Notes from Hampstead, page 7
How can it be that you are so struck by the tone of the Bible, whose God revolts you so completely? It is only about him. For without God, the Bible would not strike your heart so.
It must be grief for God that strikes you, sorrow for the tough, stubborn, passionate attempt to create and keep alive a creator who will bear the responsibility for our unhappiness.
For it is unbearable to think that this senseless chaos is folded up, straightened out, and ruled by no one.
The folds, the order, the rules: the Bible’s business.
A strong passion is useful in that it compels people to outwit it at the same time as they get to know it in its every detail.
He stood before his deadest departed, saying, “God is good.” He repeated it over and over, a thousand, a hundred thousand times, but it did not raise the dead.
He still says God is good, but now the dead don’t even return to him in dreams.
In the mouth of a young Jesuit priest I found God irritating partly because I did not know how how to react. But I found him particularly boring. I like reading about other gods; indeed, stories of gods interest me more than any others, but I avoid our God when I can. Yesterday the young Jesuit suddenly brought him into my room; the place felt strange to me, and I asked myself, “Where am I?”
The same evening the young Jesuit wrote to thank me. His letter was respectful, polite, and cordial. If only I knew whether letters like this are part of his discipline, arising out of missionary zeal, or whether he simply means what he says.
Through a kind of scientific discussion, in which certain names were mentioned and certain books produced, he and I established an immediate rapport. But then, before I could find out what I actually wanted to know (his daily routine), God came between us, and the young Jesuit eagerly, a bit rashly, wrapped himself in him. With this he lost all interest for me; he was transformed before my eyes into a child, a child of God, and of all human phenomena on earth, this is the one thing that bores me to distraction.
I am ashamed for people who fall for God. They are often good people. To be good themselves, these people need to have a power that names and describes goodness. To conquer their innate sinfulness, as we all try to do our own, they require obedience and prescribed exercises. They would be right were it not clear that their obedience has the character of all obedience, and since they do not understand this, they are working in the dark, transforming themselves, with enormous self-discipline, into tools.
But I have observed the tools of obedience and seen how they work. Total devotion has merit, but it must be balanced by an inborn freedom, and it is just this freedom that God cannot allow.
And so I listened to my youthful visitor’s prattle, trying not to let him see that my displeasure was with the very core of his being.
But he was also curious, in his disciplined way. He listened carefully to what I had to say and tried to translate it into categories and patterns familiar to him. I noticed how my statements, which I had already softened and made less pointed, were transformed into something quite different. It was an unpleasant process. I even condescended to speak of the “absolute,” in explaining why I would never give a name to anything that was truly unknown. But since I had said the word “absolute”—which I normally never do—anything else I could add was necessarily worthless.
Read two consecutive sentences of Kafka and you feel smaller than you ever have before. Kafka’s passion for making himself insignificant is transmitted to the reader.
The story of the man who finds women to whom he delegates all the activities that he has taken upon himself to do. I call him the slaveholder. He is a nice, friendly man, but what happens to them is that they become so swollen with all his tasks that they burst.
Asking too many questions is death to a person who feels.
The discoverer, failing now, cursed by his wife, the only one who can still bear him. But even she can no longer bear him—she carries him.
A person who invents orders to give himself so as to avoid any from others. He amasses more and more orders, conducts his affairs, lives his life according to them, until he finally thinks of nothing but them and suffocates.
What can we do with the people from our pasts, with all those we have known? They keep turning up, more and more of them, a kind of transmigration, not of souls but of faces and not in the hereafter but here. Years ago I was so astounded by their turning up in totally new places, with different ages, jobs, languages, that I was determined to write down every occurrence of this phenomenon. But I did so only rarely, and they have gotten more and more numerous. Now they are proliferating so fast that I could never record them all.
What is it about these constantly recurring people? Is there really only a limited number of possible faces? Or can our memories be organized only with the help of such resemblances?
It is of no help at all to know that a solution does not exist for the only problem that does.
The fate of the man who hated the idea of surviving: he made sure that he was survived.
Clarity, but not at the expense of life, whose end is unclear. For it would not be better if we knew that it had a destination?
It goes against my grain to see anything about the “end.” I need infinite openness and a life that doesn’t simply seem like food for worms.
The laughter of asses and that of tigers.
In the strongest passions, those that make life worth living, there is no mercy.
But his love is so great that he includes even the hope of such mercy in it. Though seeing, he is blind.
A man decides to build himself a Pantheon of the Forgotten.
He wishes to change the names that make up our tradition. He believes all revolutions run aground on their sacred names. In his view, we need not the revaluation of all values but the replacing of all names. He thinks humanity must first go through a stage of being orphaned, until those names that he would put in place of the prior ones are strong enough to stand on their own.
He starts by repudiating the great writers, who have been our staple diet for too long, and puts others in their place who are long forgotten.
He hunts for vanished religions and in their founders finds treasure: a new morality.
For him the great monuments of history—the pyramids, temples, and cathedrals—are no more than Augean stables.
