Collected Prose

followed by more photographs, perhaps several dozen: Mallarmé’s son, Anatole; Anne Frank (“This is a photo that shows me as I should always like to look. Then I would surely have a chance to go to Hollywood. But now, unfortunately, I usually look different”); Mur; the children of Cambodia; the children of Atlanta. The dead children. The children who will vanish, the children who are dead. Himmler: “I have made the decision to annihilate every Jewish child from the face of the earth.” Nothing but pictures. Because, at a certain point, the words lead one to conclude that it is no longer possible to speak. Because these pictures are the unspeakable.
    *

    He has spent the greater part of his adult life walking through cities, many of them foreign. He has spent the greater part of his adult life hunched over a small rectangle of wood, concentrating on an even smaller rectangle of white paper. He has spent the greater part of his adult life standing up and sitting down and pacing back and forth. These are the limits of the known world. He listens. When he hears something, he begins to listen again. Then he waits. He watches and waits. And when he begins to see something, he watches and waits again. These are the limits of the known world.
    *

    The room. Brief mention of the room and/or the dangers lurking inside it. As in the image: Hölderlin in his room.
    To revive the memory of that mysterious, three-month journey on foot, crossing the mountains of the Massif Central alone, his fingers gripped tightly around the pistol in his pocket; that journey from Bordeaux to Stuttgart (hundreds of miles) that preceded his first mental breakdown in 1802.
    “Dear friend … I have not written to you for a long time, and meanwhile have been in France and have seen the sad, lonely earth; the shepherds and shepherdesses of southern France and individual beauties, men and women, who grew up in fear of political uncertainty and of hunger…. The mighty element, the fire of heaven and the silence of the people, their life in nature, their confinedness and their contentment, moved me continually, and as one says of heroes, I can well say of myself that Apollo has struck me.”
    Arriving in Stuttgart, “deathly pale, very thin, with hollow wild eyes, long hair and a beard, and dressed like a beggar,” he stood before his friend Matthison and spoke one word only: “Hölderlin.”
    Six months later, his beloved Suzette was dead. By 1806, schizophrenia, and thereafter, for thirty-six years, fully half his life, he lived alone in the tower built for him by Zimmer, the carpenter from Tubingen— zimmer , which in German means room .
                           TO ZIMMER
The lines of life are various as roads or as
The limits of the mountains are, and what we are
Down here, in harmonies, in recompense,
In peace for ever, a god will finish there.

    Toward the end of Hölderlin’s life, a visitor to the tower mentioned Suzette’s name. The poet replied: “Ah, my Diotima. Don’t speak to me about my Diotima. Thirteen sons she bore me. One is Pope, another is the Sultan, the third is the Emperor of Russia….” And then: “Do you know what happened to her? She went mad, she did, mad, mad, mad.”
    During those years, it is said, Hölderlin rarely went out. When he did leave his room, it was only to take aimless walks through the countryside, filling his pockets with stones and picking flowers, which he would later tear to shreds. In town, the students laughed at him, and children ran away in fear whenever he approached to greet them. Towards the end, his mind became so muddled that he began to call himself by different names—Scardinelli, Killalusimeno—and once, when a visitor was slow to leave his room, he showed him the door and said, with a finger raised in warning, “I am the Lord God.”
    In recent years, there has been renewed speculation about Hölderlin’s life in that room. One man contends that Hölderlin’s madness was feigned, and that in response to the stultifying political reaction that overwhelmed Germany following the French revolution, the poet withdrew from the world. He lived, so to speak, underground in the tower. According to this theory, all of the writings of Hölderlin’s madness (1806–1843) were in fact composed in a secret, revolutionary code. There is even a play that expands upon this idea. In the final scene of that work, the young Marx pays Hölderlin a visit in his