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.
She loved taking leave of other men right in front of her jealous lover. He never came upon her unless she was saying good-bye to someone else. It happened quite easily, as in a dream, but always right in front of him. Whenever he had a date with her, she was sitting with someone else. She got up as soon as he appeared, without saying good-bye to the other man. He never found her with the same man twice. She loved the activity of taking leave; he could have whistled to her and she would have come. He made sure that they were always alone when they parted. At particularly jealous moments he imagined seeing the other man face to face, the one who was waiting for her now. So long as this did not happen, he thought of himself as her true lover and remained faithful.
What if God had retreated from Creation, ashamed of having created death?
They compared her to a panther, but she hissed too late.
He said “we” when he meant “I.” But in return he always said “I” for “you.”
We do not spare ourselves; we want to experience everything that could hurt. We dig the deepest where we are most sensitive. What nonsense to think it is a love of pain that makes us do it. It is nothing but fear, fear of the transitoriness of the intensest, purest feeling. We seek destruction from the beginning, because it is waiting for us at the end.
Nothing is more boring than self-recrimination. It is pleasurable, but only when we know ourselves well and find an allowable target for this murderous harshness. Others do not and cannot know what we are talking about; they shrug and say, “What of it?” This is basically just another form of self-inflation. We find our own company more interesting if we can ascribe sinfulness to ourselves; complacency hides behind severity.
Someone is walking, constantly. He walks and walks. He never gets anyplace but keeps on walking. Occasionally he carries a stick but then loses it and goes on without it. He lets himself be seen walking. He sleeps walking. He dreams he is at rest, but he is ashamed of this, and no dream yet has caused him to stop in reality. He eats walking, pisses walking, takes advantage of any opportunity. Women admire him as they admire all men for something, and when a woman wants him badly, she figures a way to be loved by him walking. Some will even walk alongside him awhile, perhaps hoping to persuade him to come home with them. They soon give up; he is unalterably alone and won’t let himself be disturbed again so easily. What does he think about while walking? He does not know—certainly thinking is not the main thing. He washes when going through water, drying off quickly in the wind. Does he notice every place he has been? Does he avoid the same places?
To surround oneself with people in the summer—no war and everyone is alive.
A summer in which not one person died.
The happy man, piqued by vanity. Now he wants to read and be unhappy.
Burn your old clothes, discard those phrases. No more defenses—leave the old and find what you are now.
The interesting thing about philosophies is their senselessness. They present us with various possibilities of the world. We need not choose any of them, but they need to exist. To be content to prove them all nonsense would be a silly game. For their nonsense is the most important, one might say the most vital, thing about them.
But in reality there is much more “marrow” to be extracted from religions.
The spirit in a cocoon but out there in the world, in all its din and discord, with one requirement: we must hold firm in our own din and discord and say nothing, not a word. If everything we hear cries out for an answer, be silent.
He who believed in a life hereafter reawakened the dead to this life. That is what comes to mind when I think about him; the rest is all a legend to me, but this, this for me is true.
The fog—she said this eight years ago—you will have to find the fog again so you can write. Then she disappeared in the fog herself.
He wants to be so successful that everyone loves him, and avoids him.
Is it good to see ahead? Can anything be averted by seeing ahead? Many people think that foreseeing something makes it come true. Others trust in free choice, opposing that which is foreseen. I act as if I believed both. Thus, I am bound and free at the same time. In this way, at high personal cost, I can fantasize that I know more about people, when in truth I am just floating in a void.
He would like to be made of fog, so no one could find him.
Seeing his beloved while hearing her suitors, he conveys to her their every word.
And so they file past, the young, proud and confident and less false; but without hypocrisy, they’re nothing.
“Man is pity and fear. There is nothing else.”
Cesare Pavese
There is hearing, reading, recording. But can we say this to pity, to fear?
Today read only in Hebbel’s journal.
