Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
The Discovery of Heaven
It seems to me that the book’s Wikipedia page is full of editorial comments, which is rather annoying and has no place in Wikipedia (“albeit shallow” “written with humor”, etc. – Thanks for the “review”, nerd.) – but there is some very good information there about the history of the book there – and here is Mulisch’s page – he is a fascinating guy. A legendary and controversial figure in Dutch literature, one of those great towering intellectual figures who is rather omnipresent, rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and doesn’t seem to care. He is prolific: novels, essays, op-ed columns, plays.
Now. Discovery of Heaven. To be perfectly frank, I remember almost nothing about the book but, looking back, I remember being fascinated by the intellectual sweep of the book. It’s a Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. A Raiders of the Lost Ark for the cerebral set. There are tablets hidden under the tabernacle, made of sapphire. These are the original tablets with the 10 Commandments on them. There is a rumor that they are still hidden there, and finding them will release the human race from its bondage … Mulisch seems to find the convergence of mathematics, architecture and religion to be extremely important to understanding how we see the world, and history. The famous architects, and their understanding of space, seem to have something to do with God, with a visual expression of God here on earth. And the tablets are somehow … relevant … in a world-shaking way that I cannot recall.
The book is a “novel of ideas”; every review says so! I read this book in my very little spare spare time while I was in grad school, it was the kind of thing I could just pick up and read a couple pages, and put down, and pick it back up again a week later, and not feel behind. The characters are not “the thing” here. It’s the ideas. That took some getting used to. Mulisch kills a character off early on. Someone who is, you know, a main guy. BOOM. He’s dead. It’s a plot device. And it’s obviously a plot device. That’s the whole thing. It’s a meta-moment. But it was jarring for me! I hadn’t really come to “care” about the character, Mulisch doesn’t write that way (at least here he doesn’t), because these aren’t really real people, but it still was a bit jarring to have him disappear like that. But once I stopped looking for in-depth characters and subconscious motivations, and I got into the story, the ideas, what the book was trying to say, I found it riveting. It has stuff to say about the three major religions all grouped in Jerusalem, basically huddled on the same damn rock, and how if they could speak to one another – if they would shut the fuck up for one second and listen – It has stuff to say about mathematics, and how mathematics has glimpses of God in it … I do remember the long treatises on geometry and the vanishing point, reminiscent of my Humanities classes in high school when we learned about all that stuff. These are Mulisch’s obsessions.
If you want an invigorating intellectual read – with tons of ideas thrown around, I highly recommend The Discovery of Heaven
I picked an excerpt for today based SOLELY on how many underlines and exclamation points I have added to the pages. I seriously don’t remember much of the book, in terms of why the hell the tablets come up, and how they all get to Jerusalem, and what all of that has to do with the vanishing point – but I do remember loving it. So I’m picking an excerpt that I cannot preface, or give context to – since my memory is so sparse – but I obviously found it important at the time! I re-read it just now and still found it interesting. It may be malarkey. Like I said, this very well could be Da Vinci Code for intellectuals, but whatever, I loved The Da Vinci Code, too, I recognize it is malarkey, and I loved it anyway (excerpt here). I read it in about 6 hours or something like that. Couldn’t put it down. The Discovery of Heaven isn’t as much a thriller as it is a 700-page pondering of ideas, although it does leap from country to country, in pursuit of … the secrets about those tablets, and what the architecture has to say about all of this.
In the following excerpt, someone goes to talk to someone else about something.
But read on! I have no idea what is happening (and I read the damn book) but I still find the conversation VERY interesting.
EXCERPT FROM The Discovery of Heaven
“Well, QuQu …” he said. “Times change. How old are you now?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen already …” He focused on the oak beams in the ceiling. “When I was sixteen, it was 1927. In that Lindbergh was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic – I can remember precisely. I was living in Haarlem then, close to the flea field, as we called it; I used to hang around there a lot with my friends. It was an extended grass field opposite a great white pavilion from the end of the eighteenth century, with columns and an architrave and everything that you’re crazy about.” Quinten could see that he was seeing it again, although he could only see the ceiling. “It was so grand, it didn’t fit into the bourgeois surroundings of Haarlem at all.” He looked at Quinten. “I myself was much more interested in the New Architecture, in the de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and so on. I always find your preferences rather strange for such a young boy, but shall I tell you something? You’re really modern with your Palladio and your Boullée and those people.”
“How do you mean?”
