The Secret Heart of the Clock, page 6
At this point, reading no longer achieves anything. It grasps nothing. It trails off into the mist.
Wilted or frozen thoughts.
The liar’s candor.
Shorter and shorter, until he no longer understands himself.
“Rahab seduced every man who merely said her name.”
No way of combining the lives of several people into one?
A place where everyone knows you but you don’t know anyone.
After a life full of fear he succeeded in being murdered.
To note the point where one accepts death.
Morality is narrow if one knocks against it. The real morality has become one’s skeletal structure.
* * *
Threatening others with one’s own death—one of the most important tools for living among people.
A person who thinks a lot about death cannot always keep silent about it. How not to use it as a threat? Should he pretend to be immortal without believing it? Should he disguise the frailty of old age as health and vigor? How does one pretend to be healthy? How does one affect strength?
To seek an unnamed piece of earth. There is none.
What has been frequently told begins to resemble Homer, because it was told most frequently.
A “modern” man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he had nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.
In memories there is a great deal that has been told many times, that has acquired its definite form over the years, that changes only a little; one might call it the tradition of a life.
There are other things which you never thought about again, that are only now summoned up in the process of writing, and which, as they write themselves onto the page, appear so fresh and newly painted that their very aliveness makes you doubt them a little. Yet even as you doubt them you know how true they are, and it is only the boldness with which they establish themselves, their irrefutability, that gives rise to doubt: how is it possible for something one has never thought of before to be so definite in all its details?
Some people expect you to express the doubt you so rarely acknowledge. You’re supposed to say that you had doubts, even if that has no bearing upon the origin of the memory. For the memory comes with absolute suddenness and certainty and is simply there, and the doubt only arises because of this certainty, a completely uninfluential by-product, an event in the distribution of energy and in no way connected with the Gestalt of memory.
Often it is those who think they know what one is supposed to remember who expect you to emphasize and linger on your doubt, as if the one who spells out his doubts were more truthful for that. In reality he is just weaker and preempts the doubts of others with his own. What he dresses up for this purpose is not truth but untruth, he does not dare to present himself to others unadorned, unprettified by doubt.
Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.
The most infectious aspect of the Bible: praise concentrated on God.
Nothing is known about a child’s future: therefore, many parents try to lure children into certain professions, activities they are familiar with. They want to be able to foresee more of their children’s future. When they succeed in making them resemble themselves, they think they know what will happen to them.
Actually anything can happen, since none of the outer circumstances under which the child will eventually live can be known in advance.
Prophecy is malicious deception. The prophet’s power resides in malice. All transgressions fill him with rancor. He cannot undo them and pins a threat to each one. So many transgressions, so many threats; there are unfortunately more than enough. Can you imagine anything more disgusting than a prophet?
But why call the prophet a deceiver? The prophet’s obsession is his legitimation, and he takes his threat seriously.
The deception lies in the belief in his calling, it begins with self-deception. But once he has found an audience, he will use any deception to keep that audience. He is in thrall to his own warning voice.
He kept on asking me questions until he forgot who I was.
People who write about death as if it were a thing of the past.
To be another, another, another. As another, you could see yourself again, too.
The last pencil has been eaten.
A person who stays alive only because he was insulted.
A whale full of believers.
I don’t know what it is about truth. I feel that my whole life is being devoured by it.
Where does my truth flee to when I lie there, rigid with death? I fear for the fate of my truth, not that of a soul.
The burden of the “significant” person: humility parcels.
Even if the head should become clear again, it won’t come up with anything better than oracles.
Mourning despite the futility of it? Could that be its meaning?
A person who has never noticed a funeral procession.
Insights you didn’t dare have. They remained stuck in a kind of limbo.
In order to stay alone, he feigns a trembling infirmity.
* * *
A mob of yawners.
I don’t believe there is anyone who knows what words are. I don’t know, either, but I sense them, they are my substance.
All the works he announced, he announced only in order to write others.
He is happy only when he reads. He is even happier when he writes. He is happiest when he reads something he didn’t already know about.
“All over again” no longer exists. The watershed has been crossed.
He is saying the same thing, only the vapor of his breath is different.
It does not help to tell oneself that one no longer retains anything new; what matters is the apparent bumping up against the old; this collision is the last thing that happens.
Maybe the purpose is merely to revitalize the old that has been lying fallow; it is jolted awake. Even if nothing inside him changes, something is set into motion.
