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.
The first several days I felt proud but calm. There was a certain positive tension, but it was containable. I did, though, note the anxious look an old woman gave me when her grandchild, an impressionable little girl, pointed her finger toward my fez and began to cry softly. I thought, she must want it, but I didn’t dare kneel down for her to play with it. I bowed my head slightly, swaying the hat gently. At first the child was silent, then she burst into tears. Her sobs were heartbreaking, and I pulled away, embarrassed by the unseemly commotion she was making. I saw groups of people whispering on the other side of the square, but as I approached them they fell stonily silent. A dog put its tail between its legs and slunk away. A young woman fell to her knees in front of me and begged the fez for its blessing. How could I have withheld from her the very thing she so longed for? With a nod of my head I granted her wish; she clasped my knees and fell into a swoon. I was very moved, but got away somehow and left her lying there in bliss. How little, how little a human being needs. For him God can even take the form of a fez.
I so often agree with Tolstoy’s way of thinking: how is it possible that his manner of expression disappoints and repels me? It irritates me that he forgoes surprise. For clarity and simplicity he states at the very outset how he will end things. The moral is there from the beginning; he never forgets it, nor does he change it. But he really ought to tell the story as if he had forgotten it and lost it; he should have forgotten it in the course of telling the story. Its sudden rediscovery would then be a revelation for the reader instead of being a storybook moral.
But one should not forget that he knew that most Russian people of his time were illiterate. So he may have viewed his task too broadly, deciding that he had to create books that would enable people to comprehend morality without outside help, each person for himself.
But he was also led astray by overplaying the significance of simple relationships. He liked to see people as simple, which they are not. Like all people, he was basically opposed to lies, to transformations. But this way of thinking ignores a major characteristic of humanity, and any further ideas that may be expressed are boring, as if meant for creatures who don’t exist: the great advantage of the Greeks, whose learning starts with the Odyssey, a “lie” that here seems fortunate: namely, transformation.
Tolstoy cannot dictate laws to men since his whole critique of humanity is simply the residuum of his own past life, once rich and colorful. And it is just this, life’s richness and color, that people will not be cheated of.
The day before yesterday, late: Sonia, a story reminiscent of Grimmelshausen. The father, a Hungarian landowner in Slovakia, the mother a Jew, three daughters (of whom I now know Enid and Sonia). The father always in his library. His talks with Sonia, the strongest daughter, during the second half of the war, his certainty of coming catastrophe. He sent two of his daughters to Budapest—Sonia studied agriculture at the university in Altenburg. Her last visit to the estate: she was never to return. Her parents’ last postcard: “We are going to Komorn in a truck.” A student who she knows is half-Jewish but who has false papers warns her she is in danger. Sonia demands to see her own papers and she gets them: her Jewish grandparents are there in bold underlining. The friendly student goes with her, first to Komorn, where she tries to get news of her parents. She learns that the only man who can tell her anything is the head of the local militia, a photographer. She tracks him down in his shop; he is in uniform. She asks about her father. “Baron Weiss? Sure, I remember him, he left four days ago.” Not till much later does she learn what happened. The photographer was responsible for selection for transport. First the “intellectuals” were sorted out from the “manual laborers”; the latter were to be sent back home since there were no trains or trucks around. But first the Jews in the group were separated out; they would not be sent home. Her mother was with the Jews. Her father said, “Then I am going too.” “By all means, if you like,” said the photographer, and made note of Baron Weiss, the only non-Jew to go along of his own free will, so to speak. But then the women were separated from the men immediately. Her father ended up at Flossenburg, doing hard labor; he was killed there in December 1944. Her mother was sent to Ravensbrück; she was too weak to work. She died on January 12, 1945.
Sonia and the student left the photographer and started off for Budapest. In the next town there was a great hue and cry; she had strange premonitions and nearly fainted, without knowing why; then she heard that they were having a “Jew drive.” She wanted to look among the people for her parents, but the student pulled her away: “Your parents have been gone four days.” Sonia knew this, but the thought that she had somehow passed her parents by as they were being taken away never left her. The student accompanied her as far as Budapest and brought her to her sisters.
Later she heard about a position as chambermaid to the Archduchess Stephanie, the widow of Crown Prince Rudolf (she had married a Lonyai and now, age eighty, lived in the Orosvar Castle). “Her Royal Highness” wanted to emigrate to Switzerland and wanted a chambermaid who spoke languages to take along. Sonia made herself known to her, but the old lady didn’t understand why she wanted the position. Sonia confided in her and found empathy: “She was not an anti-Semite.” A week later Sonia started work; most of the castle was occupied by German soldiers, and she had to pass the sentry point. “That’s sure no chambermaid.” She pretended not to know German and got through. She was gradually trained in her duties by the archduchess, but already by the fifth day she had been entrusted with her mistress’s wig; from then on she was indispensable. They were busy making preparations for the journey to Switzerland when the old lady had a stroke, and that was the end of travel plans. A German staff medical officer visited “Her Highness”; he went up to Sonia and declared, “You’re no maid! Who are you? I want to help you!”
