Notes from Hampstead, page 3
It is clear that all mythology depends on names. With myths, the name stays fresh. With religions, the name is depleted by its broad dispersion. The world religions account for the greatest possible depletion of names but are still bound up with them, even in their most diluted form. Mathematical thought, which has gradually led to human technological power, involves the abandonment of names; they are eliminated from the thought process, we think utterly without them.
Names, which intensify the strength of myth, now serve more the purpose of connecting.
Names as roots and names as vessels.
Names of low specific gravity: balloons, quickly lifting into the air. Heavy names that pull their bearers to the ground.
Name pairs, forming twinned masses.
The names of creatures are terribly important. The introduction of naming at the beginning of Genesis is one of the few clues to the nature of naming. The name of a person who died young, which he bore only a short time, is entirely different from an old person’s name, long in use. Hungry names, sated names. The sudden fame surrounding hungry names. The fame of sated names in decline.
A man who is known by all but who knows no one. He never notices faces, voices, forms. When he has been loved by someone, he never knows who it was. He experiences the moment, but nothing remains of it. It seems to him that no one has a name or that everyone has the same name. People collect around him but run off him like water.
His pronouncements on this: “I don’t notice differences. People are all the same. As for dogs—that’s something else again.”
He appears to be loveless but doesn’t know hate either. He can have no grudges against anyone. He harms no one. This provokes many people to try to force their way into his memory.
Women’s attempts to remind him of his relations with them. “I don’t know,” he always says, “it’s certainly possible.” You can take him anywhere—he doesn’t care where he is. He is rented or robbed, used and abused. But in the long run no one can put up with his equanimity, and they always take him back to his home.
Because he is always saying, “It’s all the same to me” or “Every man is the same,” “Same” has become his name.
He is positively thriving, as though his lack of memory kept him young. Generations know him, talk about him, but he doesn’t change; from father to son, from mother to daughter, it is always the same image of him that is handed down.
He is a tall, powerful man, his face set in a kind of permanent astonishment, never revealing any other expression. He approaches everyone quite openly, shying away from no one. He greets everyone with a trusting handshake. His trusting nature is like a child’s, but in this archetype of a man it is irresistible.
While getting to know him, many mistrust him and try to uncover all sorts of dark secrets. But this always proves his innocence and eventually embarrasses even the most evil-minded doubter.
People like talking to him because he doesn’t remember anything. He is the least dangerous of all father confessors. He has no possessions, but he has everything he needs. Everyone wants to be alone with him, and in this way he gets clothed and taken care of. He accumulates nothing: since he doesn’t see anything as belonging to him, he gives it all away.
A woman’s attempt to bind him to her through an object of value. She brings him a beautiful gleaming ring, then she takes it away, bringing it back again every time she sees him. At last she thinks she can leave the ring with him. But on her next visit the ring has vanished. His household consists of the property of others. His benefactors are mindful of his minimal needs and keep things stored away for him.
Though he is often talked about, he never takes part in these discussions. To make him one’s slave would be impossible since he obeys no one. At some point he must have learned speech; thus he cannot always have been without a memory. But since no one remembers this period, his background and his youth remain a mystery.
Animals approach him as if they were humans; it appears they get to know him.
Good people, always giving something away, until suddenly they bitterly regret it and hate everyone for it.
A voice that chirps, mercilessly.
The laugh of a pregnant woman: the child quickening within her.
It is a great pleasure to listen to people who have nothing to say. They ought to be what they are and not be judged for it; still less should one try to influence them. Keep your ears wide open and let it all flow in, in all its senselessness, disorder, and futility. You can make sense of it only later, in your own imagination.
He saw them as fishes swimming among one another, mouths of all sizes, totally at each other’s mercy.
Elegant, well-curried words.
Torture: the hours lost listening to people who make the same confessions, year in and year out. A new person talking about himself for the first time always amazes us.
Brecht’s preachiness as ersatz Bible proverbs: you need only to hold his sayings up against the power of the biblical ones he cites to see how dubious and poor his own are. Theater is not school, for it employs transformation as its most important method. Learning takes place only through the right kind of transformation—but this has not yet been found. Brecht objects to transformation because he knows and fears what it can do; thus his prohibition of it, his “alienation effect.”
His life, in which nothing, absolutely nothing, happened. He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.
The innocence of a person who has never murdered is precious. He will know till his last moment that he has killed no one. Let the murderers mock him! They will search heaven and hell in vain for those whom they killed. But they will never be granted the vengeance to which they would offer themselves up, and they will remain murderers for all eternity.
He laughs, out of forgetfulness.
Plato as the golden age of discourse. The conciseness of the Chinese.
She smiles at you, to laugh with the someone else.
His memory, like his heart, beating even in sleep.
A thought that swells with pride.
