Notes from Hampstead, page 12
I like most to move within others and not be able to find my way out for a while.
You can only bear them by running away from them like a pawn and springing back again like a knight.
In the anarchic tangle of their hair they find freedom.
I have run about among all the gods. What a colorful life it’s been! But too much fun—I didn’t have to believe in them. So I had an easy time of it.
Now I need to be a little tougher on myself—but without Hegel.
Every report of the trip gets it more and more wrong. When you talk to someone about it, the experience is altered. Keeping quiet changes it too, differently.
There can be no report.
Other languages? Yes, but only to avoid our own, through clumsiness. After all, we need broken languages too.
The unrecognized friend: he stalks you to protect you.
Someone who escapes from the things of the world through their names.
An unexecutable order that takes an entire lifetime.
He goes crawling to her with seldom-used words. She misunderstands and yields to him.
There everyone can pick ten years to skip.
He lines up everyone he has persecuted with his hatred. The figure that results is himself.
She kept everything for herself until he gave it to her again.
The one fascinating thing about vengefulness is that it has a good memory. What it does is undignified. One takes revenge through kindness.
He has the dignity of a thin person, not reading himself into corpulence but picking pathways through the corpus of texts, taking care that these pathways constantly cross. But the junctions are new, and he is always reorienting himself.
He knows what matters at the moment, and this is mainly how he tries to guide himself. But he is sparing enough to be mindful of the past. He doesn’t gorge on time; the past leaves no fat on him, only its mark.
All that it takes for him to avoid public places he visits too often is for him to talk with someone who might turn up again and continue the conversation.
He hates nothing more than a conversation’s being continued. He prefers that every conversation occur once and once only.
A name has to have a beginning. Whatever you have done, no matter how wonderful, it means nothing to anyone before your name has begun. Once it has begun, it will keep growing faster and faster for less and less reason, for none at all. But how does a name begin?
In the past, it depended on chance, which no one could influence. Today we fabricate names on purpose, and the bearer of a name would have to be very dim indeed not to know how absolutely meaningless this artificial, mass-produced ornament really is.
The ordering of influences, dramatically demonstrated by the ordering of books. No sooner have influences been arranged than they fall asleep.
It is enough to submit to your thoughts for an hour a day, pointlessly, to stay somewhat human.
We are dangerously much and don’t see all of ourselves. If we had complete insight into what we are, it would paralyze us and we would have to hold our breath till we fell down dead.
He doesn’t know his own smell and hates it in others.
Eternity as a comet.
I can’t praise correctly. I can’t mete out gratitude properly. So much gets spilled along the way. It is better to add more right away.
I saw Alexandra Tolstoy, and she spoke about her father, about the night he fled, when he suddenly came to her and said, “I am going away forever.”
Sixty-one years ago, and she talked about her sister Masha, who had died, and about her mother, who was crazy—she used the word paranoia—and about how her mother lived nine years longer than he, found peace, and realized what she had done to him.
She spoke English when I saw her, dropping a Russian word now and then, as if to prove it was really she, Tolstoy’s only daughter, his only living child.
Five years old when he died and still in Ruschuk, I heard his name from my mother in Vienna when I was ten. But only in the past few months, as I’ve been learning about his life, has he really become a part of me.
One who sucks all the poison out of books and administers it to those around him in careful doses.
This instinct he has for avoiding everything technical, deeming it knowledge and accomplishment. Not that he rejects the usual conveniences; he does make use of them, and they both ease and enliven his life. But he refuses to think about them; like a Greek, he grants them no status and treats them like slaves.
And thus he has remained open to all the puzzles that have ever been, breaking his teeth and bones on them.
The reason he is not impressed by riches is that he has never met anyone who was able to get rid of them quickly.
Sentences have not become exhausted. Not even close to it. Sentences are exhausted only for those who are compelled to break them to bits.
She watched him at prayer, and he prayed better.
“Give them limits, they need limits,” he said, and turned the key in the lock and kept an eye fixed on him through the keyhole.
What did Adam do to God when he opened his eyes?
An enemy reveals himself to be the truest friend: reverse unmasking. Thus, there has to exist a counterdisease to paranoia. One does exist.
P. revolted me when he spoke of his spiritualist séances; he is convinced of an afterlife and wants to offer me these experiences and introduce me into his circle.
But to me, my dead are sacred; I don’t wish to find them again in a circle of strangers.
