The Secret Heart of the Clock, page 9
Do you want to forget him whom you never found?
It is undeniable: what interests him most in the ancient cultures are their gods.
Astonishment of the deceived serpent: the apple’s inextinguishable remains.
“Life experience” does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life.
With the slowing down of memory you begin to lose all the things you invented for yourself. All that’s left of you are the conventional generalities, and you take up their cause with vigor as if they were discoveries.
This trick of stocking up on reading matter for future centuries.
An animal that saves humanity from destruction. —An animal, and the memory it preserves of extinct humanity.
He refines his impressions until they are so thin that they can’t apply to anyone else.
* * *
The destroyer of tradition who contributes the most to its preservation.
He has become more defenseless against death. The faith to which he was committed offered no protection. He was not permitted to defend himself.
But now others were there, with him. Did he not defend them either? Why is it that most of them have been cut down and he is still there? What secret, disgraceful relation prevails here, unknown to him?
If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word “God,” merely because it was always there.
There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure.
Something of this impure substance has been present, from the very beginning, in laments for the dead.
There is more than one reason for working with characters. One of them, the important and right one, is directed against destruction. The other, the worthless one, has to do with a self-love that wants to see itself variously reflected.
There is an interplay between both these reasons; their relationship determines whether one’s characters are universally valid or vain.
The heart has become too old and longs to go everywhere.
Your “definitive” statements are the least conclusive of all. But what’s vague, even careless, acquires substance by virtue of what it lacks.
Someone who proves what he least believes.
* * *
Back to closed-off, calm sentences that stand securely on their feet and don’t drip from all their pores.
What do you feel like when you close up the wall between you and the future?
Musil is my ratio, as many Frenchmen have always been. He doesn’t panic, or doesn’t show it. He stands up to threats like a soldier, but he understands them. He is sensitive and imperturbable. Whoever is terrified of softness can find refuge in him. One is not ashamed at the thought that he is a man. He is not just an ear. He can insult with silence. His insult is comforting.
Always occupied with the wrong things. Do you know the right ones?
The same fear for seventy years, but always for others.
Without reading, no new thoughts occur to him. Nothing connects with anything anymore. Everything totters in its separate domain. A loose landscape of stalks that stand far apart, not dense like grass.
He can’t get it out of his head that everything might be useless. Not just he alone, everything.
Nevertheless he can only go on living as if it were not useless.
Pj.: I see the room. I see his bed, his rotting teeth. How did he manage to live so long. I have never asked myself that about anyone else. He nibbled at the necks of elderly women, they let him. In Paris I once saw him in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, mocking the students mercilessly, his only hardness, otherwise he was gentle and soft. I have not seen Pj. for at least ten years, maybe longer. But earlier, when I came to Paris, he treated me as if we were old acquaintances, he was the only one who called me by my first name. We had almost nothing in common, even though he treated me in such an open and generous manner. I knew he had been in the camps. He didn’t mind accepting honors for that. But the real liberty he took was in refusing to fit into anything, any rule, any marriage, any course of events, any clothes. Everything he wore hung loosely about him, threadbare giveaways, and since one never saw him dressed in anything other than these wide flapping garments, there was something clown-like about this man who was always smiling.
He lived in Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead” but he lived alone. He knew that was a large part of his attraction. He had been released and was still there. He smiled and grinned at his freedom. He seemed happy to me. Perhaps that was why, after my brother’s death, I could not stand him anymore.
You will not escape any signification. You will be distorted in every possible way. Maybe you only existed in order to be distorted.
A great many people can live only in names. They acquire the names of well-known persons and use them incessantly. Then it almost doesn’t matter what they say about them, so long as they just mention their names. Names are their wine and spirits. They are not afraid of using them up, there’s a steady supply of other names, they’re always on the lookout for new ones, and in a pinch they’ll take one from the obituary.
Pawnbrokers for fame.
Nations discover what they owe each other. Feasts of indebtedness.
A year of islands.
A place where no famous man ever set foot, a chaste place.
* * *
The treasure of the seen as the treasure of good works.
Justify memories? —Impossible.
“When a grape sees another grape, it ripens.”
—BYZANTINE SAYING
“His face radiated the same kind of grave charm when he told with intense delight how he had once held a swallow in his hands, peered into its eyes, and felt as though he had looked into heaven.”
—WASIANSKI: IMMANUEL KANT IN Seinen Letzten Lebensjahren
The most difficult thing for one who does not believe in God: that he has no one to give thanks to.
More than for one’s time of need, one needs a God for giving thanks.
