Authors: Thomas Bernhard
My father goes to see the prince only to treat him for his insomnia, I thought, without doing anything about his real illness, without, as became more and more evident to me while we walked back and forth along the outer wall of the castle, doing anything about his madness. For suddenly I saw quite clearly that the prince is mad, which had not been evident to me while he was talking about his interviews in the morning. It had seemed then that the prince was not mad, and when he spoke about the applicants for the post of steward I had thought that the prince was anything but mad, contrary to my father’s remarks, for my father in the past had always called the prince mad. But now, as we walked
faster and faster on the outer walls of the castle, I saw that the prince
is
actually mad.
The prince said: “The difficulty that morning, Doctor, the morning after the play, was for me this: From the moment I entered the library, saw my relatives sitting on the floor, and became aware that I must lead the discussion, must deliver a lecture, I knew that now I could no longer turn back. Now I can no longer return to my thinking, isolated as it is in my thousands of principles. I cannot simply return to my own brain. I must think
aloud
, must publicly establish clarity about so completely linear a matter as the problem of the antibody in nature. For it is linear, even though it is highly complicated and possibly insoluble. But along with this, Doctor, I must, as an artificial human sacrifice, balance upon a rope stretched across the entire world of the mind, across all sciences and arts, causes and effects, must pass through past and future millennia, through all the innumerable concepts of nature, with my brain presumably already far out in the universal atmosphere, and must move, balancing on my rope, toward a goal lying in uttermost darkness, a goal from which an icy chill already wafted toward me.”
We stood still.
“Such a night as the night after the play, the play was good, Doctor, it was a very good play,” the prince said, “such a tranquil night, this calm before the flood, Doctor (because of the play), one of those quiet nights which have become very rare in Hochgobernitz—you can imagine how rare these quiet nights have become in Hochgobernitz since my son has been gone—because the quiet is perfect in Hochgobernitz, because it is really all there is, there is not quiet any more.… There simply is no more quiet, no peace, no tranquility
in Hochgobernitz. That night and that cold morning among us and among the books, in this icy cold daybreak atmosphere in which feelings freely are transmuted into thoughts and thoughts freely transmuted into feelings, and that is the ideal magic suddenly to be together and find one another bearable—that night, in which the self-destructive and self-disintegrating elements of the family were so cleverly muted, whether from weariness
after
the play or from madness
before
the dawn, or from madness and weariness
after
the play
and
before the dawn, so that suddenly in truth everything was able to exist and everything was justified in existing—imagine, suddenly everybody in the house felt the prevailing quiet in the house merely as a quiet prevailing in the house; the dreadfulness of it, the uncanniness of it, had suddenly been taken away. A suddenly uninstrumental society constituted directly for evil, quite in the nature of this house, a society in which a day shaken by the play was transformed from philosophical and unbearable to nonphilosophical and bearable (perhaps a brilliant compound!). On this morning in which the autumn for the first time became palpable in me, in me and, differently, in the others—we suddenly were able to look within ourselves into this year’s autumn (each of us into his own autumn), look in because of our excitement before the play and during the play, look into the tranquility of the autumn after the play, by means of our inner geometry look into the perishing of outer nature.”
On the morning after the play, with all of them assembled in the library—“except for my son nearly all the members of the family were assembled there,” the prince said,
“all of them,”
he repeated, and added that for many years he had not observed all of them assembled in Hochgobernitz—on
that morning after the play he had delivered a “dissecting lecture,” he said. “They all sit there and listen to what I have to say about nature, and hear about the concept of nature and the concept of the antibody in nature, about the antibody nature concept, and I suddenly find myself looking into my family, into a monstrously large, monstrously outmoded Hochgobernitz, into a horrifying history growing increasingly sinister as it recedes back toward its origins, into a ghastly stench of generations, into a more and more stinking art of generations, artificiality of generations, into a labyrinth of dead horror stories under the Saurau name, from which from time to time I actually keep hearing cries of horror, Doctor, I actually hear cries of horror coming up out of the labyrinth of my family, the belated cries of horror of those who died before me.… Yes,” the prince said, “my son doesn’t write to me, my son is silent, my son studies silently in England, my silently studying son in England. He writes no letters of truth.”
