this bundle of reflexes and a well-educated will, I fed on the refuse o f history, refuse of impulse and instinct, I with

one foot in the wilderness and the other on the high road

26

to everlasting civilization. I impenetrable, a mixture o f all materials, matted, insoluble and yet capable o f being extin­

guished by a blow on the back o f the head. Silenced I of silence. . . .

W hy have I spent a whole summer trying to destroy my­

self in intoxication or to intensify my feelings in intoxication?

— Only to avoid becoming aware that I am an abandoned instrument upon which someone, a long time ago, struck a few notes on which I helplessly produce variations, out o f which I try furiously to make a piece o f sound that bears my handwriting. M y handwriting! As if it were important for something to bear my handwriting! Flashes o f lightning have passed through trees and split them. Madness has come upon men and inwardly broken them in pieces. Swarms o f locusts have descended upon the fields and left the trail o f their devouring. Floods have devastated hills and torrents the mountainsides. Earthquakes have not ceased. These are handwritings, the only ones.

If I had not immersed myself in books, in stories and legends, in newspapers, in reports, if everything communi­

cable had not grown up in me, I should have been a non­

entity, a collection o f uncomprehended events. (And that might have been a good thing, then I should have thought o f something new.) That I can see, that I can hear, are things I do not deserve; but my feelings, those I truly deserve, these herons over white beaches, these wanderers by night, the hungry vagabonds that take my heart as their highroad. I wish I could call out to all those who believe in their unique brains and the hard currency o f their thoughts: be o f good faith! But these coins which you clink together have been withdrawn from circulation, only you don’t know it yet.

Withdraw them from currency along with the images o f death’s heads and eagles which they bear. Admit that it’s all

up with the land o f Greece and the land o f Buddha, with enlightenment and alchemy. Admit that you are merely living in a country furnished by the ancients, that your views are only rented, the pictures o f your world hired.

Admit that when you really pay, with your lives, you do so only beyond the barrier, when you have said farewell to everything that is so dear to you— to landing-places, flying- bases, and only from there do you embark upon your own path and your journey from imagined stop to imagined stop, travellers who must not be concerned with arriving.

Attempt at flight! Fresh attempt at love! Since to your despair an immense, uncomprehended world offers itself—

let it g o !

Shadowy sleep, winged gaiety above abysses. When one person no longer entwines the other, lets him go quiedy on his way, when the polyp Man retracts his tentacle, stops devouring his neighbour . . . Humanity: to be able to keep one’s distance.

Keep your distance from me, or I shall die, or I shall murder, or I shall murder myself. Distance, in the name o f God!

I am angry, with an anger that has no beginning and no end. M y anger, which dates from an early Ice Age and now turns against this icy age. . . . For if the world is coming to an end— and everyone says that it is, the faithful and the superstitious, the scientists and the prophets, one day it will come to an end— then why should it not come to an end before it stops rotating or before the bang or before the Last Judgment? Why not out o f insight and anger? Why should not this race be able to act ethically and set an end?

The end o f the saints, o f the unfruitful fruitful, o f those who truly love. For once no objection can be raised to that.

28

He found it more and more difficult to wake up in the morn­

ing. He blinked in what little light there was, turned away, buried his head in the pillow. He asked for more sleep.

Come, lovely autumn. In this October o f the last roses . . . It is true that there is an island someone has told him about in the Aegean, on which there are only flowers and stone lions; the same flowers that in our country bloom modestly and briefly there appear twice a year, big and brilliant. The meagre soil, the hostile rock, spur them on.

Poverty drives them into the arms o f beauty.

He generally slept till far into the afternoon and got through the evening with the aid o f pastimes. He rid himself o f more and more ill-humour during these long sleeps and gathered strength through them. Suddenly time no longer seemed precious to him, no longer capable o f being wasted.

N or did he have to do anything in particular in order to be content, there was no longer any wish or ambition that he had to satisfy in order to remain alive.

It was a peculiarity o f this departing year to be mean with light. Even the bright days wore grey.

N ow he always went to little squares, to the Ghetto or to the coachmen’s cafes in Trastevere, and there drank his Campari slowly, day after day at the same time. He acquired habits, cultivated them, even the smallest. He observed his ossification with approval. On the telephone he often said:

‘M y dear friends, I’m afraid I can’t manage today. Perhaps next week.’— The following week he disconnected the tele­

phone. N or would he commit himself to any promises or explanations in letters. He had spent so many useless hours with other people, and although he made no use o f the hours now either, he did bend them towards him and sniff at them.

