He will take the pains, in a letter, to answer a microscopic point, if the point is worth answering. He will begin on a post-card and end by presenting you with an album. With the superabundant energy of a colossus he will uncover a ton of debris in order to bring to light an infinitesimal speck of radium with which to illumine the question.
He does not impose his verdict; he turns his searchlight on the problem. He is a visionary of heavy substance, a seer who looks into the bowels of the earth as well as into the blue. He is equipped with the most sensitive antennae and the boring tusk of a rhinoceros to boot.
The ordinary reader is killed off—not by the back-breaking longueurs à la Proust or Henry James, nor by the learned abracadabra of a Joyce, but by the unaccustomed variety of media through which the muscular flow of thought cleaves and surges. People have accused him of being derivative, assimilative, synthetic.
The truth is that he is analgesic and amalgamatic. As the thought flows it congeals, imprisoning in the most marvelous veined clots the hemorrhages produced by the terrifying lesions which his impetuous ardor opens up.
He is a thinker who attacks with the whole body, who emerges at the end of a book bleeding from every pore. With Keyserling the spirit goes berserker. It is the rage of the giants who, weary of earthly conquests, flung themselves at the heavens. He makes a blood marriage with the spirit: Apis the Bull goring the Holy Ghost in ecstasy.
Sometimes it seems more like God lying down on the operating table with his adopted son Hermann and exchanging vital fluids: a last minute operation in preparation for the final ordeal, the quest and conquest of death.*
- Written in Corfu as a tribute to Keyserling on the occasion of his 6oth birthday this July 1940.
The end