And a few steps farther on the prince said: “The flood is costing me one and a half millions. A flood in the millions. But,” he said, reverting to the morning after the play, “as I stood there among my people, among those who had remained with me in Hochgobernitz, and as I explained everything to them, but chiefly to this Pole with the highly intelligent face, explained nature, and explained the nature of explanation, for all explanation must be explained,” the prince said, “that’s an ancient, necessary process, well then, as I was attempting to explain and throw light on the concept of nature, the twilight of dawn helps me enormously, the sharpness of the air—as I was talking I look into the faces of my sisters and my daughters—in this autumnal cold one suddenly
sees very acutely, Doctor—and I see them all together, I also see my son, my absent son, Doctor, see them all together through myself, and a monstrous constellation dawns on me, possibly the one concept that is sheer horror in itself:
I am the father!”
The prince said: “I see all of them as an incredibly differentiated proto-reality, this proto-reality which comes from me and from which I come—and in my brain there is the din of the noises.”
Far off, down in the valley, as if in a marionette theater worked from below, we saw laborers on a wooden bridge obeying an invisible foreman, and in the sudden chill in the air we heard a rapidly accelerating din of noises rising up through the woods.
The prince said: “I have the impression that it would be natural for the world to fly apart at any moment. Or is it that nature must destroy herself?” he said. “This process is always one that proceeds from within and completes itself outwardly. When I come to, am forced to, this observation, this view, because I apparently have an organism geared only for this observation, this view—when I come to it, I have the feeling that the time has arrived—at first it is only a crumbling, cracks, tears, a rending and crumbling!… This time can go on for centuries, of course, centuries behind me, centuries before me. Millennia. But what astounds me,” the prince said, “is not the fact that these noises have been in my brain, that these noises are always there, have always been, always will be, but the horrible fact that no human being with whom I have ever come in contact—and, my dear Doctor, I have come in contact with so many people, with so many characters that if you saw them all in a heap in front of
you your whole world would instantly collapse, for I’ve had so tremendously large a selection of humanity at my disposal and at certain times have associated every day with all possible characters and mentalities—but what astounds me, I say, is that no person, not a single brain, has ever taken notice of these noises or ever will. The fact that this is so is not so shocking, only that I alone am the one person, that my brain alone is the one brain, which is forced to note the frightfulness, the deadliness! Everyone around me—and it is always from myself, from my brain as a kind of thinking Hochgobernitz, so to speak, from my immediate surroundings, that I draw conclusions about the whole, about the whole world in which at any rate the whole of humanity has room—everyone around me has a numbing incapacity for perception, incapacity for observation, incapacity for receptivity.… To me this fact is deadly, it is a deadly fact to me that I am alone in this fact,
that I am alone in this fact
. This enormous landslide!” the prince cried out, and repeated several times: “This enormous landslide!”
He told us to look down into the valley at the workmen dangling from the wooden bridge. “I have to pay for all these people sitting around doing nothing, I have to pay for them. I pay these people for a disability of nature, for a disability of nature I pay all these useless people!” It seemed to me that the tone in which he says the word
people
indicates an enormous aloofness from people.
“In the past,” the prince continued, “in the past, I had difficulty, just as you do, Doctor, in probing and mastering a single subject within a single problem, in penetrating the perilously varied heights and depths of a single aspect of a single train of thought; but those difficulties now seem to me
insignificant compared to the state of absolute necessity in which I am now forced to operate in the greatest imaginable number of simultaneous areas in order to make any sense at all. And it is horribly plain that no limits exist any more for those areas, for as far as I am concerned I have truly arrived at the point where limitlessness has become a certainty. I have reached the permanent derangement of advanced age, the more and more philosophical, philosophistic isolation of the mind: the point where everything is continually present in consciousness, where the brain as such no longer exists.… The truth is that I more and more believe I am everything, because in reality I am no longer anything, and in consequence I can only feel everything human, everything humanly possible, as shameful. After the play I became fully conscious of this state in relation principally to my relatives, those relatives whom I have always called incapable of perception. More clearly than ever before I became aware of a tremendous remoteness and alienation, which simultaneously is the greatest possible closeness and comradeship in suffering, but not a comradeship in torment. I have always shared suffering with other people, but never torment. It seems to me that throughout my life I have continually had only one single thought: What potentialities for unremitting effort there are in the human mind! And I have long thought,” the prince said, “that what I am immersed in is nothing but torment, a torment that is my own, that belongs only to me, that is inherent in my nature, that is my own nature, already removed from the human capacity for suffering, matured out of it, matured out of all human potentialities. Here in Hochgobernitz, where everything of late has given me continual pain, it has seemed quite natural that this
thin air of the heights should be so destructive. Yet if I were but a generation back, or had a different sort of brain, I too would be fundamentally incapable of perception like the others. For a long time the realization of that fact has been a source of the deepest torment to me, and simultaneously of the greatest pleasure.”
