manzoni to the moderns, historical fiction has tried to make the past an animate present (as did the historical painters, Gothic decorators, and stage designers of the bourgeois realistic age). Science fiction has tried to project rational maps of the future. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are naturalists who transpose forward. Between past and future lies the zone of present totality each of whose categories—economic, sexual, political, private, technological, ideological, religious—has at some point become the object of fictional representation. Finally, and by logical culmination, the magnitude of available données, the crowded weave of fact and event, became itself the subject, the central myth of the novel. This is what takes place in Proust and Ulysses, the imagination circling, surfeited and victorious, around the compendium, the summa of European civilization.
This surfeit brought a natural reaction. The few novels that matter after Joyce, which explore new possibilities in the genre or educate new echoes in the reader, are striking for their reduction of focus, for their implicit resolve to approach reality with wariness. Like Klee, Kafka moves in total ambush, as if nothing could be depended on as solid or within rational call, as if a constant earth tremor were underfoot. William Empson’s
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row
could almost be the motto of the new situation. Broch’s Death of Virgil, the only fiction to move any distance inward from Joyce, concentrates its fantastic means of realization and expression on a single vanishing point, the instant of the passage into death, of the momentary transition into what cannot be narrated because it lies a breath beyond language. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a turning point not only because it argues, by subtle and tragic implication, the preeminence of music, with its polyphonic modes and freedom from realistic props, over language and verbal narrative; but because it shows how the classic form and claims of the novel are inseparable from the bias of a middle-class, humanistic culture, how their ruin is a common one. (Thus it is no accident that the critique of the Communist revolution made essentially from the values of the humanistic past should be a novel, Doctor Zhivago; whereas the critique in the name of the future, stated from inside a collective idiom, should be the lyric verse of the new young poets.)
All of which amounts to saying, quite simply, that there is a crisis of the novel. One knows the denials, the assurance that good novels are being written, that every major literary genre has been perennially accused of decay, that neither writers nor readers of fiction are aware of any ominous condition. To which the answer is: yes, but. At either end of the spectrum, whether it be in the monotonous, hysterical authenticities of reportage-fiction, the surrender of the eye to camera-blindness, or in the nouveau roman with its fetishistic naturalism and moral neutrality, the sense of disarray is perceptible. It is eloquent also in the lunatic economics of the fiction business. At rough estimate, some ten novels are published each day in Europe and the United States. Of these, the iceberg bulk is ephemeral trash calculated to go under almost immediately. The tip is the presumably serious novels: they enter a lottery, a race for success in which only a minute proportion can survive. Having half a dozen new “serious” works of fiction to review weekly, the critic does an absurdly modish, superficial job. Often success or failure is merest chance. But failure is irremediable. The law of the trade is such that the decried or unnoticed novel vanishes from the publisher’s advertisement and the bookseller’s table in a fortnight or three weeks. Thence to be remaindered or pulped. Saturation is obviously near. Significantly, over the last five years statistics of new books published and sold in England (where figures are most reliable) show a distinct decline in fiction, a turn of the literate public to history, biography, science, and argument.
But these are externals.
The novel is doubly undermined. First, by the change in the nature, in the availability to imaginative order, of that social and psychological reality in which novelists found their principal matter. Ulysses is probably the last coherent attempt at a summa mundi. Already Faulkner’s saga is deliberately parochial, cunningly eccentric to the main locale and fabric of contemporary affairs. The pace and complication of human experience in urban, technological society have increased exponentially over the last forty years. What Goethe foresaw in the Prologue to Faust, what Wordsworth feared in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and the 1846 sonnet on “Illustrated Books and Newspapers” has become commonplace: the dramatic, “totalizing” function of modern political and economic happenings, the graphic authority and speed with which they are thrust home to our nerves and brains by means of instantaneous reproduction, the nerve-consuming “journalism” of our existence, have sharply reduced the freshness, the discriminations of our imaginative response. In its endeavor to excite and hold our interest, the novel now has to compete with media of dramatic presentation far more “authentic,” far easier to assimilate into our increasingly lazy, inert sensibilities. To compete at all with the strident alternatives of television and film, of the photograph and the tape recording, the novel has had to find new areas of emotional shock—or, more exactly, the serious novel has had to choose topics formerly exploited by trash-fiction. Hence the compulsive sadism and eroticism of so many current novels.
More essentially, instead of mastering the documentary background, of selecting and reorganizing to his own artistic and critical purpose the multitudinous material of our lives, the novelist has become a harried witness. He is not master but servant of his observations; the transition can be located in Zola. The great mass of current fiction is reportage—less convincing, less acute, less impressive on the memory, than are current works of history, of biography, of social and political narrative. By absurd but unassailable logic, the mass-circulation magazines which purvey sentimental romances or tales of contrived terror now call themselves “True Fiction.”
