Gargoyles

by Thomas Bernhard

The essential elements of a person, my father said, come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.

You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

I had written to him fancying that I would receive an answer, and now I realized that no such answer would ever be forthcoming.

Bloch had become a friend who meant more than other lost friends, all those others scattered throughout the countryside pretending to be its intelligentsia, exiled in deep, sunless valleys, in small towns and dull marketplaces and villages, accepting their monotonous fate as country doctors in a way that used to pain him when he himself was still a student, but now only repelled him. For all these people, the high point had been their university years, he said. Once discharged into a world disastrously trustful of them, they fell into a horrible familial and consulting-room apathy, irrespective of whether they worked in hospitals or in private practice.

Lifelong dilettantes, they married much too soon or much too late and were destroyed by their increasing lack of ideas, lack of imagination, lack of strength, and finally by their wives.

The smiles of such women who know they are done for and who wake from sleep to find that they are still in this painful world—these smiles are nothing but horror.

Her daughter-in-law had thrust her into the outer darkness of hopeless solitude,

If her husband had not fallen to his death he would probably have been destroyed “slowly and miserably” by their son’s feeble-mindedness, she thought

Every day I completely built myself up, and completely destroyed myself. Self-control, I said, is the satisfaction of using your brain to make the self into a mechanism that obeys your command. Only through such control can man be happy and perceive his own nature. But very few people ever perceive their natures. To let the feelings predominate, to do nothing against the normal gloominess of the emotions, delivers people up to despair. Where the reason is in control, I said, despair is impossible. “Whenever this state of total irrationality closes down on me, there is nothing but despair inside me.” Nowadays I only very rarely succumb to this state, I said. Life always seemed grim if you did not step outside it; the satisfaction came from enduring it rationally. Most people were governed by their emotions, not their reason, I said, and the result was that most sank into despair. “But the kind of reason I mean,” I said, “is completely unscientific.”

Students were always prey to a kind of restlessness, I said, because as long as they are at school they live in a no-man’s land between the parents they have left behind and the world they cannot yet attain, and their instincts still draw them back to their parents rather than toward the world. There are often tragedies inside that no-man’s land, which happen when they realize that they can neither return to their parents nor step out into the world.

It was a well-known phenomenon, my father said, that at a crisis in their lives some people seek out a dungeon, voluntarily enter it, and devote their lives—which they regard as philosophically oriented—to some scholarly task or to some imaginative scientific obsession. They always take with them into their dungeon some creature who is attached to them. In most cases they sooner or later destroy this creature who has entered the dungeon with them, and then themselves.

Whenever I look at people, I look at unhappy people,” the prince said. “They are people who carry their torment into the streets and thus make the world a comedy, which is of course laughable. In this comedy they all suffer from tumors both mental and physical; they take pleasure in their fatal illness. When they hear its name, no matter whether the scene is London, Brussels, or Styria, they are frightened, but they try not to show their fright. All these people conceal the actual play within the comedy that this world is. Whenever they feel themselves unobserved, they run away from themselves toward themselves. Grotesque. But we do not even see the most ridiculous side of it because the most ridiculous side is always the reverse side. God sometimes speaks to them, but he uses the same vulgar words as they themselves, the same clumsy phrases. Whether a person has a gigantic factory or a gigantic farm or an equally gigantic sentence of Pascal’s in his head, is all the same,” the prince said. “It is poverty that makes people the same; at the human core, even the greatest wealth is poverty. In men’s minds and bodies poverty is always simultaneously a poverty of the body and a poverty of the mind, which necessarily makes them sick and drives them mad. Listen to me, Doctor, all my life I have seen nothing but sick people and madmen. Wherever I look, the worn and the dying look back at me. All the billions of the human race spread over the five continents are nothing but one vas...