From the outer wall we went to the inner wall. The prince pointed out that in the course of only thirty years he had been able to double the property he inherited from his father, “contrary to all rumors,” he said, “contrary to the whole political development in Europe, to the development of the whole world.” All his life, he said, he had thought about enlarging Hochgobernitz, and one day he had observed that Hochgobernitz had in fact been doubled in size. “But my son,” he said, “will destroy Hochgobernitz as soon as he receives it into his hands.”
Last night, the prince said, he had had a dream. “In this dream,” he said, “I was able to look at a sheet of paper moving slowly from far below to high up, paper on which my own son had written the following. I see every word that my son is writing on that sheet of paper,” the prince said. “It is my son’s hand writing it. My son writes: As one who has taken refuge in scientific allegories I seemed to have cured myself of my father for good, as one cures oneself of a contagious disease. But today I see that this disease is an elemental, shattering fatal illness of which everyone without exception dies. Eight months after my father’s suicide—note that, Doctor, after his father’s suicide, after my suicide; my son writes about my suicide!—eight months after my father’s suicide everything is already ruined, and I can say that I have ruined it. I can say that I have ruined Hochgobernitz, my
son writes, and he writes: I have ruined this flourishing economy! This tremendous,
anachronistic
agricultural and forest economy. I suddenly see, my son writes,” the prince said, “that by liquidating the business even though or precisely because it is the best, I am for the first time implementing my theory, my son writes!” the prince said. “I have taken my first steps in reality, my son writes. From the office I see Moser coming, he writes (Moser is the town clerk); the man I hate is approaching, my son writes. I tell myself: I know what he wants, but he might want something else, but no, he is trying it for the third time. This is the third time I have observed Moser, my son writes,” the prince said. “From the window of the office, with the fog gone, that utterly Londonlike English fog, I can now see down to the woods. I see the whole area outside the window and all the way down to the woods when I look out, and it is a looking out against my personal elemental fear, my son writes. In reality, he writes, possibly due to my even more heightened antipathy against myself ever since my return from England and against everything else, and due also to my more or less catastrophic though fantastic solitude, and likewise to my base fear of suddenly being surprised by that intruder Moser, possibly also due to a frightful situation that I am afraid of—the drastic changes within the briefest time in my physical and mental state—due to all this, my son writes, not a minute passes without my looking out of the window. Or at least every two or three minutes I look out of the window and survey the fields, and I try to determine whether anything is moving in the woods. For it often happens, my son writes, that somebody is hiding in the woods, forcing himself to immobility among the trees, out of sheer cunning; but as soon as he
thinks himself unobserved he moves swiftly and with incredible speed toward his victim. Actually, my son writes, Town Clerk Moser must have been standing immobile among the trees for some time. Everything about him as he trotted across the fields toward the castle indicated that a period of time had passed, and naturally it is connected with his intentions and therefore with me; he gave himself time to think out a plan which concerns me and of course is harmful to me.… From the first moment I saw him, my son writes, this man has been suspect, suspect, and less because of his repulsive physical appearance than because of his base cast of mind, in which all the nastiness of his disgusting categories seemed to come together in a single, continuous evil dangerous to everyone. The man is a constant, disgusting outrage—listen, Doctor, to what my son writes. He writes: For my father this man did not exist at all (actually he is an excellent man because he is endowed with a dismal despicableness in the most dreaded sense; at every moment his physiognomy gave the lie on every count to the entire world of humanity); but I have managed to escape entirely the impact of this habitual criminal who has run around at liberty all his life, who has never come into conflict with the law and never will because the world is too stupid. I actually watched Moser long before he emerged from the woods, listen, Doctor, listen, and I even know precisely, my son writes, that he appeared at the very moment in today’s reading that I had come to that dangerous agitating sentence which says that
