Agony of Flies, page 13
Der Freß- und Friedfertige hat keineswegs immer Unrecht. Die Edel-Reden erregend, weil sie von Freß-Reden abgelöst werden.
Man verzeiht ihm viel, wegen des mystischen Wortes Verwandlung.
Alle Worte, die noch prall von Bedeutung sind – und du verzagst! Genügt es nicht, daß die Worte sich weitergeben?
Eine Aufzeichnung muß wenig genug sein, sonst ist sie keine.
»Diese Energieschübe steigen in Form heißer Plasmaströme aus dem Sonnenkern empor und entfachen dabei (wie sich berechnen läßt) eine Art Brandungsdonner von unvorstellbarer Lautstärke.«
Nichts ist mir unerträglicher als die Mechanik des Denkens. Darum zerbreche ich seinen Gang nach jedem Satz.
Ungeheurer und gewollter Vorrat: Goethe.
Wo du ihn aufschlägst, bedeutet er dir etwas. Wie ist das möglich? Aber es ist sicher nur möglich, wenn es nicht zu einer Lehre verarbeitet wird.
Das Unerlangbare an Tieren: wie sie einen sehen.
Die scheinbare Gerechtigkeit, mit der man das eigene Leben betrachtet.
Zu wirklicher Gerechtigkeit müßte man noch viel älter sein, 300, 500 Jahre.
Hundertjähriger, der den ›Überlebenden‹ aus der Welt schaffen will.
An Jacob Burckhardt ist zu bewundern, daß er nie über seine Verhältnisse denkt. Aber was für Verhältnisse das waren!
Erzählen in Katarakten.
Groll macht ihn zutraulicher.
Mächtiger, der vorsichtig von Ohnmacht träumt.
Der Konsequente, der für jede Nation ist, auch für solche, die nur zwei Sprecher zählen.
Er geht als Atem in andere ein. Sie lassen ihn gewähren.
Präpositions-Denker.
Es ist wahr, daß man sehr viel vergessen hat. Aber was alles nachgewachsen ist und die ›leeren‹ Stellen erfüllt! Das ist das Interessante an einer Lebensgeschichte.
Wieder Pascal.
Der einen nie irritiert hat, nie enttäuscht. Er ist nirgends entliehen. Seine Schlüssigkeit läßt Türen offen. Sogar wenn man mit keinem Wort von ihm einverstanden wäre, möchte man sie wieder und wieder sehen und bedenken. Keine Entdeckung steht ihm im Weg. Glaube und Denken empfindet man bei ihm als einander ebenbürtig.
In den Pensées kommt Pascal zugute, daß er immer unterbricht. Von jedem lassen sich die Stücke anders zusammensetzen. Sie bleiben am besten unzusammengesetzt.
Der Ansatz ist sein Eigentliches, und die Reinheit Pascals drückt sich in jedem Ansatz aus.
»Die Vielheit, die sich nicht zur Einheit zusammenschließt, ist Verwirrung, die Einheit, die nicht von der Vielheit abhängig ist, ist Tyrannis.«
Nicht Bilder, nicht Bilder allein. Hie und da ein Bild. Aber du hast die Bilder vernachlässigt. Den Beteuerungen verfallen, hast du dir für die Bilder nicht Zeit genommen.
Sind sie erloschen, eingeschlafen, verfallen?
VIII
The hardships of Cervantes in honor-corroded Spain. A late oeuvre, when he was past fifty, and much later, the highest honors. A soldier and slave in his youth, for five years on the lowest social rung and nevertheless proving his worth there, a failed tax collector at forty, tormented by his family as by lice, yet not succumbing to it thanks to his writing, irrepressible in his writing as well, his experience so rich that his writing never chokes.
The “greatest” man must also be measured by all the wrong he has done, provided he is conscious of it.
Can there be anything more despicable than to listen for hours to a man with the firm intention of not giving in to his pleadings, to listen to him begging for his life—all the while enjoying safety, comfort, and splendor?
He has no use for philosophers who are involved with themselves exclusively. He needs philosophers who painfully touch his own vital points or those of others.