Mr. Themaat raised his hand for a moment, perhaps to brush his face, but a moment later he dropped it, trembling.
“I haven’t kept up with the literature for quite some time, but after classicism and neoclassicism, all those classical forms are coming back for the third time. By the year 2000 the world will be full of them – you mark my words, you’ll see. At the beginning I thought it was just a whim of fashion but it goes much deeper. You’ll be proved right, and I’m not sure if I’m pleased about that. In the visual arts and literature and music, it might be the end of modernism, and in politics as well. Gropius, Picasso, Joyce, Schönberg, Lenin – they determined my life. It looks as though soon it will all be in the past.”
“Freud and Einstein, too?” asked Quinten. At home he had always heard those names in that kind of list.
“It wouldn’t surprise me. The last few years I’ve felt like a champion of the Gothic must have felt at the rise of classicism. All those magnificent cathedrals had suddenly become old-fashioned. Are you still interested in that kind of thing?”
Quinten had the feeling that Themaat was not quite sure who he was talking to. It was though he were regarding Quinten as a retired professor like he himself was.
“I’ve never been interested in that way.”
“In what way, then?”
Quinten thought for a moment. Should he tell him about the Citadel of his dreams? But how could you really tell someone about a dream? When you told someone about a dream, it always sounded stupid, but while you were dreaming it, it wasn’t stupid at all – so when you tell a dream precisely, you are still not telling the person what you dreamed. Telling someone about a dream was impossible.
“Well, I was just interested,” he said. “I don’t know. I think you’ve told me everything that I wanted to know.”
Themaat looked at him for a while, then turned his legs laboriously off the sofa and sat up, with his back bent, two flat white hands next to his thighs.
He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Shall I tell you one thing that you may not know yet?”
“Yes, please.”
“Perhaps you’ll think it’s nonsense, just the chatter of a sick old man, but I want to tell you anyway. Look, how is it that that ideal Greco-Roman architecture and that of the Renaissance could turn into the inhuman gigantism of someone like Boullée? And how couldd it later, with Speer, even degenerate into the expression of genocide?”
“You once said that it had something to do with Egypt. With the pyramids. With death.”
“That’s right, but how could it have had anything to do with that?”
“Do you know, then?”
“I think I know, QuQu. And you must know too. It comes from the loss of music.”
Quinten looked at him in astonishment. Music? What did music suddenly have to do with architecture? It seemed to him as though a vague smile crossed the mask of Mr. Themaat’s face.
The humanist architects, like Palladio, he said, were guided in their designs not only by Vitruvius’s discovery of the squared circle, which determined the proportions of the divine human body, but also by a discovery of Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ: that the relationship between the harmonic intervals was the same as that between prime numbers. If you plucked a string and then wanted to hear the octave of that note, then you simply had to halve its length – the harmony of a note and its octave was therefore determined by the simplest ratio, 1:2. With fifths, it was 2:3 and with fourths, 3:4. The fact that the fantastic notion 1:2:3:4, which was as simple as it was inexpressible, was the basis of musical harmony, and that the whole of musical theory could be derived from it, gave Plato such a shock 150 years later that in his Dialogue “Timaeus” he had a demiurge create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul.
Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions – namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concern. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. In Palladio that developed into an extremely sophisticated system. And subsequently that Greek divine world harmony also became connected with the Old Testament Jahweh, who had ordered Moses to build the tabernacle according to carefully prescribed measurements – but he could no longer remember the details. He’d forgotten.
“The tabernacle?” asked Quinten.
“That was a tent in which the Jews displayed their relics on their journey through the desert.”
“Did it have to be square or round?”
“Yes, you’ve put your finger on it. That was precisely the obstacle to reconciling Plato and the Bible. There were also squares involved, if I remember correctly, but nothing round. The whole tent must be oblong.”
“Oblong? Greek and Egyptian temples were oblong too, weren’t they – like beds?” Quinten’s eyes widened for a moment, but he wasn’t given the opportunity to pursue his thoughts, because Themaat came to a conclusion.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he said, at the birth of the new age, when modern science originated, it had all been lost. The view that musical theory should be the metaphysical foundation of the world, of body and soul and architecture, was rejected as obscurantist nonsense – and that led directly to Boullée and Speer. The harmonic relationships of course did not automatically change when the elements were enlarged a hundredfold; but the dimensions of the human body, as the measure of all things, remained unchanged – that is: it became proportionately a hundred times smaller, thus ultimately disturbing all harmony and eliminating the human soul in an Egyptian way.