To be more precise about the nature of invention: I think it always depends on your starting point. There do exist such things as the “germs” of invention; I know them and know they are irresistible. But I am not sure whether they differ from person to person or whether there is some kind of general supply of these “germs” that move all people everywhere to tell stories.
It is important to find belief, but in order to do so, we must ourselves believe what we have invented. We can know very well that we are making something up and yet believe it all the same. The sensation of expansion that we feel must be true, like another way of breathing, if we are to believe what we bring forth.
To be believable, the story must first of all arouse our astonishment: only the astounding will be believed. Anything obvious or everyday cannot be a story; since it doesn’t arouse our astonishment, it is not believed.
All that matters is that we have a sense of what can astonish.
Part of this sense is excitement, the pure excitement of wonder. We see this clearly when children listen to fairy tales.
But it is odd that the same story can be told and retold and that despite its familiarity it can astonish us anew. We can tell it exactly the same way or totally differently. Variants are a concern of literature, and yet also something like impotence.
The reason for my aversion to “aesthetic” writers is their indulging themselves only in variants. Not only are they unable but they are unwilling to invent anything new. They must rely on what already exists or they don’t believe even themselves.
And it’s not just “refined” writers like Hofmannsthal that this applies to. There are “tougher” figures as well, like Brecht, who can’t invent without considerable reliance on what already exists.
It seems that the immediate source of invention, the thing that sets it off, works differently for different people. Some people soon throw the original inspiration away, leaving everything behind in their headlong dash. Others make it a road that they stay right on, drifting off for no more than a centimeter or so before returning to it again. Brecht is one of those who stays true to his road. That is his charm, and he knows it. But he considers this limitation to be more real and mistrusts those who leave their original inspiration behind.
Invention is one of my most natural states of being, so it is time I tried to define precisely what is involved in it.
Nothing is more crippling for the inventive person than the presence of someone who is always asking, “And is it true?” The question arises out of the listener’s closed world, which his fearfulness keeps him from leaving; he sticks to his own gut.
More than anything else, an inventor cannot abide people who are unable to forget their own guts. He avoids them like the plague.
The real creator gets bolder with age. He has more invention germs within him; in the course of his life they have multiplied. Of course, the danger for him is that he will be embarrassed to astonish or will be ashamed of showing his embarrassment. He is expected to know everything; nothing should be new for him or the general opinion of idiots will be that he hasn’t experienced enough.
But the truth is that the more one has experienced, the more there is to be astonished by. Our capacity for wonder grows with experience, becomes more urgent.
How does the storyteller assure himself of the belief of his listeners? For one thing, by not giving them a moment’s peace, burying them in an ever-growing heap of fabrications, into which he has apparently mixed the familiar. These quiet places are the springboards from which he propels himself off again. In his torrent of invention they have to be very easy to spot and incredibly simple, so one can push oneself off from them again.
Some inventive people wait too long and so have the effect of appearing too reasonable. As soon as we don’t expect anything from them, we don’t believe them either. One other thing: the inventor mustn’t stay in the foreground. He himself is unimportant; we don’t want to know anything about him personally. The only interesting thing about him is the process of invention itself: one could easily imagine a man’s inventing things, day after day, night after night, for years and decades, without knowing the least thing about himself.
He wants to know more than what is contained in books. But he wants to know everything that’s in them as well.
A writer who doesn’t have a wound that’s always open is no writer for me. He may prefer to hide it if (out of pride) he doesn’t want pity, but he must have one.
Future-sick: he cannot bear the thought of the future, not of a specific future—a particularly bad one, say—but of every future.
A green window in the distance and in it, once a year, a light.
I have tracked down every childhood memory of anything involving masses; I have distorted nothing. But I have lost my earliest memory of leaves.
It is impossible to keep silent when someone dies. We demand a howling pack to grieve with us, and when none is available, we look to find one by sending off letters.
But the power of our grief is so great that we do not write just to people who knew the dead person, we force everyone we know to honor the memory of that person. We introduce our dead to them retroactively, summoning the best that we can say about them. We make it very plain how much the person meant to us, applying a kind of pressure on our friends: woe to him who does not feel the same way. We secretly make the continuation of our friendship with them dependent on how they react to the death notice. We test them, watch them suspiciously. We weigh every word of their reaction carefully in the balance; if it is too light, we reject it mercilessly, and they will never be part of us again.
I find it difficult to learn any more; something compels me to react to everything immediately. I can no longer retain anything without being touched by it.
He has one eye in back and one in front and sees the same with either one. (The mistrustful one.)