The change in the flavor of life, the power of the media which control and communicate that flavor—for to most men in an urban, mass-media culture the world now looks and feels as newspaper or television chooses to present it—affect the novel in a second major way.
Literary genres have their specific economic and social context. We can no more separate the heroic epic from the particular character of an aristocratic, clannish pre-feudalism than we can the theater of Racine and Molière from the complicated poise of absolutism and rising middle class in seventeenth-century France. As is well known, the rise and primacy of the prose novel are closely inwoven with that of the post-revolutionary bourgeoisie. In its moral and psychological focus, in the technology of its production and distribution, in the domestic privacy, leisure, and reading habits which it required from its audience, the novel matches precisely the great age of the industrial, mercantile bourgeoisie. Floruit 1830–1930, Balzac to Proust and Joyce. That age is obviously over, gutted by two world wars and the decline of Europe from economic preponderance. The new shapes of history—collective, racially mixed yet antagonistic, highly mobile, scientifically oriented—are now discernible, though their full quality and weight are as yet difficult to assess. The literate middle-class figure, reading a novel which he owns and for which he has a library, in a quiet room in his own house or apartment (silence being a function of size), embodies a complex of economic privileges, stabilities, psychological safeguards, and deliberately nurtured tastes of which Thomas Mann was the last full representative and ironic valedictorian.
This is why the paperback book in its present format is a significant transitional phenomenon. It realizes both triumphs and illusions of the new, post-bourgeois literacy. It brings to a very large audience, often of limited means, the potential of high literature. But its physical shape is inherently ephemeral; it does not make for a library privately collected; its low cost, visual attractiveness, and ease of acquisition may have created a situation in which far more books are purchased than read. Above all, the literary experience is “prepackaged” as so much else in our technological lives. Paperbacks do not impel a man to make his own discoveries, to enter into that personal dialogue with a writer which arises where a set of complete works is involved, where the neglected or less accomplished takes its qualifying place next to the classic. A certain dust and difficulty of search are part of genuine literacy, of that which we have discovered with our own nerve ends. (I recently paid £3 for twelve volumes of George Eliot in mint condition. The bookseller remarked that they had lain unnoticed while a fairly expensive paperback of one particular novel, fashionably prefaced and got up, had sold rapidly. But to be read? Or to be part of the lively wallpaper and status objects in the rabbit warrens in which so many of us pass our falsely bright lives?)
After the novel, what then? I have tried to suggest elsewhere that in an era of electronic and primarily visual means of statement, and among the new collective societies now emerging, drama—and specially the kind of drama open to audience participation and critique—has an immense future. More than any other genre the theater can organize, explore, and symbolize the consciousness of a developing community. And it can, very precisely, stimulate the transition of its audience from pre-literate to literate habits of representation, combining within its flexible ensemble every idiom, from dance, mime, and music to highly stylized verbal codes.
But in Western culture, with its urban and technological character, the representative transitional genre seems to be a kind of documentary poetic or “post-fiction.”
When a major literary form declines, its energies and instigations are not wholly or rapidly dispersed. They animate the new modes. Thus the achievements of the heroic epic (and even the Iliad and Odyssey were late, summarizing cases) carried over strongly into the language, uses of myth, and heroic stance of Greek tragedy. In the growing confidence of the novel, in its articulation of mood, milieu, and tone, we note the legacy of the decayed drama. Congreve and Sheridan had no adequate successors on the English stage; but their control of dialogue and private crisis is vital in the art of Jane Austen. Though it is itself no longer a very interesting medium, the novel has developed and made available to other literary modes a large range of ideals and technical resources. We can now see these at work throughout the varieties of nonfiction.
In modern biographies and historical writing there is a wide measure of collaboration, one might almost say collusion, between factual material and a particular rhetoric of vivid presentation. Colorful setting, dramatic psychology, imaginary dialogue—devices derived from the novel—are put at the service of the archive. The problem is not one of stylistic liveliness, but of the inevitable manipulations which the idiom and psychology of the novel bring to the historical evidence. Sociology, especially in its more popular, influential versions, draws heavily on the dramatic concreteness and personifications of fiction. The latent strength of the fictional ideal can be seen even in the most “objective,” neutral arrangements of sociological data. Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez is, no doubt, an honest selection of tape recordings; but as grouped and, in a real sense, “heard” by the particular listener, the rawness of life takes on the cumulative order of a novel.
