The Wanderings of a Sceptic ∗

Bruno Schulz

The strolls of a sceptic through the debris of culture  rubble

and dust as far as the eye can see. The wanderer has found everything
already in ruins, furrowed, down and across, by the plough of unremit-
ting human thought. The wanderer puts forth his walking stick with
caution, then he comes to a halt, leaning on it, and smiles. Despon-
dently, he digs around in the rubble with that walking stick: problems,
problems, and the remains, shards and fragments of problems. Here, a
broken o head looks askance  there, a leg scrambles out, and hobbles
over the rubbish heap on its own. Those remnants still have a weak
pulse of life in them. Brought up close, they fuse together and revive.
The wanderer likes to reconstruct them, to assemble them, although
not always with the right head on the right body. Thus monstrosities
arise. The wanderer is pleased, and breaks into quiet laughter when
those anomalies argue between themselves over their swapped heads.
He rubs his hands when he manages to stir up general confusion 
a masquerade of misunderstandings, a Tower of Babel of ideas. He
plays with enthusiasm the part of mediator, adjudicating the disputes
between those apparitions of problems  he adjudicates them most
unsuitaby, with an ill will, with the single intention of reducing all
matters to absurdity. He seems to claim their stolen limbs in the ser-
vice of some damaged idea  an ill-favoured idea: soon he will have
choked it with a surfeit of reclaimed contents.
∗
translated by John Curran Davis

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 One human generation back, another sceptic wandered over the
expanses of culture, an old man in a long dressing gown, with a grey
beard. How much more human was his face than the face of that
gnome. He too was aected a little; he carried the germs of the fever
that has touched the other one  but his scepticism was a childhood
illness, a kind of chicken pox that one does not die of. The world he
believed in was only slightly weathered, just a little corroded on its
surface, coarse with a ne deposit of unhealthy mould.
A kernel of pragmatic dogmata still remained intact. That wise
old man did not know then about the insidiousness of the natural
sciences; he harboured an ingenuous and nave belief in atoms and
matter. His cosmos had, in comparison with the cosmos of that gnome,
relatively human proportions. It was measured in accordance with the
categories of human thought. But since that good old man's time, the
world has passed through many sieves, with narrow openings, where
it has gradually lost its consistency. Freudianism and psychoanalysis,
the theory of relativivty and microphysics, quantum physics and non-
Euclidean geometry. What has been ltered through those sieves is
a world that no longer resembles the world  mucilaginous and ill-
proportioned fauna, plankton with owing and undulating outlines.
By what miracle did we come out alive? And are we now to be
forever sh in a deep sea? And so, does this debris of problems lie on
a sea bed, while our walker wends his way like a crab over the rubbish
heap of the bottom, lighting his way with the phosphorescence of his
brain? How was he able to survive the catastrophe? How did he
arrive at that carefree symbiosis with an agnostic parasite? From
where does he draw that lightness, that grim humour? How did he
throw o gravity, weight and responsibility, to become the dancer of
the bottom? Simply, perhaps  we shall reveal it in whispers  he
is dead... Perhaps he survived the catastrophe as a corpse  the
easiest form in which to survive it. That would explain everything:
his lightness, his eortless acrobatics  his breakneck, but in fact risk-

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free, juggling. Such lightness falls freely into the lap of the dead  at
no cost whatsoever.
Or could it be that he was a convalescent, returning from the bor-
derlands of death? It is so dicult on that border to distinguish be-
tween a convalescent and a corpse. They might be as alike as two peas
in a pod. For convalescents too have that same lightness, blitheness
and irresponsibility. They have, after all, returned from the other side,
where they have cast aside all of their burdens. Their limbs move reck-
lessly, in fun, for a joke, as a game, for the sake of new and innate
pleasure in the disporting of their body parts. They are still taunting,
and irting with death.
A new hunger for adventure, for the unknown and the untried,
swells his breast with a strange sigh.
And perhaps it was all for the best that everything lay in ruins,
that nothing anymore is sacred  pacts, laws and dogmata  that all
things are permissible, that all things are possible, and that anyone
may build what they like from the ruins  each according to his own
caprice, according to an as yet unseen chimera.