I am a native of Gelderland.1 Our property consists only of a few acres of briar and brackish water. Pines that rustle with a metallic sound grow on its boundaries. Only a few rare inhabitable rooms remain on the farm, which is dying stone by stone in solitude. We issue from an old family of shepherds, formerly large, now reduced to my parents, my sister, and me.
My destiny, rather gloomy at first, has become the most beautiful that I am aware of. I have met The One Being who has understood me; it is he who will teach to others what I alone among men now know. For a long time, however, I suffered, I despaired, prey to doubt, to solitude of the soul, which in the end gnaws away everything right down to the most absolute certainties.
I came into the world with a unique constitution. Right from the beginning, I was an object of wonder. Not that I seemed to be misshapen: I was, I was told, more graceful of body and face than one is usually at birth.2 But I had the most extraordinary complexion, of a sort of pale violet color—very pale but very clear. In the lamplight, especially that of oil lamps, this nuance became paler yet, took on a strange whiteness, like a lily submerged in water. This is, at least, what other men saw: for I myself see myself differently, just as I see differently all the objects in this world. To this first oddity others were added that came to light later.
Although born with the appearance of health, I grew with difficulty. I was thin, I cried constantly; by the age of eight months, no one had yet seen me smile. Before long, they despaired of ever raising me. The doctor from Zwartendam declared that I was suffering from a physiological malady: he saw no other remedy but a rigorous health regimen. Nonetheless I continued to waste away; from one day to the next, they expected to see me die. My father, I believe, had resigned himself to this, having been vexed in his self-pride—in his Dutch amour propre made up of order and regularity—by the strange aspect of his child. My mother, to the contrary, loved me all the more in proportion to my strangeness, finally coming to find the color of my skin pleasant.
Things had reached this point, when a very simple event came to my rescue: as everything concerning me of course had to be abnormal, this event became a cause of scandal and apprehension.
When one of the servants left, she was replaced by a strong Friesland girl, hardworking and honest, but given to drinking. I was placed in the care of the newcomer. Seeing me so feeble, she fancied that she could give me in secret a little beer and water mixed with Schiedam,3 the remedies, according to her, best for any illness.
The most curious thing is that I soon began to regain strength, and that from then on I showed an extraordinary predilection for alcoholic drinks. The good-hearted lass secretly rejoiced, not without taking some pleasure in causing puzzlement in my parents and the doctor. But, confronted with the evidence, she finally revealed the mystery. My father became violently angry, the doctor ranted against ignorance and superstition. Strict orders were given to all the servants, I was removed from the care of the Friesland girl.
I began again to lose weight, to waste away, until my mother, harking only to her tenderness, put me back on the beer and Schiedam diet. At once, I regained strength and liveliness. The experiment was conclusive: alcohol proved to be essential to my health. My father was humiliated by this; the doctor saved face by prescribing medicinal wine, and my health has been excellent ever since: everyone hastened to predict that I would have a life of drunkenness and debauchery.
Soon after this incident, a new anomaly struck those around me. My eyes, that had at first seemed normal, became oddly opaque, took on a corneous look, like the elytra of certain coleoptera.4 The doctor predicted that I would lose my sight; he admitted nonetheless that the illness seemed totally odd to him and that he had never been given the opportunity of studying anything like it before. Soon the pupil became so much like the iris that it was impossible to tell one from the other. In addition, they noticed that I could look into the sun without being troubled by it. To tell the truth, I was in no way blind, in fact one finally had to admit that I saw with my eyes very well indeed.
In this manner I reached the age of three. I was then, in the opinion of our neighbors, a little monster. There had been little change in the violet hue of my skin; my eyes were completely opaque. I spoke incorrectly and with an astounding speed. I was dextrous with my hands, and well endowed to perform movements that demand more agility than physical strength. No one denied that I would have been graceful and even pretty had I had a normal complexion and transparent pupils. I showed some intelligence, but with gaps in knowledge that people around me did not try to understand, all the more because, with the exception of my mother and the Friesland girl, I was hardly liked by anyone. I was in the eyes of strangers an object of curiosity, and for my father a continual source of humiliation.
If in fact the latter had preserved any hope of seeing me become like other human beings, time acted to dissuade him of this. I became stranger and stranger, in my tastes, my habits, and even my good qualities. At the age of six, I nourished myself almost entirely with alcohol. I barely ate a few mouthfuls of vegetables and fruit. I grew incredibly fast, I was astonishingly thin and light. I mean “light” in a literal sense, which is precisely the opposite of being thin: thus, I was able to swim without the least effort, I floated like a plank of poplar wood. My head was no more immersed than the rest of my body.
I was agile in proportion to this lightness. I ran with the speed of a deer, I leapt easily over ditches and obstacles no one would even have tried to jump over. In the twinkling of an eye, I would reach the top of a beech tree; or, even more surprising, I would jump to the roof of our farm. On the other hand, the least burden exceeded my strength.
* * *
All these, in fact, were merely phenomena that indicated a unique nature, phenomena that in themselves could only have served to single me out and make me unwelcome; none placed me outside the realm of Humanity. Without doubt, I was a monster, but certainly not so much as someone born with horns, or ears like a beast, the head of a calf or a horse, or with fins, no eyes, or an extra eye, four arms, four legs, or without arms or legs. My skin, despite its surprising hue, was close to being like skin that was suntanned; my eyes had nothing repugnant about them, despite their opacity. My extreme agility of movement was a positive quality; my need for alcohol could pass as a mere vice, the hereditary trait of a drunkard: the bumpkins, in fact, like our Frieslander, only saw in all of that a confirmation of their sense of the “strength” of Schiedam, a slightly excessive demonstration of how excellent their tastes were. As for the rapidity of my speech, its glibness, which was impossible to follow, this could be confused with speech defects—stammering, lisping, stuttering—commonly found in so many small children. Therefore, strictly speaking, I had no marked signs of monstrosity, although all these things taken together were extraordinary: the fact was that the most unusual aspect of my nature escaped detection by those around me, for nobody realized that my vision differed strangely from the normal way of seeing.5
If I saw certain things less clearly than other men, I saw a large number of things that no one else sees. This difference was especially marked in the case of colors. All those colors known as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo appeared to me as a more or less blackish gray, while I did see the color violet, and a series of colors beyond this end of the spectrum, colors that are only night for normal eyes. I later came to understand that I can distinguish fifteen or so colors that are as different from each other as, for example, yellow and green—with, of course, an infinity of gradations.
