Authors: Thomas Bernhard
decent, indecent. But thinking is free of this repulsiveness. In reading, one tries to ignore oneself,” the prince said. “Permanent identity as consolation. An initially melancholic but then more and more tormenting kind of imagining influences us. I always tell myself that I know everything is fatal, but I act contrarily. My head is often separated from my body by the span of several centuries or millennia and absolutely an empirical
master of galvanization
. I always have fever, Doctor, but it is the kind of fever the thermometer does not show. I am a barometer that is no longer functioning. In court I once met a person I had never seen before,” the prince said, “but who reminded me of all the people I have ever seen. He said he had something magnificent in store for his head. But I must not think he was going to cut it off himself. He put a knife into my hand and said:
Cut my head off, my dear fellow. I have long waited for you to turn up to cut off my head. For I have something magnificent in store for my head. Don’t be afraid
, this eccentric said,
I have calculated everything in advance. It cannot go wrong. Here, cut!
He gave me three minutes.
Here
, he said,
this is the spot where I want my head cut off. I’ll continue to stand, because it seems to me thoroughly undignified to have your head cut off while lying down, let alone sitting. I won’t embarrass you!
the stranger said.
Incidentally, the knife is manufactured by the Christofle Company
, he said. And I actually saw the name Christofle engraved on the knife. I seized the head and cut it off. I was quite astonished at how easy it was. The head then said: You see, you had no difficulty cutting off my head. But then I see that I haven’t cut off his head, and the stranger said:
You didn’t seriously imagine you could cut off my head, did you? Or did you? Let us go
on
, the stranger said. He was my cousin. Actually,” the prince said, “I did not dream the story to its end. That was a pity.”
The prince said: “We are without parents. We are orphans. That is our condition, and we shall not, Europe will not escape from this condition ever again. The question has always been, how can I expand, how solidify Hochgobernitz even more. Never before has Hochgobernitz been so utterly cut off from the world and simultaneously so dependent on the world. I am always afraid of earthquakes. It is no longer possible for me to walk without thinking about earthquakes, feeling earthquakes, future earthquakes, noises, underground noises, and at the same time noises inside my head. I have the idea,” the prince said, “that we are writing letters, sending letters, and receiving letters, and that the signatures on all these letters are illegible. Who writes all these sent and received letters? I see how the catastrophe is shaping up; looking out of the window I see it shaping up noiselessly, taking place noiselessly. I am not allowed to speak of it. But the fact that I occupy the smallest room in vast Hochgobernitz is uncanny, Doctor. This room, moreover, is the dampest and coldest. Suppose I were to write an essay in my room, I think, a study bearing the simple title
My Room
, into which I would squeeze the entire world. I would squeeze the entire room into my room and into my study. No, not a study,” the prince said. “The thinking man’s task is more and more to remove images from his memory. His goal has been attained when there is no longer a single image in his brain. When the representational potentialities of his brain are exhausted. I bear no guilt,” he said. “I often tell myself, I know I bear no guilt. Guilt? For decades I tried to
communicate; as long as I have been alive nothing but the attempt to communicate has consumed me. At first I started trying to communicate with my parents, my sisters, my children. I wanted to communicate with everybody. Now I am trying to communicate with you, and with your son. Actually,” the prince said, “these September nights can already be very cold. The cold comes up from below, from the gorge. It is usually ice cold here. Hochgobernitz is made of ice. People frozen into ice in Hochgobernitz. The times in which we live obviously are poor for furthering communication. At first,” the prince said, “my mother thought of me as a crime against herself, later as a crime she had committed. Then I became a nuisance to her. Then she began to despise me, then to love me, to hate me, because she always felt forced to identify with me. For the parents, children are an incurable tumor which deforms them for life. I withdraw more and more into my room as a sickroom. I have always taken everything I have in this room, the food, the reading, the thinking, as if it were medicine, emotional fluids, intellectual liquids, tablets of philosophy. Being incurable is a condition that has lasted ten years. I have been conscious of this condition for that long—a nondenominational disease inherited by right of succession,” the prince said. “You see, Doctor, I am putting on my jacket, and I am taking my jacket off again. I bought this jacket in Brussels, that one in London, that one in Cairo. I am putting on the Cairo jacket, taking off the London jacket, putting on the Brussels jacket, taking off the Cairo jacket. Curiosity, which costs so much money,” the prince said. “Naturally I cannot leave Hochgobernitz. I always bought newspapers and without reading them, merely leafing through them, threw them away again not a hundred
paces away from the newsstand where I bought them. If I were to let the newspapers I have bought in my life blow down Kärntnerstrasse as a newspaper drift, a newspaper drift like a snowdrift, Kärntnerstrasse would be completely stuffed up in no time at all; everything in Kärntnerstrasse would be smothered, half of Vienna would be smothered; people would be smothered under the newspapers I have bought in my life, could be buried and smothered; a deadly newspaper winter would descend on Vienna. I see,” the prince said, “the fever of childhood in the faces of children. Childhood tires quickly; age is the recollection of childhood. Best of all to be in bed and be able to fall asleep—for a long time now that has been all I want or need. Have you properly made use of your body? I think. Of your mind? Of life? When you begin to worry about that, you’re already past it-Foolish statements,” the prince said. “On railroad platforms, often, I am struck by the notion of throwing myself under the train at the last moment, but in big city toilets I find I am still curious after all. Pleasure in inventing complicated, impeccable sentences. Grasping the meaning of the word
ethometer
. Grasping the helplessness of all people, but without pity. The necessity of letting everything you know freeze hard. Challenging the steward who dismissed five gravel pit workers,” the prince said. “I ask:
Why?
