Joachim is this month’s winner of $560.00 for his gripping philosophical mystery.
Bio: Joachim Glage’s short stories, often about imaginary and fabulous books, have appeared in The Georgia Review, LitMag, Santa Monica Review, and many other periodicals and anthologies. A collection of these stories, The Devil's Library, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press. His website is http://www.JoachimGlage.net
Without further ado, “Epilogue” by Joachim Glage.
Somewhere deep in that treasure trove of quotations that is The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton cites the following maxim:
All must toil, but none more so than the sparrow.
The meaning of this antique sentence—it is adduced by Burton in support of the stoic principle that “no soul is poor indeed but in opinion”—has long confounded readers, and not least because Burton clumsily attributes the line to Cicero. In the text that Burton cites (it is one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus), the sentence is actually ascribed—ambiguously, maddeningly—to “a famous lyrist of old Syracuse.”* No further hint of the origin of the quote is given, nor is it found anywhere else in Cicero’s writings (or in Burton’s, for that matter). My initial guess as to the identity of this “famous lyrist”—and I admit it was probably not my own idea, likely I came away with it from some old book—was that Cicero must have had the ancient poetess Sappho in mind, who after all lived in Syracuse for a time, and whose Aphrodite famously rode a chariot drawn by sparrows. (With thy car yoked, and sparrows that pulled thee… (Sappho, Fragment 1).) Of course, even if Sappho was indeed the source of the quote, the meaning of the sentence (which is not found in any of her extant verses) remains elusive. Why should it be the sparrow who toils the most?
* Here is the passage in full, which I translate from the Latin: “Pompey first treated Caesar like an apprentice, but then became afraid of him, and then refused peace but made no preparations for war, and then fled Rome, and by his own doing lost Picenum, was foiled in Apulia, and sped off to Greece without telling us any of his plans. Who has ever wrought more vigorously his own downfall or that of his allies! He might as well say, after a famous lyrist of old Syracuse,
All must toil, but none more so than the sparrow.”
Some years ago—I recall it was early in the winter—while I was conducting research on this question at the Soerling Library and Manuscript Archive in Princeton, New Jersey, I found my reflections sailing off in different directions (though to be sure without any of them ever sighting terra firma). Perhaps the meaning of that little aphorism—or so I mused to myself, taking for granted that the line indeed came from Sappho—was that romantic love must be ever widespread, and that Aphrodite’s task of distributing it to all the corners of the earth, and as it were on the backs of sparrows (which, in older Greek mythology, signify lasciviousness), is a frantic and laborious one. Or perhaps it meant something like the opposite, and that the bulk of the heavy substance of love never escapes Aphrodite’s carriage, and therefore weighs it down—a burden which her sparrows’ fraught, beating wings sadly must bear. Or perhaps the implication was that Aphrodite, being the goddess of love, must also be that devil who breaks hearts, and that this labor is by far the vastest of them all, and that her poor sparrows, who are obliged to fly her from place to place as she conducts her wicked business (but who also, we may opine, possess few of Aphrodite’s Olympic resources), must be demoralized and beaten ragged by it. (A slave, said wise Gregory of Nyssa, is wretched not because he toils but because he is yoked to sin...) Ultimately, however, these various interpretations, along with my enthusiasm for them, only ended up wilting on their stalks until, finally, I had little choice but to leave them to the mulch.
But then, near the very end of that year, during the week after Christmas, and just as I was about to give up on the topic altogether, one of the library assistants surprised me in the stacks. (I don’t recall the librarian’s name; I mean the tall, bony one with purposeful eyebrows, the woman with thin hair the color of half-burnt straw, the one who always wears conservative linen dresses and drinks a pungent pu-erh tea all day, the one with brownish teeth and chafed, exceptionally long and accusing fingers...) This assistant happened to know the subject matter of my research, as I’d been relying on her for some time. “This might be of interest,” she said to me, almost in a whisper, as she handed over a brittle-looking, loosely-bound set of folio pages. (It was the first time I’d ever seen her smile, wide and gummy and piebald; I confess it threw me.) The text she’d just put into my hands was obviously very old, and was written in Latin, without any front matter. It bore the title, Quisque operatur sed nemo assidius quam passerculus, or, All must toil, but no one more than the poor little sparrow. Upon reading that heading I felt a thrill pass through me, the kind that only library-dwellers like me, when they chance upon some possible clue to a research question, ever feel. I looked closely at the first page; the work appeared to be a treatise devoted to the subject of malum contra naturam, or “unnatural evil.” The author was designated by a single name, “Philoxenus.”
