The Golden Age Read Online Free PDF Page B

was just a sickness that afflicted logic in the tropics; but the Europeans felt an ever-growing anxiety that something worse was going on, that in this accursed place they had got themselves into a trap from which there was no escape, that logic had taken off its mask and with a grimace of irony exposed the true nature it had hitherto kept hidden.

The secret war

    Now the Europeans were coming to regret the vaingloriousness with which they had paraded their machines to the natives. The islanders turned the handles of the apparatus and machines brought to the island by the foreigners and all the components moved as predetermined, but everything was different. A machine performed the activity for which it had been built, lifting or beating, ejecting or grinding or turning, but suddenly these functions were no more important than all the other movements of the machine that made them possible, while these movements were no more important than the many small, pointless movements with which they were accompanied—the shaking and rattling and grinding of parts, the various vibrations for which there were no names. (Here the Europeans suddenly felt their language to be inadequate.)
    Suddenly it was no longer possible to distinguish the purposeful movements from these others, and the unified process towards whose achievement all movements of the machine were joined was not the most important, nor even was it different in kind from the movements and processes going on around but apart from the apparatus, such as branches swaying in the wind or the rustling made by the sand as it recast its shape. All these movements became parts of some kind of cosmic ballet in which every part had an equal share, in which every part was equally important, equally nonsensical and had the same disturbing, bewitching gift for histrionics.
    All this gave the Europeans bad migraines, which drove them into the gloom of their rooms and interior courtyards. They were alarmed to realize that they were beginning to look at the world through the eyes of the islanders. They were made nauseous by the world revealing itself to them, a world in which all sounds made a dreamlike music and all movements a monotonous, incomprehensible, melancholy ballet. On the island a great many things occurred which frightened them, but perhaps most frightening of all was the fact that in the depths of their consciousness they understood this singular world and actually liked it. They had grasped the extreme certainties of mathematics and faith but in so doing they had accelerated the catastrophe: to this presumed stronghold they had attracted demons who fell on the new prey with gusto and devoured its world. With the fall of mathematics and faith, the rest of the world, too, would go soundlessly into decline.
    The Europeans continued to hold to mathematics, even after they began to perceive mathematical equations and calculations as bizarre dramas, as evidence of the work of the same blind forces as those that cultivated logical deduction and flowed through machines, forces which drove an unceasing, monotonous division and unification. The Europeans were made nauseous by multiplication because now they perceived it as a diseased swelling, a proliferation anterior to any kind of sense and order, a growth which had arisen by the dull repetition of the same numbers and their resigned coalescence in the whole; they dreaded division because in it they saw disintegration, made more horrifying still by the unnatural disintegration of wholes into parts of equal size. Addition was yet worse, as it meant a progressive decline in new units, heralding the destruction of all divided shapes and the enthronement of One that is nothing, the victory of the monster of the Whole. Subtraction was the saddest of all: they saw in it the falling off of sick pieces, a kind of arithmetical leprosy, a crumbling that turned shapes into dust, that led down another path to nothingness. They performed