Agony of Flies, page 15
Sein vorbildliches Familienleben. Der Mann, der Millionen Tote aushält, weil er auf Vergasungen gebaut hat.
Dieser Wunsch zu bleiben, eine Art von Buchhaltung.
Wäre es richtiger, wenn nichts von einem Leben bliebe, gar nichts? Wenn der Tod bedeuten würde, daß man in allen, die ein Bild von einem haben, auf der Stelle erlischt? Wäre es vornehmer gegen die Kommenden? Denn vielleicht ist alles, was von uns bleibt, ein Anspruch an sie, der sie belastet. Vielleicht ist der Mensch darum nicht frei, weil zu viel von den Toten in ihm bleibt und dieses Viele sich weigert, je zu erlöschen.
Der Durst des Vergessens – unstillbar?
Es gibt manche Tote, nach denen man sich nie sehnt. Sehr kostbare sind darunter.
Zaumzeug des Witzes. – Er redet Leuten solange zu, bis sie ihn übervorteilen. Dann kann er sie verachten.
Er hat mehr Würde, als er erträgt. Wenn er sie ablegt, kriecht er.
Er will gesucht sein, um sich besser zu verbergen.
Seine wildeste Passion: die Dankbarkeit. Es ist zu verwundern, daß er daran nicht wie an einer Spiel-Leidenschaft in Stücke gegangen ist.
Er vergrößert neue Berühmtheiten durch alte. Er anerkennt alte Berühmtheiten durch neue. Sein Wechselgeschäft.
Einer kennt kein Bild. Er hat ohne Bild gelebt. Er hat nie gewußt, daß es Bilder gibt.
Das erste Bild.
Im Mythos finde ich mich zuerst. Solange es mir natürlich eingeht wie Atem, nenn’ ich’s Mythos. In Zeiten, da es sich verschließt, heiß’ ich es anders. Ich lege es dann beiseite und erwarte die Wiederkehr seiner Einfalt. Verwirrung ist der Mythos nie, selbst das Entsetzlichste – als Mythos hat es Richtung und Kraft und schließlich Sinn, er darf nur nicht in die Augen springen.
Zu einer anderen Vergangenheit finden, mit Menschen, auf die du dich noch nie besonnen hast.
Die Vergangenheit jener drei Bücher lähmt dich. Sie ist zu sehr wahr.
Wie haben sie mich aufgeregt, die noblen Lebensverlasser, wie habe ich mich gemüht, ihnen zu trotzen und abzusprechen, was sie sehr wohl erfahren haben.
Jetzt denke ich mit Zärtlichkeit an sie, sie könnten noch da sein – würde ich ihnen jetzt zureden?
Einer soll mir zurückkommen, ein Einziger, und ich geb’s auf. Solange aber keiner zurückkommt, bleib ich.
Aus der Bibel kamen sie auf ihn zugerannt.
Das eigentliche geistige Leben besteht im Wieder-Lesen.
Aus sehr vielen Schicksalen, von denen man erfährt, bildet sich ein eigenes versäumtes Schicksal.
Viel Zeit hat man daran gewandt, dem Leben sozusagen unter die Arme zu greifen. Es war vielleicht verlorene Zeit. Aber es will nicht anders gewesen sein. Leichtigkeit, gewiß, ist Glück. Ich beuge mich vor der Schwere.
Er besteht nur noch aus den wenigen Worten, die er zu oft wiederholt hat.
Beschränkung auf das, was einen wirklich etwas angeht? Eben das macht das Elend und die Glorie des Menschen aus, daß er nach dem fragen muß, was ihn nichts angeht.
Wenn er sagt, er glaubt an nichts als Verwandlung, so heißt das, er übt sich im Entschlüpfen, wohl wissend, daß er dem Tod noch nicht entschlüpfen wird, aber andere, einmal andere.
IX
He can long for people almost as much as if they were no longer alive.
Though not quite.
The worst is not being something but always to be taken for so being.