in bourgeois revolutions bloodshed, terror, and political assassination are the indispensable weapons in the hands of the rising classes
. I saw Moser emerge from among the pine trunks in one of the most rapid movements
the eye can possibly observe, and then, after two or three minutes, when I looked out of the window again as is my habit, I suddenly see him crossing the meadow, coming along the outer wall of the castle. I recognized him at once as Town Clerk Moser, and I say to myself:
Vulgar motion in itself
. I stand up, my son writes, and go into the vestibule and close the front door which I had left open because it had suddenly turned warm, but probably left open too long anyhow because it was suddenly cold again; in this house you have to be very sensitive about when to open the doors and windows and when to close them again, so that it is neither too warm nor too cold, and every window and every door demands a different rhythm of opening and shutting,” the prince said, “and the weather here, I see, is unlike the weather in England, changing completely every hour, it could certainly drive you out of your mind if you plunged too deeply into this absolutely unlearnable science. Even as I closed the front door, my son writes,” the prince said, “disturbed in my reading as I was, wrenched out of it, I suddenly no longer knew what was the point of the sentence which after my fashion I had multiplied and divided again about a hundred times, or the second sentence which I had repeated loudly and clearly:
The proletarian revolution needs no terrorism to accomplish its aims, for it despises killing people
—even as I closed the door I thought that I would not admit the Town Clerk Moser. I draw the curtains, my son writes,” the prince said. “After all, I might be away, he writes, and he writes: I actually draw the curtains, but then open them again because it seems to me ridiculous that I should draw them on account of Town Clerk Moser. After all, I think, has Town Clerk Moser already so much power over a Saurau
that I have to make any pretenses for his benefit? To make any pretenses to him and to myself? To have to draw the curtains to shut him out, close the door to shut him out … and I draw the curtains open again as far as possible and return to the vestibule and open the door as far as possible. Suddenly it is warm again; Moser is only about a hundred paces away from me, already on the inner walls, is now walking more slowly. I had wondered at the speed with which Moser trotted across the meadow, for he is said to suffer from heart disease, and as I know for sure, once or twice a year spends several weeks in a sanatorium for cardiac patients in Holzöster, paid for by the District Health Insurance Fund. On the inner walls he trotted even faster than he had on the meadow, which I haven’t had mowed for the past eight months. As long as I live, my son writes,” the prince said, “I am thinking now of my breakthrough into reality, of my triumph over my theories, as long as I exist this meadow will never be mowed again; as long as I exist nothing profitable or useful will ever again be done on these fields—on mine! on mine! I think. Never again, do you hear, Doctor, never again, never again,” the prince said. “From now on the Saurau fields are nothing but useless, unprofitable fields.… Moser is typical of the baseness and depravity of the individual human being, my son writes; Moser is typical, he writes, of the baseness and depravity of the state. Moser can be used for proof of anything except the slightest touch of idealism. He embodies the fact, which surely no one can be entirely ignorant of, that man is base and depraved, and that his begetter, insofar as he is the begetter, is even baser and more depraved than he himself.
Moser discredits the world and its creator
. Suddenly I think, my son writes, isn’t it
wretched to play a part before such a person as Moser? I should have received him right at the door, where I was still preoccupied with the most ludicrous thoughts about Moser. But no, my son writes, I won’t receive him at the door. That would only be reacting as if I were ready for the poorhouse. For even without the slightest, strangest secret fear of Moser I should from the first have stayed sitting behind my desk in the office and I should have received Moser where I was before I discovered Moser coming. Imagine, I am not able to cope with Moser, whom I always call an idiot whenever I think of him, although I never say the word aloud.
A Saurau is not able to cope with a Moser!