Sonia trusted him and told him her whole story. He told her that she was the subject of talk among the German soldiers in the castle, that they thought she was a Jew in hiding. He could help her only if he could say she was his lover. She agreed to this. He behaved honorably; in the course of the next week he confessed to her that he loved her. He was around fifty, married, he had children but his wife did not understand him. When the Russians came, the Germans vacated the castle; he wanted to stay for her sake, if she would agree to marry him later. They discussed the idea at length and came to the decision that he could not stay. He left, and she stayed behind, in great consternation.
As the Russians approached, a priest (a Benedictine who happened to be at the castle) gathered all the women and girls, to wall them in (and thus protect them from the Russian soldiers). But Sonia had to stay with the archduchess. The Russians arrived, and on hearing that an old princess was living in the castle, they wanted to have a look at her. They were expected any minute in the old lady’s sickroom, and to save Sonia the priest hit upon the idea of having her hide in the old lady’s bed. Still clothed she crawled under the covers and squeezed up against the wall. Now came the parade of Russians; one after the other they filed politely by the bed of the “princess” and looked at her curiously. While they were plundering all over the castle, here in the room of the “princess” they touched nothing. The priest received them all and did the honors, so to speak. They did not touch him; it was simply not true that the Russians were after aristocrats, priests, or other Hungarians. They were looking only for German soldiers and, when they were drunk, for women.
After they had left the sickroom, she thought she was saved. But when night came, she heard a drunken Russian in the courtyard below. He was yelling that he knew the chambermaid was there, hiding in the bed of the “princess.” He came upstairs, she squeezed more tightly against the wall, she heard his steps approaching, all at once he pulled the covers from off the archduchess, and she saw a machine gun pointed at her. In her shock she forgot everything that had gone before, even the name of the German staff doctor, and in the seventeen years since, she has wracked her brain for his name, unable to remember it again. She got up from the bed and followed the Russian, the whole time under threat of the machine gun. Now I have only two choices, she thought to herself, to die or to give in. Suddenly in the long corridor the roll call started. Fighting was still going on: the Russian left her standing there and ran to his unit. Russians could plunder and take women, but when the roll call was read, they had to obey instantly or be shot. So she was saved; a miracle, said the priest, a true miracle.
She stayed a while longer at the castle; Archduchess Stephanie’s condition went rapidly downhill. The priest bought a horse for Sonia, and she rode for four days to Budapest. During those four days the value of the horse increased tenfold. She sold it immediately on arriving, and here she was lucky, for two hours later she would not have been able to sell it. From this windfall her two sisters lived for six months. That was what I heard of her story. Much more would have followed, but it had gotten so late I had to stop, and she had to go to bed. I have told only the most important parts, and in abbreviated form, and the story has lost all its color. When I visit her in Paris, I hope to hear more.
Interpreting a statement’s meaning—all that remains of the tradition of consulting oracles. But since this takes place outside the scope of fear, not even that is left.
The true stories that we tell are false; with false stories at least there is the chance that they might come true.
All our lives we circle around the same ideas, as if they were so many suns. So why should we not at least hope for comets?
The progress of friends who include us in their progress: nothing makes us feel lonelier and more alien.
How much it bothers him when he recalls something, but with the wrong people. It makes even the realest memories false, and they cry out like stuck pigs.
One book! Three-fourths of your life is there—your hope, your pleasure, your melancholy, your sorrow, and your doubt. All of that you have now lost. Where are you? What is left of you? The crater your book left.
A man who delights in touching every woman because she will never be his.
The French: they sit down for dinner as if for life everlasting.
Since visiting Greece, I read the Greeks differently: more haltingly, as if going from name to name; more easily, as if my visit were still to come.
Never to see again the highest beauty.
After Paris: to find my way back to the Chinese, my greatest joy. And if it takes me the whole winter, I want to be with the Chinese and stay there. With them, all the forms of my own thinking are more clearly outlined. I feel myself unfolding, opening up around them. Nature and custom have their full meaning. The spirit has not sucked life dry. Life is everything; it is ready and waiting for every transformation. Not even Buddhism has smothered China in spirituality. Nor will the narrow modernists be able to. And I know I need China more than I need my bread.
The brevity of Chinese books: I’d like to be, and stay, that brief.
The parallel reader. He has ten books open at once and reads one sentence in each, then the next sentence in the book beside it. What a scholar!
Have you listened to all this music only to succumb to the voices of those entirely unknown to you?
You are a simple man, you put your trust in few ideas, but in those completely.
A beast that has lived since the beginning of creation.
“Quel dérèglement de jugement, par lequel il n’y a personne qui ne se mette au-dessus de tout le reste du monde, et qui n’aime mieux son propre bien, et la durée de son bonheur, et de sa vie, que celle de tout le reste du monde!”
(The survivor)
Pascal
If prayers were to be answered, they could not be retracted: a highly alarming state of affairs.
“The human race uses thought only as an evasive tactic.”
from Conversations with Goethe