How marvelous that they will all be resurrected! But do they all have to be judged right away?
Leonardo, who was much affected by animals and by the vileness of humans who oppress them.
His incessant thinking which nevertheless did not pervert him.
“Concerning donkeys, which we beat. Oh, woe for our indifferent nature … and yet they spend their entire life doing good to their oppressors.”
“Concerning sheep, cows, goats, and innumerable other such animals, whose little ones are taken away from them and then quartered in the most barbarous manner!”
This is the time when our words go galloping away.
No, don’t rein them in! Run in stride with them!
That man interprets death.
It is said: “When a person suddenly remembers his or her earlier incarnation and mentions it, death is sure to follow.” And what if that person keeps it secret?
Somadeva
To learn from history that one cannot learn anything from it.
The power of dreams—so he believes—is tied to the multiformity of animals: with their disappearance one may soon expect the dreams to dry up as well.
That others will fiddle around with my life fills me with dismay. In their hands it will become a different life. Yet I want to keep it the way it really was.
How to find a means of concealing one’s life so that it reveals itself only to those intelligent enough not to distort it?
Gilgamesh is in no way less compelling than the Bible. In fact, it has one advantage: a hostile goddess against whom the hero openly struggles. The female element, however it may be viewed, is present. In the Bible it is there only in a reduced form, as Eve.
Provided it has remained fallow long enough, one single delusion of grandeur may nourish millions.
He collected all opinions to show how few there are.
They search all over me for their ruins. But I am my own.
Compassion must overwhelm or it is not compassion. Which is why we need the word “mercy.”
Unfathomable what becomes of authors in other authors. It is not so much a matter of repetition, of flowery ornamentation, of arabesque added to arabesque, of borrowed passion—it is mainly a matter of misunderstandings, so insoluble they ultimately bear fruit. Strange and baffling creatures come into being as a result of this, authors who are greater than their prototypes.
It is not the candor of Stendhal alone, it is the candor of any masquerade.
When it comes to the dead and what is being done to them, I am merciless in my rage.
But they have to be my very own dead. With others, I merely watch—with fear or with pity.
Philosophers who know everything in between.
It is possible that through brevity he missed out on everything that is worthwhile in sentences, their swelling and their ebbing, their rise and fall, their misery and their happiness. It could be that sentences should be neither compressed nor distilled, but should pour forth in everlasting fullness. If that should be the case, then in all the years of his writing he has been deprived of its greatest joy, and his preaching the asceticism of frugality has been in vain.
Today I found a most horrible story in the memoirs of Misia Sert. I call it the agony of flies and quote it here verbatim: “One of my little bed companions has become a real master in the art of catching flies. Patient studies of these insects has enabled her to find the exact spot where one could insert a needle into their bodies to thread them without causing their death. In this way she manufactured strings of living flies and delighted in the heavenly feeling on her skin caused by the desperately scrabbling little feet and the tiny trembling wings.”
The woefulness penetrates from all sides. But it doesn’t affect you personally. It affects the other people, people you watch while they live. You cannot stand the pains they suffer. You want to avert anything that could cause them suffering. What is this?
It is the result of your inability to acknowledge anything as it actually is. Nor are you able to acknowledge that which was and already is past. All of history for you is false. You read it with a trembling heart. You would like to rescind it. But how can one rescind history? Through new sufferings?
People should not make a virtue out of their sensitivity. They may experience it and preserve it as it was experienced. But they should not adorn themselves with it. Sensitivity will make an addict out of anyone who displays its medals on his chest. He will require more and more objects to enable him to demonstrate his sensitivity, and if he runs out of them, he will simply make things up—and his sensitivity will then reveal itself for what it is: precious, brittle, and rotted through and through.
Yes, you may place sentences next to each other, they may see each other and, if they should feel that urge, they may even touch each other. But no more.
When he says “Hell” it sounds as if he had already served his sentence down there and had been released to everyone’s satisfaction.