When I looked up to thank the librarian she was already gone, though the musty scent of her tea lingered in the air, and even welled up from the pages in my hands.
2.
All books harbor secrets; that is why people hoard them and keep libraries—because human beings, like house cats, are drawn to mysteries, and one never knows what a book might be hiding. It might sound like a paradox, but books are among the most secretive things in existence; even some little novella you’ve read three times already is no doubt still hiding something from you (and if you don’t believe me, then just read it a fourth time and find out for yourself). Books are secretive because reading is; indeed, even the most avid and prodigious readers attain from their pursuits what is mainly a private reward, a private glory, one that no one else even glimpses. You and I might discuss the works of Borges, or a volume of Blake’s poetry, and of course there will be universals and moods that we both instantly grasp and can share with one another; but still the broader effects those books produce, say, in my life—the way they accompany me, the way they influence my perception and embolden my imagination (The astounding manner in which I now observe a cloud, Richter has the dreamy Albano say in Titan)—I can scarcely share with you, and most often it is pointless even to try. Could I explain, to you who never met him, what it is to have known and loved my father? It would be like having to build a planet. It is much the same with the books we love or brood over, even those books we have in common. Which is to say, we have no books in common. Not really.
Even setting aside such themes (which belong to the ontology of books in general, a part of metaphysics that perhaps only Blanchot has explored with an appropriate degree of seriousness), I think I may safely say that, as the winter progressed, I did not have Philoxenus’s little book in common with anyone else. As far as I could tell at the time, no one but me had ever read it. Even after weeks of research, I had not unearthed a single mention of the text anywhere (that is, except for one purely bibliographical citation, to which I’ll return in a moment); meanwhile, the investigations I made into Philoxenus himself proved no less abortive. To begin with, there was the onerous business of distinguishing him from his various namesakes in the ancient world (Philoxenus of Cythera [435 – 380 BCE], for example, or of Eretria [4th century BCE], or of Antioch [503 – 554 CE]). Then there was the distressing fact that no agreement was to be found in the literature as to just when and where Philoxenus lived (some historians put him mainly in Galatia in the third century; others, including Wholff, insist he lived for the most part in Roman Africa more than a hundred years later, and even became de facto coadjutor to Augustine when that dear bishop’s health started to fail), or even as to whether he existed at all (“Philoxenus evidently is the name of a hoax,” contends Moller Gitch in an alliterative footnote to Modes of Expression: “Whatever works have been attributed to this fictitious figure are undoubtedly forgeries, albeit fantastic ones, and perpetrated over centuries by fraudsters writing from different nations and even from different continents”). What, then, can I tell you about Philoxenus that is sure and definite? Nothing. I’ve no choice therefore but to keep silent about him. (You will eventually see that this resolve of mine may be judicious in more than one way.) I will also not speak here of either the Ludi Diabolorum or the Significatio in Liliis, the two (Satanic) works most infamously associated with the man, as I have not been able to verify the authenticity or even the existence of those volumes (though many writers, including de Quincey and Ambrose Bierce, purport to quote them). I will instead confine my remarks to the only book that is rightly germane to my narrative, the only one ostensibly by Philoxenus that I’ve actually read, the only one that I know exists, the one that was given to me by the brown-toothed librarian at Soerling, the one with the excruciating title, All must toil, but no one more than the poor little sparrow.
3.
Before engaging with that text itself, however, permit me briefly to acknowledge the one reference to the book that I was able to locate in my research. I don’t know if it is essential to my story, but to me at least it is an important detail—for it is what first made me wonder if Philoxenus’s book might in fact be…dangerous.
