In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

362 CODES COLLAPSED
as irresistible fate: '''You're so right, Maria,' I said. 'It's as if a groundswell
of life had suddenly flung us into each other, and we didn't know
what to do.' Perhaps I'd expected her to cry out despairingly, 'I don't
understand you!' Instead, she said: 'Claus, I know what you mean!' I
stood there, overwhelmed. She hung on my neck. And although the little
train rattled by, at that moment, she kissed me slowly, right on the
mouth. Then she kissed me again and again, each time more feverishly.
'This!' she murmured fiercely between the kisses, 'This! This! Do you get
it now? Is it clear to you? As clear as the sun? Or only as clear as the
moon? Is this what we should do with each other? This and nothing but
this!" (Schickele, 393) . Even the setting for this scene of erotic excitement,
a small town in southern France, is "abounding with life. And this
life showed itself quite recklessly in the streets. The house doors stood
open, and since only the narrow thresholds separated the streets from
the rooms, we saw people working, sleeping, fighting, loving" (347). But
unlike his Italian lover Maria, Claus, the narrator, cannot help associating
this ferment of Life with a glimpse of Death: "I was thinking about
the 'sick spot' in myself, about the morbid weakness which now and then
afflicted me and robbed me of all my strength to live. It made me long
for sickness and care, for a deck chair at death's edge" (348). [see
Immanence = Transcendence (Death in Life)]
The enthusiasm for Life's overwhelming strength that emerges from
the collapse of the distinction between Authenticity and Artificiality is
almost always accompanied by a certain disdain for-or sheer absence
of-thought. This relation becomes obvious in the formula that Jorge
Luis Borges uses to describe the reality of Buenos Aires: "Our life-reality
is magnificent and our thought-reality is beggarly" (Borges, 13). The
philosopher Martin Heidegger attempts to question the superiority of
man's intellectual capacities over some nonintellectual existential realities.
This may be why, in the correspondence with his friend Elisabeth
Blochmann, Heidegger frequently uses the notion of Existenzfreudigkeit
("existence-affirmation") as a toned-down version of all the more ecstatic
concepts of Life. Existenzfreudigkeit promotes acting and thinking-but
it is an inspiration that can only be gratefully received, never
produced or initiated by the human will: "These days, I imagine that
you're in the same mood that always comes over me at the beginning of
the semester. It sets free the passion that is necessary for our work. Only
new opportunities make possible the productivity through which we, as