I still find it a wonderful book. As chance would have it, last week I picked up Lichtenberg. I am closer to him than to Hebbel, which may be because what Lichtenberg writes is closer to my idea of a sketch, while what Hebbel writes is a diary studded with random ideas. The running account of his rise as a writer occasionally bothers me—there is something self-satisfied about it. Lichtenberg has the advantage of being unbiased while Hebbel is heavier, often gloomy. Lichtenberg’s ideas are purer; they exist for their own sake. Hebbel always has a motivation: perhaps he could do something with them. I am powerfully drawn to Lichtenberg’s lavishness; Hebbel is more economical. Still, I don’t know of any journals in German that mean more to me.
While reading Hebbel’s journal: how little one has written oneself! And one really doesn’t notice that Hebbel, too, left most things out. How rich his years seem, summed up.
Phrases that shy away from one another.
Faces only decipherable two thousand years later.
A hide made of tiny mollusks.
He eats while sleeping, he eats when making love; walking, lying, kneeling, speaking, weeping, groaning, dying, he eats.
“The sleeping calf, rescued from the butcher’s cart.”
Hebbel, Journals (age twenty-three)
A. says the older we get, the more we sense that there are no other geniuses.
An infinity of figures, all unused; he’ll touch them only after they’ve been forgotten.
The blind man gives his eyes to another, who sees with them.
A brain as hard as a cobblestone, hurled at doubt.
He would like to be swimming in money so he could throw it after everyone he despises.
The world’s esteem is quite worthless unless we despise it. But how can we think of despising it when we eke out our life with it? So then there is just one way out: to be rich, and that is no way out because it takes too much from us.
Today I denied myself Robert Walser for fear he would become a kind of narcotic.
Acquittal via self-recrimination.
Gnawing on his uniqueness, he wasted away and died of starvation.
He babbles blood and exudes epistles.
I need a lot of foreigners around me, and the heavens dump them down here in Hampstead like a cloudburst.
He fails at arrivals but is a master of departure.
This tendency of the successful to praise one another. As if they were then more what they want to be, since even their rivals confirm it for them. But it is a fact that a contemporary’s praise is no help, because it is never disinterested. “Say something good about me, and I will say it about you.”
So it is a truly awkward situation when we come across someone we really admire and suddenly notice how highly he himself has always regarded us.
Most important: to forget what one has made. But to do this one must have made something too.
Today the legitimation of a work is the evil in it, and in this age the idyll has died forever. The arena of life is varied, and its monstrous tension is our daily trial.
Having no peace, we must listen in God’s stead and burst from doing so. No one is good enough and open enough for sainthood in this century, with its sacrificial madness, and its martyrs cannot know for what they were martyred.
A heaven, in despair of mankind, arching itself ever farther away.
He always says the same thing, but each time it becomes one sentence longer. Since he says it so often, it swells to monstrous size, and finally there is no time left intervening for him to be silent.
Look for someone to make you slow.
Phrases like eyelashes.
A half tree held the street upright.
The English expression “I appreciate”: embarrassing. Its tone a mixture of “pressure” and “price,” as if one wanted to say, “I will keep pressing till the price is right.” But without the pressure, the price wouldn’t mean anything. One of the arrogant expressions of the English language—in this, the language is inimitable.
The dog barks the riot act at him.
A woman dies of a disease that is incurable; her lover is in despair. Soon after, he contracts the same disease. Meanwhile a cure for it is discovered, and he recovers.
That monstrous heart in which the cities settle.
To find a person who has never yet told the truth—and no one has ever noticed.
A person he likes so much, it’s as though in an earlier life he had escaped from him.
We need only say, “Years, years,” and the hasty drop to their knees.
Everything you don’t like in others is really what you don’t like in yourself, and knowing this, you are a broken satirist, one whose black wings have been clipped.
The monologue has become so insipid, vacuous, sterile, boring, wordy, tasteless, colorless, odorless, it would be better to talk to someone, anyone. This person could even be invented, just so long as “I” and “you” finally disappeared, rotted away, evaporated.