Comedy. The world actually is, as has so often been said, a stage on which roles are forever being rehearsed. Wherever we look it is a perpetual learning to speak and learning to walk and learning to think and learning by heart, learning to cheat, learning to die, learning to be dead. This is what takes up all our time. Men are nothing but actors putting on a show all too familiar to us. Learners of roles,” the prince said. “Each of us is forever learning one (his) or several or all imaginable roles, without knowing why he is learning them (or for whom). This stage is an unending torment and no one feels that the events on it are a pleasure. But everything that happens on this stage happens naturally. A critic to explain the play is constantly being sought. When the curtain rises, everything is over.” Life, he went on, changing his image, was a school in which death was being taught. It was filled with millions and billions of pupils and teachers. The world was the school of death. “First the world is the elementary school of death, then the secondary school of death, then, for the very few, the university of death,” the prince said. People alternate as teachers or pupils in these schools. “The only attainable goal of study is death,”

Inside every human head is the human catastrophe corresponding to this particular head, the prince said. It is not necessary to open up men’s heads in order to know that there is nothing inside them but a human catastrophe. “Without his human catastrophe, man does not exist at all,” the prince said. Man loves his misery, he said, and if he is without his misery for a moment, he does everything he can to return into his misery. “When we look at people, they are either in their misery or seeking their misery. There are no individuals who are free of human misery,” he said. Man exists continually in an extremely dangerous state, the prince said, but he is not conscious of the fact that he continually exists in an extremely dangerous state, forever opposed to himself. This is the basis of his existence, but this is also the basis of his sickness. “All dying,” the prince said.

Whenever you engage in a dialogue with another person (with yourself!) because otherwise you are suddenly afraid of suffocating, you must be prepared for his doing his utmost to undercut you. That can be done in the subtlest, the most elaborate, but also the nastiest manner. Whenever people talk they undercut one another. The art of conversation is an art of undercutting, and the art of monologue is the most horrible kind of undercutting. I always think,” the prince said, “that my interlocutor is trying to push me down into his own abyss after I have just barely managed to escape from my own abyss. Your interlocutors try to push you into as many abysses as possible simultaneously. All interlocutors are always mutually pushing one another into all abysses.”

The prince went on to say that he often went to bed with a particular classical melody, or a still irregular one, in his head, and woke up with the same melody there. “Must I assume,” the prince said, “that this melody remained in my head all night long? Of course. As you know, I always tell myself, everything is always in your head. Everything is always in all heads. Only in all heads. There is nothing outside of heads.

I never think of my wife any longer,” the prince said, although of all people she was the one he had loved most. He also wondered why he no longer dreamed of her. “For years I have not dreamed of my wife,” he said. “I neither think of her nor dream of her. She is gone. Gone where? Of course she still exists, because I am now speaking of her. You know, Doctor, the tragedy is that nothing is ever really dead.

But chance, not God, as the common herd believes, must be assumed.

Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three he would shut himself up in his room for days, not even leaving it for meals, for the sake of his thoughts. Each of us has protracted periods in which we do not exist at all, only pretend to exist. Sometimes the actual existence and the pretended existence of a person merge in a way that is fatal for him.

There are people who manage quite well with the raw materials of life and do not refine it; the raw materials suffice them. Everything in my son’s letters, except for himself, is mere backdrop; ideas are nothing but sets dropped from the grid of the universe, and his brain is nothing but a highly complicated modern stage-lighting system which constantly influences these sets.

The prince said he was forever compelled to make a stupid society realize it was stupid, and that he was always doing everything in his power to prove to this stupid society how stupid it was. But sometimes this stupid society would say that he was stupid.

“Sometimes I am delighted by the fact that I am left entirely to myself and am full of pain.”

“In conversation,” the prince said, “people constantly feel as if they are treading a tightrope and are always afraid of falling down to the low level more proper to them. I too have this fear. Therefore all conversations are conducted by people who are treading a tightrope and constantly in fear of falling to their low level, of being pushed down to the low level.

Again and again I reflect that I have been left alone. And I feel this to be the most loathsome of thoughts: to be left alone. Loneliness is man’s route to loathsomeness.

What is more, I no longer have the desire to observe people and consider everything they touch, have to touch, as artificial creations. I have already exhausted myself in contemplation. One exhausts oneself very rapidly in contemplation.