Second, my eye cannot perceive transparency under normal conditions. I see poorly through a windowpane, and through water: I see glass as a highly colored substance; water is slightly colored, even when there is little thickness.6 Many crystals said to be diaphanous are more or less opaque for me; then again, a large number of bodies said to be opaque do not stop my seeing through them. Generally, I see through bodies much more frequently than you do; and translucency, cloudy transparency, occurs so often that I can say that, for my eye, it is the rule of nature, while total opacity is an exception. It is thus that I distinguish objects through wood, leaves, flower petals, magnetic iron, coal, and so on. However, when the thickness varies, these bodies become an obstacle: as with a huge tree, or a meter’s depth of water, or a thick chunk of coal or quartz.
Gold, platinum, mercury are black and opaque, ice appears blackish. Air and water vapor are transparent, and yet tinted, as well as certain samples of steel, certain very pure clays. Clouds do not prevent me from seeing the sun and the stars. In addition, I clearly distinguish the same clouds hovering in the atmosphere.
The difference between my sight and that of other men was, as I have mentioned, rarely noticed by those close to me; they simply thought that I perceived colors only with difficulty; this is too common an infirmity to attract attention. It had no importance for the everyday activities of my life, as I could see the forms of objects in the same way as—and perhaps more subtly than—the majority of men. The designation of an object by its color, when color was needed to distinguish it from another object of the same shape, did not bother me unless the objects were new to me. If somebody called the color of a vest “blue” and the color of another “red,” it made little difference to me what the real colors were in which these vests appeared to me: blue and red became terms of a purely mnemonic nature.
From all of this, you might believe that there was some kind of agreement between my colors and those of others, and that therefore it was the same as if I had seen their colors. But, as I have already written, red, green, yellow, blue, and so on, when they are pure, like the colors of the prism—I see them all as a more or less blackish gray; they are not colors for me. In nature, where no color is pure, it is not the same: such and such a substance called green, for example, is made up for me of a certain compound color;* but another substance called green, and which for you is identical in shade to the first one, is not at all the same color for me.7 Thus you can see that my spectrum of colors does not correspond to yours: when I accept calling both brass and gold yellow, it is somewhat as if you accepted calling both a cornflower and a poppy “red.”
If the difference between my way of seeing and that of general humanity had stopped there, it would have indeed seemed extraordinary enough. It is only a small part, however, in comparison with the remainder of what I have to tell you. This differently colored world, differently transparent and opaque—the faculty that enables to see through clouds, to perceive stars on the most cloudy nights, to discern through a wooden wall what is taking place in the neighboring room, or outside a house—what is all of that in comparison with the perception of a living world, a world of Beings that are alive, moving next to and all around man, without man being aware of it, without him being alerted to it by any kind of direct contact? What is all of that, next to the realization that a fauna other than ours exists on Earth, a fauna without the least resemblance to our own, neither in form, nor in organization, nor in habits, nor in patterns of growth, of birth and of death? A fauna that lives next to, and through, our own fauna, influences the elements that surround us, and is influenced, strengthened by those elements, without our having the least suspicion of its presence. A fauna that—as I have demonstrated—ignores us just as we ignore it; and as we evolve without it knowing about us, it evolves without our knowing about it. A living world, as varied as ours, as powerful as ours—and perhaps more so—in its effects on the surface of the planet!8 A kingdom of beings, finally, moving about upon the waters, in the atmosphere, on the ground, transforming these waters, this atmosphere, this ground, in completely different ways than we do, but with a certainly formidable energy, by means of which it acts indirectly upon us and our destiny, just as we act indirectly on it and its destiny! . . . This is, however, what I saw, what I see now, alone among men and beasts alike, here is what I have been passionately studying for five years, after having spent childhood and adolescence simply noticing its presence.
Noticing it! As far back as I can remember, I have by instinct succumbed to the seduction of this creation alien to our own. At first, I confused it with other living things. Noticing that no one else was bothered by its presence, that everyone else, on the contrary, seemed to ignore it, I hardly felt the need to point out its singularities. At the age of six, I knew perfectly how it differed from the plants in the fields, from animals of the farmyard and the stable, but I confused it somewhat with inert phenomena like the glow of light, the drift of waters and clouds. This was because these beings were intangible: whenever they came to me, I never felt any effect from their contact. Their form, quite varied in fact, had nevertheless the particularity of being so thin, in one of their three dimensions, that one could compare them to drawn figures, to flat surfaces, to geometric lines that would be moving about.9 They passed through all organic bodies; on the other hand, they appeared to be stopped sometimes, to get tangled up in invisible obstacles . . . But I will describe them later. For the time being, I only wish to indicate their presence, to affirm the variety of their contours and lines, their near absence of thickness, their impalpability, all combined with the autonomy of their movements.
* * *
As I approached my eighth year, I realized perfectly well that they were just as distinct from atmospheric phenomena as animals are from our kingdom. In the rapture this discovery brought me, I attempted to express it. I was never able to do so. Beside the fact that my speech was almost entirely incomprehensible, as I have said, the extraordinary nature of my vision made it suspicious. No one attempted to disentangle my gestures and sentences, any more than they were ready to admit that I might be able to see through wooden panels, even though I had given proof of this many times. There was, between me and the others, an almost insurmountable barrier.
I sank into a state of discouragement and reverie; I became a sort of little solitary being; I provoked uneasiness, and felt the same in return, in the company of children of my age. I was not exactly a victim, because my speed of movement kept me out of reach of childish mischief, and gave me the means of avenging myself with ease. At the least sign of menace, I was already at a safe distance, I mocked my pursuers. However great their number might be, no boys were ever able to surround me, let alone constrain me. It was also futile to attempt to take me by ruse. However weak I might have been in shouldering burdens, my forward momentum was unstoppable, immediately extricated me. I could come back by surprise, subdue the adversary, indeed adversaries, with swift and sure blows. Therefore they left me alone. They considered me at one and the same time naive and a bit of a sorcerer, but one whose sorcery was little feared, but despised instead. Little by little I created a life outside society, wild, contemplative, not entirely devoid of gentleness. My mother’s tenderness alone rendered me human, even though, too occupied during the day, she rarely found time for caresses.