But there was no longer any means of undoing the situation, and so it no longer mattered where I received the town clerk, at the door or in the office. In any case, I think, the man is one of the sort who without more ado would walk right in through an unlocked door into a house or even into a castle, and then open one door after another, hypocritically asking in each room whether anybody is there. But Moser knows, my son writes, that I spend all the time I am not asleep in the office; how he knows that I don’t know, but I know that he knows. In saying the name Moser you are naming a person who knows absolutely everything that is useful to him. And he knows, my son writes, that in order to read—the last time, too, he interrupted me in the middle of my reading: Schumpeter, Rosa Luxemburg, Morus, Clara Zetkin—I stay in the office because of the view, not in the library, whenever I am not asleep. And for him it is important to know that when I am in the office I am not there, as my dead father was, working hard on the estate, except insofar as I plan to destroy it, to destroy the entire estate, do you hear, Doctor, to destroy the
entire estate is not precisely a way of working hard for the Saurau estate! I spend my time meditating on my revenge upon my father—possibly not only for an injustice centuries old, but thousands of years old. In the time remaining to me I shall still be able to define it exactly. This whole vast ancestral agricultural enterprise has more and more come to seem to me a mistake grown to vast proportions, my son writes. I read in the office, he writes, and the reading disgusts me too, but still I read. Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust. For Moser it is valuable, my son writes, to know among other things that I stay in the office in order to read. The fact is that I regard the absurdity of reading among hundreds of files and calculating machines meant for the farms and forests, in which nothing is filed and nothing calculated any more—I regard that absurdity
as my father’s absurdity
. Here, now that he is dead, I am working out my revenge complex. Here, where I inhale to the brink of losing consciousness five hundred years of disciplined labor on farm and forest, I read Kautsky, Babeuf, Turati, and such people. My father knows that I have already, although so far only inside my head, alienated the whole of Hochgobernitz from its true purposes. And he certainly scents that total alienation where he is. In heaven? So I sit reading in the office, my son writes—listen to what he writes, Doctor,” the prince said, “and Moser goes around saying: Young Saurau now reads in the office where his father worked! Moser often asks, and always at the moment most favorable to him, my son writes,” the prince said,
“what I am or what I am not
, but he always says that I am crazy. I hear, even when I do not hear, how he constantly says I am crazy. Whenever he speaks of me anywhere the word
damaging
occurs, neither
too frequently nor too rarely, even though whenever
he
says
a spoiled son
it sounds miserable because everything about Moser is miserable. But Moser is careful not to
appear
miserable. I think: Actually and oddly enough, Moser never appears ridiculous to my eyes, my son writes,” the prince said, “never, because his baseness is without sharpness, without any comical or tragicomical element. He annoys me and is hated by the few people who have schooled themselves to insight into human nature, but whenever I think of Moser, my son writes, even my annoyance turns into hatred. The defect annoys me, but I hate Moser. Here I am engaged in a task which demands the fullest mental effort, the capacity to exert ever more painful discipline in order to draw everything insofar as it is possible on the thread of a single thought from far below the horizon up out of the void. When such a person as Moser appears, he scatters by his approach all that has been painfully pinned down for use and for consumption. To the degree that Moser approaches, he destroys what I have discovered in the course of reading for a whole morning and half an afternoon, and as soon as Moser is there, nothing at all is left, my son writes. Moser, my son writes; proved this contention by his present approach. I suddenly felt a depressing relaxation of the brain, an increasing sense that I am lost, obviously; because of Moser the intensity is displaced into what is trivial to me. I could say it more simply, my son writes,” the prince said. “Moser
comes
and my intelligence
goes
. I was struck by the self-importance with which these base creatures walk, my son writes, for Moser was now no more than a few steps away from me. Every step a Moser takes is taken as if he were important. Stupidity takes these steps, I think. Whereas people of acceptable
intelligence walk casually, often utterly casually, the base, low person walks self-importantly. The extraordinary person walks casually, my son writes. But workmen, for example, and farmers, people who work with their hands in general, walk self-importantly. But I also reckon among the self-important walkers three quarters of the entire intelligentsia, my son writes. The journalists, the writers, the artists, all bureaucrats, walk self-importantly, and the most self-important walkers of all are the new politicians. Those who take the most casual steps of all,” the prince said, “those who walk utterly casually and therefore have the gait of genius, my son writes, are only the independent in spirit. But when do we ever see someone who is independent in spirit? Actually my father had, my son writes, not entirely a casual walk, but still a more casual one, and my grandfather set no store on his walk at all.… Oddly enough, Moser’s walk always reminds me of the walk of many different kinds of convicts at one and the same time.… Moser really has some of the air of a captured criminal, but in everything about him there is also something implying a secret that only he knows. Something triumphant. I have frequently thought about what the underlying nastiness of Moser is, wherein his baseness lies. The moment he stands before me, I think: He dares! Without managing to sum up in my mind just what it is he dares. I say to myself: How dare this man! And he wants to shake hands with me, but I don’t take his hand. Moser doesn’t even expect me to admit him, my son writes; I have never yet admitted him to Gobernitz. He doesn’t know the castle from inside, not at all, but he would not be Moser, my son writes,” the prince said, “if he were not acquainted with the interior of the castle in spite of that. There it is