Aversion to the theory of origin of the species. Wherever I encounter it, I feel a kind of paralysis. It appears to me just as implausible as the story of the Creation and, in any case, much less colorful.
Everything is being attributed to the broadest spans of time, in intervals so large as to be beyond our grasp. The acid test for the qualifying of new forms is their survival per se, so that mass death becomes something useful. In order for anything new to emerge, a great deal of life must first perish—this is a monstrous concept which essentially originates in the realm of power.
That it should be impossible to imagine people much older than they actually have become.
Just as there are pictures of people in their youth, genuine ones, there should also exist fictive pictures of people in their old age.
The historians of facts who omit the most interesting thing about history—namely, its invention.
Praise first animates the spirit, which then desires to deserve it.
Two contemporaries, Cervantes and Shakespeare: we know so much about one and nothing at all about the other. Who would they be if we could interchange that knowledge and that ignorance?
“A young Salvadoran, for example, walked up the railway tracks all the way from El Salvador to the United States because at home his parents and three of his sisters had been shot in the middle of the village square.”
May a single individual be taken so seriously as to stand for all others?
May he be burdened with so much love and so much innocence?
The sounds of whales: Basically I feel ashamed at eavesdropping on those peaceable sounds of creatures who are defenseless against us. Not only did we appropriate their bodies—as we did with all the rest—we also took the emotions they display toward each other—though we are being punished for it by being unable to understand them. I myself renounce all further investigation of them. I will let them be. My compassion for them has been poisoned. They remain prey.
Find the pains you have inflicted. Those you have suffered will keep well enough without any effort on your part.
It soothes him to utter the names of the animals. He is proud of their names. “This one is still around. We haven’t exterminated it yet.”
He turns his attention toward everything that will never again exist. He finds an inextinguishable presence. He puts his finger to it and it bursts into laughter and scatters in all directions.
To mourn? To wait. To wait. To have waited till the end. Man, the patient creature. Man, the raging creature. The creature devouring, the creature devoured: Man.
The wisdom of awakening. After sleep, immediately thereafter, one’s thinking is different. Floating, less weighty, transparent, selfless, quiet.
Carlyle about his dreams:
“Dreams! My dreams are always unpleasant—nothing but confusion—loss of clothes and similar things, nothing beautiful. The same dreams night after night, over a long span of time. I am a worse man in my dreams than when awake—I commit cowardly deeds. I dream that I am being prosecuted for some crime. Long ago I have come to the conclusion that dreams have no significance for me.”
William Allingham, A Diary
He is too full: even three volumes of his life story have failed to relieve him; there is more past inside him now than ever before. The past grows in all directions through its depiction. Wouldn’t the same hold true for history? Or is historiography reductive, in contrast to memory accumulated and shaped?
“Mankind need be destroyed once more.” A sentence by Goethe, every bit as tough as Augustine’s predestination. How readily this thought forms in the mind of anyone who mentions Napoleon and Mozart in the same breath!
It is true that there are animals that resemble Man in their stupidity. Yet one cannot help feeling that this stupidity of animals is not real and that, in any case, it is more innocent than ours.
Putting a bridle on words: It should cause them some slight pain, but in a way that would still make them grateful for it.
The way we become what we constantly name: For years on end Karl Kraus repeated “Swift” to himself, indeed for so long that he actually turned into him in The Last Days of Mankind.
People shouldn’t simply get rid of prejudices. Only on the strength of an achievement, a deed, or an action should they be permitted to free themselves from a prejudice.
The good thing about notations is that they are free of calculation. They are too swift, they don’t have enough time for the head that conceives them to ask how they might be used.
People who approach you with special words resembling a lackey’s livery: They have been at your service and wish to remain so, but are already on the lookout for higher patrons.
In a painting by Munch I have seen the head of a horse—wildness and slavery all in one—and now I finally know why I love horses so painfully.
I read about the leaps of a gazelle child in that oasis, a human child able to jump four yards like the gazelles to whom it belonged, and while reading I asked and keep asking myself: is this what I meant by metamorphosis?
Pensées against death.
The only possibility: These must remain fragments. You must not publish them yourself. You must not edit them. You must not unify them.
