WE CANNOT imagine the shape, the substance of a day in Victorian England, nor the quiet isolation of our own countryside even fifty years ago. Everything good is bought with the blood of someone’s lack, someone’s wretchedness. And so we are propelled onward, gaining and losing, building and destroying. Some try to hold a little here, save something there, to preserve, to remember; but the preserver is himself shaped out of losses and impatience. All of his little motors of need are running in his flesh just as they are running through the electric current in his house.
“To have time,” in the personal sense, is to have an emptiness, an absence, a failure of diversion. Something is withheld from you, and this nothingness gives you time. No amount of money can buy it, and so it is fortunate that few want it. Quite the opposite: Our bodies would not be prepared, our souls and our vanity even less.
It is a jolt, not easy by any means, to find oneself suddenly at the Metropolitan Opera House for Wagner’s Parsifal. This splendid, wonderfully successful new production is, like all the others before it since 1882, over four hours long. It is a static, contemplative work; its intensities are inward and abstract. The wound of Amfortas is not an ache, a sickness, a casualty, but the universal unhealed wound of existence. It is healed by the touch of a spear, the instrument of wounds. In a moment of dazzling modern technology, we see a flash of silvery movement—the spear, flung across the stage by Klingsor, is, with the speed of light, shining in Parsifal’s hand. For the rest, we look inward, led by the music, into the cave of ourselves.
In this production, and I understand also in Bayreuth, the stage is quite dark throughout. Even the final Good Friday light is only a long, thin stream of whiteness in the shadows. In this way we are at a further remove from the usual involvement with the action on the stage. There is wisdom enough in this, since Parsifal can only be as it is; it is one of those works of art that will not budge to accommodate current taste. There is no way to move it. You must surrender, submit, call upon some sense of motionlessness in yourself. That is, if you want to be there for Redemption.
At Parsifal one must conquer time, or leave, as many do, saying with great unconscious accuracy that they must go home, they haven’t time. This loss of time is not an illusion, but a fact for all of us. If, as an amateur, as a civilized person merely, one were to set out to read Shakespeare’s works carefully, the Bible, Proust, or Dickens or Gibbon, it would be necessary to undergo some rare kind of discipline of withdrawal, to set up conditions very special, to work against the grain of our lives. Where will the time be found?
Wagner began Parsifal in 1877 and finished it in 1882, one year before his death. Nietzsche was distressed by its Christian feeling, but wrote: “It is as if someone were speaking to me again after many years about problems that disturb me. . . .” This is still true. There in the long, pure hours we think not only of the Grail and the Sword but of ourselves and the others around us, people from space, living in a new continuum.
1971