Probably you are aware already of that censorious and ignoble document—but a glorious compendium too!—first produced by the Catholic Church in the wake of the Middle Ages, and then revised and expanded over the centuries, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (i.e., a list of those books that the devout must never read, ranging from Montaigne’s essays to Madame Bovary, from the works of Spinoza to anti-Spinozist screeds, from pagan panegyrics to barefaced blasphemy). It is, at the very least, a text of some historical significance, and its various incarnations are available to anyone who might wish to read them. With a little ingenuity, however, and a few well-placed (and saccharine) phone calls to the right administrative assistants in Italy (and a friend or two in high places won’t hurt either), you might become privy, as I became, to a second, more secret list kept by the Church, or the Index Librorum a Daemonibus Scriptorum (a list of supposedly “demonic” works which the Church nonetheless keeps and conserves); and if you are really persistent, and know just how to make a pleasant nuisance of yourself, and have a man on site that you can dispatch who knows just which doors at the Vatican Apostolic Library to rap upon, then you might also gain access to a third index, the most secret of the three (for, in a sense, it is but a list of embarrassments): the Index Librorum Absentium, a list of forbidden and sacrilegious books once preserved by the Church but now deemed to be forever “lost.”
I was not surprised to see that Philoxenus’s obscure little work was never included in the first list. I felt some disappointment to find it absent from the second (you’ll see why in a moment). To my great astonishment, however, I discovered that it was in fact there among the books enumerated by the third list.
This last index, containing some three-thousand entries, tells us that some books went missing from Church libraries because of furtum (theft), others because they were abiecti (discarded) or combusti (burned). A different reason is recorded for the loss of Philoxenus’s book: vermibus destructus. My guess as to the meaning of this ominous phrase (literally: destroyed by worms) is that the book must have been eaten by termites. Probably there had been a lone copy.
Could it be, I asked myself upon making this minor discovery, that the copy of Philoxenus’s book that I had been consulting was the very last one left in the world?
4.
Quisque operatur sed nemo assidius quam passerculus, or, All must toil, but no one more than the poor little sparrow, begins with the following apostrophe (I translate as best I can from Philoxenus’s unusual Latin):
Oh Sparrow, leprous from foot to crown, whose lyre was known in old Greece, in Athens and in Syracuse, and whose melodies made even the moon tremble, give us thy music once more!
Oh Sparrow, thou icy root, who pierced down to the still colder climes below the world, and who wrote there the destiny of all things, as in a mirror held to the skies, bring thy teachings once more to light, so that warmer races of clay may find paradise. Give us guidance in the craft of wickedness contrary to nature, and in other violations of the laws of gods, for it is in such realms that a great work is to be done.
It is not long after this introductory hymn that it becomes apparent to the reader: Philoxenus’s book is not so much a treatise in its own right as it is a commentary on (and a recital of) another, more ancient book, a nameless text written in Greek by someone calling himself the Sparrow.
At the heart of this mysterious, unnamed work (at least if Philoxenus’s recapitulation of it is to be trusted), there unfolds a lengthy exposition, which can only be described as exhortatory, of various “crimes contrary to nature” and “all the most unusual evils” and “all manner of ungodly devastation.” (Such metaphysical-sounding phrases belong to Philoxenus; the Sparrow’s own prose, generally speaking, and judging from Philoxenus’s copious quotations, is far plainer.) Much is made by the Sparrow, for instance, of
that special form of murder performed outside of warfare or noble revenge, without purpose beyond love of murder itself.
The very first text, perhaps, ever written about serial killers! There are also grim passages on “the amusing torment of beasts,” and on “the ravishment of women” and “the poisoning of wells,” and on “enslavement” and “that unquenchable thirst for the setting of fires,” and on many more of the most horrible things that humans do. Many of the passages that delve deep into these iniquities are difficult to stomach, and I am not so morbid as to reproduce them here.
Then, at some point in the middle of the book, the Sparrow abruptly changes his tone and adopts a more philosophical and abstract language, and propounds axioms and deductions such as the following (remember that I am translating from Philoxenus’s translation into Latin of the Sparrow’s Greek):
Laws and Definitions
1. No quantity can exist by itself.
2. No quality can exist by itself.
3. No quantity can come into being, or have any force or value, but in relation to another quantity.
4. No quality can come into being, or have any force or value, but in relation to another quality.
Corollary
From these principles alone, without any further proof, it is evident that if a man lives but never experiences pain, then he will be unable to form any conception of the excellent value hidden within the state of painlessness. Nay, more: If he knows joys and pleasures, but never pain, then painlessness by itself will seem to him a worthless thing by comparison. It is only when he descends into the opposite of bliss, into those very forces that destroy life, that the mere absence of pain, in the form of ecstatic relief, seizes back its value as something precious.