He does not answer me. I say the gravel pit workers are not to be dismissed; it is dangerous to dismiss even a single gravel pit worker. We must not dismiss any of them, I say, but the steward dismisses the five. Instantly I feel something sinister about the gravel pits.… Or,” the prince said, “I walk on the outer wall, right here where we are walking now, and pick up a chestnut leaf. The chestnut leaf reminds me of my mother;
as I look at it I see her. Its smell reminds me of
Measure for Measure
. I see
Measure for Measure. Measure for Measure
reminds me of a pair of old shoes I wore as a child, and so on.… We see a person and instantly pass judgment,” the prince said. “This is a clever person, we say, a stupid person, a rabid person, a happy person, a cultivated, foolish, sociable, always laughing, always hopeless, always businesslike, always vulgar, always pitiable person … and we understand nothing. If we say,
he is a catastrophic person
, without knowing him, if we say,
he is
dead, and so on.… We see in a person frailties which at once make us see the frailties of the community in which we live, the frailties of all communities, the state; we feel them, we see through them, we catastrophize them. The greater the capacity for judgment, the greater the wariness. Our wariness slowly permeates everything. Even as a child my father toyed with the thought of killing himself. It cost him the greatest self-control, whenever he crossed the Ache, not to throw himself into the Ache. To hang himself. To shoot himself. This thought dominated him. Thinking in possibilities of suicide as a learned discipline subordinate to science,” the prince said. “The mystical element in my thinking has almost been switched off. Isolation. Nothing has purpose,” he said. “The millions of experiments,” he said, “lead back to the source, if we look at them with open eyes. These experiments in the mass and in so-called untrammeled nature. Nothing is easier than to escape into the commonplace. I say something,” the prince said, “and I immediately perceive the opposite of it in myself. We can persuade ourselves that we are not alone with a book, as we can persuade ourselves that we are not alone with a person. When we hire an actor, we want to be entertained; we
blast him if he forgets that. We always live in the delusion (because we think it will enable us to live) that we can escape completely from at least one of the elements of nature, that for example we are able to make a revolution, to topple a king from his pinnacle, and so on.… The eye is often abandoned by the intellect, the intellect by the eye. Nowadays,” the prince said, “we feel at ease in biblical descriptions; we have discovered the poetry of Sodom and Gomorrah and
feel
it. We are no longer fearful unto death, we
go
to death. Illnesses lead man by the shortest path to himself. Of course we must demand precision at least in our first premises. A man without a brain would be thoughtless. Our teachers have been enemies of our intellects. What does not concern us vexes us. For a long time now I have been concerned not with the idea of who will be on the moon tomorrow, but who will be the first to
travel through the earth
. The complete conversational incapacity of my wife, who could be sentimental about the whole world in regard to any single thing. Fatal diseases spreading everywhere. Always thinking in comparisons between the upper,
my
, and the lower,
their
, rooms. Habits, tendencies that have slowly consumed us all. Our impoverishment in action. In the lower rooms philosophy is no more possible than mysticism in the upper rooms. Sometimes I hear all the clocks in the house so loudly that I must get up and stop them. That requires several hours. Then I can fall asleep. Formerly, as children, we knocked on the walls to communicate with one another. Now nobody has knocked on the walls for half a century. In no time at all Hochgobernitz will be tenanted by the beetles and spiders,” the prince said. “Beetles and spiders as nature’s craziness, I often think. Everything is mystification,” he said.
We drove rapidly home by way of Landschach. “Unrewarding cases,” my father said. My sister had already gone to bed. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go for another walk with her and talk with her. It was already eleven o’clock. My father had yet another call to make, on a butcher in Krennhof who had shot himself in the belly with the apparatus used for shooting the animals. He expected to be back before midnight. While he was gone I thought about the utter silence in which we had descended from Hochgobernitz into the gorge and then driven out of the gorge. Tomorrow your father will take you back to Leoben in the early afternoon, I thought. You need not bother to unpack your suitcase. The local constable had been waiting for my father to hear the final word on the dead wife of the innkeeper. Grössl had been arrested, he reported. I did not want to wake my sister. I sat up trying to write a long overdue letter to a friend of my uncle who has a farm near Guttaring in Carinthia. He had invited me there a long time ago. I wanted to write that I would not be coming, could not come. My studies did not allow of any interruption just now, I had written, and then tore up the letter I had begun. In bed I thought:
What did the prince say?