In that characteristic contemporary genre which might be called “high journalism,” techniques inherited from the novel play a decisive role. The eye of the political and social reporter is direct heir to that of the novelist. Hence the obvious stylization, the deceptive dramatic or sentimental gloss on so much that passes itself off as scrupulous witness. Much of the interpretation and record offered us of the causes of political actions, of the behavior of great persons, comes in the dramatic conventions of the realistic novel, conventions now worn to cliché.
The novel’s promise of vivacity, organized emotion, and direct address is also honored in a good deal of current writing about the sciences. Ours is a brilliant period of didacticism, of books that teach us about the deeps of the sea, about radio-stars, microbiology, or archaeology. They do so in an unencumbered, stylish prose and with an attitude of feeling which can be related to the dramatic or poetic uses of learning and documentation in fiction. Here again, Thomas Mann is the master of transition: the musicology in Doctor Faustus, the morphology, botany, and cosmology so handsomely conveyed in Felix Krull, go beyond the incorporation of technical and “abstract” matter into the body of the classic novel. They are preliminary models of a new virtuosity in the exposition of specialized and scientific information to the layman.
In short: there is at this point in Western culture a mass of non-fiction whose particular qualities of vividness, dramatic pace, and psychological appeal derive from the fact that it has behind it the major epoch of the novel. In De Quincey’s terms, the distinction between the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power” is no longer a sharp or obvious one; wherever possible, and often in disregard of its theoretic or moral commitments, the knowledge draws on the power. Thinking on the period of haute vulgarisation which preceded the French Revolution, one wonders whether such periods—a society making total inventory of its skills—are logical forerunners to political and social crisis. Do societies harvest before a storm?
But although the “lyric documentary” is at present the dominant mode in that it concentrates much of the best general prose and usurps yearly on the actual readership of serious fiction, it is not a very significant genre. It cannot go much beyond itself except by embroidery, or by pressing the fact to yield more than it is worth. Moreover, precisely where it is honest with the current state of politics or science or historical scholarship, this “literature of knowledge” has a built-in obsolescence, the facts changing almost as soon as they are presented. One values the eloquent welcome shown to the general reader by science, history, sociology, and all the techniques of which we have to know the contour if we are to get on. But the essential life of literary form has more subterranean, obstinate channels.
Our culture has seen the rise and decay of the verse epic and of “high” drama; it has seen the retreat of poetry from a central mnemonic or argumentative function in society; it is at present witnessing the decline of the novel from essential purpose. But there are other possibilities of form, other shapes of expression dimly at work. In the disorder of our affairs—a disorder made worse by the seeming coherence of kitsch—new modes of statement, new grammars or poetics for insight, are becoming visible. They are tentative and isolated. But they exist like those packets of radiant energy around which matter is said to gather in turbulent space. They exist, if only in a number of rather solitary, little understood books.
It is not the actual list that matters. Anyone can add to it or take away under the impulse of his own recognitions. It is the common factor in these works—the reaching out of language toward new relations (what we call logic), and in a wider sense toward a new syntax by which to tempt reality into the momentary but living order of words. There are books, though not many, in which the old divisions between prose and verse, between dramatic and narrative voice, between imaginary and documentary, are beautifully irrelevant or false. Just as criteria of conventional verisimilitude and common perspective were beginning to be irrelevant to the new focus of Impressionism. Starting in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, books have appeared which allow no ready answer to the question: what species of literature am I, to what genre do I belong? Works so organized—we tend to forget the imperative of life in that word—that their expressive form is integral only to themselves, that they modify, by the very fact of their existence, our sense of how meaning may be communicated.
Blake would be relevant: because of his anger at set forms, because of his redisposal of statement in all manner of personal and complex spaces, part aphorism, part sung prose, part epic verse so hurtling and uncertainly stressed that the paragraphs achieve an effect of prose-poetry or prose libre. Also because of his uses of art not to illustrate or comment from the margin but as an active partner to language inside a total statement. Blake’s drawings are in harness with the poem or strike out at the obstinate radiance of the unspoken vision. Their incompleteness, the fluidity of the line beyond the frame is like the incompleteness in many of Blake’s visionary texts. When picture and word come together, they re-group each other in a dynamic suggestion of new meanings and new relations. It has been said that Blake’s failure, the lapse of fresh authority into singularity and chaos, derives from the lack of a responsible echo, from the absence in his society of adequate “social collaboration.” Thus “he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense.” But part of the reason may be more radical. Like Mallarmé, but with greater honesty of need, Blake was striving toward a new form of book altogether, toward new interactions of typography and syntax, of language and space, of graphic means and verbal codes. This is apparent in the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 and in the Laocoon Group (engraved ca. 1820), with its use of Hebrew, Greek, and English, its disposal of aphoristic clusters at various points in the composition, its bordure of lapidary statements. I realize that there are eighteenth-century precedents and contemporary analogues to this kind of pictorial-poetic device; but Blake lives.