He, he, he, just he, something of the timidity and chasteness of Kafka instead of loudmouth confessional posing.
Yesterday R. T., the poet who was long crippled, proudly showed off her real fingernails.
There couples embrace each other so long that they become grafted together. Then the couples must embrace other couples, until they also graft together.
He found it pleasant to torture his dog at home and then take him for a nice walk.
It would be more to your liking if you had another word for myth: there is none.
I take immense pleasure from people who come here from afar, especially the young, as if they could make the earth’s condition more elastic.
Poets are unbearable to one another. You have to see them with other people to know what they’re like.
“Supply of Faces”: sometimes the storehoused faces can’t stand being kept in the dark and fling themselves upon actual human beings, whom they then appropriate by force.
Aristophanes: The Peace
The dung beetle as Trygaeus’s mount; slaves feeding him dung at the beginning. Trygaeus’s fear of manure smells on earth during his ascension to Zeus.
This first stink-filled idea is strong and unforgettable.
The scene where they string rope about the buried goddess of peace is much weaker.
The rest of the play is a panegyric to the joys of peaceful life, and in this it is true, natural, and relevant for every age from then to now, the sigh of the simple man after every war. But the comic sections within, for example, when the victors enter, are not Aristophanes’ best. As is often the case with him, individual objects (helmet, armor, etc.) have odd significance.
House pet: A fat queen termite.
The poet who invented the language of the bees, and it is spoken.
The biggest hypocrite may write about the most honest: literary history.
Some believe they can pass as mystics by saying, “One! One! One!” Others try through fragmentation, by doing everything in their power never to be “one.”
Enemies, so that they can be talked into friendship.
The blind man announces what he would have seen.
The man who also knows all the animals he is.
How fortifying rejection is! So critics, whose whole enterprise consists of it, may easily seem to themselves like supermen.
He reads the satirists, too, to know what hate is. In Aristophanes, in Quevedo, in Swift, he understands his own hatred.
It must be very funny, his speaking about immortality. And yet that is what he really wants, and wants not just for himself but for everyone he has known.
A sleep so long that we awake to just a dream. But then, in this dream, a full life.
The concentration I seek tears my breath apart.
Amazing about satirists, that they can spare themselves so long. Not all of them become idiots; many grow old. Gogol alone destroys himself early—is this why, among those we know most about, he is the greatest?
In order not to forget time, he lives only where it whirs.
“Ce que j’aime du voyage, c’est l’étonnement au retour.”
Stendhal
Once again, as in the last war, news of natural catastrophes not caused by human action is somehow comforting. Can anything more horrible be said about the condition of our world?
Marvelous, the conversations we don’t have.
When someone says “gods,” he is saying that besides the god that now inhabits him there is something else, a lot else, no less worthy of being divine. Thus, for the world a single god is not all-embracing or all-destroying. And so other gods can set themselves up against this one god, revitalizing and extending the shrinking world.
There are ideas so revolting that we can never get rid of them. It appears that the power of many great writers consists in just this.
Yesterday Plato’s Symposium—I had not read it for a long time. What touched me most was the speech of Aristophanes, as grotesquely inventive as if written by himself, and that of Alcibiades at the end, the eulogy for Socrates. In this latter presentation—clear, immediate, and inspired by passionate admiration—Socrates is a tangible object of love. It is unutterably beautiful how the discussion of love is itself crowned and completed by actual love. Alcibiades’ devotion to Socrates creates a perfect picture of him, and could there be anyone who would not want to be like that Socrates?