I now will attempt to describe, in summary fashion, a few scenes from my tenth year, in order to give concrete form to the preceding explanations.
It is in the morning. A strong glow lights up the kitchen, a glow that is pale yellow to my parents and to the servants, but for me a very diverse light. Breakfast is being served, bread with tea. But I don’t drink tea. They have given me a glass of Schiedam with a raw egg. My mother cares for me tenderly; my father asks me questions. I try to answer him, I slow down my speech; he only understands a syllable here and there, he shrugs his shoulders.
“He will never speak.”
My mother looks at me compassionately, persuaded that I am a bit simple-minded. The servants and maids are no longer even curious about the little violet monster; the Friesland girl has gone back to her region long ago. As for my sister—she is two years old—she plays next to me, and I have a deep tenderness for her.
Once breakfast is over, my father goes out into the fields with the servants, my mother begins to go about the daily chores. I follow her into the courtyard. The animals come toward her. I look at them with interest, I love them. But all around them, the other Kingdom is moving and captivates my interest to a greater degree: this is the mysterious domain that I am alone in knowing.10
Against the dark soil, there are a few forms spread out; they move about, they stop, they pulsate at the level of the ground. They belong to several species, differentiated by their contours, by their movements, and especially by the arrangement, the design, and the nuances of the lines that traverse them. These lines in fact constitute the essence of their being, and, as a young child, I perceived this very clearly. While the mass of their form is dull, grayish, the lines are almost always sparkling. They constitute very complicated networks, they emanate from centers, they radiate out from these, until they become lost, imprecise.11 Their nuances are countless, their curves infinite. These nuances vary within a single line, as the form also varies within that line, if to a lesser degree.
In general, this being is shaped by rather irregular, but very distinct, contours, by centers that irradiate outward, by multicolored lines that crisscross each other abundantly. When it moves, the lines vibrate, oscillate, the centers contract and dilate, while the outer shape varies little.
All of that, ever since that time, I see very clearly, although I am incapable of defining its nature: a delightful charm invades me when I contemplate the Moedigen.* One of them, a colossus ten meters long and almost as wide, passes slowly across the courtyard, and disappears. This one, with several bands as large as cables, with centers as large as the wings of eagles, is of extreme interest to me, and almost frightens me. I hesitate a moment to follow it, but others attract my attention. They are of all sizes: some are no longer than our tiniest insects, while I have seen others reach a length of more than thirty meters. They move along the ground itself, as if attached to solid surfaces. Whenever a material obstacle—a wall or a house—presents itself, they breach it by molding themselves to its surface, always without making any important modifications to their shapes. But wherever the obstacle is composed of matter that is either alive or has lived, they pass directly through it: it is thus that I have seen them a thousand times emerge from a tree or from under the foot of an animal or a man. They also pass through water, but prefer to remain on the surface.
These terrestrial Moedigen are not the only intangible beings. There is an aerial population, of marvelous splendor, incomparable in subtlety, variety, and brightness, next to which the most beautiful of birds are dull, slow and ponderous. Here again, there is a contour and some lines. But the background is no longer grayish; it is strangely luminous; it sparkles like the sun, and the lines stand out against it like vibrating veins, its centers vibrate violently. The Vuren, as I thus call them, have a more irregular shape than the terrestrial Moedigen, and generally, they navigate by means of rhythmical arrangements, of crisscrossings and uncrossings that, in my ignorance, I cannot grasp, and that confound my imagination.
Then, I strike out across a field recently mowed: the fight between one Moedig and another attracts my attention. Such combats are frequent; I have a violent passion for them. Sometimes, it is a fight between equals; more often, it is the attack of a strong one on a weak one (the weak one is not necessarily the smaller). This time, the weak one, after a brief defense, starts to flee, closely pursued by its attacker. Despite the speed of their chase, I follow them, I succeed in keeping them in sight, until the moment when the fight begins anew. They rush toward each other, in a hard, even rigid manner, as each one is solid to the other. With each shock, their lines become phosphorescent, converge toward the point of contact, their centers pale and shrink. First, the struggle remains more or less equal, the weak one deploys the most intense energy, and succeeds even in gaining a respite from its attacker. It takes advantage of this to flee again, but it is soon caught up with, attacked with force, and finally captured, that is, held in an opening in the contour of the other. This is exactly what the weak one had tried to avoid, by responding to the shocks from the strong one with less energetic, but more rapid, shocks. Now, I see all its lines vibrate, its centers struggle desperately; and as this continues the lines become paler, thinner, the centers lose their precise form. After a few minutes, it is given back its freedom; it moves away slowly, dull, debilitated. The antagonist, to the contrary, sparkles more, its lines take on more color, its centers become sharper and pulsate more rapidly.
This struggle moved me deeply; I dream of it, I compare it to fights I see sometimes between our animals and our small creatures; I understand dimly that the Moedigen in fact do not kill each other, or rarely, that the victor contents itself with drawing energy at the expense of the vanquished.12
The morning advances, it is close to eight o’clock; the school in Zwartendam is about to open: I make a leap up to the farm, I take my books, and here I am among my peers, where no one guesses the deep mysteries that palpitate around me, where no one has even the most confused idea of living beings through which all humanity passes, and which pass through humanity, without any indication of this mutual inter-penetration.
I am a very poor student. My handwriting is no more than a hasty scrawl, formless, unreadable; my speech remains incomprehensible; it is obvious I am distracted. The teacher continuously exclaims:
“Karel Ondereet, when are you going to stop looking at flies in flight!”
Alas! my dear teacher, it is true that I am watching the flies flying around, but how much more does my soul soar along with those mysterious Vuren that are moving about the room! And what strange feelings obsess my childlike soul, when I realize the blindness of all around me, and above all, your own, O solemn shepherd of minds.
The most difficult period of my life was that from twelve to eighteen years.