So it is not just the future that you want but a nobler future. Fine, why not? But what are you doing about it? Trying to smuggle your own words into it, to touch the future with your own self! What a ridiculous undertaking, what arrogance, what mindless, shameless, blind underestimation of the future!
He always sees the end in advance, so as not to begin anything.
I have never yet hated a man whom I did not feel sorry for later because the hate within me treated him so roughly.
He waits with bated breath for success, anywhere, under the earth, at the North Pole, on the moon.
Each individual perception is precious so long as it remains autonomous. But it dissolves into nothingness when absorbed into the gut of a system.
The couple’s watches: never the same time.
Joubert has seriousness, grace, and depth. These three qualities share equally in his thinking, and thus he is closer to the ancients than any other aphorist. Of particular charm is his lack of weight. His melancholy does not burden his statements but rather seasons them with compassion and kindness. Even when attacked, he is not aggressive. His modesty does not allow for viciousness; his sense of the permanence of things keeps him from all that is petty. He breathes the spiritual as if it were air in motion. He senses thoughts and words as breath or as the ascent or descent of birds.
If we really knew what happens to our inmost thoughts, we would probably avoid ever having any.
All that blather about responsibility—and now, a few months later, you see what happens to your thoughts! But maybe the arrogance lies in your insistence on the form you have given to your ideas. But are they really yours then? Aren’t you just one of many random transmitters? It is very hard not to take oneself seriously. Hard not to insist: I mean this and nothing else.
Don’t tell me who you are. I want to worship you.
1961
Your spirit has power only when it is given direction; left to its own devices, it would sing itself into despair.
How many people you have seen this week! The five historians from Berlin. The Italian actress from Australia. The young Jew from New York who worships Isaac Babel. The publisher with the most important voice in England. The mother of the deceased Otter woman. The secret hairdresser from the Abruzzi. Veza’s weepy cavalier. The Chinese pianist and his fiancée, the daughter of the famous violinist. Kafka, who came from Frankfurt to ask for the hand of his cousin. It was a lot, it was too much, and yet you were nearly smothered by yourself alone.
Mercy is a flood that destroys him completely.
That which he could lose he casts far off from himself, to keep it in his possession.
To mangle a sentence into a landscape.
For months he didn’t talk even to himself. Now words shoot out of him like knives.
We are hypocrites because we cannot forget the things we have acquired.
I would like once more to be as innocent as if I did not own a single book and hadn’t written one yet.
Every forgotten idea crops up again on the other side of the world.
To have someone happy at home, so you can be happy elsewhere.
Sometimes things get so close that they ignite each other. This illumination, coming from closeness, is what we live for.
You have not even finally settled the few things you have thought about the last thirty years. Everything is all still there. The world is untouched; no one has figured it out. But there is enough within you now to create the world from yourself. You shrink from this because you still doubt your own breadth. “Is it even enough? Isn’t it far too little?”
It is not important to tell oneself one is alone, when that’s all it is. The pose of the solitary thinker makes his existence worthless. As for thinking something just because one is alone in thinking it, not to think it at all is better. One ought not to see oneself as here and the whole worthless world there. One may have to abstain from the world periodically, but this is happiness, not bitterness. Contempt for everyone one does not know, just because one does know some others, is an infallible sign of stupidity, and the worst of our human legacy.
Those things one tries to get to the bottom of disperse into nothingness. This is one danger. But they also become knottier. This is another danger: they become heavier, harder problems.
Learn to speak again at fifty-five, not a new language but speech itself. Discard all my prejudices, even if nothing else is left. Reread the great books whether I’ve actually read them before or not. Listen to people without lecturing them, especially those who have nothing to teach me. Stop validating fear as a means of fulfillment. Struggle against death without constantly pronouncing its name. In short, courage and justice.
Splendid to think that we are steeped in secrets. The nicest thing about learning is that it multiplies the secrets.
Whoever touches power will, unawares, be contaminated by it. He cannot forget it unless he can forget himself.
He cannot shut out loathsome praise; it crawls inside him and reaches his heart.
Uncanny how all the calculations agree, as though the universe arranged itself according to science.
Subjection of the universe to the earth.
1962
His greatest satisfaction, which he constantly denies himself, is putting things in context.
He doesn’t want to describe something, he wants to be that something. If he can’t be it, he wants to sing its praises. If he can’t praise it, then he wants to divine it.
Someone who always waits for the judgments of others. When suddenly they have none, he is subsumed by old opinions.
Indignation at being admired. That long, scornful nose of hers bounces men right off. She knows that she is beautiful only when she looks somber. The tragic aspect of her face would be likable without that weapon of a nose on it.
Even from their dearest beloved the dead vanish; in the end they even forget to call on them. It is better to live so intensely that no one can die.