The images of gods and idols are likewise hateful to him. He is his own archaeologist doing his own excavations. He finds his flowers in junk rooms and dunghills.
For him, the ancient languages that our modern ones feed on are not the most beautiful. Along the byways of history he finds other, better languages.
He shatters the dominant myths, whose misuse extends even into science, in favor of ones whose power remains unutilized.
He sees in laziness the dominant leitmotiv of history. Progress is made on crutches; we rely on the past rather than push its failed ideas away and proceed at our own pace.
But even the forgotten names, which he has substituted for the overly famous, are of use to him only as long as they are weak. As soon as they have established themselves, they are to be mercilessly removed.
To be sure, he has the young for himself, but he despises them for growing old.
He doesn’t care about other people’s appearance or about his own. He speaks in words, certainly, but doesn’t overvalue them. He is well aware of their unforeseeable, dangerous burden. He lives without caring how he lives, so he lives well.
He has followers, like everyone else with conviction, but these in particular he keeps at arm’s length.
He treats flatterers like lepers, faultfinders like friends, and grumblers like siblings.
He cannot remember even his family. His name is so unimportant to him that he does not change it.
He goes everywhere and talks to everyone. He refuses to meet with people a second time, because they have already spoken with him once.
He succeeds in recognizing no one; thus, he can be just. He doesn’t always understand himself, but he is always understood. “You said…” “I said nothing.” “But is that all you know?” “I know nothing.”
The power of this “nothing” is greater than the “something” of others, only this power is something.
He keeps no appointments and never goes to the same place twice. He regards cities, especially the great, famous ones, as random places. Rome means as little to him as London, Paris as much as New York. On pictures he always gives things the wrong names. He calls Fujiyama Mont Blanc, and Lugano Leicester. The confidence he radiates is that of impartiality. He considers nothing beautiful that once was thought to be so. In the papers the first thing he notices is destruction, but because he doesn’t approve of it, it keeps him free.
As soon as they attain power, how well they all get along. As for the others, it’s as if they did not exist.
“Rather, the wise teacher is one who makes demands of his pupil in such a way that he keeps his character flaws veiled, hidden, and secret.”
Ibn Zafar, 1169
The bungler who always gets what he does not want.
He still takes it seriously, that overused word whose hide was so scalded that it fell off long ago, never to grow back.
In the coarsest words I use to say it, the gentlest words lie hidden, untouchable.
An enemy you have to lend teeth to.
Fame is cursed when it makes a city one man’s.
He sees with painful clarity that what he brought on himself will be his fate. At least he chooses to believe that he wanted what now must come.
It could be that writers who love death can never summon up the combative toughness that the hatred of death provides. Since they have no objection to death, they become spiritually flabby. Death doesn’t trouble them, so nothing compels them to represent death in their work.
Now, there are writers who appear to accept death, so as to trick it, like Schopenhauer. In their inmost selves they remain deeply opposed to it, and this is betrayed in the way they write.
Pause after pause, and in between, quadrangles of words like fortresses.
He is proud that within him there is such a ferment of activity that future generations will never ossify in him.
All the people of the world, all the young people, came to Hampstead to see him.
Only those who can be bothered live. If you can’t be bothered, you have already died.
Someday the prophets will realize that they see only into the past.
Nothing is so antiquated as power. Even faith is more modern.
I have read all the myths and sagas, avoiding those of the Jews. For twelve years the volumes have been standing by the door in my home. I have walked right by them every day, never thinking to open them. Have I had contempt for them? Have I feared them? I don’t think it has been contempt. I am afraid of everything Jewish, afraid of falling under its sway. The well-known names, the age-old destiny, the Jewish way of questioning and answering gets into the very marrow of my being. But how can I be open to everything else if I become too absorbed with that which I already am?
I have been living in these sagas for the past few days and cannot get enough of them. I force myself not to read more than a hundred pages a day. If I had my way, I would do nothing else night and day but read and reread them one by one until I knew the contents of all five volumes by heart. I love the variations on a single story, elaborating what is really always the same. What I have found is the closest thing to Kafka—he has written the sequels to these stories. But they are also my stories; in every exaggeration I recognize my own spirit. I prefer the God of these stories to the one in the Bible—less of a zealot, more human, with a great deal of talk about animals. The animals in the Bible come off badly. But the best thing is the variations on identical themes, as if the tradition contained multiple meanings, with all the interpretations arrayed alongside one another, of equal worth. The moral, pervading everything absolutely, commands our respect. It is never shallow, never sounds preachy. It is both lesson and enlightenment. We feel ourselves in the company of a few sage men, thinking men who wish to be just, and I have been looking for such men my whole life. I have found just one, Sonne, and so everything I read here sounds as if it came from him.
