perhaps it would be simplest of all if I said that in a moment of playfulness, not mathematical
playfulness, necessarily—mathematics, I warn you, is but a perpetual game of leapfrog over its own
shoulders as it keeps breeding—I kept combining various ideas, and finally found the right combination
and exploded, like Berthold Schwartz. Somehow I sur vived; perhaps another in my place might have
survived, too. However, after the incident with my charming doctor I do not have the least de sire to be
bothered by the police again.»
«You’re warming up, Falter. But let’s get back to the point: what exactly makes you certain that
it is the truth? That monkey is not really a party to the cast lots.»
«Truths, and shadows of truths,» said Falter, «in the sense of spe cies, of course, not specimens,
are so rare in the world, and available ones are either so trivial or tainted, that—how shall I put it?—that
the recoil upon perceiving Truth, the instant reaction of one’s whole be ing, remains an unfamiliar, little-
studied phenomenon. Oh, well, some times in children—when a boy wakes up or regains his senses
after a bout with scarlet fever and there is an electric discharge of reality, rel ative reality, no doubt, for
you, humans, possess no other. Take any truism, that is, the corpse of a relative truth. Now analyze the
physical sensation evoked in you by the words ‘black is darker than brown,’ or «ice is cold.’ Your thought
is too lazy even to make a polite pretense of raising its rump from its bench, as if the same teacher were
to enter your classroom a hundred times in the course of one lesson in old Rus-sia. But, in my childhood,
one day of great frost, I licked the shiny lock of a wicket. Let us dismiss the physical pain, or the pride of
discovery, if it is a pleasant one—all that is not the real reaction to truth. You see, its impact is so little
known that one cannot even find an exact word for it. All your nerves simultaneously answer ‘yes!’—
something like that. Let us also set aside a kind of astonishment, which is merely the unaccustomed
assimilation of the thingness of truth, not of Truth itself. If you tell me that So-and-so is a thief, then I
combine at once in my mind a number of suddenly illuminated trifles that I had myself ob-served, yet I
have time to marvel that a man who had seemed so upright turned out to be a crook, but unconsciously
I have already absorbed the truth, so that my astonishment itself promptly assumes an inverted form
(how could one have ever thought honest such an obvious crook?); in other words, the sensitive point of
truth lies exactly halflway between the first surprise and the second.»
«Right. This is all fairly clear.»
«On the other hand, surprise carried to stunning, unimaginable dimensions,» Falter went on,
«can have extremely painful effects, and it is still nothing compared to the shock of Truth itself. And that
can no longer be ‘absorbed.’ It was by chance that it did not kill me, just as it was by chance that it struck
me. I doubt one could think of checking a sensation of such intensity. A check can, however, be made ex
post facto, though I personally have no need for the complexities of the ver-ification. Take any
commonplace truth—for instance, that two angles equal to a third are equal to each other; does the
postulate also include anything about ice being hot or rocks occurring in Canada? In other words, a given
truthlet, to coin a diminutive, does not contain any other related truthlets and, even less, such ones that
belong to differ-ent kinds or levels of knowledge or thought. What, then, would you say about a Truth
with a capital Tthat comprises in itself the explanation and the proof of all possible mental affirmations?
One can believe in the poetry of a wildflower or the power of money, but neither belief predetermines
faith in homeopathy or in the necessity to exterminate antelope on the islands of Lake Victoria Nyanza;
but in any case, hav-ing learned what I have—if this can be called learning—I received a key to
absolutely all the doors and treasure chests in the world; only I have no need to use it, since every
thought about its practical significance automatically, by its very nature, grades into the whole series of
hinged lids. I may doubt my physical ability to imagine to the very end all the consequences of my
discovery, and namely, to what degree I have not yet gone insane, or, inversely, how far behind I have
left all that is meant by insanity; but I certainly cannot doubt that, as you put it, ‘essence has been
revealed to me.’ Some water, please.»
