The Secret Heart of the Clock, page 10
You shall become so old that you no longer notice it.
A glutton for nations, sampling every one of them.
The slanderer who follows after the eulogists, to liven up the action.
“I do not believe it would be entirely impossible for a human being to live forever, for constant decrease does not necessarily entail the concept of cessation.”
—LICHTENBERG
The most peculiar person I know at the moment is X. He is angry at me for not being Peter Kien fifty years after his death by fire.
Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.
How long could you live without admiration? Another reason for the creation of gods.
And so the first instinctive reaction was the right one. When the letters of Nietzsche’s mother were published fifty years ago, I was overcome by rage, Nietzsche’s illness opened my eyes, I saw through the “will to power,” and never since have I been tempted to make a concession to Nietzsche.
Everything was there from the beginning. If ever there was a predestined way of thinking, this was it. What a pair of siblings! Enemies and yet so similar! The roaring madman in his mother’s house and the sister who almost achieves becoming “Your Excellency.” The disgust with Christianity, which was a disgust with Naumburg, and the end in Liszt’s Weimar. The model of Bayreuth, for both, but he was shunned there. This sister’s part in his rise to eminence.
The most peculiar survivor was Nietzsche, who was not conscious of it for twelve years.
He sees himself in his student, all his parts fully assembled, but in such a way that he would like to take him apart again.
The coarsening effects of fame.
“Fortuna” has become unbearable for everyone. There is no place left for her on earth.
An urgent fantasy: that the earth has to attain a certain density of human beings, that it mustn’t explode before that.
He is on my trail. But it bothers him that I’m on the trail of his trailing me.
It is good that some of his work remains unknown, as a compensation, for his disgust with his known work is getting to be unbearable.
If he knew who will be the last person he sees, his life would proceed differently.
Nothing more revolting than amor fati: sick Nietzsche roaring in his mother’s house.
It is difficult to write about a life and refuse to acknowledge the transience of anything.
* * *
How can I be bored as long as I know words?
Every place that allows for sentences is whole. Broken places stammer.
When everything fits together, as it does with the philosophers, it no longer means anything. Disconnected, it wounds and it counts.
Now that the danger is so near, he hates lamentation.
The paralyzing effect of the general hopelessness: an illusion. Everything goes on as usual and only the gray words adapt to each other everywhere. Except for the lip service to fear, nothing appears to be unusual.
Everything he bites out of me he sends me by mail, wrapped in alpine herbs.
He strays into history books. He doesn’t care about the period and certainly not about unattainable truth. So what is he after? —other names.
It is so cold there that the names freeze.
Yesterday the whole day in terror of the danger: the plane they shot down.
This is exactly the way it could start and be all over. There is no longer a word for it, no course of events, no duration.
Have we deserved it? Does anything happen by merit? Are we ourselves the ultimate authority? Has this driven us insane? Was everything crazy from the beginning? Was there a beginning? Is the end already past?
For how long has God gone into hiding?
* * *
All the mass murders: early omens.
You knew it. You didn’t say it.
Was that your hope?
The scorn he felt for others and no longer permits himself now falls entirely upon him.
You have to turn to your own work in order to hate it anew. It slackens in the contentedness of forgetting.
A blind Bible.
To find out, with each person, whom he envies.
He is getting old and is in a hurry to find people whom he can respect, people who will no longer change inside him. Does that mean that all those whom he used to know have become monsters inside him?
You’re allowed to be solemn, but not about your origins.
Can one still invent anything without being afraid of it?
How gladly he would ply those people with questions who attack him just for that purpose!
One needs names in which one finds no fault; there’s nothing one needs more than that.
Disturbances from posterity.
There are so many he knows better than himself, yet he returns again and again to himself, whom he would like to know.
* * *
One should live as if everything would continue. Should one really? Even though not an hour passes when one does not think that in fifty years there may be no one left?
He can still say “human being,” he does not yet turn away disgusted or bored.
He cannot hear it.
The man who is driven to say something beautiful to everybody. He is not a flatterer. But does he mean it? Most people’s reaction is surprise. Many become addicted and seek him out to hear more. But those he no longer addresses. He needs new ones. New ones to whom he can give his beautiful message.
He lies in wait for ugly people. He draws people out from the twilight. It is never more than one at a time.
This respect for a mind whose person he despises! What alarms him most is that it might not matter who’s doing the thinking.
People who manage to ferret out every one of his thoughts. What on earth do they do with them?
How does one prevent followers? It isn’t good for them. But weren’t you one yourself? And how! And how! It wasn’t good for me either. It took me fifty years to get over it.