To rediscover all those useless words and drown in them for shame.
He laughs with his liver, I laugh with my ear.
Obsessed with Nothing, he is constantly putting things in order. Without order, he could not bear Nothing. In a Nothing that’s orderly he feels cozy.
Perched there, a spider in his web of order, he need not ask himself what will happen.
For all that could happen would be Nothing, and he has that under control.
A smile whose innocence lies in its intelligence. It recognizes and approves what it observes. Without arrogance, it knows it to be its own.
Exhausted by decisions. Invigorated by decisions.
Observe the other, not always the self.
Montaigne, the visitor, is stabbed by Torquato Tasso gone mad.
God seeks a man who has never heard his name and bows down in gratitude before a deaf and dumb beggar.
Eight men, old as the hills, living off a coin that no one knows.
Swift treads on Quevedo’s heels and makes no apology.
The man who was duped makes up the stories that led to his duping and savors them.
He refuses to speak to people he knows. He speaks only to strangers.
A sign of respect: to pass by someone more quickly.
Confucius, Conversations
Creel at the end of his book on Confucius: “He trusted the human race.” A very beautiful thought.
We learn the wisdom of foreign cultures to gain perspective on our own. Whatever familiarity has made meaningless or dubious suddenly gains new life through distance. We must see this from afar, without warning. We don’t know when we will see it again; we don’t realize it is what we are after. It appears all of a sudden, like something we forgot in our preoccupation with the exotic, like an unexpected and surprising view.
And so we have to recollect all that which was as close to us as our own skin.
Basically I don’t trust anyone who calls himself a poet, especially not the self-styled poet who really is one.
For he would know it all depends on words alone, and not on him. What more can he do with words, astounding and uncanny as they are even before his involvement with them? What is his little juggling act weighed against the splendor of words as they are, as he found them, as they remain! He should be grateful that they allow him to handle them. He should be ashamed he has never appreciated them. He should think of those who have appreciated them better. He should be mindful of those who should never handle them.
All that remains of past generations is contained in words handed down. This treasure is so huge that no single person can absorb or contain it within himself. The little bit of philosophy we pride ourselves on consists of attempts to take seriously some few of these words at the expense of all the rest.
François Villon as a censor of modern lyrics, and how he corrects them.
We can talk only about the same things, over and over. Fine, if they’re not too few.
A woman who remembers every man who got away but who has forgotten all those who loved her.
Surrounded by angels he alone saw, he traveled through the world, observing them in silence. He never drew attention to himself, never said a thing. If he missed anything, the angels would warn him until he saw it himself.
Fufluns, the Etruscan god of delight.
In the play of language, death disappears.
He distills his blood with music. His twelve-room house a retort.
How much hate does it take to destroy the world? When will it start to defend itself?
“The Muisca believed an ordinary man could not bear to look upon the prince with impunity. For this reason it was the custom to sentence criminals to gaze now and then at the prince.”
He gave the moon for the blue of a peacock’s throat and landed on that patch of peacock blue.
The Battle of the Short Words and the Long Words by Brueghel.
The smiling mummy with hair three meters long. He saw her, bought her, and brought her home. She hangs before him now, a thousand years old, two thousand? Teeth, in her crooked mouth, are a mockery. Her chin barely resting on her narrow, delicate hand. What does she wish for, since being dug up in the New World? Even as she was first decomposing, her world was not new. And did she have as many admirers back then? Was her hair already this long, or has it grown only for us?
Today I saw G. on the railway platform in Grenoble. I was in the moving train and he was standing there waving, getting smaller and smaller. It was him, I recognized him. Is it a miracle that he, who loved movies so much, had slipped into one himself? And in Grenoble, where I had come to visit him?
Also by Elias Canetti
The Secret Heart of the Clock
Auto-da-Fé
Crowds and Power
Earwitness: Fifty Characters
The Human Province
The Plays of Elias Canetti
The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood
The Torch in My Ear
The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit
The Play of the Eyes
Essays in Honor of Elias Canetti
The Agony of Flies
About the Author
Elias Canetti (1905-94) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. His writings include a monumental work of social theory, Crowds and Power, and three volumes of memoirs, The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
1954–1956
1957–1959
1960
1961
1962
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
Also by Elias Canetti
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 1994 by Elias Canetti, Zurich
Translation copyright © 1998 by John Hargraves
All rights reserved
First published in 1994 by Carl Hanser Verlag, Germany as Nachträge aus Hampstead
