« p. 21-27: A Fog Over the Sea
Intentions
p. 28-34
I’m sitting here on deck next to a distinguished American. We talk about his continent and my continent, and occasionally he gives me a piece of advice. He is a fine, educated man. He comes from Kiel, has won a first and second prize on his yacht and has spoken with the Kaiser. (The Kaiser asked him how American society handles the rich Jews, and my neighbor has given the Kaiser an answer.)
Like I said, sometimes he gives me pieces of advice. I say to him that I want to see for myself how America deals with the poor, which interests me very much. He responds by saying that I cannot miss a trip to Newport, where all the rich people gather. I tell him that I’m not making this trip for the billionaires, I’ve seen enough of them in Europe. The man replies that I’ll never get a rounded picture of America to write down if I don’t go to see all the smart people dancing in Newport. I say that I really don’t expect to cobble together a rounded picture over the course of a few months, several cruises and a few trips through the trivial segments of America. We both say that a writer is not as good at this sort of thing as a painter like Whistler, who, in his picture, Valparaiso Harbor, records and completes the atmosphere of a continent in twelve or fifteen watercolor strokes on a silver-gray background!
To be sure, I’m not about to start chasing theories, but living things instead, and I will unite this new continent with my feelings for the world and its people. For the time being, this feeling is very strong in me and is exacting a strong and heavy toll. I don’t want to feed at the tables of the rich, and I don’t want the refuse of the gutter trailing behind me. I want, if I can, to walk sensibly through this continent with my feelings and, if I can, to carefully observe what impressions I have of the things that meet me.
Already, in the first hour on board the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great, I was offered an open chair on the starboard side, even though I knew that it was safer to sit to port. I resolved on that first night to stay up long enough to see the lights of England to the west. Even then, there would be nothing to see but a flimsy lightship in front of one of the dangerous sandbanks on the east coast of ancient England.
By morning the Frisian islands had already disappeared as we went through the canal. To the left were the Netherlands, Belgium, France; to the right the island of Great Britain. This is the way taken by the founders of the empire of the new world, after they were kicked out onto the sea. Our brave ship, our four-funneled monster, our diligent carthorse ploughed its furrow through historic waters.
If I want to look at things over there like a peasant, like an emigrant, for whom the first twenty days after his arrival on the pier in Hoboken are more important than the twenty and more centuries coming before it -- and if the merry sea breeze, which immediately tore away my hat in the first half-hour, has also torn away all sense of history from my brain -- no one person could hold me back from this trip in-between the coasts.
No one could hold me back from launching away from the empires on the port side, the land-grabbing Hollanders and the iron-fisted French fighting for the king, and no one could keep me from thinking of the people of England and that saying of Emerson: “The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions.”
For English genius I needed only think of freedom of the individual, of respect for the freedom of all individuals and of continually changing conditions: the absence of tradition, prejudice or history -- and that was as good a reason as any to travel to America and see Americans.
But there was still this idea out of an old book from my childhood, concerning those nice, pale Puritans, who were thrown out on the Mayflower into a dangerous part of the world to found something akin to a Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God isn’t all that different than a higher form of free collective living, sovereign over itself. I say to my neighbor that there are still some scattered fragments of this kingdom to be found on either side of this channel.
By now the migration of the Puritans to the democratic part of the world should have resulted in a club, some sort of aristocratic society. And the expression, “Your ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower!” should have the same sort of disheartening meaning over there as our saying here in Europe: “Your ancestors were dragged by their pants on their backs through the village!” But when it comes to aristocracy, I would much rather belong to those knights of the pure Word of God than to the illustrious highway robbers of old Europe!
Ha! I hear somebody say. To me that’s evidence of unhistorical thinking. The Puritans were terrible inquisitors and land-grabbers.
But the wonderful sea air convinces me to stand against the railing and lose myself in fantasy. The Mayflower is something very beautiful, pure, fantastical, something which inspires me to circumvent historical necessity, a living joy on the earth -- like I said, an old children’s book!