Like a refrain, Philoxenus quotes the following sentence several times during his rehearsal of the argument, which he calls “the Sparrow’s most thunderous chord:” Outrageous suffering is the labor that turns lead to gold, as well as the rope that hauls it home.
I shall not deign to describe any of the other sections of the Sparrow’s ancient book, which are appalling, even when clothed in Philoxenus’s polite Latin.
5.
In the late nineteenth century, Leon Bloy wrote:
If I never was wholly wretched then how could I feel joy, which is the daughter of wretchedness and eerily resembles her?
Two-and-a-half millenniums before this fragment was composed, someone calling himself “Sparrow”—an early epithet for that figure we call the devil, no doubt, as even the later Chrysostom knew*—had already written its mirror image:
The highest peace and joy, and that faraway delight of paradise, are brought low and put within reach of human hands only by the doing of gratuitous evil, and by the wretchedness that is engendered, which wrecks the gods’ design and bewilders nature, just as a rebellious daughter bewilders the one who bore her, and which makes mere water more soothing than wine.
Implicit in this reasoning, according to Philoxenus, if not in the historical fact, then at least sub specie aeternitatis, there lurks a quasi-biblical allegory—it is nothing short of a cosmogony—which may be summarized as follows: The devil was never condemned by God; instead the dissatisfied angel consigned himself to hell, and pushed mightily at the outer walls of that domain, so that heaven might thereby be pulled closer to the earth. (Yes, the war above was fought over geometry.) If a superb happiness is possible for human beings outside of Eden, in other words, it is only thanks to the Adversary, whose sacrifice—whose infinitely wretched state and deeds—reoriented the entire universe, and who continues to do our dirtiest work for us, so to speak, though of course we may assist him. Let us tarry with the darkest and farthest reaches of the negative! (Hegel should have said this instead.) A great and rare wrongdoing opens new worlds; Cain and Judas were pilgrims. As Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus (and frequently quoted by Philoxenus), wrote: It is by the contrary that the nature of contraries is especially to be known (De Gigantibus). Philo also rightly marveled at that “extraordinary law” from Leviticus (13:12-13), which enjoined
that a man only partly leprous shall be deemed impure, but a man wholly leprous, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, shall be deemed pure (Quod Deus Immutabilis Sit).
And if John of Damascus is to be believed, then Philo also said: It is as impossible that the love of the world can coexist with the love of God, as for light and darkness to coexist at the same time with one another.
The Sparrow—the lyrist, the leper, the devil, the contrary, the whipping boy, the princeps huius mundi (as the apostle says in the Vulgate), or whoever else he was—loved the world, and loved it more than God. For him (as for his later Roman disciple), evil, brought to its limit, was but the unfortunate lever with which to pry heaven loose, pull it down to earth, and bestow it upon the poor life that God abandoned there.
* “And just as a criminal who sails the sea bores a hole in the ship using an instrument of iron and draws all the sea into the ship, so too the devil, seeing Adam’s ship, that is, his soul, full of many good things, used his voice and his sparrow’s song as a tool of iron and after approaching it bore a hole and emptied it of all its wealth and sunk the ship itself.” Three Homilies on the Devil, Homily 1.
6.
Casuistry, all of it! That, at least, was my initial reaction to the Sparrow’s argument, as it was to Philoxenus’s (half-Christian) sublimation of it. Alas, I have since changed my mind. If I am up to the task—that is, if I may muster the strength to proceed without flinching—then the paragraphs that follow will explain why.
During this same studious period of my life, it was a habit of mine occasionally to stroll through the library stacks and to select a book at random, and then open to an arbitrary page and start reading. I thought of this exercise as a kind of cleansing of the palette of the readerly mind, a way of refreshing my thoughts so that I might better focus on whatever texts I happened to be studying. (I think anyone who spends much time with books will immediately understand the purpose and benefits of such a practice.) On one particular evening at Soerling, however, after squandering several hours trying—and failing—to secure some iota of reliable information about Philoxenus (or about the Sparrow for that matter), and after proceeding to my normal routine of picking out a random book to read, something very unusual happened. No, that’s not right; I should say it more truthfully: something impossible happened.