A bad night. I don’t want to read what I wrote during those hours. No doubt it was weak, it was not permissible, but it calmed me.
How much may one tell oneself for the sake of calming the mind, and what are its continuing effects?
You are not the only one who does not forget. How many equally sensitive people have you hurt, who will never get over it.
No one understands the subterranean spadework of anger.
They allowed him the choice of one limb that would not be eaten: grateful cannibals.
Each time, before every rebirth, he rebelled.
* * *
The ones who still interest him most among the ancient peoples are the Egyptians and the Chinese: the scribes.
Beauties, yes, but not in the language in which you write, in other languages.
He doesn’t understand anyone he hasn’t insulted.
He imagines how old he would be if no one close to him had died.
To live in secret. Could there be anything more wonderful?
A region, as large as Europe, inhabited by four people.
What is solitude, he asks, and how many people would one have to know before it would be permissible to be alone, and is it a reward one has to serve like a sentence, and will it be followed by one punishment among many?
It turns out that creation has yet to take place, and we, we seem to be there in order to prevent it.
At every feeling, he catches himself red-handed.
Don’t sharpen your thoughts to a point. Break them off in their nakedness.
The great thing about Schopenhauer is the way he was formed by a very few early experiences which he never forgot, which he never allowed to be distorted. Everything that came later is nothing but solid decoration. He isn’t hiding anything beneath it, consciously or unconsciously. He reads in order to confirm the early impressions. He never learns anything new, although he is always learning. Even in a hundred years he would not have exhausted the early material.
* * *
Every day someone else tries to bite off a piece of his name.
Doesn’t anyone know how bitter that tastes?
He recollects everything he hasn’t experienced.
Say thank you? No. But shower them with thanks!
“… and just as they went into raptures over the unconscious when that was fashionable, now they will go into raptures over aristocratism, because that is in fashion.”
—PAUL ERNST, FR. NEITZSCHE, 1890
That those who understand the horror of power don’t see to what extent power makes use of death! Without death, power would have remained harmless. They go on and on, talking about power in the belief that they’re fighting it, and leave death by the wayside. They think it’s natural and therefore of no concern to them. It’s no great shakes, this nature of theirs. I always felt bad in the presence of nature when it pretended to be inalterable and I believed it to be so. Now that its alterability is showing up wherever you look, I feel even worse, for those performing the alterations don’t know that there are things that must never be changed, under any circumstances.
Envisioning the threat does not diminish the significance of the past for him; on the contrary, he follows its traces back further, as if there one could find the rupture, the fault line, knowledge of which would enable one to meet the threat with good fortune.
But there are many fault lines, and each one proclaims itself the only one.
Juan Rulfo: “A dead man doesn’t die. On All Souls’ Day one talks to him and feeds him. The deserted widow goes to the grave of her dead husband, reproaches him for his adulteries, abuses him, threatens to take revenge. Death in Mexico is not a sacred and alien thing. Death is the most ordinary thing there is.”
…
“And what, Mr. Rulfo, do you feel when you write?”
“Pangs of conscience.”
If everything collapses: it has to be said. If nothing is to remain—let us at least not exit obediently.
I feel no weakness as long as I consider what I am still there for. As soon as I stop thinking of that, I feel weakness.
He feels violated by people, and animated by images.
Soutine: “I once saw the village butcher slit open the neck of a goose and let the blood run out. I wanted to scream, but his cheerful look throttled the sound in my throat.”
Soutine observed his throat and continued: “I still feel that scream here. When as a child I drew a primitive portrait of my teacher, I tried to liberate myself from this scream, but in vain. When I painted the dead ox, it was still this scream I was trying to get rid of. I still haven’t succeeded!”
—SOUTINE TO EMILE SZITTYA
There is a terrible power in the intolerance with which one perceives people, as if one were shutting their mouth with both hands to prevent them from biting. But they don’t always want to bite, how can one know what they want if one forces them to keep their mouth shut? What if they want to say something that can never be said again? What if they just want to moan? To exhale?
Everything is missed, the most innocent, the best, because one is afraid of their teeth.
He was proud of not knowing the way. Now he is weak and looks at the road.
* * *
What he most hated about history was its revenge.
No wonder you prefer the old chronicles—they know so little.
All the forgotten ones came to him to pick up their faces.
The words of praise that besmirch the purest things.
Should one from time to time commit treason against oneself, i.e., acknowledge the impossibility of a beginning and draw the conclusions? Why does one like those people so much more who are not able to do that, who, as it were, believe themselves to death?
For some confusions there is no religion.
To stop biting down, to leave the mouth of the sentences open.