Put on the brakes better. You feel too far.
You know nothing, nothing, nothing. But does that make you a nihilist?
Everything that has happened, and it didn’t happen to you? How can you take yourself seriously?
What are you afraid of? The destruction that does not yet have a name. How simple it would be if God could help. He helps in unexpected ways. In order to continue to be able to pray to him, the faithful want to save the earth.
Fewer convictions? —What would be better, then?
You can’t even rely on the know-alls. There are some who will suddenly revile what they used to praise to the skies and insist that they’re right this time, too.
Would Lichtenberg’s notebooks have become boring if he had lived to the age of two hundred?
Too much past, suffocating.
But how marvelous the past was when it began.
If they with their prospects of hell could hold out—why not we with our prospects?
It’s not going to get better, but perhaps slower?
Out of every year, twelve drops. Steady drops? What stone?
Slipped into literary history by mistake, no longer removable.
He came home. Everything was there. The table had disintegrated. He sat down and wrote in the air.
Late aftereffects of conversations, as if it took you days to understand what you yourself said.
Words that only gradually open up.
Words that are right there, like missiles.
Words that change in the receiver by osmosis.
He fears the repercussions he causes in himself when he speaks to others. The echo of his words.
* * *
The paranoid is on his way to nowhere. Everything external becomes a part of his inner labyrinth. He cannot escape himself. He loses himself without forgetting himself.
After a while he inevitably starts boasting: everyone looks at the modest, sociable man and asks: Who is that?
Now that they can fly, the houses they build play possum.
What student of K.K.’s school could have failed to learn polemics? And yet, to the depths of my soul, I detest polemics. I don’t like to argue. I listen to the other person. I say my piece. But a fight between his conviction and mine, no, that is the last thing I want. For me, there is something obscene about fighting.
Sometimes you tell yourself that everything that could be said has been said. Then you hear a voice saying the same thing, but it is new.
Then, with a slight movement of the hand, gentleness stood up and all explosions fell silent.
Ah, the landscapes that have eluded you! And you are full of urgent, unredeemed images.
A late work consisting of letters.
The best thing about the oldest people would be that they want to bring back so many whom they have lost. Their respect for the people they have survived would have to be as great as their own sense of loss, and if it were possible to bring one of them back, they should bid him welcome with an offering of some of their own years.
(1984)
“ONE MIGHT SAY that he who is not able to empathize with the joys and pains of all living creatures is not a human being.”
—TSUREZURE GUSA
The guilt of surviving, which you have always felt.
He keeps the sinews of language and spills its blood.
It is the sublime miracle of the human mind: memory, and this word for it moves me as though it were an ancient thing itself, forgotten and then retrieved.
Broch turned Sonne into his Virgil. May I not describe him as he was and call him by his name?
* * *
Who dared to tear the animal mask from the gods of the Egyptians?
Father as wolf, my first god.
Geniuses of adaptation who have nothing to say. Geniuses? Yes, they are supremely perfect specimens in whom the most important faculty of their species is exaggerated to an exemplary degree—as a deterrent.
The animals! The animals! Where do you know them from? From everything you are not and would like to be on a trial basis.
As far back as the Egyptians, scribes have taken a presumptive stance: that of recording.
Since then, nothing has been forgotten and everything has established itself by being recorded.
He does not want to design another world, not even one that would be exciting or wonderful; this is the only one.
Will the last thing be outrage? Pain? Gratitude? Retribution?
Beautiful villages where desolations are planted.
To keep it from happening, I see it everywhere; I try to see it away.
The poses, where are the poses? Who provokes whom? Who challenges whom?
Once again someone has explained him and knows better and promises never to shut up about him.
Who was he not afraid of? But does he know who was afraid of him?
* * *
How much one loves, and how much one loves in vain, that is the essential thing.
All the ones in whom Nietzsche bore fruit: very great ones, like Musil, and all the ones he left untouched: Kafka.
It is this division that’s important to me:
Here was Nietzsche.
Here Nietzsche was not.
Spanish literature’s faithful German offshoot.
G. predicts the fate of the prize winners:
Suicide, sterility, oblivion, decline.
I ask him about the fate of those who don’t win prizes.
From Halley to Halley, the span of your life.
A country where anyone who says “I” is immediately swallowed up by the earth.
You behave as if there were nothing after the pre-Socratics and the Chinese.
It’s been a long time since the swindlers started from scratch.
The heavens resound with costly realizations.
He cannot look at a landscape without seeking refuge in it.
All the things you tore up there. Will the gods reward you for these human sacrifices?
