In the deepest stupidity there is a kind of dizzying, whirlpool attraction, like death: the pull of the vacuum. You look for them everywhere, pursue them, to no avail, and your life wastes away in nostalgia.” At other times, it becomes a menacing Charybdian whirlpool that threatens to engulf the narrator: He knew that the traveller had been journeying through that increasingly abandoned landscape, between tumultuous trees and stylized ruins, terrified by tempests and wolves, for an immense period of time, and that he, and no-one else in all the world, would come abroad on such a night, so utterly alone.Īt times, this landscape of the past is tinged with eroticism: “You yearn for someone, maniacally, mortally, to the verges of hell and death. Mortality hung over the tiny figure, the traveller, who, leaning on his stick, made his way across the landscape under a brilliant moon.

This phantasmal, complex novel of ideas takes place in a “wild, precipitous landscape” in which In this case, however, the land of the dead is not the wasteland of Europe’s ruined culture but the hinterland of one’s own memory, of one’s own lost youth and the tragedies that characterized it. So Eliot, too, uses her as a mouth-the mouth (of hell) by means of which one descends, in the first part of his poetic underworld, “The Burial of the Dead,” into the ground.Īntal Szerb performs a similar journey of descent in Journey by Moonlight ( Utas és holdvilág), written in 1937, in the midst of another war. More specifically, he reproduces the Roman satirist’s story of the Cumaean Sibyl: “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις: respondebat illa: άποθανειν θέλω” (“Once I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied: “I want to die.”) Apollo had employed the Sibyl as a prophetess, as a mouth through which the truth could be spoken. Eliot cites Petronius’s picaresque novel, The Satyricon. In the epigraph to his best-known poem, The Waste Land, T.

Szerb antal journey by moonlight