Notes from Hampstead, page 11
One who defaces every picture of himself.
A woman who can only give praise while being loved.
One who believes in God only while being praised.
One who hates praise violently because others, too, get praise.
Sufficient praise, but not nearly enough to continue.
Hearing false statements, he positively blossoms; he knows everything so much better!
What I have brought back with me from this trip: Pessoa.
How can I believe that I was Pessoa’s contemporary for thirty years?
Basically I never wanted to do anything more than to splinter myself, like Pessoa, into a small number of figures, which I steadfastly retain.
Everything we record is already too old.
I come alive when I narrate orally. It doesn’t matter to whom—it just has to be spontaneous and without preconditions. I can’t know in advance what I will say. It cannot be repeated and it has to take me by surprise.
So I depend on ears and am unutterably thankful to those who have ears for me. But they cannot be idle ears, they can’t fake anything, and I have to get the feeling that I could keep them open a thousand days and nights.
It is always painful for me when I stop narrating. It is this pain that keeps me alive.
G. is his mother’s victim. He ascribes his having outlived her by thirty-three years to a trick of his psyche: he continues to live as he would have with her and has excluded every other woman from his life. The disease she died of has become his calling and his science, and both remain a strenuous attempt to cure her. A gentle, tender man, he has sacrificed thousands of guinea pigs for her. But she never has, never will have, enough. The real victim he sees in her, not in himself. Even now he would freely give up his life to save hers. In these thirty-three years there has always been something physically wrong with him, to keep the wound of separation from her fresh. In his mind she seems as alive today as then. If anyone has ever been a slave of love, it is he. When he can, he brings home a new token of veneration in memory of her. He knows how untamable are the demands of her ambition, and he bears it, too, beneath his abraded skin.
He sometimes gets lost in his library. He snatches one wrong book after another and reads, his anger growing. He gets worked up, then he grabs the next one. He knows nothing will come of this pursuit. He only wants to get worked up.
He grabbed the nosy snoop by the snout and tied him—it—up.
Before his death a man distributes his wealth to people whom he likes at first sight. He walks the street looking for them. The moment he likes someone, he immediately gives that person what anyone else would only bequeath. This activity, which makes him happy, takes him a long time. He drags it out and gives away less and less. He needs a lot of tact to avoid antagonizing people. Women believe him right away, though some are disappointed that he doesn’t expect anything from them for the money. But by and large his candidates soon disappear, for fear he might change his mind.
Should chance bring him back to the same region, no one will admit knowing him.
“And that the likes of Shelley, Hölderlin, and Leopardi perish in misery means nothing; I think very little of such men.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“May the God to whom I prayed as a child forgive me! I cannot understand Death in his world.”
Friedrich Hölderlin to Friedrich Neuffer. Letter from Jena,
May 8, 1795
The Jews’ obedience to God, that which has preserved them over the centuries, irritates me. In their wisest, most wonderful stories, there is always this obedience. How I love their readers, who remain poor because they read but who are nonetheless accorded the highest respect! How I love the sense of justice Jews demand of people, their patience, often their kindness! But their obedience to the never-ending threat of God disgusts me. I know in this I am a child of my time. I have been a witness to too much obedience. And one need hardly still say it: those against God were the most obedient, but their obedience was a model and the brutes would settle for nothing less. The constant bowing I saw as a child was repeated for the visible rulers of the world to horrific effect.
Can we stand up against a visible lord if we have no invisible lord? A trying question.
There have never been greater barbarians than we. We must look for our humanity in the past. (Objection to Crowds and Power.)
I wish to know much, thus I have respect for science. But I shall never be its slave, just as in a former age I would never have been a slave of theology.
Erna P. was in Venice when Schnitzler’s daughter committed suicide. She knew the young Italian officer with whom the daughter had fallen in love. She had been present when the two met in Saint Mark’s Square. The young man wore his Fascist uniform with conviction. Schnitzler was horrified by his daughter’s decision to marry the man. He was emphatically against it. His wife, Olga, who was in Venice and knew the good-looking Italian, wrote him that he should remember certain things he had written. Schnitzler’s answer: “Don’t quote my own works to me.” The marriage came about and ended soon after with his daughter’s suicide. In Venice it was rumored that she had caught her mother and her husband in flagrante. Erna thought this story was so well-founded that no one who knew the people involved would have doubted the truth of it.
(Erna has much to tell about the people she knew; they included some very interesting characters. When talking about private matters that occurred forty years ago, she speaks very haltingly and softly, as if she were committing a great indiscretion. She implies that the things she is telling me she has never told another soul. She regards them as confidences and almost adds, “No one must ever hear this.”
She has forgotten nothing, is very accurate, and, one can be certain, never exaggerates. She is speaking not as a painter but as a zoologist.)
The missing heart of things: their noncreatedness.