Socrates’ method, the thing about him that I have always abhorred—his quibbling sophistry—recedes into the background in the Symposium. There is enough of it present to make one feel glad that there is less than usual. And anyway, it has to do with his discourse on “what men most want,” on immortality. Socrates’ claim, which elsewhere often gets unbearable—his “moral,” so to speak—that man desires good makes it look as if he is “covering” himself: in reality it is he, Socrates, who wants the good, and how much trouble he takes to persuade other men that they desire it! He is the daimon of good, and it should not be forgotten that Plato wrote the Symposium after Socrates was publicly sentenced to death and poisoned. His end is tragic, and it is Alcibiades—the person most responsible for his death, whose actions weighed most heavily in the balance against him—who delivers the encomium for him. There is something charming about the drunkenness that moves him to speak openly. Right at the end, after all the others have left the dinner or fallen asleep, Socrates continues his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes, the tragic poet and the comic poet, trying to prove to them that the two figures are really one and belong together.
Can one who reads only Plato become a poet?
The question, the fearful question: whether men really change.
In the Symposium Plato says yes, as if he had just read Heraclitus. They bear the same name for a lifetime, he says, but are different—everything about them and in them is always different.
I do not trust this assessment; I am not at all sure of it. I know where I am the same as I always was. It is hard for us to see where we are different.
God crawled into his ear, and how much he hears!
The blind man recognized him, and he felt very flattered.
He had a lover whom he visited only after funerals. She liked him then. “You are so different after funerals,” she would say to him, “you love me more passionately. I don’t like you any other way.” She would read the obituaries for him and notify him by phone when she thought he should go. Right off, she would say, “Do you know who died?” Sometimes he wouldn’t have heard from her for three or four weeks. “Who?” “N.N. You knew him. You’d better go.” “What time?” “Monday at three in the crematorium. I’ll expect you then.” She would immediately feel better when she had found a funeral for him and would get everything ready for his visit. He went, saw, and heard for himself, and he actually liked going, because he knew what was coming next. But he was not a cynic, or else the funerals would not have upset him. He thought about the deceased, he pictured him or her to himself, carried on old conversations with the person. The dead got to him so much that without cheering up he could scarcely have gone on living. Bent and aged, he would start off for her house. She would be standing behind the curtain and would see him on the street. Throwing the door open, she would say, “Welcome!” She would always wear something that reminded him of the special occasion, something small and quite discreet, but he always noticed it gratefully.
“Come,” she would say, “you are exhausted. It’s really taken a lot out of you.” He would nod, come in, and sit down, a bit timidly, in the best chair. She would sit near him but maintain a certain distance. “Tell me! Was it very bad? Maybe you’d rather not talk about it.” “Not for a while,” he would say—it seemed better that way. After all, he was no monster, he had feelings, he had to take a little breather before admitting to himself that life would go on. “Don’t take it to heart so,” she would say, with tears in her eyes: she was suffering with him. He was grateful for every move that demonstrated her understanding and concern. “Did it take a long time?” she would ask then. “Not especially. Luckily it was short. I don’t like ceremony. It’s such a terribly difficult thing in any case. You think you’ll break down if it doesn’t stop soon.” “How was the minister?” “Not bad. Quite short and sweet. Afterwards he stood by the door and shook everyone’s hand. I always wonder whether to give him something.” “But you can’t do that.” “He has this way of holding out his hand. I think he could hide it well enough that nobody would notice.” “Were there a lot of flowers?” “Mountains, but not as many as last time.” “Must be beautiful, all those flowers.” “Sometimes there are none, by request.” “Yes, I remember. Time before last when you were here there were no flowers.” “You have a good memory.” “I live only for you. I share all your troubles with you.” “That’s true. I just don’t know how I could go to funerals without you.” “I hope you never do.” “How could I deceive you?” “Sometimes I think you were someplace without telling me.” “But you read all the notices. You don’t miss a single one.” “I’m not infallible. If I don’t see you for six weeks, I think I must have missed something.” “Hopefully you read more than one paper.” “Sure, of course, but there are people who don’t put a notice in the paper.” “Then I wouldn’t know about it either.” “Do you get any private notices at home?” “I throw out anything with a black border. I leave everything up to you. Without you I’d be lost.” After this little jealous scene, which he is used to and which only follows funerals, he puts out his right hand and clasps her knee.
A friend who’s made of news.
Your ear is older than your grandfather.
Hausa saying