The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar

For nearly half a century Zeno had used his mind, wedge-like, to enlarge, as best he could, the breaks in the wall which on all sides confine us. The cracks were widening, or rather, it seemed that the wall was slowly losing its solidity, though it still remained opaque, as if it were a wall of smoke and not of stone. Objects no longer played their part merely as useful accessories; like a mattress from which the hair stuffing protrudes, they were beginning to reveal their substance. A forest was filling the room: the stool, its height measured by the distance that separates a seated man's rump from the ground, this table which serves for eating or writing, the door connecting one cube of air, surrounded by partitions, with another, neighboring cube of air, are were losing those reasons for existing which an artisan had given them, to be again only trunks or branches stripped of their bark, like the Saint Bartholomews, stripped of their skin, in church paintings, here and there the carpenter's plane had left lumps where the sap had bled. The corpses of trees were laden with ghostly leaves and invisible birds, and still creaked from tempests long since gone by. This blanket and those old clothes hanging on a nail smelled of animal fat, of milk, of blood. These shoes gaping open beside the bed had once moved in rhythm with the breathing of an ox at rest on the grass; and a pig, bled to death, was still squealing in that lard with which the cobbler had greased them.

Zeno, a young man from a wealthy family in 16th century Belgium, leaves home to pursue a life of the mind. Stories of his exploits trickle back to his hometown of Bruges: he has become a renowned physician, treating those dying of plague, and his writings about philosophy and alchemy have been condemned by the church and burned. Later in his life, an aged Zeno decides to return to Bruges under the assumed name of Dr. Sebastian Theus, settling down to contemplate at last the nature of things. But Zeno/Dr. Theus is threatened by the raging fires of the Reformation; as splinter religions proliferate, the Church is all the more eager to punish those it suspects of heresy, atheism, and sexual deviancy.

What The Abyss captures, I think, is a sense of what we call The Enlightenment: the collapse of old structures and the rise of new ways of thinking, epitomized in Great Thinkers like Zeno, who is cobbled together from real-life figures like Paracelsus and Erasmus. This period produced some of the greatest advances in knowledge in all of human history, but it also produced a lot of battiness and violence: Zeno's estranged mother, for instance, gets caught up in the millenarian cult of the Anabaptists in Munster, led by the Christ-figure John of Leiden, and is killed when the cult is violently crushed. For his part, Zeno is one of those figures whose specific title or field--physician--belies an interest in the totality of the natural world, and a viewpoint that sees all fields as intrinsically connected.

The French title of The Abyss, L'Oeuvre au Noir, means "The Black Work" or "The Black Phase," referring to the phase of alchemical transition in which the substance of things is unmade so that it can be remade. (If you ask me, they should have stuck with The Black Phase as a title in English, too.) In a way, the black phase is what Europe itself is going through, and Zeno himself goes through a black phase when he returns to Bruges, captured in the section I quoted above: the nature of things begins to dissolve and return to its origins, and so the structures of Zeno's mind themselves begin to dissolve. In contrast to the wanderings of Zeno's life, it seems that the black phase is something you have to do on your own, alone in a room, and points toward the importance of Zeno's work as a physician, searching for truth not in the cosmos but deep within the human body itself.

I thought this "black phase" was the most compelling part of a book which, though really tremendously written, often felt elusive to me. I loved Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, a book which, according to her postscript, is similar in conception and in history--both books were put away for decades before being complete, and both of course are scrupulously researched accounts of history. It may be that I just don't have as clear a mental picture of the Holy Roman Empire as I do the Roman Empire of Hadrian's time; I often found myself meekly retreating to Wikipedia to remind myself who is who and what is going on. But the strangeness and richness of The Abyss is part of its appeal, and its depiction of a world that is different from our own simply because such great philosophical upheavals no longer seem possible.