The Torch in my Ear, page 35
When he lay in the sun outside his house and no longer felt like reading and closed his eyes, he never slept. He would be laughing at the people who made an effort to walk softly so as not to wake him. This was one of the methods he used to investigate their characters: the way they changed their gait when approaching and then the way they changed it when they had walked a bit and thought he couldn’t hear them anymore. But he heard them a lot sooner than they thought and also a lot later. He always had some sort of footsteps in his mind; there were people he hated because of the way they walked, and people whom he wished to be friends with because he liked the way they walked. However, he envied everyone for walking. The thing he desired most in the world was to be able to walk freely someday, and he had an idea which he confided to me, more timidly than was his wont: he felt that he could earn the ability to walk by producing a great philosophical work. “When the work exists, I’m going to stand up and walk. Not earlier. This will take a long time.”
He expected a great deal of people who could walk; he listened to steps as though they were miracles. Every new walker was to be worthy of his good fortune and excel with words that he alone and no one else could say. Marek could never get over the triviality of the words spoken by couples when they approached his wagon and thought him asleep. It was always a fresh and extreme disappointment for him when he heard their “nonsense”; he noted it and repeated the stupidest examples with seething scorn. “They ought to prohibit him from walking,” he would then say. “Such a person doesn’t deserve to walk.” But perhaps it was lucky for him that couples who approached him didn’t come out with lines from Spinoza. Although he waited for people to address him, he was very selective about whom he condescended to hear. It cost him quite an effort to pretend to be deaf (his particular strength of mind), and he was proud whenever he succeeded at demonstrating his rejection in front of a third party. As soon as someone whom he didn’t seem to hear had gone away, Marek’s face lit up. He could laugh so hard that his wagon began to surge like waves; he would then say: “He thinks I’m deaf. What’s he doing standing here! He has no right to stand at all! He feels sorry for me because he thinks I’m deaf. I feel sorry for him. What an idiot!”
He was sensitive to everything, but he was most sensitive to people who could stand and walk but didn’t realize how well off they were. He was quite aware of the effect of his large, dark eyes, and he used them for some of the movements that were denied his limbs. He would close his eyes in midsentence, breaking off so dramatically that people were a bit frightened even if they were long accustomed to his game. But no one would miss the moment when his eyelids rose very slowly and his eyes opened in majestic calm. At such times, he resembled a Christ on an Eastern icon. During this slow process of opening his eyes, he was very earnest. He was performing his own self; it was a ritual spectacle.
The word God never crossed his lips. When he was a little boy, his mother had gotten the other two children, his sister and his brother, to pray aloud for his recovery. This had filled him with despair and anger. At first, he had wept when they began to pray. Later, he interrupted them, shrieking, reviling them, reviling God, and raging so wildly that his mother got scared and finally put a stop to the praying. He was resigned to nothing. When he told me about these memories, he justified his early outbursts against God: “What kind of a God is this whom you have to ask for something! He knows about it! He should do something of his own accord!” Then he added: “But he doesn’t do it.” And you could tell by this last sentence that his expectation had not died out.
The second time I came by, I didn’t find him in front of the house. I entered. His mother had been expecting me, and she took me into the living room. He lay there in his wagon, right by the family table. A Giorgione painting hung on the back wall over the sofa: The Three Philosophers. I had recently seen the original at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; this seemed like a good copy. He spoke about it right away. I soon realized that he had received me in here in order to talk about his family. It was easier here; he could point everything out. In front of the house, it would have sounded less plausible. His father was a painter, the Giorgione copy was his work. It was his lone masterpiece, the best thing he had ever done. Nothing else of his was worth looking at. I must have seen the father already. He sometimes went on walks, flaunting his artist’s mane of hair. He would walk completely upright, a handsome man, boldly fixing his gaze on one thing or another. But there was nothing to him; at home, he merely sat around, never earning anything. Every few years, he might be commissioned to do a copy, but his copies were no longer as good as The Three Philosophers, which had been done a long, long time ago.
His mother had left us; she always left him alone with his visitors; thus he could talk about her, too. She came from the countryside. She had been a milkmaid in a small hamlet in Lower Austria. The young painter had been strutting about, a striking man with a flowing mane and a trilby, and the girls ogled him. She fell for him head over heels and became his wife, and felt heaven knows how honored; but there was nothing behind the mane, she had fallen for the strutting; that was his entire art.
The mother had to provide for the family; the father earned next to nothing. Three children came, his sister, his brother, and he, whom she loved most. Starting at the age of six, he became more and more helpless, causing her more work than an entire household. This had been very hard on his mother, he said. She had moved heaven and earth looking for a doctor to cure him. She had pushed his wagon into every hospital, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and came back over and over again—this was all she could think of.