Slowly, as though he were lifting something heavy, Mr. Themaat raised an index finger. “And what you see at the moment, QuQu, is the unexpected return of all those classical motifs, all those stylobates and shafts and capitals and friezes and architraves – fortunately on a human scale again, but also in a totally crazy way. It’s just as though somewhere high in space the classical ideal exploded and the fragments and splinters are now falling back to earth, all confused, distorted, broken and out of their equilibrium. Here,” he said, and took hold of a large, thick book, which he had obviously laid out ready. “Catalog of the Biennale in Venice. Four years ago there was an architecture exhibition there, which made me first see what was brewing. ‘The Presence of the Past’ was the theme. Look,” he said, and opened the book where he had laid a bookmark. “The Acropolis in a distorting mirror.” With half-closed lids, he handed the book to Quinten.
Was it a view of the Citadel? Quinten’s eyes began to shine. How splendid! They were photos of a fantastic street, indoors, consisting of a covered hallway: huge pieces of scenery consisting of gables, designed by different architects, all the gables differing totally from each other and yet belonging together, while each gable also consisted of elements that didn’t belong together and yet formed a whole. While Themaat said that Vetruvius would have a heart attack if he saw that and that Palladio would kill himself laughing, Quinten looked at a paradoxical portico with four standing columns very close together: the first was a bare tree trunk,t he second stood on a model of a house, the third was only half built – the upper half, which floated in the air and still pretended to support the architrave – the fourth was a hedge cut in a form of the column; the architrave was indicated by a curved strip of blue neon. Everything had a fairy-tale paradoxical quality, the disharmony as harmony. Mr. Themaat might meanwhile maintain that it was classical language, but with all the words wrongly spelled and the syntax turned into an Augean stable, such as toddlers wrote, it gave him an overwhelming feeling of happiness.
“I thought you’d like it, QuQu,” said Mr. Themaat, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. “For me it’s an end, a kind of fireworks to conclude the great banquet, which once began in Greece. But then you had the balanced world view of Ptolemy, with the earth resting in the center of the universe; according to humanism you got that from Copernicus, with the sun resting in the middle; afterward you got the infinite universe of Giordano Bruno, which no longer had any center at all. All those universes were eternal and unchanging, but recently we have been living in the explosive, violent universe of your foster father, which suddenly has a beginning. Then you get a postmodern sort of spectacle; then everything bursts into pieces and fragments. Everything’s exploding at the moment, up to and including the world population, and that’s all because of the crazy development of technology. Suddenly a whole new age has dawned, which fortunately I won’t have to experience.”
Quinten looked out of the window thoughtfully. “But a beginning is also some kind of fixed point, isn’t it? What is more fixed than a beginning? You really ought to see that as progress after the previous universe, which had no center anymore.”
“Yes,” said Themaat. “You could look at it like that.”
“Anyway, I suddenly remember what Max once said: that human beings are smaller than the universe in approximately the same proportion as the smallest particle is smaller than the human being.”
For a few seconds Mr. Themaat fixed his great staring eyes on him. “So it is true after all? So is man in the middle after all? They should have known that.”
“Who?”
“Well, Plato, Protagoras, Vitruvius, Palladio – all those fellows.”
Groaning a little, he lay down again, and there was a moment’s silence. “For the last few weeks I’ve found myself thinking of music all the time, QuQu. The Platonic harmony of the spheres has disappeared from the world since Newton, and harmony disappeared from music itself with Schönberg, in Einstein’s time. But just like those wretched columns in the catalog, tonality is making a comeback at the moment – except that in the meantime music has become a bane instead of a boon. Here it’s still relatively quiet – here it’s just dogs barking – but in the city there’s no escaping it anymore. There’s music everywhere, even in the elevators and the bathrooms. Music comes out of cars, and on the scaffolding every building worker has his portable radio on as loud as it will go. Everywhere is like it only used to be at the fair. But all that harmonic music now together forms cacophony, compared with which Schönberg’s relativist twelve-tone system was nothing. And that ubiquitous cacophony is what the new-fangled cacophonous architecture expresses. That bomb that you once talked about, Quinten, has exploded. That’s what I wanted to tell you, but perhaps you should forget it again at once. Anyway, I’ve gotten tired. I think I’m going to close my eyes for a minute.”
