The Secret Heart of the Clock, page 11
He only says no for the sake of practice.
* * *
A person who is not allowed to be in the world: how he behaves (exemplary novella).
Whoever claims to have learned from the experiences of others, let him speak up. From his own?
He needs people who carry his pains after him.
S., who died of a fall on his way home. He had given up drinking, he never fell when he was drunk.
The raging of the mute.
He feels creative when he says “God.”
He takes pride in his stupid defiance. But is compliance smarter?
Love of every word one has heard. Expectation of every word one might still hear.
Insatiable need for words.
Is that immortality?
The gesture of traveling. He escapes from one city into the same.
The philosophers condensed into a pack of cards.
Goya in his old age: his ugly son, his heir. The nine-year-old girl, perhaps his daughter, who is already learning to paint. Her mother, Theresa, whose nagging Goya cannot hear: his deafness as salvation.
A supply of dead ones, for repenting.
He thinks of his pathetic contacts and of his inner life, also of the fact that in his old age he is more powerfully afflicted by love than ever, not at all preoccupied with his own death but all the more incessantly with the death of his loved ones; he realizes that he is becoming less capable of being “objective” toward those close to him and never indifferent, that he despises everything that is not breathing, feeling, and insight.
But he also realizes that he does not want to see others, that every new person agitates him to the core of his being, that he cannot defend himself against this tumult either by aversion or by contempt, that he is utterly at the mercy of everyone, defenseless (though the other doesn’t notice it), that he can find no rest on account of this other, no sleep, no dreams, no breath—that every new person is a paragon, important, most important, and when he compares that with the useful and no less wakeful calm that others have attained in their old age, he doesn’t know which he prefers, he would be ashamed of such calm, just as he is ashamed of his naked soul and wishes he were like the calm one and would not like to be like him and knows one thing for certain: that he would not change places with him.
Saying nothing, he hears even less.
Apollonius of Tyana— his way of knowing as an unusual form of seeing through. Since he believes in reincarnation, he is concerned with the unmasking of previous existences. He wants to know who someone used to be, and he knows it.
In a tame lion he recognizes Amasis, the Egyptian king, the friend of Polycrates. In a beggar, he recognizes an evil spirit and incites a mob to stone him mercilessly.
“A woman receiving the gift of an elephant offers herself to the giver. Such surrender is not considered shameful among the Indians, indeed the women feel honored that their beauty should be as highly valued as an elephant.”
—ARRAN
* * *
He disintegrates when he doesn’t tell stories. What power of speech, his own, over himself!
Very few ideas in a lifetime, their constant return, as if they were new and yet familiar, wrapped in time as in leaves.
“The flight of cranes, the way they form letters.”
—HYGINUS
A country where people walk on their heads when they are angry.
A person in his old age trying to gauge what damage he has done by talking.
A society where all the words that have been spoken are preserved, but one is not permitted access to them.
From time to time, unpredictably, their casing opens and they pour out irresistibly upon their speaker.
(1985)
DRINK, DRINK, you will die of thirst if you don’t tell your story!
Self-satisfaction: a giant telescope.
The sum of a life, less than its parts.
With every truth you exposed yourself as much as if it had been a lie.
If everyone had accepted it, it would no longer be true. Imprisoned in a biography: everything you have summoned up is there now and continues. It cannot be turned off or concealed anymore. It demands its new rights. It claims indemnity for long concealment. It resents all doubts.
Homesickness of hatred.
* * *
He would like to be better, but it is too expensive.
Reduced to splendor.
Ten minutes of Lichtenberg and all the things he suppressed in himself for a year are running through his head.
Don’t let a day pass without signs. Someone or other will need them.
You have never been as brief as you wanted to be.
A man made of parts of speech.
They despise you because you are hiding. They would despise you no less if you were still swaggering.
“The blind enjoyed special protection. Their debtors were forced to reimburse them; thus the blind were able to amass great fortunes as usurers.”
—JAPAN, CA. 1850
Old age is more dependent on its laws. Old age is not fortuitous enough.
They reproach you for the cohesiveness of your biography, for the fact that everything that happens points to some later occurrence.
But is there a life that does not move toward its later phases? When a man is eighty years old, he can’t write the story of his life as if he had killed himself at forty. When the book he had to write, after inexpressible delays, is finally there and passes the test, he cannot for the sake of a whim act as if it were a failure.