With regard to names, I have not yet begun: I know nothing about names. I have experienced them, that’s all. If I really knew what a name is, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of mine.
To be one of the powerful is a bitter thing, even if it’s only later that one joins them, after one’s death.
One wishes to be praised, but what one craves is enmity.
* * *
You are now so averse to coming to grips with the thirties (as you did most recently with the twenties) that it’s probably unavoidable.
Whatever you try to avoid at any price is surely coming to you.
With his earliest life he acquired an audience for his later life.
And rightly so, for it all started back then, and with great power.
Death was present in every form: as threat, salvation, event, and sorrow, as an ever-changing guilt through the years. Thus he acquired the strength to push it away. And so he still spends his days, pushing it along before him.
The reputation-trimmer.
Now learning becomes your master: it is futile.
Singing filth.
He gives the words a year’s respite.
Animals are becoming more and more mysterious to me, perhaps because I think I know something about people.
I am not capable of disregarding anything, anything that is alive.
The observation, the unexpected observation: An orangutan took away his fear. The otherness that was more important, more remarkable, more incomprehensible than oneself.
Should one want to know nothing? No one can do that. Should one not want to know more? One’s habits are too strong for that. To lose more and more, to watch oneself forgetting; to heave a sigh of relief at the sight of some liberty, to stagger up to it joyfully, for one has never seen it before; to grow lighter and smile and breathe as if in syllables, for words are already too long.
I have gone to the animals and awakened again in their presence. It makes no difference that they like to eat as much as we do, for they don’t talk about it. I believe this will be the last, the very last thing in my life that still makes an impression on me: animals. I have never been anything but astonished by them. I have never comprehended them. I always knew: I am that, and yet each time it was something else.
What was it about life—which you have known, after all—that aroused your enthusiasm? Its persistence in memory.
The names of cities and how in old age they become more urgent, more splendid.
How many dead can one endure once one has rejected the baseness of survival once and for all?
He talks to the sun, and the child listens. Now the child speaks and he hears the sun.
A man who has never made a word. He is not mute, but he never makes a word. Does it cost him a great effort? Is it easy for him? Never a word, not a single one. He hears what one says to him, and whatever he likes, he accepts. But what he doesn’t like, he covers with silence. A man, so happy that nothing can harm him: he need have no fear of his own words.
A terrible man searching for terrible ancestors.
The story of my life is not really about me. But who will believe that?
* * *
To sleep in advance, preparing for a second half of life when one never sleeps at all.
A man who after seventy years gets rid of all correspondence. What is left of him? The documents of this life are its greatest forgery. There is nothing more difficult than to ferret out the truth despite this forgery.
Is it laziness if you leave all the various parts of yourself scattered about, wherever they happen to be?
To cut a sect right through the middle.
Everything unfinished was better. It kept you suspended and dissatisfied.
For the sake of breathing he lapsed back into storytelling.
No poem can be the true image of our world. The true, the appalling image of our world is the newspaper.
“And death vanishes from the community of creatures.”
—HYPERION
He takes leave of the gods, that is the most difficult thing.
He is chockful of knowledge. He knows nothing. And still he wants to know.
The giant Olmec head: space for a calendar.
“He is a lesser figure than X”—how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in, a wood louse.
Being a critic in order to be able to say “minor” and “lesser.”
* * *
Fame is added to fame, but the poor remain poor.
For breakfast the cup of tears.
The true critic, who is rejuvenated by his subject.
Little man changing horses.
They almost killed him: with the word “success.” But he resolutely took it into his hands and broke it.
One of the words you always avoided like the plague was “object.” You were more at ease with “subject.”
The animating quality in Gogol is his heartlessness. It is as great as his fear. He scoffs in order to escape his fear, but the fear never sleeps.
I do not find it difficult to let myself be deceived. But I find it difficult not to show that I am aware of it.
Now he sees others fingering his life. “Savages,” he says, and does not consider himself one.
To pass away in the shortest sentence.
Fame sweeps in double the amount that envy cuts away.
Even the things you know and have wanted and attained, even these slip away. It’s like letting everything drop to the floor. You release everything that was once part of you and surrender it to the earth’s gravity.
To recall your promises; you have made many in the course of your life and left them forgotten and unfulfilled.
If you could awaken them, you would be alive again.