He came to enjoy time; its taste was pure and good. He wanted to withdraw entirely into himself. But nobody

noticed that or nobody wanted to perceive it. In the eyes o f those around him he still behaved extravagantly, was still one o f the boys, and often he met his cloudy shape in the town and greeted it with reserve because he knew it from the past. It wasn’t o f today. Today he was another man. He felt good only when he was alone, he no longer made demands, demolished the edifice o f his wishes, gave up his hopes and became simpler day by day. He began to think humbly o f the world. He sought a duty, he wanted to serve.

T o plant a tree. T o procreate a child.

Is that modest enough? Is it simple enough?

If he were to look round for a piece o f land and a woman

— and he knew people who had done so in all modesty— he could leave home at eight in the morning and go to work, occupy a place in the hive o f industry, make use o f the hire purchase system for furniture and the state allowance for children. He could see what he had learnt rewarded each month with bank-notes and use them to make a quiet week­

end for himself and his family. He could help to stimulate circulation, could circle with it.

He would like that. Particularly to plant a tree. He could watch it through all the seasons, see it add fresh rings and let his children climb it. He would like to harvest fruit. Apples.

Although he doesn’t like apples he insists on an apple tree.

And to have a son, that would be to his taste, although when he sees children it makes no difference to him which sex they are. His son would also have children, sons.

But a harvest that is so far away, outside in the garden that others will take over, outside in the time in which he will no longer be alive. Horrifying thought! And here is the whole world full o f trees and children, scabby, stunted trees, hungry children, and no assistance is sufficient to help them to a worthy life. Tend a wild tree, take these children to you,

30

do it if you can, just protect a tree from being felled and then go on talking!

Hope: I hope that nothing happens as I hope it will. I hope that if tree and child are to be given me this will happen at a time when I have lost all hope o f it and all modesty.

Then I shall be able to deal with the two o f them, well and definitely, and shall be able to leave them at the hour o f my death.

But I’m alive! That is indisputable.

Once, when he was barely twenty, he had thought every­

thing to an end in the Vienna National Library and then discovered that he was alive. He lay over the books like a drowning man and thought, while the little green lamps burned and the readers crept about soft-footed, coughed softly, turned the pages softly, as though they feared to wake the spirits that dwelt between the book covers. He thought—

if anyone understands what that means! He can still remem­

ber the precise moment when he was pursuing a problem of knowledge and all concepts lay loose and handy in his head.

And as he thought and thought and flew higher and higher as though on a swing, without feeling dizzy, and as he gave himself the most magnificent push, he felt himself fly against a ceiling through which he had to push his way up. A feeling o f happiness such as he had never known before had taken possession o f him, because at this instant he was on the point o f understanding something relating to everything and the ultimate. He would push his way through with his next thought! Then it happened. Then a blow struck and shook him, inside his head; a pain arose that caused him to slacken, he slowed down his thinking, became confused and jumped down from the swing. He had exceeded his capacity for thinking or perhaps no one could go on thinking where he

had been. Up above, in his head, against the roof o f his skull, something was going click-click-click; the clicking was frightening and went on for several seconds. He thought he had gone mad, and clutched at his book with his hands. He let his head sink forward and shut his eyes, fainting while fully conscious.

He had come to the end.

He had come to the end more than ever before, more than when he was with a woman and when for an instant all the circuits in his brain were broken, when he hoped for the destruction o f his individuality and felt himself enter into the kingdom o f the species. For what had been destroyed here, in the big old room, by the light o f the little green lamp, in the silence o f the festive feeding on letters, was a creature that had risen too high, a winged being that had striven to pass through corridors filled with blue dusk to a source of light, to be exact a man, no longer as a counterpart, but as the potential accessory to Creation. He was destroyed as a potential accessory, and from now on he would never be able to rise so high and touch the logic upon which the world is suspended.

He knew that he had been turned away, that he was incapable, and from that hour forward knowledge became a torment to him, because he had committed a crime there, because he had gone too far and been destroyed in the pro­

cess. Henceforth he could only learn odds and ends, become a hack and keep his intelligence supple, but that didn’t interest him. He would have liked to set himself up outside, to have looked over the frontier and from there back upon himself and the world and language and every proviso. He would have liked to have come back with another language that would have been capable o f expressing the secret he had discovered.