But meanwhile, everything had changed; for the past eight years, he, Thomas, had been the provider for the family. His brother had a job, said Thomas; he was a clerk. His sister, in order to get out of the house, had married, much to his displeasure. She was a beautiful woman, he said. Everyone noticed her. She walked like a goddess—she was a dancer and actress and she could have reached the top. As children, they had been very close. His sister had watched him when his mother went to work. They shared all their secrets with one another. She read to him, and he had aroused her ambition, stoking it tirelessly. If only she had remained at home—but she couldn’t stand it. The young men who admired her and came by weren’t worthy of her, he found, and he put them down in front of her; she sensed that none of them was on his intellectual level. But then came a “painting official,” a schoolteacher; Thomas respected him least of all—“a boring fellow, but tenacious.” The teacher wouldn’t give up, and this was the man she married. Yet by then, Thomas already had his scholarship, and the entire family could live on it. It was true, by studying, he supported his family.
He told me this with scornful pride. He was scornful of his sister, who preferred being kept by her husband rather than by him; she could have lived on Thomas’s scholarship, too, if she had stayed at home. I didn’t quite understand what he meant by “scholarship.” I would have liked to ask him, but I felt it was tactless and I held back. I didn’t have to ask, however; he kept talking on his own, explaining in detail what he meant. As soon as the professors who came out to see him were convinced of his gift and forecast a philosophic future for him, they presented his case to a rich old lady who was active as a maecenas. She wasn’t interested in charity, however. She looked for very special, unique cases. Any project of hers was to benefit all mankind, not just an individual person. Professor Gomperz, and others, made it clear to her that if Thomas could only complete his education carefully and thoroughly, he would produce an intellectual achievement that no one else was capable of. What seemed like a disadvantage under the given circumstances would prove to be an advantage, and all that was required was patience and a suitable stipend. His mother, they told the patroness, was indispensable for him; if she did it right, she would have to attend to him all day long. And if Thomas were to study with all due concentration, he mustn’t think of his father as being impoverished. It was correct, of course, to regard the father as a failure, but if one didn’t let him feel all too strongly how helpless he was, then he would not cause any trouble. He wasn’t a bad person, after all, merely lamentable, like all people who rely on their legs instead of their minds and strut about instead of reading a serious book.
The lady came just once: the father was waiting for her on the sofa in front of his Giorgione. She looked at the painting for a long time and praised him for it; he had the gall not to mention that it was only a copy. She said the painting was so beautiful that she would love to purchase it—she said “purchase” not “buy,” such an elegant woman—whereupon the father rudely declared: “This painting is not for sale. It is my best work, and I will never part with it.” She had taken fright and apologized. She hadn’t meant to offend him, she said. Naturally he had to keep his best work at hand, if only to inspire him to do further works. Thomas, who was in the room, lying in his wagon, had felt like throwing in: “Wouldn’t you like to see the other paintings?” or “Haven’t you ever been to the Kunsthistorisches Museum?” When it came to what Thomas called his father’s insolence, he felt his oats. However, Thomas kept still. The lady didn’t quite have the nerve to look at Thomas, but she could tell that a heavy philosophical book was lying on the pillow next to him, and he would have liked to show her how well he could read. He had planned to read an entire page aloud to her, so she could make certain she wasn’t being swindled. But the lady was much too tactful and perhaps she was scared of his tongue—some people were scared of seeing him read with his tongue. She gave him a friendly look and asked his father whether he felt that they could halfway get along on four hundred schillings a month; if that was too little, he should simply say so. The father shook his head and said: No, no, that was quite enough, but, he added, the question was for how long. Such a course of studies could take a long time.
“As long as it takes. Let me worry about that,” said the lady. “If it is all right with you, let us establish it for twelve years, for now. That way your son does not have to feel pressured. Perhaps he will also feel like commencing his book already. People expect a great deal from him. I have heard good things about his mind from all sides. If he then wishes to continue working on his book, we can always extend the stipend for another four or five years.”
The father, instead of thanking the woman on bended knees for such faith in his son, merely stroked his beard and said: “I believe I can express my acceptance on behalf of my son.” The woman thanked him as heartily as if he had saved her life, and she then said to the father, who never did anything: “You must have a great deal to do. I do not want to keep you any longer.” She gave Thomas a friendly nod. On the way to the door, almost squeezing past his wagon, she added: “You are giving me great joy. But I am afraid I will not understand your book. I have no head for philosophy.” Then she left. Since then, four hundred schillings had come from her punctually on the first of every month. She had begun eight years ago, and she had never once forgotten to send the money.
I felt that I had never heard such a lovely story. The only thing that Thomas had committed himself to was to keep reading. Yet he would have done so in any case: there was nothing he would rather do. It must have been assumed that he might get his doctorate if at all possible. But the lady had not said one word about it. She must have known that there were difficulties involved. Where, for instance, if he ever got that far, would he take his examinations? Would the mother have to bring him to the university in his wagon or did the professors who came to instruct him (there were several) hope to obtain special permission to have him tested at home? After all, his entire education was taking place at home or, on sunny days, outside on Erzbischofgasse.