All the evil things which, in your thoughts, you pin on others—where did you get them from?
How proud people are when reminded of the character they once possessed.
The theoreticians of their own successes are deathly boring. They need to prove that these successes are deserved.
But nothing could be less deserved.
How does one recognize that someone has reached the end? By his bite? By his writing? By his laughter?
The heaviest loss suffered by Usama, an Arab knight from the time of the Crusades: his library of four thousand tomes. “Four thousand folios, precious writings! Their loss will tear my heart for the rest of my life.”
The fear of animals confronted by a dead, skinned lion: “I once watched as the head of a lion was brought into one of our houses. When the cats caught sight of it, they fled the house and threw themselves from the roof, even though they never had seen a lion before. Whenever we killed a lion, we skinned it and threw the corpse from the fortress wall to the bottom of the bastion. Yet neither the dogs nor any of the birds approached it. When the ravens caught sight of the carrion, they flew down toward it, but as soon as they were close, they screamed and flew away forthwith.”
Usama, The Book of Instruction by Examples
“She now counts her dead practically every night. She never gets the number right. She forgets some: there are some who are more dead than the others.” Jules Renard, Journal
It serves no purpose whatsoever to tell oneself the truth and never anything but the truth. The only truth that does not transform itself into nothing is horror and annihilation.
The tonality of the Egyptians is your own as no other. Animals as sacred as writing. Judgment and scales. The dismembered dead reassembled to life. The lament for the dead.
The lament for the dead that does not reproach the dead for anything.
To retrieve what the dead person loved in us. To give up what we hate for his sake. To purify ourselves for the dead. The dead as highest authority. Nothing is hidden from the dead.
To use the past as the time of the dead.
The loftiness of the eulogists. At first, a certain timid uncertainty: is it you? Then the confirmatory tap on the shoulder, condescending praise, rising farewell. As if they had lifted you, and thereby themselves, from the ground.
They chide him for setting up his memories so sturdily, so upright. They feel that remembrance should sway, that it should flow apart, that nothing should be recognizable; whatever existed before deserves only to disintegrate.
Cervantes and his rhetoric of experience. He is his own knight. He mocks himself.
His tenacity: that of the slave, working on his liberation.
The constancy, the immutability of the characters: Don Quixote as much as Sancho Panza, and yet, within the most stringent restrictions, their richness. Measured against that, how unfocused, how unengaging, and how flabby later novels appear to us.
Rhetoric at its peak, but within the limits imposed by the characters. The rhetoric of chivalry versus the rhetoric of proverbs.
The conciliatory glutton is by no means always in the wrong. The lofty speeches are exciting because they alternate with speeches of gluttony.
Much is being forgiven to him because of the mystic word “metamorphosis. “
All those words still chock-full of meaning—and yet you lose heart! Isn’t it enough that the words propagate themselves?
A notation must be sufficiently small—or else it ceases to be one.
“Thrusts of energy rise from the core of the sun in the form of hot plasma streams and, in the process, produce (as can be calculated) a surf-like thunder of inconceivable volume.”
Nothing is more unbearable to me than the mechanics of thinking. This is why I disrupt its motion after each sentence.
Enormous and deliberate reserve: Goethe.
Wherever you open him, he is full of meaning to you. How is this possible? Surely it is only possible as long as Goethe is not being elaborated into a doctrine.
The unattainable in animals: how they see us.
The seeming righteousness with which we view our life. To achieve genuine righteousness, we would have to be much older, say, by three or five hundred years.
A hundred-year-old who wants to eliminate the “survivor” from the world.
What is admirable in Jacob Burckhardt is the fact that he never thinks about his own circumstances. And what circumstances these were!
To tell a story in cataracts.
Rancor makes him more trusting.
A powerful man who cautiously dreams of powerlessness.
The consistent person who speaks out in favor of all nations, even those whose language is spoken only by two people.
He enters others as breath. They allow him to have his way.
A thinker of prepositions.
It is true that I have forgotten a great deal. Yet how much regrowth has there been in the interim and how this growth has filled my “empty” spaces! This is what is interesting about the story of a life.