There are servants of wealth and servants of fame. Neither are innocent: both wait for scraps.
In the expectations you have of any new person you meet, you have remained a child. But in the disappointments that followed, you very quickly became a cantankerous old man.
He lacks the ability to move away from himself. Even when he travels, he always stays close to himself. He never forgets that he is there. Whatever he takes is his due, because he took it. The world is there for his sake; the others are mere illustrations.
In growing, knowledge changes its shape. True knowledge knows no uniformity. All leaps in knowledge occur sideways: the way knights move on a chessboard.
Anything that grows in a straight line and in a predictable manner is without significance. It is the skewed and particularly the lateral knowledge that is decisive.
There, people read the newspapers twice a year, then they throw up and recuperate.
There, countries have no capitals. The people all settle at the borders. The country itself remains empty. The whole border is the capital.
There, it is the dead who dream dreams and resound as an echo.
There, people greet each other with a scream of despair and part from each other in jubilation.
There, the houses are empty and cleaned every hour: for future generations.
There, someone who has been insulted closes his eyes forever, and opens them in secret when he is alone.
There, people bite quickly and furtively, and then say: “It’s not me.”
There, people say “You are” and mean “I might be.”
There, people recognize their forebears, but are blind to their contemporaries.
Stay, someone says, as he goes to fetch the hangman.
One person who travels constantly, so as not to grow old. Someone else, with the same intent, who doesn’t move a muscle.
In old age, prejudices become dangerous. You are proud of them. You are grateful to them, as if it were they who kept you alive. In the oddest way—very belatedly—they become active, a kind of late blooming of prejudices. You no longer struggle or resist them. You draw them forth separately and examine them tolerantly, they, the products of a rich life, precious valuables you can count on, inexhaustible remains. If someone reproaches you for them, saying: “These are nothing but prejudices!” you assent delightedly. If only there were more of them! If only a few of them hadn’t been lost on the way! The owner of prejudices proudly feels his own weight. The young, who hardly have accumulated any prejudices as yet, for him are nothing but straws blowing in the wind. The possessor of prejudices is determined not to give up a single part of himself that might irritate others.
All those unforgotten faces! There hasn’t been a new one added now for quite some years. Whoever enters my life now goes and fetches a face from the pile of old ones. I help him find one. He is not himself, he is like someone out of the heap.
How ludicrous that a person wants to be loved, even though he knows himself.
Ants spend most of their time being inactive. A revolution in our conception of ants?
No dream is ever as absurd as its interpretation.
Out of the enormous legacy left by antiquity, the transformations have retained the most vitality.
Their effects are still inexhaustible. They will never be exhausted.
He who learns of them early is never lost—not even today. Of all the miracles, this is the only one which has remained credible.
In every sentence, a wind that blows things open. Only in Büchner. Not a breath, but a wind, or perhaps wind instead of breath. You don’t think about it; it just blows, carrying away all our weakness and arrogance.
A comparable wind blows in the Bible, but it is heavier; it cannot be escaped without great effort; the reader must struggle for his freedom. Büchner’s wind is freedom for everyone.
He who speaks much of animals is ashamed of mankind.
He sorts the moments until they become extinguished.
S. immediately comes on with terror, right away he unveils the most horrible threats he intends for the other. Hitler concealed his terror at first and revealed it only gradually. He always kept its intensification to himself.
One of S.’s main weapons is the respect for human life shown by Americans (and Englishmen), which only points up his own side’s readiness to sacrifice. The reconquest of Fao alone cost 53,000 victims, much more than the Americans lost during their ten-year war in Vietnam.
Never before have piles of corpses been computed so nakedly. S. is an Assyrian and he has not forgotten how the Mongols became masters of Baghdad. History never ends. It is most forcibly effective in rulers who find in it their models and their incentive.