Kierkegaard is obviously important here. Each of the fragments he detached from the marvelously unflagging discourse of his mind, what Donne would call “this dialogue of one,” carries the mark of a central design, secret but coherent, of a logic and architecture of literary form so appropriate and resilient that it could contain and express the great forces of doubt and renewal in Kierkegaard’s meditation. He did not achieve or publish (make public) this design; perhaps he only saw it fitfully himself. But Either/Or, the dramatic spiral of the parables in Fear and Trembling, the synthesis of intimate lyricism and philosophic dialectic, of pain and logic, in Kierkegaard’s books communicate, as do the incompletions, the different possible alignments of Pascal’s Pensées, the impact of a new form. After Kierkegaard the conventions of philosophic argument are as “open,” as subject to revision, as are the shapes of trees after Van Gogh.
A need to make all expression unprecedented, so acute that it ended in inevitable silence, governs the forms of Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s style, in the experimental guise of his successive works, the pressure of new feelings and philosophic demands on traditional modes of presentation is constant. If one tries to rearrange the aphoristic segments of Morgenröte or Beyond Good and Evil, a force of necessary location asserts itself. The discontinuities, which keep the reader alert and vulnerable, mesh into an implicit logic, like iron filings above a hidden magnet. Zarathustra is, in one sense, almost old-fashioned: rhapsodic, orientalizing cadences, the bardic stance, can be found throughout the century, from Ossian to Whitman and Renan. But in another sense the work is profoundly original. It proclaims, as does Ungaretti’s famous distich, M’illumino d’immenso. It renders philosophic argument musical. It has a polyphonic texture in which different styles and literary modes proceed together, almost simultaneously. There are great fugues of thought which lead to the particular effect of musical resolution—unreconciled energy inside repose. This use of music, not for outward sonority or tricks of rhythm, but as a model for the actions of the mind within language—as an attendant major language to make the writer’s consciousness in some root sense bilingual—is vital to both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (the latter being, in fact, a musician). Precisely as line and color are vital to the poetic syntax of Blake.
In short: wherever literary structure strives toward new potentialities, wherever the old categories are challenged by genuine compulsion, the writer will reach out to one of the other principal grammars of human perception—art, music, or more recently, mathematics.
There are other examples of nascent form, of anarchic style moving toward new discipline, which one would want to look at. Péguy is a minor figure, and a bully of language. But his attempt to slow down the natural pace of French, to give the prose of Nôtre Jeunesse and Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo a ponderous, erosive drive, as of lava, is more than rhetoric. Péguy wanted to make the logic of persuasion visceral and incantatory as it had not been since before Descartes. Proof arises out of the vehemence of reassertion, each insistence spiraling back on its premise. His essays and books are like no others; slow beasts that tread the mind.
Karl Kraus was, like Péguy, a pamphleteer, a man who made eloquence of journalistic occasion. But Die letzten Tage der Menschheit is more than that. Part mammoth drama, part philosophic dialogue, part lyric feuilleton, it declares a crisis of disequilibrium between traditional literary genres and the voice and quality of the historical epoch. It says, in its own exorbitant way, that neither poetic nor realistic drama, neither the essay nor the novel, can cope. That their settled forms are given the lie by the shapeless ferocity of social and political realities. There is in Kraus an attempt toward a “total form,” a Gesamtsprachwerk, though he lacked the invention and “negative capability” needed to sustain it.
These might have been in Walter Benjamin, had he not died early, after a life too much harrassed by foresight. Benjamin’s essays with their resolve to make of literary criticism a form almost lyric, a mirror creating images, belong to our theme. As do the Vexierbilder und Miniaturen, and the essay on Paris, instigated by Baudelaire’s Tableaux de Paris, whose shape is a mimesis of the city, district following district with sudden avenues or winding alleys between them. In an early essay, Benjamin spoke of the necessary opaqueness of language, of the difficulty that confronts the writer because each language communicates only itself, only its own essence. Thus the writer who has something new to feel and say must hammer out his own speech against the grain or just to one side of the conventional ensemble of words, signs, grammars. Otherwise, how shall he be heard?