* * *
In the end, people compare you with everything you have worshipped and held high above yourself. It’s called old age.
Attempt to transform oneself from a precious thing into something worthless.
Ingratiating oneself with the dead. Do they notice?
Love letters to a specimen of handwriting.
One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions.
If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.
He needs a place where he is pitied for not having achieved anything.
He sucks at the works of others, but he never reaches their marrow.
The issue, for him, is who he is saying something wrong about, not the fact that he’s wrong.
Homage, not too late
In Geneva, already during the reading, I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything. No more measuring, but the thing itself, the ideas, turns, convolutions, blows. The room was full, there were no empty seats. As always when I give a reading I noticed many faces, but again and again I returned to the preternaturally white head in front of me, which was not only curious but—I sensed this clearly—wanted to be seen. I would have liked to know who he was; throughout the reading, which lasted a little more than an hour, I was preoccupied with this head, which—it seemed to me—was that of an eighty-year-old man. I did not speak for him, but he was the only one I noticed who immediately grasped and weighed every sentence.
Right after the reading, a tall middle-aged lady, who had sat next to him and seemed to be taking care of him, emerged from the milling crowd and addressed me: “I want to introduce you. This is Ludwig Hohl.” I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might come, but now I was especially glad that the intense white head I had fallen in love with belonged to Ludwig Hohl. —The crowd withdrew from the auditorium into an adjacent room where there was a buffet; to get there, one had to squeeze through a rather narrow doorway. This gave me the first opportunity to insist on giving him precedence. He hesitated; I insisted; he finally said, with some embarrassment: “All right, I’m the older one!” and made a step forward. I said: “No, not because of that, I don’t think you are the older one.” I happened to know that he was a few months older; there was something silly about this part of our exchange, but I had achieved what I wanted: it was more than obvious that I revered him. Right after that, others approached me, people I knew and didn’t know; we were separated, and when he saw that we would not get together so soon, he sat down with his guardian at the only table in the room and waited.
I tried to traverse the short distance separating us, but was constantly drawn into new conversations. A few times I managed to look in his direction; he had a small sheet of paper in front of him and was sternly pondering something as he wrote, but I noticed it was just a few words, many would not have fitted onto the paper. When I finally reached him, he handed me the sheet; beneath it, as I noticed only now, was a second sheet, also covered with writing. He explained that these were two different notes he had written in the course of one or two years, in response to The Human Province. He had tried to reconstruct them from memory but wasn’t sure they were exactly right.
How elegantly he had reciprocated the precedence I had given him at the door. He had shifted the “contest” to the only meaningful arena, that of written notes, and he paid homage to my Province as I had to his person. Possessed by undeserved honors, one wants to give homage where it is due.
It was late and we were the last to leave the building where the Red Cross had been founded. At the gate downstairs I forced him for the last time to step out before me. He didn’t object too much, since he knew his much more substantial gesture—the two sheets of paper—to be in my safekeeping. I had put them in my pocket as something very precious, although I had not yet fully taken them in word for word. We took leave of each other on the street.
That was February 16, 1978. On November 3, 1980, he died.
You shy away from taking too much with you. You want to unpack a few things. Since you know that almost everything will remain unpacked, you want to destroy it.
Unbearable idea: dragging heavy luggage from one world into the other or from here into the void.
Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?
In a thousand years: a few numbered animals of a very few species, rare and coddled like gods.
To know the number of steps one was allotted from the beginning.
The number of heartbeats and breaths.
The number of bites.
He is so unsure of the future that he hesitates to just name it. For a long time it was a burden to him; before that, an obsession; still earlier, when he was young, an intoxication. How burned out you are, future, where are you, you are nowhere. Who would want to avoid you, now that you’re gone? Who could still say: “I am planning” without being mocked by his entrails?
More, more, more, least.
Where are you, friend to whom I could tell the truth without plunging you into despair?
There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.
To recover in an hour what was left undone for eighty years. This would require that one reach the age of eighty.
Chinese exhibition: Everything from there gets more and more astonishing. No one will come to the end of it in this brief life. But I tell myself, not without pride, how long I have known about China. Only the Greeks were there for me even earlier, but not more than six or seven years earlier, and if I accept the earliest reports about Marco Polo, they even came at the same time. The fact is that for about sixty years I have been carrying an idea of China in my head, and when it changes, it means that it is becoming more complex and more weighty.