As Adam still lay on the ground, a lump of clay, God pondered: “Shall I leave him thus?” He was pleased with the well-formed shape. If it breathed would it do evil? “Perhaps he does not deserve my giving breath to him?” For God was not omniscient; all that he created was independent of him. Nothing was predetermined, and all things came the way they wished. There was not even a louse that didn’t crawl as it liked. And even the gazelle outran the lion when it cared enough to do so. For God had never imagined ruling over Creation. He would work his will and make things with it, and when they came to life and ran off, that was fine with him. Nor did he much want to remember all that he made. He wanted innovation: this and only this excited and amused him. God was alone, he was always alone, and all the stories about his companion are invention. One need only imagine what it was like to be alone. Would, say, a human have found it any easier? One comes upon all kinds of thoughts when alone, and these thoughts of God became Creation.
The excess fat in my works will turn rancid. Only a few sentences will remain. But which will they be?
The prophets deplore most deeply that which they themselves have brought to pass. How could they admit to themselves and grasp that their fears were justified?
The first truly human being would be one who never killed and never wished death for himself.
That the hubris of passion leads to madness: how can you revere the Greeks so if you did not learn that from them?
1967
The vilest letters he answers conscientiously. To serious ones he makes no reply at all. And why does he so carelessly squander the rare respect of their authors? He is totally fascinated by those who hate him. He counts his haters in every country and carefully decodes for himself what they have against him. How much he agrees with them! How much he understands them! They make him feel proud: how dangerous he is! He hears their words in seven dozen languages and translates them into his own. There are never enough: he is always hoping for more.
A man whom I had been avoiding used to go about on three words. The fourth was gone, but he enjoyed limping. He got around better than if he were whole. Sometimes he would sit at the roadside mending and cleaning things. If one of his words gave him trouble, he put it in his mouth. Once a dog bit him in his best word, but its rabies did no harm; the other two words were afraid, though. This is the state I found him in. I heard a word foaming at the mouth and stopped in my tracks, and soon this wreck was at my side. The owner politely asked me for help. I took it on my shoulder and couldn’t get rid of it again. Now I am carrying the three words that carry him—I hear them whining for alms.
The believer guards his mistrust so as not to drown in happiness.
He is itching to mix sentences together till none means a thing.
He makes order for two months and then produces two sentences. In chaos, sentences feel poisonous.
He does not believe he will ever go silent. He puts his faith in the turbulent passion of words.
To sift one language through another: the sense and nonsense of translation.
Grieving for what is lost, as if we had destroyed it ourselves.
He was so good that no one ever remembered his name.
She kills every man who won’t love her. But she also kills every man who does.
“Nothing pleases me more than presenting a totally false picture of myself to those people I have taken into my heart. Perhaps this is unfair, but it is daring and, so, correct.”
Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten
Those who maintain their simplicity while avoiding mere cleverness will find justification in the eyes of history. Those who cultivate their cleverness till they attain all that is due to the simple, posterity will view as scum.
A person wounds himself to see blood flow. A person kills himself to kill.
All those who despise him because he has never killed anyone. D. was of the opinion that only someone who has killed another is human.
The gap between the priestly castes and the castes of warriors and killers was certainly enormous, by its very nature. But these same priests still killed animals for sacrifices.
Are there not dreadful forces at work even in those who could never kill under any circumstances, forces that could gradually kill those nearest them?
Should we not have one completely false relationship in our lives, to make the other ones true and genuine?
He wraps everything he does inside something he has never done.
The parasite’s problem: the life of his host, and thus his own, is threatened. He does not know what would be best for him. Has he stored up enough to start his own career, free of the host’s control? Should he not store up more as fast as possible? Should he do everything possible to keep his host alive a little longer? Shouldn’t he at least be present when the host dies, to give the report of the “sole survivor”? Since the threat, he panics if people stop seeing him for a while. He makes calls daily, but no one answers. Will he eventually have the courage to lie in wait outside someone’s house, “out of concern”? He feels no gratitude; who is grateful for subsistence? He feels only resentment toward a subsistence that is suddenly being taken away.
So I have been living among the English for thirty years without knowing the nastier types among them. This fact does an injustice to the Viennese, among whom I knew just this type especially well.
The evil eyes attach themselves to God’s wounds and are happy.
The man who does not live to see the murders of the future: how he hates his contemporaries!
He delves back into the centuries, retrieving that which they would rather have forgotten.
People were trained in special schools to dwell in the cities of old. There were Venetians, Toledans, Pompeians, Parisians. They walked about in period costumes and ate and drank only what was appropriate. They lived in their little dollhouses and were watched night and day. They had been told to act as though they were not aware of being watched. In the pubs they drank with gusto in front of a crowd of tourists. They were permanent employees, not allowed to take tips. They intermarried and produced children, but these were later taken from them. In the Sorbonne the students held debates in Latin; there were even goliards. The attrapes of Montmartre were very popular in Paris. In Venice the women bought theater tickets while masked, and the Biennale, as always, was just round the corner from Tintoretto. In Toledo, El Greco’s house was balanced on real swords. In Pompeii those who had suffocated lay in every other house, some in the street, obscene epithets still on their lips. Everything was real, and visitors came by the millions.