What remains is not for you to decide. Don’t try to decide it.
Don’t believe him, he writes to be interpreted. The lucid ones have the fortunate disadvantage of not finding enough eager interpreters. But when these suddenly multiply for some reason, everything is obscured.
Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply.
Without reading it, you are in the Bible.
Don’t think that some god will have consideration for you. Mercy—certainly not, but neither does any god want to rob you of anything.
An interim in Purgatory and it’s like Paradise. Added days, hope resuscitated.
Fewer fears about realization in the present.
That is how all those people live who cannot see what is in store for them. They live better that way.
Don’t presume to despise them!
Oh, how they disgust me, those words that have been deliberately encoded!
One who buries the gods and another who never finds them.
He is not ashamed to attribute to him his own shrinking thoughts.
Be quiet, and absolve them of their guilt!
How you protested against everything that confirms karma! How mild even this horrible belief seems to you now!
You mourn for them, the dying languages, the dying animals, the dying earth.
He talks incessantly until everything falls apart.
* * *
The ashes are still there. They have not been scattered yet. He still feels their lightness. He still ascribes to them a sense of being.
Death as an insult. —But how to describe that?
What you haven’t said is getting better.
He looks so restrained: eyes like distilled water.
As to my dominant ideas, I owe nothing to Sonne; but as to my persistent and concentrated readiness for them, I owe him a great deal.
That readiness he embodied perfectly as no one did before. I could always find him. He was always willing to answer my questions. His ambition—he had overcome it, if indeed he had ever had it. Despite his great renunciation, he remained alive as an alert and penetrating mind. He is the only human being I have never hurt, not even in my thoughts.
Death, which he will not tolerate, carries him.
There they walk upright and break in half.
He demands of everyone who has erred that he come back. “Think about it! You can come back.”
What a moment, when one of them opens his eyes again!
The great words are failing you, too, now. What little ones remain?
Would you rather live in allusions?
Landscape as a gala uniform.
A man who has the gift of being forgotten by everyone.
* * *
Two kinds of pillagers: the grateful and the spiteful.
In the meantime, the gods had secretly changed their names.
A suicide by which another life could be saved—permissible suicide?
He reads about himself and notices that he was another.
The old ones who know less and less, but with dignity.
His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.
He believes only those whose language he does not know.
He likes to make friends with half-wits most of all, their immeasurability.
Imagine an eternal being who is not old. One who has survived only in appearance, not inwardly. For since he was already there before everyone else, he cannot be compared within any time span. No one goes as far back as he does, so he cannot be measured against anyone. All others, without exception, begin at different times. A desirable figure, separate from everything, not in everything, even in his separateness unknown and incomprehensible.
He mourned ahead of time, years in advance; he mourned her ever since he was born, long before he knew her; he got to know her in order to know the reason for his mourning.
The elimination of concepts becomes a necessity when one has heard them too often: expectorations of the mind. —That’s how you feel these days about fetish, Oedipus, and other abominations. That’s how others will feel about crowd, pack, and sting.
There is nothing I could detach. There’s always a human being connected to it.
“I am dying of thirst, let me drink of the waters of memory.”
—ORPHIC
Whom do I still contain who wants to be released? Whom am I not releasing?
The angry words fall from your pencil like the worms from the nose of Enkidu.
Don’t forgive him, he’s melting.
He stands before the mirror and shows himself his teeth. The only thing he’s still afraid of is himself.
Not to slow down before death: faster, faster.
Where memory borders on that of the others.
These cities, which are so rich and great that even in remembering them one has to find one’s bearings.
He drank of God from every jug.
Intolerable, a life one knows too much about.
Expeditions to the abandoned earth. Search for the guilty. The discovery.
* * *
His race is not old enough for him. Not Jordan! Not Sinai! Earlier, earlier!
Whom does he still find tolerable, other than himself? And when he finally gets to the point where he can no longer tolerate himself, how will he manage to separate from himself?
The one who’s always looking at himself, this way and that way, what’s left for him to laugh at?
There everyone lies somewhere else and there are nothing but false graves.
Not a single friend among the animals! You call this life?
To read until one no longer understands a single sentence, that alone is reading.
To die of the self-satisfaction of places.
The noise abated, and he became Nobody. The joy of it! And that he lived to experience it!
Intoxicating reprieve. How much has been gained? A winter, an endless winter?
Haven’t they become too important to you, the people of your early years? Have you forgotten who is gambling with the world today?
Is it maturity, this reaching back further and further? To save and preserve, certainly. But isn’t there more at stake, everything?