Once again Pascal:
He never irritates, never disappoints. He isn’t borrowed from anywhere. His logical conclusiveness leaves doors open. Even if you do not agree with a single word of his, you want to read his words again and again, so as to think them over. No discovery bars his way. In him you sense the absolute equality of faith and thought.
In the Pensées Pascal benefits from the fact that he constantly interrupts. In each one, the parts can be assembled differently, but it is best to leave them unassembled.
The beginning is its essential component, and the purity of Pascal is expressed in every one of his beginnings.
“Diversity which fails to merge into unity amounts to confusion; unity independent of diversity amounts to tyranny.”
Not images, not images alone. An image here and there. But you have neglected the images. Addicted to affirmations, you failed to take time for images.
Have they become extinguished, did they fall asleep, did they disintegrate?
IX
Er kann sich nach Menschen beinah so sehnen, als ob sie nicht mehr am Leben wären.
Ganz nicht.
Das Schlimme ist nicht, etwas zu sein, sondern immer dafür zu gelten.
Wie wunderbar, daß sie alle wieder auferstehen! Aber müssen sie dann gleich gerichtet werden!
Leonardo, der von den Tieren ergriffen war und von der Niedertracht des Menschen, der sie bedrückt.
Sein unablässiges Denken, das ihn nicht schlecht macht.
»Von Eseln, die wir schlagen. O gleichgültige Natur … und sie verbringen ihr ganzes Leben, indem sie ihren Bedrückern Gutes tun.«
»Von Schafen, Kühen, Ziegen und ähnlichem. Unzähligen von ihnen werden ihre kleinen Kinder weggenommen, und sie werden aufs Barbarischste gevierteilt.«
Es ist die Zeit, in der deine Worte sich überstürzen.
Fall ihnen nicht in die Zügel! Lauf mit!
Der interpretiert den Tod.
Es heißt: »Wenn eine Person sich plötzlich ihrer früheren Geburt erinnert und es sagt, bedeutet das sicher den Tod.«
Und wenn sie es verschweigt?
Somadeva
Aus der Geschichte lernen, daß man nichts aus ihr lernen kann.
Die Kraft des Träumens, meint er, sei an die Vielgestaltigkeit der Tiere gebunden. Mit ihrem Verschwinden sei das Versiegen des Träumens in Sicht.
Daß andere an meinem Leben herumfingern werden, erfüllt mich mit Widerwillen. Unter ihren Händen wird es ein anderes Leben werden. Ich will es aber so haben, wie es wirklich war.
Ein Mittel finden, sein Leben so zu verbergen, daß es nur für die sichtbar wird, die klug genug sind, es nicht zu entstellen.
Gilgamesch ist um nichts weniger zwingend als die Bibel. Er hat einen Vorteil über sie: eine feindliche Göttin, gegen die er offen kämpft. Das Weibliche, wie immer angesehen, ist da. In der Bibel ist es reduziert da, als Eva.
In einem einzigen Größenwahn, wenn er nur lang genug brach lag, ist Platz für Millionen.
Er sammelte alle Meinungen, um zu zeigen, wie wenige es sind.
Sie suchen mich nach ihren Ruinen ab. Ich bin meine eigene.
Mitgefühl ist überwältigend, oder es ist keines. Darum braucht man das Wort Erbarmen.
Unergründlich, was aus Autoren in anderen Autoren wird. Es geht nicht nur um Wiederholungen, um pflanzenhaften Schmuck, um Arabesken zu Arabesken, um geliehene Leidenschaft – es geht vor allem um Mißverständnisse, so unauflösliche, daß sie fruchtbar werden. So kommt es zu ganz absonderlichen und rätselhaften Gebilden, zu Autoren, die größer sind als ihre Vorbilder.
Es ist nicht die Offenheit allein bei Stendhal, es ist die Offenheit in jeder Maskerade.
Wenn es um Tote geht, um das, was ihnen geschieht, bin ich erbarmungslos vor Zorn.
Aber es müssen meine Toten sein. Bei anderen schaue ich mitleidig oder erschrocken zu.