The poet whose art resides in his lack of detachment: Dostoevsky.
One expresses one’s time most completely by what one doesn’t accept about it.
He never asked God.
He wants clarity only where he means to offer a glimpse. Everywhere else a questioning darkness.
It’s possible that the form of Crowds and Power will turn out to be its strength. By continuing the book, you would have destroyed it with your hopes. As it stands now, you force the readers to search for their hopes.
He wants to be selfless without denying his work. The squaring of the poet.
(1983)
HE PRETENDED TO EAT so as not to embarrass his host. In his country, the people had long lost the habit of eating, and one did not hear the screams of slaughtered animals. There one lived on air, it was sufficient nourishment, its intake was not limited to special times of the day, one never knew that one was eating, and dishes, knives, and forks served only as archaic decorations. For voyages into the lands of the eaters, the people had learned the gestures of the barbarians like an exotic language, and knew how to pretend to be hungry without actually eating anything.
Enemies, he says, and his desert takes on life. The sun stabs and hovering birds die of thirst.
There the people are most alive while dying.
* * *
There a person can keep himself going with a nickname no one else knows.
There the people walk about in rows; it’s considered indecent to show oneself alone.
There everyone who stutters must also limp.
There the house numbers are changed every day so that no one can find his way home.
There one has someone else for pain, one’s own doesn’t count.
There it’s considered impudent to say the same thing.
There each sentence connects with another. Between them lie a hundred years.
All the religions cut into readable pieces, strung in rows like dried fruit, deprived of their breath and thereby distorted.
A teaching can be so true that one discards it for that reason.
How wonderful Buddhism appears compared to our life-negators!
Disgust with life, but a thousand tales of rebirth.
It would be beautiful to disappear. Nowhere to be found. It would be beautiful to be the only one to know that you have disappeared.
One who arrests himself at every corner.
What you wish for most—how modest!—is an immortality of reading.
* * *
He grieves for every word that dies with him.
To understand just one name.
The most momentous aspect of Aristotle: his minuteness of detail.
“To torment snakes, the children put them in a sack full of quicklime and then pour water on top of them; the hissing of the snakes as they suffer the agony of burning is called by the children the laughter of the snakes.”
An artificial leg for a gazelle. It scratches itself with it.
The honors line up and grab their candidates.
The child thinks of nothing. It is happy. It watches my pencil and smiles.
The late religions, and you will know nothing about them. Perhaps they are religions without sacrifices.
So many people whom you couldn’t take seriously wished you well, and how many whom you did take seriously didn’t want anything to do with you!
What is appealing in the idea of reincarnation is the notion that animals can thereby acquire souls and achieve a high rank (though not as high as human beings, for it is a punishment for a soul to be incarnated in an animal body).
It is less acceptable that by reincarnating as an animal, the soul turns into a completely different creature and then remains that creature for the rest of that life. The transformation, attractive in itself, should be free and not compulsory. Above all, one should always have the option of returning to oneself the way one is now in this life. So the main accent, for me, is always on this life now, it is a center of the world that I would like to see preserved as a center, I cannot accept its transience; not even if the soul, burdened with its actions, were to continue its existence. But when I say “center,” I certainly do not see it as the only or most important center, but as one among countless others, of which each is important.
My “obstinacy” consists of not being able to consign a single life to extinction; to me each one is sacred. But this has nothing to do with the merit, the brilliance, the respect someone may have acquired in the course of his life. The notion according to which souls of a lower order must serve as nourishment for higher ones strikes me as despicable.
The hope must be sustained and nourished that every soul is of value not only for itself but might also, in some way that can never be foreseen, acquire significance for others or even for all others.
As soon as reincarnation is connected with karma, it becomes a predetermined order, none of the transformations still lying ahead is free, it is a compulsion of ceaseless dismemberment forever. But what makes true transformation wonderful and invaluable for human beings is its freedom. Since it is possible to be transformed into anything, i.e., in all directions, it is impossible to predict where one will go. You stand at a crossroad that opens out in a hundred directions and—this is the most important thing—you have no idea which one you will choose.
The planning nature of man is a very late addition that violates his essential, his transforming nature.
Everything is occupied and the old places are swarming.
A letter that makes you happy. Right after it, a phone conversation with the writer of the letter, and he didn’t write it at all.
The fear of God has become God’s fear of us, and it is so great that he is hiding and no one can find him. He fears the brazen face of man and that he, whom he created, might put a familiar arm around his shoulders and comfort him, the creator. “Do not fear, we are still there, your creatures will protect you!”
Unknown to all, the secret heart of the clock.
