The Clown (The Essential Heinrich Boll)
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Read between October 3 - October 14, 2019
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in five years
Staycee
1st mention of time.
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Silence is a good weapon.
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The children of this world are not only smarter, they are also more humane and more generous than the children of light.
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It must be difficult to believe all that.
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Marie is even less settled than I am, yet she seems bent on becoming so.
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Nobody knew just what was happening.
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(Not long ago I ran into him again; he is old now, and white-haired, a professor at a Teachers’ Training College, and is said to be a man with a “courageous political past,” because he never joined the Party.)
Staycee
Hypocritical
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He blew up himself and the Apollo with a bazooka which he let off by mistake. Herbert Kalick’s comment on this accident was laconic: “What a good thing Georg
Staycee
Oh my goodness!
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I believe that the living are dead, and that the dead live, not the way Protestants and Catholics believe it. For
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would have like to phone Henrietta, but the theologians have not yet invented this kind of dialing.
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Alfons, Dr., Managing Director. The “Dr.” was something new—it must be an honorary degree.
Staycee
Hasnt talked to his family in years. But time is not specified
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five
Staycee
Hasn't Seen his mother in five years
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A hypocrite like that doesn’t even have to tell lies to be always on the right side of the fence.
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“That’s easy,” I said, “these old boys are not bothered by either memories or conscience. Is he at home now?”
Staycee
Men of atrocities have no memory or consciousness
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For the outsider—and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else—something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an “artistic decline.”
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I gave up talking long ago to anyone about money or art. When these two things meet, something is always wrong: art is either under- or overpaid.
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even made a farewell speech “on the Mistaken Assumption that Graduation is Essential to Eternal Bliss.”
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Catholics have no feeling whatever for detail.
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One never knows what someone will do under ideological pressure,
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False hopes, false modesty, false speculation on the unnatural.
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“Stay away from St. Augustine: skillfully formulated subjectivity is not theology, not by a long shot, and it’s harmful to young souls. Nothing but journalism with a few dialectical features.
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Marie had the miscarriage,
Staycee
Through reflections we get the decline of the relationship
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I would have liked to ask him whether my conception of Catholicism was correct. For me there were only four Catholics in the world: Pope John, Alec Guinness, Marie, and Gregory, an old negro boxer who had once nearly become world champion and who was now eking out a meagre living as a strong man in vaudeville.
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really hadn’t known one has to have a civil wedding before one can be married in church.
Staycee
Abstract order
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“You’re just agreeing now out of laziness and not because you are convinced of the justness of abstract principles of order,” and I said, Yes, it was true I was doing it out of laziness and because I wanted to have her by me my whole life long, and I would even go over properly to the Catholic church if that was necessary in order to keep her.
Staycee
Abstract order
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was simply incapable of carrying on an ideological discussion.
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I could see from her mouth that her behavior was caused by motives she did not admit to herself.
Staycee
What motives?
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had no desire to, and to do it out of mere routine or duty didn’t appeal to me.
Staycee
He acts out of pure intent not for routine or social expectations.
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“there is a point at which human beings, even if for ideological reasons—become human.”
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have often noticed how wives are loyal to their husbands to the point of absolute madness.
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Shortly afterwards Fredebeul arrived, with his fiancée, Monika Silvs and a certain Von Severn of whom, before he came, it was said that “although he had just converted he was very close to the Socialist Party,” which was evidently regarded as a terrific sensation. I
35%
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“Everything was fine with Marie as long as she was worried about my soul, but you people taught her to worry about her own soul, and now it’s got to the point where I, who have no sense of metaphysics, am worrying about Marie’s soul. When she marries Züpfner, then she will really be sinning. That much I have grasped of your metaphysics: what she is doing is fornication and adultery, and Prelate Sommerwild is acting the pimp.”
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“That all sounds very funny when you stop to think that Heribert is so to speak the temporal eminence and Prelate Sommerwild the spiritual eminence of German Catholicism.”
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Doctor, your madonnas would have meant your excommunication and interdict. You know perfectly well they were lifted from churches in Bavaria and the Tyrol—I don’t need to tell you that even today robbing churches is still considered a pretty serious crime.”
Staycee
Kinkle is a thief
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Marie could never understand that, a large part of her Catholic up-bringing consisted after all simply of psychological information and of a rationalism decked out with mysticism, of the order of “make them play football so they won’t think about girls.”
Staycee
Catholicism
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What I find particularly embarrassing are films about artists. Most films about artists must be made by people who would have paid Von Gogh not even an ounce of tobacco for a picture but only half an ounce, and later would have regretted even that because they realized he would have sold it even for a pipeful of tobacco. In films about artists the suffering of the artistic soul, the poverty and the wrestling with the demon, are always put in the past. A living artist who has run out of cigarettes, can’t buy shoes for his wife, is of no interest to film people because three generations of ...more
Staycee
Artists and money
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(one thing is certain, anyone who collects art is not an artist).
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My acts are too much of a mixture of pantomime, artistry, clowning—I would be a good Pierrot, but I could also be a good clown, and I vary my acts too often.
Staycee
Type of clown he is
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in a child’s life there is a greatness in the banal, it is strange, random, always tragic. A
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child, too, never takes time off as a child; time off does not begin until the “principles of order” have been accepted.
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An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.
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“Yes,” he said, “entirely of her own free will, although conceivably in a conflict between the natural and the supernatural.” “And where does the
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“I know this much,” I said, “that you Catholics are as hard on an unbeliever like me as the Jews are on the Christians, and the Christians on the heathen. All I ever hear is: law, theology—and when you come right down to it, this is all on account of a stupid bit of paper which the state—the state, mind you—has to issue.”
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She was really jealous. I have often noticed that with Catholics: they guard their treasures … the sacraments, the Pope—like misers.
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esthete
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That’s something I can understand, when a young person dreams a false dream of social justice and so on.
Staycee
Father doesn't believe in social justice
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And Marie would say with her wonderful pathos: “My husband is an artist, you see, an artist.”
Staycee
Marie calls him her husband
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Heinrich Behlen even got into trouble over it with his pastor, who had no idea I practiced there every day and who told Heinrich “not to carry brotherly love too far.”
Staycee
How do you take brotherly love too far when jesus calls to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
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We had both been so frightened, had been separated for ages, we were too desperate
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to kiss, we just whispered over and over again that we would never, never be separated again, “until death do us part,” whispered Marie.
Staycee
Wedding vows
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