I will never be convinced that there is a grandeur to killing. I know what it feels like without myself having killed—it is worth less than a single breath of either the killed or the killer.
The hand that forms a single letter is mightier than the hand that kills; and the finger that has contributed to a death shall turn to dust before it has time to wither. As if it weren’t enough that men die, without their abetting death!
There no man has ever seen another; even if he sees someone daily, he does not recognize him. To recognize another person would be the most grievous insult. And this fiction is maintained in marriage. Thus, people do not have names; they feel freer without names. To be independent means to know no one. But since people can’t entirely break the habit of memory, they conceal what they know, and it feels to them like guilt.
Both are following in his footsteps; soon enough they will be kicking each other.
He cursed his dream before all the leaves had fallen from it.
Perfection admits no one.
I was nothing but a will; now I am a sound.
The age of innocence has begun, when everything new quickly fades. The spirit is a ravenous beast no more; satiated with earlier prey, it now stays true to itself.
He has the consumptive illness called praise; he is already quite ravaged by it. Praise will gallop off with him to death.
Mosaic lyrics, made from hot pebbles.
The beautiful picture of Bettina, in which she appears as an old woman. Has she here become her beloved mother, who died in the camp? The picture was taken in the Lotschental by Bettina’s husband, who last saw her mother in the camp and as her messenger came to Bettina and proposed. She became his wife and has been for fifteen years; now with the camera’s help he has been able to transform Bettina into the likeness of her mother, whose final image he bore her in his gaze.
Wouldn’t recurrence be even sadder than disappearance?
Every report of a planned, regular, recorded life fills you with guilt, and it seems to you as if you have wasted your whole life staring at the clock.
Happy when blowing into his Horn of Damnation, the Great Transformer.
Once he met a cleverer bird, capable, prudent, disciplined, and dreadfully practical. But, oh, how he prefers his own raven, foolish, obsessed, impulsive, and wonderfully boisterous!
You have to let words burst forth again—blind, evil, cruel, pitiless, and excessive—and not live in fear of every sentence coming into the hands of ten-year-old children. Responsibility is a sorry affair when it dogs your every step. Are you a king in Jukun or Ikara? You live in the jungle of today’s people, all its people, and not in the well-mannered port of England.
He has spent so much time with extinct peoples that they know him on sight.
I no longer want anything enough. I want it a little, and hardly have I taken a step in its direction than I don’t want it any more.
I am ashamed to seize an opportunity. That it is offered, that the opportunity exists, is nice—how can you then just grab it? If you’re sure of it, you don’t. Grab it, and you’ve lost it. But if you don’t grab it, you may already have lost it—and that never occurs to me.
I am too old. I hate almost nothing. I have reached the stage where you like everything that’s there. I am beginning to understand for the first time that there are philosophers who approve of everything in existence. To be sure, the disciples of death still fill me with revulsion. But I have not found an answer. I am faced with the same doubt I have always faced. I know that death is bad. I do not know what might replace it.
It is difficult to continue thinking about a book that now exists. So long as it was in manuscript, I could keep thinking about it. I was obligated by nothing. I had not, so to speak, signed off on anything. Now it is all in print: my ideas and yet not my ideas, something intermediate and embarrassing that somehow I will always have to admit to. I can only just connect with it, but I don’t like connecting with myself—I only like to connect with things that are strange and new. So now I seem to myself like a hanged man dangling in the air, knowing and feeling that my own words are the noose.
Your original sin: you opened your mouth. As long as you listen, you are innocent.
His sentences rub against and so erase each other. This drives him to despair. So he makes of every sentence its own cage.
You must get back inside your head, into its storms, its northern lights, its conflagrations. Enough of this familiar veneer of civility, this incessant self-congratulation that you are alive. Are you, then? Are you learning? Doing anything? Getting bloody?
I am sick of longing for places I already have an image of. I am sick of being astonished by words because they are inscrutably splendid. I want to seek something that I, and only I, will find. I want to feel that nothing is certain until I have it. I can’t bother with stones someone else has already piled up. Leave these games to the fair, who forget themselves in their self-assurance, to the dancers who only recognize themselves in front of mirrors, to the consumers, the travelers, the inheritors and celebrities.
Fear not your treasures turning to dust. They will decay only if you stand watch over them. Go ahead, quivering and uncertain. What you don’t know will preserve what you do.
I went home and found a fez. Whose had it been? I put it on and went for a walk. Now everyone knew me. Soon I was a celebrity. The fez cast its crimson dignity about me. What was its purpose? There was general curiosity but never disrespect: all my pursuers kept their distance. I was disinclined to take off the fez; without it, everyone would have felt humiliated. I felt how I was exalting them all with my fez. If I had foreseen the fateful consequences, I would not have shown myself as much with it on.