So one might hold it against you that you believe in Crowds and Power, that its insights—despite the flippancy with which they were brushed aside—have remained valid. The story of your life was written with this conviction; its form and to a large extent its content are determined by it.
The fact that so many people appear in these pages, and that some of them occupy more space than the narrator himself, may seem confusing. But that is the only possible way to depict the reality of a life, against the powerful pull of its current.
Think of people, then you’ll know something.
He administers the days, they have become precious. But management doesn’t make them more precious.
At the poles of eternity. When did it begin? When does it end?
A would-be man of power who cannot be powerful and is therefore a historian.
You are constantly rejecting something and confirming it with your contempt.
But it could be that things are diminished by ceaseless contempt.
Should one love only those heirs who never want to become heirs?
“It was said of her that she lived sixty years by the edge of the river but never bent down to look at it.”
—Wisdom of the Fathers
He is eighty. It’s as if he had illicitly set foot in another century.
What is attractive in Schopenhauer is his turning away from God, decisively and irrevocably.
A philosophy that is free of power, yet presumes the existence of God, is impossible.
* * *
Stendhal is to be envied for many things. Most of all for his complete exposure after his death.
Everything will be distorted and prostituted in one way or another. Why should it be important what you thought? Since you have not achieved anything, anything at all, it can just as well disappear. On the other hand, you don’t know whether it might not have some effect later, under different circumstances. Maybe it’s not supposed to have any effect. Maybe some things are supposed to exist for their own sake: but in that case undistorted, nothing more.
Every person, especially every new person, animates you in an unpredictable, uncanny way.
It begins with your wanting to rid yourself of everything that you are and attacking your hapless interlocutor with it. Whoever it is, you beset him with yourself, and then you’re shocked to see him succumb. It usually takes a whole night for you to recover from this assault.
You are frightened by yourself because you discover so much of yourself. You’re frightened by the other, who hardly dares to react, who listens to you and tries to take note of everything, as if every bit of it were precious. But you’re not precious at all, it disgusts you to be thought of that way, you’ve just been alive for eighty years and have most of your experience still inside you, untouched and unused.
You do everything to increase the consciousness of death. You magnify the danger, which is great as it is, in order not to lose your sense of it. You are the opposite of a person who takes drugs, your knowledge of horror is never allowed a rest.
But what do you gain by the ceaseless wakefulness of this consciousness of death?
Does it make you stronger? Does it help you to better protect others who are in danger? Do you give anyone encouragement by always thinking about it?
This whole enormous apparatus you have erected serves no purpose. It doesn’t save anyone. It gives a false appearance of strength, no more than a boast, and is from beginning to end as helpless as any other scheme.
The truth is that you have not yet found out what would be the right and valid and humanly useful attitude. You haven’t gone beyond saying no.
But I curse death. I can’t help it. And if I should go blind in the process, I can’t help it, I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.
I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no viola like hers, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.
You—a doctor! A single patient would have been your downfall.
Woe to you if you hadn’t saved him!
He needs the forms of animals in order not to lose faith in all forms.
He does not want to know how these forms came about. They are blurred by transitions. He needs the leaps.
A man made of ears of corn and how they all simultaneously bow down to listen.
They don’t want to believe that he lived. If you had disparaged Sonne a little, he would have been believable. But he was the way he was; I knew him for four years, and may this hand of mine wither if it distorts the least of his features.
I loved him so much, loved him silently for fifty years, never wrote him a word about it; I would never have told him, and now the sparrows are whistling it from the rooftops and his last poem is printed in the newspaper and the opposite of what he wanted has happened.
But what he did to me has been revealed, and now people have learned from others who he was, and what appeared to be secretiveness on my part has now turned out to have been his way, and no one who has understood him will hold it against me that I didn’t say more about him than I knew at the time.
Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.
He makes no final dispositions. He won’t grant death the honor.
How far have you gotten—after all the announcements—with your preparations for the book against death?
Try the opposite: glorify it, and you’ll quickly come to yourself and to your real business.
Corrosive names.
One who has known every word of yours for years and has not the least thing in common with you.
“Man” is no longer a miracle for him. “Animal” is a miracle for him.
Targets for accusations: you can buy them ready-made, vent your spite on them, sweep away the shards, then, free at last, make a fresh start.
Escaped from the world, he and no one else.
Days when hope lingers before it dries up, happy days.
He hung his hurting arm in the plane tree and recovered.
* * *
Oh dear, whatever he said was always such a mouthful, and now he’s supposed to just talk.
I don’t see anyone. I am blind. I see her, the endangered one.