This refusal to accept the sufficiency of established literary forms, this desire to make of each book a free yet necessary genre and to bring the pressure of musical and mathematical “speech” to bear on literary style, underlies the work of Broch. It is so rich and unequal an achievement that one cannot deal with it summarily. Already in The Sleepwalkers we find a conjunction of fiction and philosophic essay. In the Schuldlosen we find not only a corroboration of verse and novella, but a fictional design built around a musical axis (Mozart’s Don Giovanni is meant to give the narrative its implicit shape). The Death of Virgil is composed in the form of a string quartet, the prose of the different sections being imitative of the mood and rhythms of corresponding musical movements. In Broch, technical experiment sprang, as it must if it is not to be frivolous, from moral need, from the need to find symbols or shapes adequate to the pain or anger or prophetic shock of the exploring intellect. Toward the end of his life, Broch inclined more and more to mathematics and silence (mathematics being, in one way, the language of silence).
This is no accident. The entire radical, experimental tradition which I have been referring to carries inside it a potential of silence, the recognized possibility that literature may be insufficient. Perhaps our culture has grown wasteful of its words. Perhaps it has cheapened or spent what assurance of perception and numinous value they once contained. This thought is hinted at in the distinction between loquacious and laconic cultures drawn by Lévi-Strauss in his Anthropologie structurale. The point is made even more impressively in Le Cru et le cuit, a book which affirms that music is superior to language, being both intelligible and untranslatable, and which is itself organized in musical patterns—overture, themes and variations, cantata, symphonic interlude.
Wherever it reaches out toward the limits of expressive form, literature comes to the shore of silence. There is nothing mystical in this. Only the realization that the poet and philosopher, by investing language with the utmost precision and illumination, are made aware, and make the reader aware, of other dimensions which cannot be circumscribed in words. For Broch this is one way of saying that death has another language. Reached by way of linguistic philosophy and formal logic (logic is one of the prosodies of the mind, one of the ways in which it scans the world), the borderline is Wittgenstein’s: what we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.
The Tractatus is a graphic example of the kind of book, of the forms and motions of spirit, which I am trying to define. It is built of aphorisms and numbers, as if borrowing from another kind of certitude. It makes its own syntax and idiom and object of doubt and rigorous appraisal. Wittgenstein has a poet’s capacity to make every word seem new and full of untapped, possibly destructive vitality. At several points the Tractatus, with its economy of image and its typographical effects, reads almost like a poem. And like the Sonnets to Orpheus, of which it is close contemporary, it commends us to silence.
If we take all these elements together—the determination to make style and genre unique to the particular occasion, the proximity of music and mathematics to the writer’s sense of his own medium, an implication, arising directly out of the language, that we are near silence (call it a core of magic)—a name may suggest itself, a metaphor by which to keep these different books in focus. Relations between things are fully grasped only when the class to which they belong has been recognized. Thus we may come to see this apparently discontinuous, idiosyncratic series, which begins in the region of Blake and Kierkegaard and has continued to Wittgenstein, as part of a new form. I would call it the “Pythagorean genre.”
Not only for its music and numbers, its metaphysical poetics and frequent meditation on silence and death, but because pre-Socratic philosophy—or what we gather from the ever dubious, therefore vital order of the fragments—recalls a time in which literary form was an act of magic, an exorcism of ancient chaos. A time when metaphysics and mineralogy spoke verse, and words had the driven force of the dance. The books I have cited are like sparks from Heraclitus’ fire.
Pythagoras and Heraclitus appear often in Das Prinzip Hoffnung. And what I have said can be seen as a footnote to one of the aspects of the work of Ernst Bloch. I have wanted to suggest that he is perhaps the foremost living writer in the Pythagorean genre.
The importance of Ernst Bloch to the historian of utopian Marxism, to the epistemologist and student of natural law, to the Kulturphilosoph and historian of the German-Jewish mind in the twentieth century, is obvious. But a rich share of his achievement concerns the literary critic and student of language. As early as the essays of 1912–1917 and Thomas Münzer, Bloch makes of the act of writing a peculiarly individual and urgent deed. Though strongly influenced by Expressionism, Bloch’s earlier prose has its own abrupt lyric insistence. In Bloch’s mature style, there are pages we can set beside Hölderlin and Nietzsche for their subtle brightness. Like few other masters of German, he has broken the generically ponderous, clotted norms of German syntax.
Das Prinzip Hoffnung is like no other book. There is no ready designation for its shape and tone, for its fantastic range and metaphoric logic. On its first page, we find number and space (the typographical equivalent to silence), headings full of abrupt mystery, and three prose paragraphs, each longer than the one before as in a stanzaic pattern. The page asserts an unprecedented need and the determination to give it unique voice. The first sentence is set in large letters as an aubade to the mind starting on its great voyage: “We begin empty.” That is the watchword of the Pythagorean form. The book we begin tomorrow must be as if there had been none before; new and outrageous as the morning sun.