“The Earl of Portsmouth would slaughter his own cattle with an axe, shouting, ‘That serves them right! The ambitious toads!’ ”
A man arrives who has counted his hair. He counts it daily. It’s not thinning—but he must not lose a single strand. His job is to be sure that he always has the same number of hairs. He does his job well and prides himself on it. You just have to see him make his entrance, a clear conscience on his sleeve and a withering glance at all the people whose hair isn’t counted. “How nice the world would be if everyone counted their hair. There would be no discontent, because there would be no disorder.”
He is convinced that disorder is irrevocably linked with one’s hair. He knows people who would not be nearly so bad, if only they had enough character to realize this. So he looks everyone he runs into straight in the eye and estimates the number of hairs they have. Of course, the job isn’t really done with just an estimate, but it’s better than nothing.
It is part of his task to keep quiet. The reason for his contentment is his secret. But he keeps his head high and counts his “population” every day. It is not an easy job, for he has a lot of hair. He has nimble fingers. How does he do it? To know that, you’d have to count hair every day.
1971
He is offended that he cannot get even the stupidest man on earth to listen to him.
His hoary, hairy, overgrown wisdom. To reacquire it would take him three lifetimes. Only what he knew at fifteen remains as alive as it was then. Everything more recent is dormant and that which is most recent is in the deepest sleep.
He only hears you when he has smelled you.
A little more concision, and I can say I am writing Chinese.
I most mistrust the moral rules with which I am obsessed.
But nothing seems more contemptible to me than simply throwing them overboard, as N. did.
I certainly have something to say about the awful enlargement of the ego. But I also know that it means nothing, that it is a wretched self-deception about death, against which it is no help at all.
When he is around books, he can’t get drunk; they are their own kind of wine.
Every truth irritates me that I have not discovered this very moment, in a flash.
Pi-chi. Brush sketches of the Sung dynasty.
Pi-chi (miscellaneous notes). These consist of short notes of the most various sort, on literature, art, politics, archaeology, all mixed together. The pi-chi are a treasure house for the history of the culture of the time; they contain many details, often of importance, about China’s neighboring peoples.
They were intended to serve as suggestions for learned conversation when scholars came together; they aimed at showing how wide was a scholar’s knowledge.
Wolfram Eberhard
So, without realizing it, I have rediscovered in my sketches an ancient Chinese form. It is not arrogance or vain fancy that despite my ignorance of the language I love everything Chinese.
It would be good to research the extent to which the Japanese pillow books were inspired by pi-chi (it would have been possible historically). Long ago, in Vienna, I stumbled on the pillow book of Sei Shonagon, and I have read countless times the excerpts from it available to me.
“Bunin could hardly keep pace with the old man, who had started running and kept repeating in a wild, broken tone of voice, ‘There is no death! There is no death!’ ” (On Tolstoy)
It could well be that one day I will submit and die. I beg all who may hear of it for forgiveness.
I am reminded of much in my own life, since reading Tolstoy’s. Life is infectious, and remembrance no less so.
I sense a great desire to write my life down, not all of it, of course, but certain parts. I am very much afraid that I will not get to it and that it will all be lost, which would be a great pity.
It wouldn’t matter where I started. There would be a lot to say about every phase.
I used to say that it was a kind of resignation to write one’s life down, as if one had no plans to do anything further. It never occurred to me that there are writers who began their careers with the depiction of their youth and who nevertheless afterward wrote one work after another. This not-so-rare event never occurred to me until now, as I am reading Tolstoy, and it hit me like a bolt from the blue.
Someday I want to find out what I really revere. I want to bring together the figures from every area that I still revere today.
One never thinks of them together. They are very scattered, some of them at times forgotten.
I don’t think I am harming them by bringing them together once. It need not just annoy them; they might actually find it amusing.
We accord ourselves the reverence we withhold from others. So the inability to revere others is questionable.
I could never have guessed that the moon landing would be capable of destroying the religion of my life that seemed the most secure. There is no indestructible religion; what happened to this one is—given its vivid presentation—simply more apparent.
“… that nothing that is his own could ever impress a man.” (A useful apercu from Gombrowicz’s diaries.)
Do not avoid the word “story” (in the sense of an account). But do avoid “text.”
He particularly loves those he will never see again.
She only sees what is behind the scenes. Beyond that she sees nothing.
Appetite goes in circles there, and one person eats after the next.
What makes Buddhism so colorful?
Its extension over such a wide area? The variety of people who have absorbed it?
Why is Christianity so much less colorful?
Because its seats of power have been so well known to us for so long? Or because it so rarely includes animals and treats them so trivially?
This last reason has much to recommend it. Everything having to do with Saint Francis is exciting. Once I stopped in my tracks before a painting by Veronese in the Galleria Borghese, Saint Anthony Preaching to the Fishes, as if it were a miracle. No Madonna could ever mean as much to me.
Christ on the cross means something when his pain is horrifying. But mostly he is just a pleasant, good-looking man. You could take him down from there and hear him talk as if nothing had happened. He makes death easier by making it seem pleasant.