32 *

As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best o f it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves5 cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned. He would have to ladle up his soup and on the last day be proud or cowardly, keep silent, despise or speak furiously to the God whom he could not meet here and who had not admitted him there. For if He had anything to do with this world here, with this language, He would not be God. God cannot be in this madness, cannot be in it, can only have to do with the fact that this madness is, that this madness is there and that there is no end to the madness!

In the winter o f the same year he had gone with Leni into the mountains, on the Rax, over the week-end, yes, he knows exactly how it was. N ow he knows for the first time how it was. They had frozen, shivered, clung anxiously together in the stormy night. They had pushed the much too thin, shabby blanket alternately one to the other, and then pulled it away one from the other as they dozed. Before this, he had been to Moll’s place and confided everything to him.

He had run to Moll because he didn’t know what to do, he understood nothing about all that, he didn’t know a doctor, he didn’t know his way around with himself and Leni, didn’t know his way around with women. Leni was so young, he was so young, and his knowledge, with which he had shown off in front o f her, came from Moll, who knew his way around, or pretended to know his way around. Moll had got hold o f the tablets which he ordered Leni to take during the evening in the skiing hut. He had discussed everything with Moll, and although he felt so awful he had let M oll envy him. (‘A virgin, that’s something I’ve never had in this city, tell me

B

all about it, old friend!5 He had drunk with Moll and in his intoxication he had inhaled M oll’s views. (‘Make an end while there’s still time. That’s the only thing to do. Get out while the going’s good. Think o f the future. The stone round your neck.’) But in the snowy night he felt a horror of himself, o f Moll, of Leni whom he had no longer felt like touching since he knew what lay in store for her, never again did he want to touch that bony, colourless body, that odour­

less child-woman, and therefore he got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs again into the guestroom, sat down at an empty table and felt sorry for himself, until he was no longer alone, until the two blonde skiing girls sat down with him, until he was drunk and went upstairs with the two o f them, walking behind them like a condemned man, to the same floor on which Leni was lying awake crying or sleeping and crying in her sleep. When he was in the bed­

room with the two girls and heard himself laughing with them, everything seemed to him simple and easy. A ll that still existed for him, he could demand anything; it was so easy, he merely hadn’t got the right attitude yet, but he would have it, straight away and from now on for ever. He felt that he shared a secret of easiness, of cheapness and of unwanton wantonness. Even before he began kissing one of the girls, Leni had already been abandoned. Even before he overcame a residue of resistance and bashfulness and went for the other one, his fear had been got rid of. But then he paid, because he couldn’t shut his ears to the shrill words and the mad stammer that encircled him. He couldn’t turn back now and he couldn’t shut his eyes, he paid with his eyes for everything which before and afterwards it was vouch­

safed him to see on those nights when a light was burning.

Next morning Leni was gone. When he returned to Vienna he shut himself in for a few days, he didn’t go to her, and

34 *

he never heard from her again. N ot until years later did he enter the house in the Third District in which she had lived;

but she no longer lived there. Even now he dared not search for her, and he would have left at once, would have fled, if she had still lived there. Often he saw her in haunted hours, drifting down the Danube with a bloated face or pushing the child in a pram through the City Park (and on such days he avoided the City Park), or he saw her without a child because the child couldn’t be alive, saw her standing in a shop as a salesgirl and asking him, before she saw him, if she could help him. He also saw her happily married to a commercial traveller in the provinces. But he never saw her again. And he buried so deep inside him that it seldom rose to the surface the picture o f the snowy night, o f the storm, o f the snow that was blown right up to the level o f the little hut window, o f the light that had burnt over three entwined bodies and a giggling, the giggling o f witches, and blond hair.

When religion has been hung up with one’s Sunday suit, when a man has fallen into the pit he dug for another, when the proverbial has been fulfilled and all predictions regarding changes o f the moon and sunset have once more been proved right— in a word, when the sum for the time being works out, and everything that ought to fly in the cosmos flies, he can only shake his head and reflect upon what an age he is living in.

Like everyone, he is not well informed; he knows only the smallest part, and everyone knows only a very tiny part, o f what is going on.

He happens to know that there are robots that never make mistakes, and he knows a tram driver who once made a mistake about the time o f departure and the right o f way. Perhaps the stars and comets make mistakes when too

much intervenes, out o f absentmindedness and weariness and because their attention has been distracted from the old poetic delivery o f their light.

He wouldn’t like to be up above, but he is glad that everything is continuing up above, because above is also below, so everything is continuing all round, since it cannot

He wouldn’t like to be up above, but he is glad that everything is continuing up above, because above is also below, so everything is continuing all round, since it cannot