First of all, my parents tried to send me to high school; there I knew only misery and failures. As a result of exhausting efforts, I succeeded in expressing the most common things in an almost comprehensible manner: making a great effort to slow down my syllables, I blurted them out awkwardly, and with the stresses of a deaf person. But as soon as it was a matter of expressing something complex, my speech regained its fatal rapidity: no one was able to follow me.13 Thus, I was not able to make people aware of my progress orally. And my handwriting was atrocious, my letters overlapped each other, and in my impatience, I forgot syllables, words: it was monstrous gibberish. Besides, writing for me was a torture perhaps even more intolerable than speaking—it was so ponderous, so stiflingly slow!—If, sometimes, after great effort and the sweat of my brow, I managed to begin my homework, soon I was exhausted and out of patience, I felt myself fainting. I preferred therefore the reprimands of the teacher, my father’s bouts of fury, punishments, privations, scorn, to this horrible labor.
Thus, I was almost totally deprived of means of expressing myself: already an object of ridicule because of my thinness and my odd complexion, because of my strange eyes, even more I was seen as being some sort of idiot. It was necessary to take me out of school, to accept the fact that I must become a peasant. The day my father decided to give up all hope, he said to me with an unaccustomed gentleness:
“My poor lad, you see, I have done my duty . . . my entire duty! Never reproach me your fate!”
I was violently moved, I cried all the tears of my heart: never before had I felt with so much bitterness how isolated I was in the midst of mankind. I dared to kiss my father tenderly; I murmured:
“Yet it is not true that I am an imbecile!”
And in fact I felt superior to those who had been my peers. For some time now, my intelligence had been undergoing a remarkable development. I read, I understood, I intuited things, and I had, more than other men have, immense possibilities for meditation, within this universe that was visible to me alone.
My father was unable to untangle my words, but he was moved by my affection.
“Poor lad!” he said.
I looked at him; I felt a terrible despair, knowing all the more that the void that separated us would never be filled. My mother, through her loving intuition, realized at that moment that I was not inferior to other boys of my age: she stared at me tenderly, she spoke sweet words to me that came from the utmost depths of her being. Despite all that, I was condemned to cease my studies.
Because of my weak muscular strength, I was relegated to tending the flocks and livestock. I did the job marvelously well; I needed no dog to tend the herds, for no colt, no stallion had greater agility than I did. Thus I lived, from fourteen to seventeen, the solitary life of a shepherd. It suited me more than any other. Given over to observation and contemplation, and also to some readings, my mind did not stop developing. Endlessly, I made comparisons between the dual creation I had before my eyes. From this I deduced ideas about the nature of the universe, I formulated vague hypotheses and systems. If it is true that my thoughts at that time did not perfectly correlate, did not achieve a clear synthesis—for they were the thoughts of an adolescent, uncoordinated, hasty, enthusiastic—they were nevertheless original and fertile. I will not deny that their value was especially dependent on my unique constitution. But they did not derive their full power from this alone. Without the least vanity, I believe I can assert that they far outstripped, in subtlety as in logic, those of ordinary young men.
They alone brought consolation to my sad life as a semipariah, without companions, without any real communication with those surrounding me, not even with my adorable mother.
* * *
At seventeen, life became undeniably intolerable for me. I was tired of dreaming, tired of vegetating in a wasteland of thought. I languished with boredom. I remained motionless for long hours, disinterested in the entire world, paying no attention to what took place in my family. Of what avail to me was it to know things more marvelous than other men, insofar as this knowledge was destined to perish with me? Of what avail to me this mystery of other living beings, and even the dual nature of two living systems passing though each other without knowing each other? These things could have turned my head, could have filled me with enthusiasm and ardor, if only I could, in some way or other, have taught them or shared them with others. But to what avail! Vain and sterile, absurd and wretched, they contributed instead to my perpetual psychic quarantine.
Several times, I dreamt of writing, in order at least to establish, as the reward of continued efforts, some of my observations. Yet ever since leaving school, I had completely abandoned writing. Already such a wretched scribbler, I was barely able, even if I applied myself to the task, to inscribe the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Had I had the least glimpse of hope, perhaps I would have persisted! But who would take my miserable ramblings seriously? Where was the reader who would not think me mad? Or the wise man who would not dismiss me with disdain or irony? What was the use, from now on, of devoting myself to that vain task, to that vexing torture, which is almost what it would be like for an ordinary man to have to inscribe his thoughts on a marble tablet, with a large chisel and a cyclopean hammer! My own handwriting was like a shorthand—and even then, a shorthand much faster than normal!14
Thus I had no courage at all to write, and yet I ardently hoped for I don’t know what unknown occurrence, for some fortunate and unique act of fate, to happen. It seemed to me that there must exist, in some corner of the Earth, minds that were impartial, lucid, discerning, suited to studying me, to understanding me, to drawing from me my great secret, and communicating it to others. But where are such men? What hope did I have of ever meeting them?
And I would fall back into a deep melancholy, into a desire to remain immobile, to annihilate myself. During an entire autumn, I despaired of the Universe. I languished in a vegetative state, from which I emerged only to give myself over to long moans, followed by agonizing moments of revolt.
I became thinner yet, to the point of becoming fantastical in appearance. The folks of the village called me, with irony, “den Heyligen Gheest,” the Holy Spirit. My silhouette trembled like those of young poplar trees, was as light as a reflected image, and because of this I attained the stature of giants.
Slowly, a project began to form in my mind. Insofar as my life had been sacrificed, because none of my days bore me any pleasure, and all to me was darkness and bitterness, why stagnate in inaction? Supposing that no soul existed capable of responding to mine, at least it seemed worthwhile to make the effort to convince myself of the fact. At least it seemed worthwhile to leave this gloomy land, to go find in the large cities the scientists and philosophers. Was I not myself an object of curiosity? Before calling attention to my knowledge of extrahuman phenomena, might I not stimulate the desire in people to study my person? Were not my physical attributes alone worthy of being studied, and my vision as well, and the extreme rapidity of my movements, and my strange manner of taking nourishment?15
The more I dreamt of it, the more it seemed reasonable for me to hope, and the more my resolve grew. The day came when that resolve became unshakeable, when I revealed it to my parents. Neither one of them understood much of this, but both finally gave in to my repeated entreaties: I was allowed to go to Amsterdam, with the possibility of returning home if fate were unkind to me.
I departed one morning.