Someone slaps me on the shoulder and asks me scornfully “if I happen to know what a Puritan looks like.” I answer that I see the Puritans as they’re represented in that wonderful piece by Washington Irving, Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York! To that the man replies: “Yes, well! Many more look like a Londoner on a Sunday afternoon!” With that I turn around excitedly and say to the man’s face, “I’m glad you reminded me of it!”
Then I drifted to one of those notorious and strange Sunday afternoons, as I sat on the ship, on the unprotected starboard side from where I had seen the lights of England and ever since then had seen nothing more for four days but the water and the sky and the setting sun every evening!
I don’t plan to go hunting about with logic when it comes to something as gentlemanly as a trip across the ocean to a land with enormous states, endless prairies and lakes as large as a sea. I’d rather investigate that small tick in your heart which leaks into your brain, an electrical spark, a pleasure, the sort of wish that on earth is always torn away from its fulfillment. And I’d heard this small tick, this small explosion of the motors inside you, a year before on a quiet and deserted Sunday afternoon in London. --
This was the Sunday afternoon where I heard the jesters preaching in Hyde Park and saw the colonists standing with women and children and a policeman on Shaftesbury Avenue, and suddenly I forget all this and remember the old children’s book about the Puritans and the Mayflower: I hadn’t yet thought about America, all that is still a year away.
The people who like to hunt about with logic and pride themselves on owning property, they know nothing of the ways of the soul and even of the thicket where the birds sing and twitter. --
The small jester in Hyde Park was an even smaller jester, and even today I have to laugh about him. I don’t think that Zinzendorf or Menno Simons or Abadie or Fourier or the people of Oneida have pulled similar tricks.
He had brought a large bag with him to the park, and everyone in the park on Sunday afternoon was allowed to read, preach or talk about whatever suited him. It could be for God and against the church, for the people and against the state, nobody will forbid these words here in the free air of England. Neither the air nor England are a bit worse because of it. I was a little careful of the fool when he unpacked his bag, he brought his podium in it. There were four bricks, three of which were made of wood, the fourth was the Bible. He laid the three wooden bricks on the ground, two of them next to each other and the third lying to the right, because his right leg was shorter than his left. He was a limping jester, this jester on a Sunday afternoon. He climbed his podium, pounded his Bible and began to speak. His language was that of the less educated Londoners, a Cockney accent. I might’ve wanted him to be quiet, but he made a good appearance and his fire was pure. Only a few of the listeners laughed at him.
What he recited was a large speech he had probably rehearsed over the course of a week against the Presbyterian Church, which made God’s word into a business. It also spoke against the powerful, who must’ve falsified the Bible because the Bible was full of contradictions and the rich knew how to take advantage of that. It was also against Parliament, which was a lie, and the king as well, who was also a lie. And the speech was for Jesus, who was poor and true and whose words stream clearly through all the falsehoods in this book and so on. I was on guard to explain and report what he recited (I could do it because I made notes). He was a particularly naive jester, this small, warped speaker on a Sunday afternoon in the park. But I believe, simply because of the way he spoke about the true Jesus, that he would’ve taken up with the pilgrim fathers on the Mayflower, and today he’d be a member of the aristocratic clubs.
The other one, though, was a colonist. His young wife stood next to him, and he had his small sleeping child on his arm. The child had a small blue crocheted cap on its head. The man stood in an old, worn military coat with a pale green stain on the shoulder. On his feet he wore these terrible things resembling shoes. He stood with his family on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue in the summer rain and told a constable, whom he’d asked for information about where he could find lodgings, that he was traveling in the morning as early as he could to Liverpool, from where he would travel on the Empress of Ireland.
As I passed by the four people, I heard the name of the ship and saw the child on the arm of the young man, and I saw the wife’s sorrowful face. I’d seen that face once before in a wonderful painting by Ford Madox Brown: The Last of England, which I keep at home in a folder with other reproductions of the English pre-Raphaelite school.
At my boarding house, I inquired where the Empress was traveling, and someone told me she was traveling to Canada. And then, as I looked out in the evening at the old trees in small Bedford Square, I knew in myself that something was happening, that I would soon be traveling in the world and that even then the direction was already chosen for me.