“Always wanting to change everything has been a constant craving with me, an outrageous desire which leads to the most painful disputes. The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed. With putting everything on a philosophical basis, with making a public display of oneself. The darkness is cold when the head is switched off.”
The notebook:
“For days,” the prince said, “I have been searching my pockets for my mislaid notebook. This notebook of mine contains some remarkable entries.
Underlined!
My sickness is underlining important things; there are almost nothing but underlinings
in this notebook, and all these underlined sentences begin with the destruction of these sentences.… I have been searching my pockets for days for this notebook, and suddenly I found it downstairs in the kitchen. How has my notebook come to be in the kitchen? I ask myself. For days I have not been in the kitchen and suddenly I find my notebook in the kitchen. A horrible suspicion arises in me. I suspect that my elder sister took the notebook out of my jacket pocket and in the kitchen—I am a person altogether hostile to kitchens—surreptitiously read it through and left it lying there in the kitchen. I go to my elder sister at once and say: The terrible thing is the fact that you left my notebook lying in the kitchen, not that you have absorbed its contents! But I see that my elder sister cannot possibly have left the notebook lying in the kitchen, and go at once to my younger sister. I tell her straight to her face that it is a dastardly thing to read my notebooks, to take them out of my pockets and read them. I am afraid you have read all my notebooks, I say, but this is the first one you have left lying in the kitchen. Until now I have lived in the delusion that none of you is familiar with the contents of my notebooks, that you know nothing at all about what is in these notebooks. I force my younger sister into the office, because it seems monstrous to me that she of all persons has read this notebook. I recall immediately that in the notebook I have constantly made derogatory comments on my two sisters, but especially on the younger one. I have lived in the delusion, I say, that what I have written in my notebooks, written for decades, is completely unknown. And now I find that I am keeping my notebooks in public, I am keeping my notebooks publicly. But then I suddenly perceive that my younger sister does not even have an
inkling of the existence of my notebooks, and I at once tell myself, of course such a
superficial person
as my sister has not the slightest inkling of the existence of my notebooks, of course, and I say:
None of you care about anything concerning me!
I say:
Some day you will make the most frightful discoveries in these notebooks, you will make expeditions into your atrociousness
. Just because I keep silent about everything in my daily association with you, I need not keep silent about anything in my notebooks! All my ruthlessness bursts upon you in my notebooks. Upon
you
, upon your sister, upon my daughters, upon my son, upon everybody! Then, when I am dead, I shall cast a pall over you for a long while through my notebooks, I say, and you will think back on my presence with horror, on your brother and father! In the notebooks, I say, you have actually taken form, horrible form. Well, I say, if you did not leave the notebook lying in the kitchen,
who did
leave it lying in the kitchen? And I go out of the office and look for my elder daughter. It occurs to me that
she alone
is capable of taking my notebook out of my pocket and leaving it lying in the kitchen. I go through the whole house looking for my elder daughter. First I go through the lower rooms, then the upper rooms, but I do not find my elder daughter. Probably she is hiding, I think, because she has heard about the fuss over the notebook. I call, I walk in silence, then again calling, alternatively calling and silent, through the entire house. Finally it occurs to me that she might be in the pavilion. I go into the pavilion and find her on the sofa, reading a novel. I say at once:
Where is my notebook?
Yes, I say, I found my notebook in the kitchen.
This outrageous human race, now it has actually laid impious hands on my notebooks
, I say. Probably you have been
laying impious hands on my notebooks for years, I say. Possibly, I say, you have laid impious hands on all my notebooks. And probably, I say, what you have read into all my notebooks has made you turn against me with horrible cruelty. I hope, I say, that the upshot will be that you get out of Hochgobernitz, move out, move down to join your kind! But suddenly,” the prince said, “I realized that my elder daughter too
could in no way be connected with the notebook
. Then my younger daughter, I think. But nobody knows where she is.
I want to know where she is!
I shout. They say she has gone to the city. To the city! I say. I go about the lower rooms thinking that when night falls I shall take all the pictures hanging there down from the walls, all of them. And all the pictures in the upper rooms also, I say. And I will hang others.
More frightful ones
. Slowly, I calm down,” the prince said, “and then I hear my sisters whispering all at once. I must destroy this whispering, I think, and I go and chase them away.
No matter which of you took my notebook from my pocket and left it lying in the kitchen
, I say,
you must all suffer for it, all together
. Partners in crime, I think, the women are partners in crime. I have, I think, very expensive destroyers of my own person here in Hochgobernitz. And while I am ordering them to do a job that has to be done,” the prince said, “a disgusting household job, it occurs to me that I myself left the notebook lying in the kitchen, that, sleepless as always, I went into the kitchen in the middle of the night to drink something refreshing.