From Zwartendam to Amsterdam is a hundred or so kilometers. I easily covered that distance in two hours, without other adventures than the extreme surprise of those coming and going to see me running with such speed, and several gatherings of people at the entrances to the little towns and larger villages, which I avoided. To make sure I was on the right road, I inquired two or three times of elderly people who were alone. My sense of direction, which is excellent, did the rest.
It was around nine o’clock when I reached Amsterdam. Determined, I entered the big city, I passed along the beautiful, dreamy canals, filled with pleasant merchant fleets. I did not attract as much attention as I had feared. I walked quickly, among people busy with their affairs, here and there enduring the taunts of a few young vagabonds. Nevertheless, I did not decide to stop here. I crisscrossed the city somewhat in all directions, after which I finally resolved to enter a pub, on one of the banks of the Heeren Gracht.16 The place was peaceful; the splendid canal spread before me, full of life, between shady rows of trees; and among the Moedigen I saw moving on its banks, I seemed to see some that belonged to a new species. After some hesitation, I went into the pub, and directing my question to the owner, as slowly as I was able to, I entreated him to be so kind as to direct me to a hospital.
The host gazed at me with astonishment, defiance and curiosity, took his big pipe from his mouth and put it back several times, then finally said:
“You are, no doubt, from the colonies?”
As it was perfectly useless to contradict the man, I answered:
“Yes indeed!”
He appeared delighted with his perspicacity. He asked me a new question:
“Perhaps you come from that region of Borneo which no one has ever been able to enter?”17
“Exactly!”
I spoke too rapidly: he opened his eyes wide.
“Exactly!” I repeated more slowly.
The host smiled with satisfaction:
“You speak Dutch with difficulty, true? So, it’s a hospital you’re looking for . . . probably you’re sick?”
“Yes.”
The patrons had come closer. The news spread already that I was a cannibal from Borneo; even so, I was looked upon much more with curiosity than with antipathy. People ran in from the street. I became nervous, anxious. Nonetheless, I composed myself, and I repeated, coughing:
“I am very sick!”
“It’s just like the monkeys from that country,” replied a very fat man with indulgence. . . . “Holland is killing them!”
“What strange skin,” another added.
“And how does he see?” asked a third man, pointing to my eyes.
The circle drew close, I was surrounded with a hundred curious stares, and still more people were coming into the room.
“How tall he is!”
It is true that I was a head taller than the tallest among them.
“And skinny!” . . .
“Cannibalism does not appear to give them much nourishment!”
Not all the voices were malicious. A few sympathetic individuals protected me:
“Don’t press him like that, he is sick!”
“Come on, friend, courage!” the fat man said, when he noticed my nervousness. “I will take you myself to a hospital.”
He took me by the arm; he gave himself the task of plowing through the crowd, and called out:
“Make way for a sick man.”
Dutch crowds are not very fierce: they let us pass, but they accompanied us. We went along the canal, followed by a compact crowd; and some people cried out:
“He’s a cannibal from Borneo!”
* * *
Finally we reached a hospital. It was during consultation hours. I was taken before an intern, a young man with blue glasses, who greeted me sullenly. My companion said to him:
“He is a savage from the colonies.”
“What do you mean, a savage,” the other exclaimed.
He took off his glasses to look at me. He stood for a while motionless in astonishment. Abruptly he asked me:
“Are you able to see?”
“I see very well . . .”
“It’s his accent,” the fat man said proudly. “Repeat yourself, my friend!”
I repeated myself, I made myself understood.
“Those are not the eyes of a human,” the medical student muttered. “And the complexion! . . . Is this the complexion of your race?”
Then, I said, struggling terribly to slow down my speech:
“I came here to be seen by a man of science!”
“You are not sick then?”
“No!”
“And are you from Borneo?”
“No!”
“Then where are you from?”
“From Zwartendam, near Duisburg!”
“Then why does your friend claim you are from Borneo?”
“I didn’t want to contradict him.”
“And you want to see a man of science?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To be studied.”
“To make money?”
“No, for nothing.”
“You are not poor then? A beggar?”
“No!”
“Then what drives you to want to be studied?”
“My constitution . . .”
But again, despite my efforts, I had spoken too rapidly. I had to repeat myself.
“Are you sure you can see me?” he asked, staring fixedly at me. “Your eyes seem like calluses.”
“I see very well . . .”
And, moving right and left, I picked up objects rapidly, I set them down, I tossed them in the air in order to catch them.
“This is extraordinary,” the young man exclaimed.
His voice, softened, almost friendly, filled me with hope:
“Listen,” he said finally, “I think that Dr. Van den Heuvel will be interested in your case . . . I will have someone inform him about it. You wait in the next room . . . and, by the way . . . I forgot to ask, you are not sick, in fact?”
“Good. Come . . . enter here . . . the doctor will come soon.”
I found myself seated amidst monsters preserved in alcohol: fetuses, children with bestial shapes, colossal batrachians, saurians that were vaguely anthropomorphic.
This, I thought, was the waiting room just for me! Am I not a candidate for one of these sepulchers, to be preserved in alcohol?
When Dr. Van den Heuvel appeared, I was overwhelmed with emotion: I trembled as if I saw the Promised Land, felt the joy of entering it, the fear of being banished from it. The doctor, with his large bald forehead, the penetrating gaze of an analyst, a mouth that was soft and yet displayed resoluteness, examined me in silence, and my excessive thinness, my extreme height, my darkly circled eyes, my violet complexion were causes of astonishment for him, as they were for everyone else.
“You say that you want to be studied?” he finally asked.
I answered forcefully, almost violently:
“Yes!”
He smiled approvingly, and asked me the usual question:
“Can you see well through those eyes?”
“Very well . . . I can even see through wood, through clouds . . .”
But I spoke too fast. He glanced at me with anxiety. I repeated, sweating profusely:
“I even see through wood, through clouds . . .”
“Really! That would be extraordinary . . . Then tell me, what do you see through that door . . . there?”
He showed me a blind door.
“A big glass bookcase . . . a sculpted table . . .”
“Yes, truly!” he repeated, astonished.
My chest relaxed, a deep serenity descended upon my soul.
The scientist remained silent a few seconds, then:
“You speak with great difficulty.”
“Otherwise I speak too rapidly! I cannot speak slowly.”
“Then, speak in your natural manner.”