I had strolled to an empty part of the library and, as usual, blindly chose a book and opened to a random page. Here is the sentence that my eyes happened to fall upon; do not ask me how it is that I (who has anything but a photographic memory) am able to remember the sentence exactly, word for word, as I myself do not know, or dare not say, the answer to that question:
It was even deeper in the Manilda wetlands that I met a moonshiner who went by the name of Filoxanis, and if you ever happen to get out that far you’ll know it’s him because his fingertips are all stained yellow from turmeric—“The secret ingredient,” he is happy to divulge, “to a good apricot ’shine”—and because he keeps a sparrow as a pet.
My heart skipped a beat when I read the name, “Filoxanis.” For some moments, I stood there trying to compute the odds of this chance event, until finally a vague dread, like a chill, came over me. Which is why, I suppose, instead of reading on, I simply closed the book and, without bothering to take note of either its title or its author, restored it to its place on the shelf. I then walked—rather briskly, I am not ashamed to admit it—to the very opposite side of the library floor. As if in an attempt to shake off the uneasiness I was feeling, I selected another book at random and read from the middle:
In 1983, numerous declassified documents from intelligence agencies working in central Europe brought to light secret government initiatives regarding political émigrés—or so-called “sparrows”—and included some mysterious references to a “Polish-Hungarian-International-List-Of-Expatriots-Engaged-or-Now-Under-Surveillance,” or more commonly referred to in the documents by the acronym PHILOXENUS…
I stood there, frozen, staring at that sentence for what may have been a very long time. (I honestly don’t know how long I stood in that spot; it felt to me that time itself had changed somehow.) Once may be a miracle, I said to myself, twice is a design. I returned the book to its shelf, again without even glancing at the cover. I then repeated the experiment three more times, in three different parts of the library; first in the zoology section—
…the so-called “demon bird,” or the “Philoxenus sparrow”…
—and then in science fiction—
…when, without warning, there burst from the nebula that infamous ship—sparrow class, manned by a ragged crew, not the best but surely the bitterest, and fighting mad—called the Philoxenus…
—and then in philosophy—
…and even the old Yiddish joke about all cows being black in the night (a joke made immortal, perhaps, by Hegel) can quite possibly be traced back to that graver hell described by Philoxenus in The Meaning in the Lily, or “that cursed night in which all faces, like the indistinguishable faces of sparrows, become the same…”
This last book—it is the only one whose title I can recall: Hegel, Schelling, and the Bloody Head, by one Flynn Barrey—slipped from my hands and hit the floor with a strangely wet thud, like a grapefruit. I then lifted my eyes and saw, at the far end of the corridor, the brown-toothed librarian with the purposeful eyebrows. She stood grinning under a flickering Exit sign, all but motionless. Slowly—but also suddenly—she raised a long, accusing finger in my direction. I stumbled back, my heart racing. I had a mind to yell something out to her—I don’t know what—but my face burned and my vision dimmed and I was unable to form any words, not even in my mind which now felt like it was going blank. I spun on my heels and almost fell, but somehow managed to find my way to a staircase, and then half-strode and half-tumbled down the two flights to the ground floor. I passed by several people on the stairs; it was difficult to tell because of my impaired vision, but I could have sworn that they all had the same face as the librarian, and that all of them flashed their brown and grey teeth at me, menacingly, as I pushed past. Breathless, practically choking—for the air now seemed to be filled with smoke, and I wondered if the lobby had caught fire (though I refused even to glance back to see)—I scrambled out of the building and ran to my car.
That night I suffered from bewildering dreams, and a fever, and when I awoke it was acutely evident—tortuously so—that I had dislocated my jaw in my sleep.
7.
People who knew me in my more studious and excitable years might wonder why I no longer spend my hours in libraries. The foregoing account is probably the best answer I can give them. Though I might also put it this way: Sometimes just a whiff of the infernal infinite is all it takes to turn a man; sometimes a cracked open door is even more terrifying than one thrown all the way open. And what are books—and libraries—if not doorways?
But no, I’m flinching again, there’s more to it than that. For if what I’ve just written is true, then how can I refrain from asking myself: What doorways have I passed through already? And what was it that Swedenborg famously said? That the beginning of hell is indistinguishable from our sinful lives. So that if you had been sent to hell, you wouldn’t even know it at first. And now I feel my face growing pale, for I’m reminded, all of a sudden, of a bit of marginalia that had been scrawled in the Flynn Barrey book, right next to that sentence about Hegel and Philoxenus:
A text is not a road; it’s not like you can turn back the way you came.