«Here you are. But let me see, Falter—did I understand you cor rectly? Are you really henceforth
a candidate for omniscience? Excuse me, but I don’t have that impression. I can allow that you know
some thing fundamental, but your words contain no concrete indications of absolute wisdom.»
«Saving my strength,» said Falter. «Anyway, I never affirmed that I know everything now—
Arabic, for example, or how many times in your life you have shaved, or who set the type for the
newspaper which that fool over there is reading. I only say that I know everything I might want to know.
Anyone could say that—couldn’t he?—after hav ing leafed through an encyclopedia; only, the
encyclopedia whose exact title I have learned (there, by the way—I am giving you a more elegant
definition: I know the title of things) is literally all-inclusive, and therein lies the difference between me
and the most versatile scholar on earth. You see, I have learned—and here I am leading you to the very
edge of the Riviera precipice, ladies don’t look—I have learned one very simple thing about the world. It
is by itself so obvious, so amusingly obvious, that only my wretched humanity can consider it monstrous.
When in a moment I say ‘congruent’ I shall mean some thing infinitely removed from all the
congruencies known to you, just as the nature itself of my discovery has nothing in common with the
nature of any physical or philosophical conjectures. Now the main thing in me that is congruent with the
main thing in the universe could not be affected by the bodily spasm that has thus shattered me. At the
same time the possible knowledge of all things, consequent to the knowledge of the fundamental one,
did not dispose in me of suf ficiently solid apparatus. I am training myself by willpower not to leave the
vivarium, to observe the rules of your mentality as if nothing had happened; in other words, I act like a
beggar, a versifier, who has re ceived a million in foreign currency, but goes on living in his base ment,
for he knows that the least concession to luxury would ruin his liver.»
«But the treasure is in your possession, Falter—that’s what hurts. Let us drop the discussion of
your attitude toward it, and talk about the thing itself. I repeat—I have taken note of your refusal to let
me peek at your Medusa, and am further willing to refrain from the most evident inferences, since, as
you hint, any logical conclusion is a confinement of thought in itself. I propose to you a different method
for our questions and answers: I shall not ask you about the contents of vour treasure; but, after all, you
will not give away its secret by telling me if, say, it lies in the East, or if there is even one topaz in it, or if
even one man has ever passed in its proximity. At the same time, if you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to\a
question, I not only promise to avoid choosing that particular line for a further series of related
questions, but pledge to end the conversation altogether.»
«Theoretically, you are luring me into a clumsy trap,» said Falter, shaking slightly, as another
might do when laughing. «Actually, it would be a trap only if you were capable of asking me at least one
such question. There is very little chance of that. Therefore, if you enjoy pointless amusement, fire
away.»
I thought a moment and said, «Falter, allow me to begin like the traditional tourist—with an
inspection of an ancient church, familiar to him from pictures. Let me ask you: does God exist?» «Cold,»
said Falter.
I did not understand and repeated the question. «Forget it,» snapped Falter. «I said ‘cold,’ as
they say in the game, when one must find a hidden object. If you are looking under a chak or under the
shadow of a chair, and the object cannot be in that place, because it happens to be somewhere else,
then the question of there existing a chair or its shadow has nothing whatever to do with the game. To
say that perhaps the chair exists but the object is not there is the same as saying that perhaps the object
is there but the chair does not exist, which means that you end up again in the circle so dear to human
thought.»
«You must agree, though, Falter, that if as you say the thing sought is not anywhere near to the
concept of God, and if that thing is, ac-cording to your terminology, a kind of universal ‘title,’ then the
con-cept of God does not appear on the title page; hence, there exists no true necessity for such a
concept, and since there is no need for God, no God exists.»
«‘Then you did not understand what I said about the relationship between a possible place and
the impossibility of finding the object in it. All right, I shall put it more clearly. By the very act of your
mentioning a given concept you placed your own self in the position of an enigma, as if the seeker
himself were to hide. And by persisting in your question, you not only hide, but also believe
