Notes from Hampstead, page 10
The curse of being a public person—the opinions and positions people expect of you! As if you had anything to say that had not already been said a thousand times better!
Not all our insights come to us naturally. Occasionally we unexpectedly come across one anew and are amazed to see we have already noted it in our work.
There are stationary insights, ones that we float past, as if they had been placed on the shore and we merely see them as we flow by them like a stream.
“Whoever feeds tigers should be careful not to give them living creatures, on account of their ferocity, which is aroused through killing. Care should be taken not to give them whole creatures, on account of the ferocity aroused by tearing them apart. Their hunger must be stilled in time to head off their ferocity.”
Chuang-tze
Late fame is impotent, because it reveals itself to be accidental.
To enjoy fame requires innocence and stupidity. One has neither when fame arrives late.
A creature that, through its intake of food, expands to infinite size.
The speck of dirt that catches the light like a coin.
He has withdrawn from everything new and now lives off his own saliva.
The satisfaction of one who plays chess with his own assertions.
Collect all the things in your life you’ve avoided.
The most peaceful place on earth is among strangers. Alone, one has the most vivid conception of others, and thus one is least alone.
Now Africa has become—for how long?—the primal home of man. Patiently we await archaeological discoveries on the moon.
For a photograph of the entire world, of every type of people on earth, I would need another hundred years. So I’ll have to content myself with the first straw fire of curiosity.
It’s the formulas of other languages that we cannot master, at least not sufficiently for them to yield the wisdom submerged within them.
He selects for himself new languages to be silent in.
Malraux’s conversations with “great” men like Corneille. His consciousness of “history.” He believes in “the great”; he approves of them, wants them, seeks them, ingratiates himself with them: a journalist with a higher agenda.
The woman who offered her solicitude to the bushmen, bringing along her mother and brother so as not to frighten them, who took them into her family and as a result was taken into theirs: I record her name here and hope never to forget it:
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas of Boston.
After more than twenty-five years I am still an apprentice of the bushmen. More than I can learn from them I don’t want to know. But I have not come very far in my knowledge of them, for atom bombs and moon voyagers disturb me and constantly interrupt my study.
Wonderful to arise half asleep, to sit at my desk half asleep, to write half asleep.
A country where you never see people eating. The secrecy of eating.
What in our land is just the secrecy of elimination, is there the secrecy of the entire process from beginning to end.
Everyone there has just the amount of space that fits under an umbrella. No one goes out without one, and everyone puts his up. No one comes too close to anyone else. A distance is preserved. There is freedom everywhere. When acquaintances meet, the umbrellas are made to bow. How dignified are these greetings from umbrella to umbrella.
Accusations increase one’s illustriousness.
“A friend of mine”: one of the greediest English expressions when spoken.
It sounds as if this friend were being denied to the person being addressed. The friend remains indefinite, unnamed; he is private property, protected. The only noticeable thing about him is that he is “mine.” It is announced that he exists, but he is concealed, as if he were being kept behind one’s back and one were about to use him for an ambush.
A man who remembers only words in new languages, and in the process, the old ones gradually crumble away. He is alive so long as sounds have new meanings for him. He has the optimism of new definitions and unheard-of accents. He has escaped the tyranny of the beaten path. So the way I spoke before was all wrong, he tells himself. At last I am really learning to speak.
1970
Nothing should be counted as cognition that has not caused us great torment. All other insights have a mathematical or technical character, and their consequences overtake us because we have not suffered in winning them.
The urge to say something a hundred times; the wish to keep it secret.
It is said that in a remote mountain valley of New Guinea men have been discovered who walk on all fours.
Their horror of those who walk erect—they regard them as a kind of bird and hunt them like birds of paradise.
How it pleases one phony when I tell him about another!
He would like to write his last works as if he had never heard a thing about modern literature. He would like to be as old-fashioned a writer for his day as Stendhal was for his.
Memoirs! Memoirs! Maybe one should read memoirs only? The memoirs of Herzen, which I am now reading, fascinate me such that my every thought, day and night, returns to them. I read them almost the way I read Dostoyevsky at twenty, three hundred pages at a sitting. All other reading soon loses its hold on me; I break off, leave it for days, but in this case it is hard for me to be interested in other things for even an hour. Now, it is true that I began with volume 3 of my edition, with Herzen’s stay in London. So it is all familiar: the Germans, the English, the French, the Italians, and, from literature, even the Russians. My chief experience, emigration, is prefigured here: the emigration that lasts a lifetime.
This is intentional emigration, and for twenty years I, too, had the nucleus of my being here, an aim and a goal I could never let go of; in this I was as dogged and unwavering as Herzen. I was no less impressed than he by the institutions of the English, and the emigré world surrounding me during the war was even more colorful than his.
