See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

single pulpy word. As he saw it, it was as if “we were talking to each other and to ourselves in a monosyllabic language, a language of thin, flat, deceptive words, dumb guardians of a great treasure, a treasure teeming with tens and maybe hundreds of unnamed feelings, half-anonymous sensations, primeval impulses, sorrows, and delirious pleasures.” Neigel, with a groan: “Let it stay like that. It’s better like that.” And Marcus: “No, no, dear amiable Herr Neigel, that is evasion, and perhaps even—cowardice, pardon me for saying so. For we have a RESPONSIBILITY [q.v.]!” The apothecary’s actual experiments in the realm of feeling began as early as 1933. Wasserman ascertains: “On January 30 of the year 1933 of their calendar.” He began by researching sadness. According to Wasserman, Marcus’s notes from those days testify to the kind of sacrifice that was required of him. At first he believed he would be able to carry out his research at certain specified times. He still conceived of it as a curious hobby. But he quickly came to understand that the only way to do it was to live it. Wasserman: “To see this optimistic man grow more and more despondent; ai, ai, his soft, pleasant face in those days resembled a horse sinking slowly in the swamp. He saddened himself to death, if one may say such a thing, in order to explore the dark cave from the inside, to open channels clogged with disuse and give them new names.” Accordingly, Marcus began to develop his “Sentimo,” a new language of feeling, “full of goodwill, if a little primitive,” to quote Wasserman. It was an admixture of letters and numerals and secret codes, unintelligible to all but the apothecary. Wasserman: “Ai, Herr Neigel, how well I remember his difficult days on the journey to sadness, his descent into fear between 1935 and 1938, and the eleven months he spent submerged in every shade of humiliation, from November 1938 until September 1939, during which time he conducted additional experiments, much as a writer embarking upon a great novel will jot down little bastards of the pen, professional scourings, ai, this same frightening descent into the pit of helplessness, nu well, and the time he risked his life dropping into the abyss of revulsion, where he found—who would have believed it?—no less than seventeen shades of feeling between revulsion and disgust.”

The direction of the apothecary’s research began to change, it seems,around February of 1940, when OTTO BRIG [q.v.] met him for the first time in the streets of the ghetto, licking the boots of two Waffen SS men. Otto remembers that. Otto: “He smiled, I tell you, under their very noses, as happy as if he’d just stolen a peach from the priest’s garden! So I knew, of course, that he was for us!” Otto paid much money to release him from the two SS men who had humiliated him, and took him to the zoo. On the way there, Marcus explained the essence of his experiments to Otto, and the meaning of his beatific smile while being so abused became clear now as well. “There’s no time,” he told Otto. “And I want to enjoy myself in the few remaining months, and so, now—happiness.” Wasserman supposed that in those gloomy days in the ghetto Aaron Marcus had wandered the streets, and using only his psychic powers managed to “balance the scales of suffering and happiness, because unless they are balanced, we are lost.” It should be noted, however, that the apothecary was exposed to a great many dangers in the course of his experiments. Wasserman: “Like his tremulous, hasty journey into the feeling of compassion, nu well, and his almost irresponsible self-abandon there, Marcus my friend! And hope, yes, particularly in those times he wanted to explore hope … What terrible sufferings he endured! But he was not put off and made his way, step by step, through the hostile jungle of our sentimental life. Armed with the sense of introspection, a sense which became as fine as a butterfly’s antenna and as sharp as a razor, Marcus cleared the way, separated the dense undergrowth into trunks, branches, twigs, fibers, and filaments, and gave them names, like the first man in the Garden of Eden, and I swear to you, Herr Neigel, I will never understand how he kept his sanity! His face, always fine and soft, the face of a tranquil baby, aged so! At first it darkened like a cauldron, and then it brightened again, and we saw what had happened: every experiment, it seems, every psychic immersion had left its mark on him, a trace, a scar. Ai, the fate of the lonely artist who has no one to share the dangers with, you understand; all alone, he was compelled to try out each new shade of sentiment before he would consider himself entitled to enter it on his list and give it a name.” Marcus: “With great excitement I note the following: Between ‘anxiety’ and ‘terror’ I have discovered and classified by name another six shades of feeling, more or less acute, all of them definitely ‘primary.’” Marcus’s experiments did not end here: his daring brought him to the stage where he had no choice but to go furtherstill. There was no turning back, nor did he even consider turning back. Wasserman: “He understood that he must now conduct deeper experiments, ever crueler, of a kind I shudder to recall even now, Herr Neigel, with seven shades of disgust, for he now began to devote his sacred time to breeding …” Aaron Marcus began to crossbreed feelings hitherto considered alien and even inimical to each other. The man who privately called himself “an astronomer of feeling,” with modest conceit, attempted, for example, to breed anxiety with hope, or melancholy with longing; in this, it seems, he sought a way to implant every unpleasant, harmful, and destructive feeling with a seed of transcendence, of redemption. The most fascinating hybrid of