Then I told him the story of my entry into Amsterdam. He listened with extreme attentiveness, with a sense of intelligence and observation that I had never before encountered among my fellow men. He understood nothing of what I was saying, but the analysis that followed revealed his sagacity:
“I am not mistaken . . . you utter fifteen to twenty syllables per second, that is, three to four times more than the human ear is capable of perceiving. Your voice, moreover, is much higher pitched than any human voice I have ever heard. Your gestures, excessively rapid, clearly correspond to this manner of speaking. Your metabolism on the whole probably functions much faster than ours.”
“I run,” I said, “faster than a greyhound . . . I write . . .”
“Ah!” he interrupted. “Let’s see the handwriting . . .”
I scribbled a few words on a blotter that he held out to me, the first were readable enough, the others increasingly scrambled, abbreviated:
“Perfect!” he said, and a certain pleasure mingled with his astonishment. “I believe that our meeting is most felicitous. Surely, it would be most interesting to study you . . .”
“It is my most ardent, my sole desire!”
“And mine as well . . . most surely . . . Science . . .”
He seemed preoccupied, lost in dreams; at last he said:
“If only we could find an easy means of communicating . . .”
He paced back and forth, his eyebrows knitted. All at once:
“How stupid of me! You will learn shorthand, by god! . . . Yes, Yes . . .”
A jovial expression appeared on his face:
“And, I forgot, what about the phonograph . . . the faithful confidant!18 One need only play it back more slowly than the speed at which recorded . . . It’s all settled: you will live with me during your stay in Amsterdam!”
O joy at wishes fulfilled, what sweetness not to have to spend days in vain and sterile doings! In the presence of the doctor’s intelligent personality, in this scientific milieu, I felt a delightful sense of well-being; the melancholy that beset my solitary soul, the regret that my faculties might be lost, my long suffering as pariah that crushed me for so many years, all vanished, evaporated before the sense that a new life was mine, a true life, a destiny preserved!
The very next day the doctor made the necessary arrangements. He wrote to my parents; he found me a professor of shorthand, and procured phonographs. As he was a very rich man, and entirely devoted to science, there was no experiment he was not willing to undertake, and my sight, my hearing, my musculature, the color of my skin, were all subjected to rigorous examination, all of which made him increasingly enthusiastic, exclaiming:
“This is of the nature of prodigy!”
I understood perfectly, after the first days, just how important it was that things be done with method, from the simplest to the most complex task, from the simplest to the most astonishing abnormality. Thus I had recourse to a little maneuver, which I did not keep secret from the doctor: to reveal my faculties to him only in a gradual manner.
The speed of my perceptions and movements kept him busy at first. He was able to conclude that the subtle nature of my hearing corresponded to the rapidity of my speech. This point was proven conclusively by gradually more rigorous experiments on increasingly inaudible noises, which I imitated with ease, the voices of ten or fifteen people all talking at once, all of which I detected. The rapidity of my vision was likewise demonstrated; and comparative experiments between my ability to divide a horse’s gallop, the flight of an insect, into increments and the same thing done with stop-motion photography only confirmed the superiority of my eye. As for my perception of ordinary things, such as the simultaneous movements of a group of men, of children playing in a playground, of machines in movement, of stones thrown into the air or of little balls cast into an alleyway that were to be counted in flight—these astounded the doctor’s family and friends.
My running in the garden, my twenty-meter leaps, my ability to seize objects instantaneously, or to catch up with them, were more admired yet, less by the doctor than by his entourage. And it was an ever-renewed pleasure for the children and wife of my host, during a walk in the country, to see me outrun a horseman going at full gallop, or follow the path of some flitting sparrow: there was no purebred to which I could not give a two-thirds lead, no matter what the distance covered, or any bird I could not easily overtake.
As for the doctor, increasingly satisfied with the results of his experiments, he defined my nature in the following manner:
“A human being gifted, in all its movements, with a speed incomparably superior not only to that of other men, but even to that of all known animals. This speed, detected as much in the most tenuous parts of its organism as in its whole, makes it a being so distinct from the rest of creation that it merits all by itself to have a special designation in the hierarchy of animals. In the case of the very curious makeup of its eye, as well as the violet color of its skin, one must consider these as simple indications of this special nature.”
Once my muscular system was examined, no peculiarity was found, except for my excessive thinness. Nor did my ear offer any unusual data, nor did my skin for that matter, aside from its hue. As for my hair, with its dark color of a bluish black nature, it was fine like a spider’s web, and the doctor studied it with minute care:
He laughingly said to me on occasion: “One would need to be able to dissect you!”
In this manner time passed pleasantly. I had learned very rapidly to do shorthand, thanks to the ardor of my desire and to the natural aptitude I had for this mode of rapid transcription, to which by the way I introduced a few new abbreviations. I began to take notes, which my stenographer translated; and beyond this, we had phonographs, which were built to specifications specially conceived by the doctor, and turned out to be perfectly adapted to reproducing my speech, in a slowed-down manner.
The confidence my host had in me, over time, became complete. During the first weeks, he could not help but suspect, quite naturally, that the unique nature of my faculties might go hand in hand with some form of madness, some mental derangement. This fear once overcome, our relations became completely cordial and, I believe, as captivating for the one as for the other. We analyzed the nature of my faculty of perception, in relation to a great number of substances considered to be opaque, and in relation to the dark coloration that water, glass, quartz took on for me at a certain thickness or depth. You remember that I see easily through wood, tree leaves, clouds, and many other substances, and that I see poorly the bottom of a pool of water half a meter deep, and that a windowpane, although transparent for me, is less so than for ordinary men, and somewhat dark in color. A large piece of glass appears blackish to me. The doctor took ample time to convince himself of all these unusual phenomena, astonished above all to see me pick out stars on cloudy nights.
It was only during this period that I began to tell him that I also perceive color differently. A number of experiments proved conclusively that the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo are as completely invisible to me, as is infrared or ultraviolet light to the normal eye. On the other hand, I was able to demonstrate* that I do perceive the color violet and, beyond violet, a whole scale of nuances, a spectrum of colors at least twice that which lies between red and violet.