I feel a kinship with Herzen in many ways. His pessimism: he sees through people, and it is not only because they want so much from him that he sees them as they are. He finds them amusing—there is much of Gogol in him—and while most of his efforts fail, while he knows that for the most part they cannot succeed, he never gives up hope: in the end he is devoted to mankind. This is all the more remarkable in that he had to deal with the most horrible variety of all, political man.
A poet he is not, but he is still a close relative of those Russian poets without whom the world would be inconceivable. Herzen writes in defense of his money, which of course he needs for legitimate purposes. Nonetheless it is not easy to view this defense from the same perspective. I tell myself that I defend my autonomy, my loneliness, my need for solitude. In this I am just as stubborn as he in the defense of his wealth.
By drawing such dubious parallels as these, I try to overlook certain aspects of him that should not weigh too heavily in the balance, measured against his richness as a person.
He makes an unusual variety of personal observations—he is not fanatic. He sees people as complex and various and does not begrudge them their inconsistencies, despite strong moralistic convictions that sometimes border on bourgeois prejudices.
His repeated references to the London fog seem a bit banal, but he lived in the south a long time and it is a very black fog.
His various moves about London: he changed dwellings here frequently. Overrun as he was with company, perhaps he wanted now and again to surround himself with greater space.
I find it agreeable that human autonomy meant much to him, even when expressed in the restricted forms of English Victorianism. He makes one more sensitive to any form of slavery.
To me he seems a dyed-in-the-wool human being, and by that I mean someone who never forgets anyone, no matter who he is or what he meant to him. The fact that he cannot forgive the lazy or the degenerate is understandable in view of the circumstances in Russia that he was trying to change. The cosmopolitan life he led provided him with enough of the picturesque—unlike less sophisticated people he did not have to seek it in decadence. He was no believer in religion, so his rejection of power was not absolute; since he had political goals, there also had to be acceptable ways of exerting power. One cannot expect him to die for a cause.
His warmth and generosity seem too good to be true, and even in his fundamental attitudes the traces of his origins are always clear.
What I have said about him to this point is provisional and incomplete because I still know nothing at all of his early period in Russia.
Herzen’s love for Leopardi. His quarrel with Mazzini, who couldn’t stand Leopardi.
While living among emigrés Herzen got to know the national characteristics of all kinds of Europeans, who these days are even more so than then: his mankind of the future.
The young Austrian officers on the Lake Lugano steamer are reminiscent of the ones in Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind.
I can’t get away from Herzen. I am starting the first volume now, after having decided last night to take a break.
What is it that is more true about an autobiography than about any other kind of narrative?
That one doesn’t get too far off the central topic? That the references are different, nearer, less impartial?
Or just that “I” is in fact “I,” and “he” really is “he”?
True, invention can be more demanding, but somewhere it has to begin arbitrarily. This very arbitrariness is just not possible in an autobiography; it begins with birth, which does not depend on one at all. Since we know nothing about our births, we can begin only at a point that we do know something about, and that point has long been the same.
Invention’s quality of surprise, its advantage, can also be arbitrary. Later, in the context of our own lives, this arbitrariness is no longer possible. We must stay with that which our best understanding tells us is the truth. This truth is what matters, and it is on its account that we set down our life in writing.
Herzen’s uncle, his father’s oldest brother:
“Though already retired, he followed in the newspapers the promotions of his former colleagues in the service and participated with them step-by-step in their advancement, buying the medals they received and laying them out on a table as a sad reminder of the decorations he himself would have received.”
My heart leaps when I read Herzen. I have only now started to read about his youth and cannot understand why I began with the third volume (the English period), continued with the second (the revolutionary year 1848), and am just now at the beginning, his youth. I can think of only one reason for this totally cockeyed way of reading a book that so fascinates me. Since August 1968, since the Prague occupation, I cannot bear to read about things in Russia itself. Before that, in reading about the time of the serfs, I shared the hopes of those who were writing about it. Today, when I do the same thing, I sink into deep despair.
“Neither Danton nor Robespierre, nor even Louis XVI, lived past thirty-five.”
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen
On death: “Vadim died in February 1843. I was present at his passing, and that was the first time I experienced the death of someone close to me. I experienced it all the more strongly for its unmitigated horror, its pointless randomness, and all its stupid, immoral injustice.”
Herzen
The thunderstorm at dawn. I was right in the middle of it; the storm was inside the room, the ceiling cracking like thunder. It went into other houses on my street, missing none, then back to my house again, getting into the books, even closer than the lightning bolts striking to the left and right all round. Nonetheless it was a gentle storm, perhaps because it was so low, suited more to a mass of houses and rooms than to cliffs and mountains. And after the unbearable heat and humidity, it was a blessing.