He mentioned a second teacher who came out specially to see him: this teacher gave him lessons in political economy; he was the secretary of the Chamber of Labor, Benedikt Kautsky, a son of the famous Karl Kautsky (the theoretician of the German Social Democrats). Thomas found it amusing that his two most important teachers, who had accomplishments of their own, were both sons of far more famous fathers. Heinrich Gomperz’s father was Theodor Gomperz, the classicist; his multivolumed opus Greek Thinkers had even been translated into English. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had been a member of the upper chamber of parliament and was renowned as an important speaker of the Liberal Party. “All parties are represented here,” said Thomas. “I reserve the right of independent thinking for myself and so I don’t belong to any party.”
The scene in front of the father’s Giorgione work had sufficed for him, and, consistent with the true conditions in the family, the father stayed entirely in the background. I would see him now and then when I came into the house, but he was out walking a great deal. Something of his love of nature had remained from his youth. But he couldn’t always be strolling; I don’t know where else he went. He was never to be seen in taverns, and I suspect that, notwithstanding the comments of his son, who had nothing good to say about him, the father did go to work. At home, he always happened to be sitting on the sofa in front of The Three Philosophers; one got used to seeing his head as a fourth to the other three. It didn’t look so bad next to them. In poor weather, when we had to go indoors and the father was at home, I passed the four heads in the living room and went in back to the parents’ bedroom. Thomas’s mother had pushed his wagon into this room. I was alone with him here, and we could talk unhindered, as if no one else were at home.
His mother was so deeply focused on him that you never, or at best seldom, noticed her eyes. Her gaze was always fixed on him and on the things she brought him, whether she was dripping medicine into his mouth or feeding him bite by bite. He had a good appetite; she cooked only for him; whatever the others ate was peripheral. But he never praised his food; it was proper for a philosopher to scorn anything as ordinary as food. He had developed an expression for scorn, which was a bit terrifying, because you took it personally, though you learned that it was meant for something else. The interplay of eyebrows, nostrils, and the corners of his mouth made his face look like an Oriental mask, yet he couldn’t possibly have seen such a mask. He once admitted to me that he had rehearsed the mimetic expression of scorn. I told him, half jokingly, about the impression made on me by a sentence in one of Leibniz’s letters: “Je méprise presque rien” [I despise almost nothing]. Whereupon Thomas grew angry and hissed at the Leibniz volume on his pillow: “Leibniz was lying!” He didn’t like being watched while “feeding,” as he put it. But if someone were watching him, he managed to keep the expression of scorn on his face throughout the time of his feeding. He then refused to eat the last two or three bites on his plate and said quite roughly to his mother: “Take it away! I don’t want to see it!”
She never contradicted him. She never tried to talk him into anything. Wordlessly, she took each of his directives, which were sometimes so terse and domineering that they sounded like commands. Her deepset eyes didn’t seem to be looking as she carried out his directions; she could just as easily have been blind. But in reality, his slightest motion didn’t elude her, nor did anything done in regard to him by others. There were people whom she liked, because she felt they were good for him, and others whom she hated because they depressed him. She observed his state of mind when a person left him, and as soon as she noticed that someone had been good for his ego, that person became a desired and preferred visitor. Most of all, she hated people who talked to him about traveling or athletics. There were people who felt impelled by his condition to talk about those things; they were so depressed by the sight of him that they spoke about the things in their lives that were most remote from his condition. If they did seek any rationale for this crudeness, they told themselves that they were “entertaining” him, providing him with the things he lacked most. At such times, he would listen, breathing heavily, and often laughing, which would encourage them even more.
A student, who visited him every week out of “charity,” once gave him a dramatic account of how he had won a hurdle race. He spared him no detail, and Thomas, who reported it to me years later, had not forgotten a single detail. He was in such despair when the matador left him that he didn’t want to go on living. The thermometer that his temperature had been taken with was still on the pillow; he could grab it with his tongue. He took it into his mouth and chewed it into small pieces, which he swallowed together with the mercury. But nothing happened to him. He was taken to the hospital at once. His intestines, astonishingly strong, played a trick on him; he didn’t even have pains, and he survived.
That was his first suicide attempt. Two others followed in the course of time. Since he couldn’t do anything with his arms and hands, each suicide attempt required unusual speed and decisiveness. The second time, he chewed up a tumbler and swallowed the splinters. The third time, he ate an entire newspaper. He concluded his descriptions of these attempts with tears of rage. Nothing whatsoever had happened to him either time. “I’m the only person who can’t kill himself.” He was proud of some of his “unique features,” but not this one. Didn’t I feel, he asked, that, given these circumstances, he hadn’t tried it so often?
Stumbling
With Marek, I spoke unabashedly about crowds. He listened to me in a different way from other people. He was (after Fredl Waldinger) the second person with whom I had long conversations about crowds. He didn’t have the ironic attitude that Fredl had because of his richly developed Buddhist consciousness. When I spoke to Fredl about crowds—especially in earlier years—I felt a bit like a barbarian always repeating the same thing, while he opposed me with complex and carefully defined conceptions, some of which impressed me. In particular, Buddha’s starting point, the phenomena of illness, old age, and death, had a meaningful impact on me; anything connected with death was already more important to me than crowds.