The world has assumed a frenzied motion. Such accelerations usually signal wars and revolutions. Now, however, it is motion by itself, preceding wars or entirely unconnected to them, and revolutions, too, have become ambiguous. They are movements of masses, according to new dynamics, which no one has yet been able to fathom, for they are difficult to understand and marked by swiftly changing portents. We welcome these movements because they loosen what has become ossified; only someone truly fossilized would refuse to greet them with some satisfaction. Yet no one can tell where these movements will lead. Only one thing is incontrovertible: the course of history defies prediction. It remains open at every point. No one acts according to its inner logic, because no one knows it. Probably this logic doesn’t even exist. If that is the case, then history, in its openness, is always subject to influence; it is, so to speak, always in our hands. Perhaps our hands are too weak to accomplish anything. But since we don’t even know that for sure, we should at least try.
In a mind full of contents, prejudices fulfill a different function: barriers for waiting things out.
Now all of them rise together, and instead of blaming him, they look at him in surprise.
Look at me, it’s me. Recognize me, so that I may recognize you. Tell me where you’ve been. Did you sleep long? I have watched over you and you lost not a single hair. You are here. You are here. You are here.
You have come along different paths. I looked out for you, each night I fell asleep to keep a lookout for you and, disappointed, I limped from night to night.
Now finally I see you and am waiting for a word. It will be the most beautiful word, the most beautiful in all languages, and since you are delivering it to me, a new language will spring from it.
Can this be called longing, my having waited for so long? No, it is more. For this waiting has protected you from all change.
Last of all, he lost the names. Without his being aware of it, they dissolved into his own name. He no longer felt their borders, and when he heard them, he no longer recognized them. He no longer noticed how angry they were with him. He forgot what vindictiveness was. No one was hungry. Well-fed people on all streets. He invited passersby into his house, but they preferred to lose their way. The shadows walked apart from the people.
He needs people greater than himself in order to boast of them.
When he surrendered his last hostage, he broke down and gave up the ghost. — World dominion by means of hostages.
Of course it is true that I belong to the most controversial. But for that reason only.
Otherwise I belong to anyone who has a face.
He repeats it time and time again, he repeats it a thousand times: even if this life were more shameful than it already is, he wouldn’t give it up.
It is confusing and remains unfathomable.
If there’s any purpose at all in this intelligence with which humans have been endowed, then it must be to contest everything it perceives.
Instead of keeping animals, he keeps their shapes. These are impossible to murder.
What poet has not spoken to his pet fly?
Whom would I not recognize by the fly he keeps?
Who does not keep a fly which scrabbles for him?
He blossomed forth when he was very old and told one lying story after another. He ran after anyone who wanted to listen to him. People pestered him even in his sleep, and he went on talking. For as long as he talked, he was unable to die. He became as old as the oldest person ever, even older. A veritable stream of lies poured forth from him, almost all of them new, and whoever saw him then did not despair, but confidently counted on another two to three hundred years.
Anything excites him: a letter, a conversation. Anything coming from outside makes him restless. He becomes most restive when being lured into talking. Then he breaks free and realizes how full of unspent forces his life is. The life he leads is false. He should be at his peak, allowing himself that intensification to which he is continually prompted. But he says no, he says no left and right, and, crowing with dignity, takes pride in his restraint.
We are obliged to endure even though others who are quite different from us endure; we have to realize this and yet are not permitted to be like those others; we must equal them, even though the others will remain different—how hard, how unspeakably hard!
Whenever his curiosity slackens, he rereads one of the Greeks. Then he wants to know everything all over again.
Maybe he knew nothing at all. But one thing he knew very well: what it means not to be around anymore.
The greatness of Pascal lies in his self-restraint. Never has anyone been more eloquent. He constantly interrupts the flow of his writing, so that it reads as if it had been penned this very instant and as if he himself had broken it off. All the shorter and longer sentences, as well as their parts, sound as if they were written this very day.
Would decency dictate that the writer go through what passes for his best writing, sentence by sentence, in order to refute it? No, for then he would be one of those people who spend half of their life fanatically fighting for one thing and the other half of that same life fighting just as fanatically for its opposite.