“We hang at eight and breakfast at nine”: invitation from the governor of Newgate.
It is not enough to say everything is death.
Of course everything is death.
But we must also say, no matter how hopeless it seems, that we will firmly and fiercely oppose the fact that everything is death. Deprived of tricks or illusions, death will lose its respectability. Death is false. Our intent is to prove it so.
People acting out of the conviction that there is nothing but death strengthen it.
Out of their hatred for death, some of the best writers of our time have become its eulogists—a residue of Christianity in them, a misleading remnant.
He wants to be brief, as though he might be recalled at any moment. He wants to be so deep that he can never again be recalled.
The simplicity of religions attracts me to them enormously, but to all of them.
Some people wanted to be forgotten and to disappear completely. Abraham Sonne was one of these, a man without fault, the only man whom I admired and loved without the least reservation.
Others who knew him earlier or later thought the same of him. But now we cannot leave him alone. The few poems he wrote, in Hebrew, have been printed. A young British Jew translated them into English. One quite splendid poem is about his deepest wish, to vanish and leave no trace of himself. Broch created his Death of Vergil from the conversations they had. I speak of him often; whenever I want to speak of people at their most wonderful, I speak of Sonne. I had conversations with him through four lean years in which he was the only substance, but I never wrote them down. Still they have become so much a part of me that they really are my substance; they are the most important ring of the tree I sometimes feel I am, a four-year ring. If I write down my life—and more and more I feel impelled to do so—he will represent a central figure.
And so they who understood him most profoundly frustrate the wish that gave his life meaning and integrity; his closest friends are dragging him back into daylight. It is impossible for any of them to do otherwise: so imbued with him are they that it would be hypocrisy for them not to talk about him.
It grieves me that I cannot tell him why it is impossible for me not to talk about him. I could tell him in a way that he would understand, and then I could count on his forgiveness, which he would not even speak out loud.
It is from Sonne, that most detailed and articulate of speakers, that I learned what silence is. He alone has given me that longing for silence, and if it is unattainable for me and will always be so—even in death I will be incapable of silence—still, I know, thanks to him, what it is: the best.
I wonder whether Sonne could be silent even in paradise.
He never writes the works he has announced, so that he can write things no one expects.
On days like this, to step ecstatically into the light as often as possible. To run into every dark corner, just to step back joyfully into the light, ecstatically.
What is it, this love for the resonant names of old gods? Is it not finally just the pride in our own expanding self, which has created room enough for them? Does it replace the languages we never learned, since it is so much easier to content ourselves with names of gods? Or is it more? Is it our atonement for the monotheism our ancestors imposed on the world, the impoverishment and desolation that they brought down upon us with it?
I feel guilty about the power with which the Bible still often overcomes me; the guilt never stops, and it has been with me since early youth.
The reflected glory of yesterday! Water, speaking.
It might be possible to show how a person could be created from praise. You would have to quote those words of praise that penetrated early on and leave the rest out. The result would be the fearful body of praise that finally made up that person.
Some words of praise become as essential as air and food. What a person won’t do to get them back, when the usual source has closed down, when no more praise is coming. Make up some crazy thing consisting of praise alone. Devise a method of making praise ineffective by neutralizing it on the spot with an antidote.
Someone who has never been praised. What does he look like? How does he move? How does he live?
Someone who knows how to vomit forth praise.
One who bathes in puddles of praise and comes out dirty.
One who, rodentlike, stores praise in his cheeks.
One who poisons all around him with praise.
One who is sensitive only to collective praise, not even noticing what individuals say.
A praise preserver.
A praise digester.
A praise transformer: everything he hears becomes a single word that he hears and hears till his eardrums burst, and then he still hears it through his skin and nose.
A club of epicures, exchanging praise.
One who wastes away, ashamed of praise, and dies.
One who knows that all praise is false and who doesn’t really expect any more. But he can’t quite keep from listening for it.
One who is transformed by praise, becoming this or that, in turn, but is nothing without being sparked by praise.
One who, for praise, puts on his best suit.
One who has stopped doing everything, so as not to miss a word of praise. In the end he dares not even open his mouth, for fear he will not hear some praising word, and dies of hunger.
He now only says what has been said about him. His memory failing, he reads from notes.
One who classifies friends by how well they praise him.
One who needs people who praise others as well.
One who allows praise only via telephone, so as not to be distracted by anything else.
One who steals others’ telegrams of praise.
One who wants only the praise appropriate for others.
One who puts on weight with praise.
One who believes praise only if it means money.
One who so hates praise that everyone who wants something from him approaches him with words of reproach.
