The Etruscan

3.

The majority of men never stoop to pluck a pebble from the ground and save it as a symbol of the end of one era and the beginning of another. Thus it is forgivable if relatives place in the vessel a heap of pebbles equaling in number the years and months of the deceased. In that case the pebbles reveal his age but nothing else. He has lived the ordinary life of a human and been content.

Nations also have their eras, known as the centuries of the gods. Thus we immortals know that the twelve Etruscan peoples and cities have been allotted ten cycles in which to live and die. We refer to them as lasting one thousand years because it is easy to say, but the length of a cycle may not necessarily be even one hundred years. It may be more or even less. We know only its beginning and its end from the unmistakable sign we receive.

A man seeks the certainty that cannot be had. Thus the soothsayers compare the liver of a sacrificed animal with a clay model which is divided into compartments, each bearing the name of a particular deity. Divine knowledge is lacking, therefore they are fallible.

Similarly, there are priests who have learned many rules of divining from the flight of birds. But when they are confronted by a sign with which they are not familiar they become confused and make their predictions blindly. I will not even mention the interpreters of lightning who ascend the holy mountains before a storm and confidently interpret the thunderbolts according to color and position in the vault of heaven, which they have quartered and orientated and divided into sixteen celestial regions.

But I shall say no more, for thus it must ever be. Everything grows rigid, everything ossifies, everything ages. Nothing is sadder than obsolescent and withering knowledge, fallible human knowledge instead of divine perception. A man can learn much, but learning is not knowledge. The only fountainheads of true knowledge are inward certainty and divine perception.

There are divine objects of such potency that the sick are healed by touching them. There are objects which protect their bearers and others which harm. There are sacred places which are recognized as sacred although no altar or votive stone marks their site. There are also seers who are able to view the past by holding an object. But no matter how convincingly they speak to earn their porridge and oil, it is impossible to know how much of what they say is true, how much merely dream or fabrication. Not even they themselves know. To that I can testify, for I myself have the same gift.

Nevertheless, something is retained in objects which have been used and loved by people for a long time and which are associated with good or evil. Something beyond the object itself. But all this is vague and dreamlike and fully as illusory as it is true. In the same manner a man’s senses mislead him if they are fed only by his lust, the lust to see, to hear, to touch, to smell, to taste. No two persons ever see or taste the same thing in the same way. Nor does the same person hear or touch the same thing in the same way at different times. Something which is pleasing and desirable at this moment may in a short time be repulsive and worthless. Therefore a person who believes only in his senses lies to himself throughout his life.

But as I write this I know that I do so only because I am old and worn out, because life tastes bitter and the world offers nothing for which I yearn. In my earlier years I would not have written thus, although whatever I would have put down would have been equally true.

Why, then, should I write at all?

I write to conquer time and to know myself. But can I conquer time? That I will never know because I do not know whether writing which has been erased can survive. Thus I shall be content to write only that I may know myself.

But first of all I shall take in my hand a smooth black pebble and write how I had my first presentiment of what I really was, rather than that which I merely believed myself to be.