What is hardest for you? A last will. It’s as if it would mean your capitulation.
And what if you were told: One more hour?
Monuments, memorials. —To whom? Invented characters?
If the poets don’t support one another—what will be left of them?
He hid and hid until he was finally forgotten.
Since when do you evade myths? Do you fear them or do you consider them futile?
A man who grows in the course of a day and goes to sleep as a giant.
In the morning he wakes up very small, shrunk in his sleep, and resumes his daily growth.
After twenty-five years he’s reached the point where he can read his book as a stranger.
Why does he think that something is correct just because it’s so old?
What pleasure he takes in saying “gods”—in order not to say “God.”
And yet he never managed to be a slave. But he observed slaves who wanted to be slaves, that was the worst thing.
A miscalculation? The world?
* * *
The fragments of a man, worth so much more than he.
As far as language is concerned, you are a pietist. It is, for you, sacrosanct. You abhor even those who investigate it.
The unconscious, which those possess least who always speak of it.
Look at him: his sins are showing from all his pockets. He’s already had his pockets sewn up. It doesn’t help.
The German word for breath—“Atem”—the foreignness of it, as if it came from another language. There is something Egyptian and something Indian about it, but even more it sounds like an aboriginal language.
To find those words in German that sound aboriginal. For a start: Atem.
One would like to end one’s life in a meditation on words and thereby prolong it.
Your praise confuses everyone. You have not learned to praise without causing damage.
Since he has gone into hiding, he has a better opinion of himself.
He regrets no obstacle, not one thing that delayed him. If he had known he would live eighty years, he would have waited with everything even longer.
Sitting together in the bliss of old age without understanding each other on any level.
When the parasite has sucked himself full of your blood, you let him go.
You wouldn’t lay hands on your own blood!
* * *
Brutality of return.
To live without models, is that possible at eighty? Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past, it is too rich, you’re drowning in it, look at new people, pay attention to those who can no longer become models for you. Act on the word you have used more than any other: “transformation.”
Perhaps no one has doubted Man more profoundly than you. Perhaps for that reason your hope has much weight.
One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn’t despise them.
One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings.
He is looking for something he can worship with impunity.
Encounter with old characters while reading out loud from David Copperfield. What has become of Uriah Heep in yourself and what was he like in reality?
But then there are the forgotten characters you suddenly grasp as if by the hem of their coat: there he is, what was he like, is it really he, no, he’s completely different, the coat’s the same but someone else is inside it. —There are characters that made no impression on you at the time, because you were too young. Those are the ones that amaze you, some of the best are among them.
Dickens is one of the disorderly writers; it seems that among the great ones these are the greatest. Order in the novel begins with Flaubert, there is nothing there that has not been sifted. Order attains perfection in Kafka. The effect he has on us is partly due to the fact that we have been subjected to many kinds of order that have drained life of its sap, we feel their power and dominance in everything we know of Kafka. But he still has breath, which he draws from Dostoevsky’s confessional heat, and it is this breath that brings his ordered worlds to life. Only when these systems crumble will Kafka be dead.
“Two misers playing four-handed on the same piano.”
—JULES RENARD, Journal
An animal with complete memory—most precious of all animals.
He put off his last fear and died.
It turns out that the minds he held in the highest reverence would have bored him to death if he had met them in the flesh.
A thought-lark.
The peoples he read about when he was young have died out in the meantime.
He found sentences only in order to take back earlier ones.
His mind still exhausts itself in contacts. He still shies away from incorporation.
When he was utterly empty, when he had nothing left, he boldly held on to the handle of an origin.
When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak.
No animal had recognized him. No animal felt at ease with him. He refused to make an animal his servant.
It’s all about the same thing, always the same thing, and even though it’s the same thing, it’s so new that it fills me every day like gusts of wind. It never gets better. It never gets more familiar. It is always the worst thing possible and says it without mercy and so comprehensibly that I shiver and try to dissemble. When I break out of it again and start raging, No!, I am so filled with strength and determination that I expect it to have an effect.
New details on the march.
He believes all he knows belongs to him. It belongs to him until it becomes false, and no longer.
Immortality, for the Chinese, is longevity. They are not concerned with souls. There is always a body, even if it is light and winged after spending a long time in the mountains searching for mysterious roots.
Since they taught us a lesson in living, the Chinese, long before us, since the beginning of time, it is all the more painful to watch them now emulating us. When they have finally caught up with us, they will have lost all the lead they had over us.