This astonished the doctor more than all the rest. The study of this phenomenon was long, detailed and, what is more, conducted with infinite skill. It became, in the hands of this adept experimenter, the source of subtle discoveries in the domain of those scientific disciplines classified by humanity; it gave him the key to ancient phenomena such as magnetism, to elective affinities, to inductive powers, and guided him toward new concepts of physiology.19 To know that a given metal consists of a series of unknown shadings, variable with changes in pressure, temperature, electric charge; that the most diaphanous gasses have distinct colors, even at the most minute thickness; to make inquiries into the infinite richness of tonalities of objects that appear more or less black, when in fact they yield up a more magnificent scale of hues in the ultraviolet range than that of all the known colors; finally to understand how much variation of unknown nuances are given off by an electric circuit, the bark of a tree, the skin of a human, in a single day, a single hour, a single minute—one easily imagines all the advantages an ingenious scientist can derive from such notions.
In any case, this study plunged the doctor into the delights of scientific discovery, in comparison with which the products of pure imagination are as cold as ashes after fire. He never ceased telling me:
“It is clear to me! Your enhanced perception of light is in fact nothing but the result of your organism having developed with such speed.”
We worked patiently an entire year, without my mentioning the Moedigen—I absolutely wanted to convince my host, give him numerous proofs of my visual faculties, before I hazarded my supreme confidence. At last the moment came when I believed I could reveal everything.
It was a mild fall morning full of clouds, which for a week rolled across the dome of the sky, without the least rain falling from them. Van den Heuvel and I were walking in the garden. The doctor was silent, totally absorbed in speculations of which I was the main object. Finally, he said:
“It is nonetheless a beautiful dream to be able to see through those clouds, to penetrate to the very ether, when we, blind as we are . . .”
“If only all that I saw were the sky! . . .” I replied.
“Ah! Yes, the entire world so different . . .”
“Much more different even than what I have told you!”
“What?” he exclaimed with avid curiosity, “could you have hidden something from me?”
“The main thing!”
He stood before me, looked at me fixedly, with true anxiety, mingled with something I know not what of the mystical.
“Yes, the main thing!”
We had come back to the house, I rushed to ask for a phonograph. The instrument that was brought was up to the task, highly perfected by my friend, and capable of recording a long speech; the servant placed it on the stone table where the doctor and his family were accustomed to take their coffee on warm summer evenings. The good machine, timed to the second, was admirably suited to record discussions. Our conversation went forward then more or less as though it were a normal one:
“Yes, I hid the main thing from you, wanting first to gain your complete confidence. And even now, after all the discoveries that my organism allowed you to make, I still fear that you will believe me only with great difficulty, at first at least.”
I stopped speaking, in order to let the machine play back the sentence, I saw the doctor become pale with that pallor only great scientists experience before the discovery of some new property of matter. His hands were trembling.
“I shall believe you!” he said with a certain solemnity.
“Even if I assert that our creation, I mean our animal and vegetable kingdoms, is not the only form of life on earth . . . that there is another form, as vast, as numerous, as varied . . . invisible to your eyes?”
He suspected occultism, and could not help saying:
“The world of the fourth state20 . . . souls, ghosts of spirits.”
“No, no, nothing like that! A world of living beings, condemned as we are to a short life, to the needs of an organic body, to birth, growth, struggle . . . a world weak and ephemeral like ours, a world subjected to laws just as rigid, if not to the same laws, a world just as much prisoner of the earth, just as helpless in the face of contingencies . . . But still completely different from our world, without any influence on us, just as we have no influence on it, except through the modifications that it makes on our shared ground, the Earth, or through the parallel modifications that we force that same Earth to endure.”21
I do not know if Van den Heuvel believed me or not, but it was certain that he was struck by a strong emotion:
“In essence, are they fluid in nature?” he asked.
“That’s what I am not able to tell, because their properties are too contradictory to the idea that we have of what matter is. The earth is as resistant to them as to us, and in like manner so are the majority of minerals, although they can penetrate to some degree into a humus.22 They also remain totally impermeable, solid, in relation to one another. Yet they pass, if sometimes with a certain difficulty, through plants, animals, organic tissues; and we, we pass through them as well. If one of them could perceive us, we would perhaps appear to it as something fluid in relation to them, as they appear fluid to me in comparison to us; but they would probably not be able to come to a conclusion any more than I can, they would be confounded by parallel contradictions . . . Their form is strange in the sense that they have very little thickness. Their size varies infinitely. I have known some of them to reach a length of a hundred meters, others are tiny like our smallest insects. Some take their nourishment at the expense of the earth and atmospheric changes; others feed on weather changes and members of their own species, without however this being a cause of death as it is with us, for it suffices for the stronger one to extract energy, and such energy can be taken without exhausting the sources of life.”23
The doctor abruptly asked me:
“Have you seen these beings since you were a child?” I guessed that he suspected, deep down, some disorder that had taken place more or less recently in my organism:
“Since I was a child!” I replied forcefully. . . . “I will give you all the necessary proofs.”
“Do you see them at this moment?”
“I see them . . . there are a great many of them in the garden . . .”
“On the path, on the grass, on the walls, in the air . . . for you need to know that some are earthbound and some airborne . . . and there are also aquatic forms, but they rarely leave the surface of water.”
“Are there a lot of them everywhere?”
“Yes . . . and hardly less numerous in town than in the countryside, in dwellings than in the street. Those that like living inside, however, are smaller, no doubt because of the difficulty they have in going inside, although wooden doors are not an obstacle for them!”
“And what about iron . . . windowpanes . . . bricks . . . ?”
“These are impermeable to them.”
“Would you like to describe one of them to me . . . preferably one of the large ones?”
