Threshold of Fire by Hella S. Haasse

Author:Hella S. Haasse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1993-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

2.

Like a ghost surrounded by malignant spectres in a borderland of death, I wandered through the Imperial heart of the City which had for years seemed more unreal to me each time I came here. It was still broad daylight, but the sun was in the west; the columns threw elongated shadows across the porticos. That is the hour when the new Rome — or the non-Rome; I don’t know what to call it — takes on a dangerous formlessness; the crowd consists no longer of separate individuals with recognizable faces and gestures, but becomes a buzzing stream of spilled colors moving between the buildings which seem, in the honeyed light, to be made of eggshells, about to crack. One has the feeling that with a wave of the hand, one could sweep away the image of reality like a glossy film, behind which lies chaos, darkness.

Some choose to believe that it was the Gothic occupation which irrevocably changed the character of Rome within a generation. I myself often tried to explain away my feeling of alienation by attributing it to my advancing age, and to the complete reversal of my fate ten years ago. But I know that none of this is true: the Goths are not responsible for this metamorphosis; the natural deterioration of age has nothing to do with my condition, nor do the events which so radically transformed my life. These things are the culmination of a process which began twenty years ago when I left Alexandria to come to Rome.

I could have recognized the signs if I had chosen to. The Rome that I loved, that I venerated, no longer existed, had not existed for a long time … if indeed it had ever existed at all. Perhaps it existed only in the dreams of an Egyptian with a Greek education who had, under the colonnades and in the study halls of Alexandria, formed an idealized image of the civilization of his time. It seemed to me that this lustre was reflected in people like Ammanianus Marcellinus, Praetextatus Symmachus, Rutilius Namatianus, Serena. But they too lived in a different world from that whose demeanor and style they adopted. When I think of them, I remember uncertainties, contradictions, which had not struck me at the time, or which I may well have noticed but refused to accept. In the course of those years, I had become increasingly aware of the uneasiness that clouded Stilicho’s life and aspirations, despite his resolute commitment to Rome.

He knew that what he wanted to accomplish was justified, and he knew too that he would never be able to attain those goals — not because he was deficient in any way, nor because others worked against his projects (although this was certainly the case, more even than he ever suspected), but because his strength of purpose and abilities and those of his partisans were no match for the indefinable but clearly perceptible pressure from without as well as within: a torrent of change.

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