The watering down of Christianity is unbearable to me when I think of the grandeur of the Sermon on the Mount or the agony of Christ’s death.
If I lived in a Buddhist country, would I be aware of the watering down of Buddhism?
The decline cannot be quite the same, since Christianity is, at bottom, more intense and more violent. It includes killing, and Christ’s suffering on the cross cannot be easy if it is to have any meaning.
In Buddhism, the founder’s death is a gentle one, reached very slowly, through a spiritual process, not by external force. The exemplary aspect of these founding figures has always amazed me. I don’t completely understand their effect even today.
Since their very existence necessarily excludes force, it could never degenerate into our particular kind of violence.
The colorfulness of Buddhism, which is where I began, derives, on the other hand, from the idea that gives it eo ipso its universality: the belief in the transmigration of souls.
Buddha once found his home in every existence. Compared with the Jataka, Buddha’s nativity stories, the hagiographies of the Church seem rather monotone.
The existence of Buddha, who once was all, is the fullest existence attributed to any creature in history. At its core this religion has remained colorful no matter how much it may have paled or degenerated in practice.
On his birthday, Swift would read the Book of Job.
That we can no longer escape history is for me the most depressing idea of all.
Is this the real reason I bother with myths? Am I hoping to find a forgotten myth that might save us from history?
The Carper. Abul Khattib is proclaiming God. Sitting here amidst the rest of us confused scions of the West, he wails a hundred times a day, “The East! The East!”
Though opposed to sagacity, he knows all. He writes stories in Urdu and has them translated as cheaply as possible. The young gather round him—Germans, English, Swiss, French—and he carpingly rattles off what each of their countries lacks. They listen respectfully, some because they have a private longing for moralistic speeches, others because they don’t want him to feel that his skin is brown. He is treated with kid gloves and likes it here. He would like to publish his stories in every country there is, and when he is looking for publishers, he smiles sweetly. So he is not always carping—he can flatter when he wants something.
But he is really only himself when he is carping on the spiritual values of the East. One wonders what he would do if there were no East and West. He would have to switch to North and South.
It is useless to ask him about the last election results in Pakistan. He has less to say about those than what you can read in the papers. The little he knows he speaks as if it were a revelation. He lives here as a journalist and writes for newspapers in Pakistan and India. That’s what he says, and you have to believe him, he rails so against lies. But when he talks about his homeland, he knows more than he tells. He conceals everything that might denigrate the “East.”
Often, when he speaks of the grinding poverty of his homeland, his harangues grow incoherent. Then you even suspect empathy behind the words. They always sound like an accusation of the wealthy West. Since you know how right he is, you feel guilty. You feel guilty because you live here and you are much too well-off. But he quickly leaves these materialistic depths and jumps over to God and spiritual values. When he speaks of “God,” he carps the most. It’s never clear whether he sees the plight of the East as resulting from the godlessness of the West or of the East itself. But after a few hours you decide on a simpler approach: he wants to attack those who do not have God, because he does have God. Aside from God there is nothing, he is capable of saying, and no misery beyond this can really affect him deeply. He sits in his corner quietly, like a spider—often covering sheets of paper with his language’s beautiful script, flights of fancy in which he is unequaled—and waits for a victim. Barely does a young man who once heard him appear in the doorway than he smiles sweetly and greets him like an old friend, offering him a chair. He stops writing, and soon he can be plainly heard throughout the place, whining, “I hate nobody! I love every human being!” We try to ignore him, having heard him ten thousand times before, but the word “God” jumps out at us like a death threat and we freeze.
Suddenly the peoples of the world forgot what they were called. What happened?
His stories are sea swells, changing with the force and direction of the wind. He tells them a thousand times over, and they are never the same; when the air is calm he nearly forgets them. But then they become dark and angry and sweep away entire ships’ crews.
To have a single idea for the first time and not know it. People who can say only the opposite of what they believe in. To avoid causing displeasure they deny themselves to the point of death and think no one has noticed.
It bothers me that myths are called, bombastically, “myths” and fairy tales are called, childishly, “fairy tales.”
We should be brave enough to invent other names for these wonderful things.
He needs the discourse of narrowness as well, and what is dull drives him back into breadth.
He can only grasp certain fashionable ideas after he senses that they have been debunked and destroyed.
To get hold of a heart till it speaks: Dostoyevsky.
Confessions are too easy. It is impossible to see how man could become better.
Laws were an early first attempt.
They have proved themselves to the point that they have become a branch of knowledge.
Undermined by our laws, nature puts more power in our hands than we can control.
But the old laws end up in the hangman’s hands.
All his life he sought a kind of freedom for mankind. But he always knew men were basically evil. What would these radically evil creatures do with their freedom? He is still for freedom, though. Because he knows what they are capable of under duress, he mistrusts that even more than freedom.