“I see one next to that tree. Its form is highly elongated, somewhat irregular. Toward the right, it is convex, toward the left concave, with bulges and indentations: one might therefore imagine that the projection of a gigantic, bulky larva would look this way. But its form is not characteristic of its Kingdom, because form varies greatly from one species (if one can use this word here) to another. Their infinitely small thickness is, on the other hand, a quality common to all: that thickness must not be more than barely a tenth of a millimeter, while their length reaches five feet, and their largest width forty centimeters. What is its supremely defining mark, and that of its entire Kingdom, is the lines that crisscross it, somewhat in every direction, that terminate in networks that become more delicate between two systems of lines. Each system of lines has a center, a sort of spot that bulges slightly above the mass of the body, but is sometimes, on the contrary, hollowed out. These centers have no fixed shape, sometimes they are nearly circular or elliptical, sometimes curved and spiral-like, occasionally divided by several narrowing places. These beings are surprisingly mobile, and their size varies from hour to hour. Their edges palpitate vigorously, by means of a sort of transversal undulation. As a general rule, the lines that stand out are large, although some of them are very thin as well; they diverge, they end in an infinite number of delicate traces, which gradually vanish. Some lines, however, much paler than the others, are not generated by the centers; they remain isolated in the system, and crisscross each other without changing tonality: these lines have the ability to move around in the body, and to vary their curves, while the centers and the connecting lines remain stable in their respective settings . . . As for the colors of my Moedig, I must give up trying to describe them to you: none of them are part of the perceptible spectrum for your eye, for you none of them has a name. They are extremely bright in the networks of lines, less bright in the centers, very faint in the independent lines, which, on the other hand, possess an extreme degree of polish, a metallic ultraviolet, if I can speak in this way . . . I have gathered a few observations about the way the Moedigen live, nourish themselves, and are autonomous, but I do not wish to submit these to you at the present time.”
I fell silent; the doctor played back twice my words, recorded by our impeccable translation device, then he remained silent a long while. I had never seen him in such a state: his face was rigid, petrified, his eyes glassy, cataleptic; a profuse sweat ran from his temples and drenched his hair. He tried to speak but was unable to. Trembling, he made a tour of the garden, and, when he reappeared, his eyes and mouth expressed a violent passion, fervent, religious: one would have thought he was the disciple of some new faith, rather than a peaceful hunter of phenomena.
Finally, he muttered:
“You’ve overwhelmed me! All you have just told me appears desperately lucid. Do I have the right to doubt, after all the marvelous things you have already taught me?”
“Doubt,” I ardently told him, “dare to doubt . . . your experiments will be all the more fertile for it!”
“Ah!” he replied with a voice as if in dream, “this is wonder itself, and so magnificently superior to the vain wonders of The Fable!24 . . . My poor human intelligence is so small compared to such knowledge. My enthusiasm is boundless. However, something inside me doubts . . .”
“Let us work to dispel your uncertainties: our efforts will be rewarded one-hundred-fold!”
We went to work. A few weeks were sufficient for the doctor to dissipate all his doubts. Several clever experiments, undeniable connections made between each of my assertions, two or three fortunate discoveries concerning the Moedigen’s influence on atmospheric phenomena, left no room for uncertainty. The collaboration of Van den Heuvel’s eldest son, a young man possessed of the highest scientific talents, boosted the fruitfulness of our research and even more the certainty of our findings.
Thanks to the methodical minds of my two associates, to the strength of their ability to discover and classify—faculties that increasingly I made my own—what my knowledge of the Moedigen offered as confused and unorganized data was rapidly transformed. Discoveries multiplied, rigorous experiments yielded solid results, in circumstances that, in ancient times and even still in the last century, would have occasioned at the most a few enticing divagations.
Five years have now passed in which we have pursued our research: it is far, very far, from being brought to term. It will be some time before a preliminary paper on our research can be published. We have made it a rule, besides, not to produce anything hastily: our discoveries are of such an intrinsically important nature that they must be set forth in the greatest detail, with the highest degree of patience, and most exacting precision. We have no other researcher to compete with, no patent to take out, nor any ambition to satisfy. We have reached a plane where vanity and pride vanish. How to reconcile the blessed joys of our work with the paltry lure of human fame? Besides, is not the random nature of my physical structure the source of these things? And, henceforth, what pettiness it would be to glorify ourselves because of them!25
We live passionately, always on the verge of marvelous discoveries, and yet we live in a timeless serenity.
* * *
I have had an adventure that makes my life more interesting, and that, when I am at rest, fills me with infinite joy. You know how ugly I am, and how much odder I am yet, all destined to terrify young women. I have nevertheless found a companion who adapts to my affections to the point of being happy.26
It is a poor hysterical girl, neurotic, whom we encountered one day in a poor house in Amsterdam. Others said she looked miserable, pale like plaster, with sunken cheeks and a haggard gaze. For me, the sight of her is pleasant, and her company charming. Far from startling her, as happens with all others, my appearance seemed from the outset to please and comfort her. I was moved by this, I wanted to see her again.
Soon it was apparent that my presence had a beneficial effect on her health and well-being. Under examination, it seemed that I had a magnetic influence on her: my approach, and especially when I placed my hands on her, communicated to her a sense of joy, a serenity, an equanimity of mind that were truly healing. In return, I felt gentleness next to her. Her face seemed pretty to me; her pallor and her thinness were nothing more than refinement; her eyes, capable of seeing the glow of magnets, like those of many sufferers from hyperesthesia, for me did not have that haggard look that people fault them with.27
In a word, I felt an attraction to her, which she reciprocated with passion. From that moment on, I resolved to marry her, and I achieved my goal with ease, thanks to the goodwill of my friends.
The union was a happy one. My wife recovered her health, even though she remained extremely nervous and frail; I tasted the joy of being, joy in the essential things of life, like other men. But above all, my fate has become enviable. As of six months ago: A child was born to us, and that child brings together all the characteristics of my constitution. In terms of color, sight, hearing, extreme speed of movement, way of taking nourishment, he promises to be the exact replica of my organism.
The doctor anticipates his growing up with great joy: a delightful hope has come to us—that the study of Moedigen life, of that Kingdom parallel to ours, this labor that demands so much time and patience, will not cease when I am gone.28 My son will carry it on, no doubt, in his time. Why will he not be able to find collaborators of genius, capable of taking this study to a higher power yet? Why would there not be born, from himself as well, more seers of this invisible world?
I myself, might I not expect to have other children, might I not hope that my dear wife will give birth to other sons of my flesh, similar to their father? Just thinking of it, my heart thrills, an infinite bliss passes into me, and I feel blessed among men.
*And this compound color, of course, has no green in it, for the color green, for me, is darkness.
*This is the name I spontaneously gave to these creatures during my childhood, and which I have kept, even though it does not in the least correspond to any quality or form these beings have.
* Quartz gives me a spectrum of approximately eight colors: extreme violet and seven following colors in the ultraviolet range. But there remain some eight colors that quartz is unable to distinguish from each other, and which other substances are more or less able to separate.