The only force that exists, as you well know, is the force of imagination. Everything is imagined. But imagining is strenuous, is fatal.

He went on to speak of the admiration for a person that we generate in ourselves. Suddenly that person can brutally destroy our admiration by suddenly becoming, in our very presence, and simultaneously inside us, the very thing he consistently and in reality is. Ultimately such a discovery destroys everything, the prince said.

We live by little surprises that we thoughtfully contrive for ourselves—isn’t that pitiable? To think that I can say yes, but that I can also say no to everything.

When we open our mouths, we kill a reputation; we simultaneously kill a reputation and kill ourselves. But if we do not open our mouths we are soon crazy, insane, there is nothing left of us.

But if I am asked, though I am not asked, what kind of life my life is, I say: My life. Consistent existences! I say. That will arouse laughter. Contempt. General disapproval. I am constantly afraid of being asked what kind of life my life is, although I know that not a soul will ever ask me what kind of life my life is. This question cannot be put to me. This question is always asked only in order not to have to ask it, you see.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents. We all have no parents; we are never lonely but always alone. For a long time now we have been forming a world foreign legion of the mind, all of us together. And knowing that we cannot exist without being condemned, what we wish for ourselves is a constant, strict tribunal which we always understand and therefore tolerate.

“I always read the writer’s bitterness at his fate. I see him communicating on the surface though he remains deep under the surface of his despair; I see his misled self misleading others, and so on.… Slowly the stars, all the heavenly bodies [we could not see any], are becoming the symbols we have always regarded them as being. In that way we give ourselves the illusion of a creator. The intellect, Doctor, is nonlogical. Rescue lies in the place we do not go to because we cannot turn back. The greater the difficulties the more I enjoy living—I have often run this sentence through my brain and polished it for whole nights.

We tire quickly whenever we don’t tell lies. The foundations are in the earth, we feel, but we do not add the thought: in the lower strata, and we are afraid. Are we always asking too much of others?” the prince asked. “No,” he answered himself, “I think not. I confront a person and I think: What are you thinking? Can I, I ask myself, go along with you inside your brain for a little? The answer is: No! We cannot go along with someone inside the brain. We force ourselves not to perceive our own abyss. But all our lives we are looking (without perceiving) down into our physical as well as psychic chasm. Our illnesses systematically destroy our lives, just as an increasingly defective orthography destroys itself.” The prince said: “Everybody is continually discussing things with himself and saying: I do not exist.

I have always had the need, from my earliest childhood on, to enter into my fantasies, and I always have gone far into my fantasies, farther than those I have taken along with me into my fantasies, such as my sisters, for example, or my daughters, or my son. Just as they do not dare to enter infinitely deep into reality, they also do no dare enter infinitely deep into fantasies, into the realm of fantasy.

We sleep and dream of a world which has been engendered by several other minds along with our own, and we are astonished at it because we cannot know that we are not always ourselves.

During a conversation,” the prince said, “we are often reassured by the supposition that our interlocutor’s world is just one fatal element higher or deeper than our own.

At first we go into cities to visit many people,” he said. “Some that we know, others we don’t know. We think we have to visit them—that is why we have gone into the cities in the first place. We try by means of human contacts to spread ourselves out over whole cities and ultimately over the whole world. But later,” he said, “we go into cities in order not to visit anyone any longer, in order to hide better, to concentrate better on ourselves; we go into cities in order to disappear among the masses.

“The shattering thing,” he said, “is not the ugliness of people but their lack of judgment.

In the past,” the prince said, “I always had good relationships with people at first; now the first relationship is always a bad one. It is less strenuous to move from an initially bad relationship to a good one than vice versa, from an initially good one to a bad one.

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,” the prince said, “is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous. I have never yet seen a ridiculous person, although everything is ridiculous about most of the people I see. In this house,” he said, “everything makes a reasonable impression, and I have never heard anyone speak of this house as anything but a reasonable house, but in fact there is not the slightest trace of reason in this house. Just as there is not, cannot be, the slightest trace of reason in most of the people whom we meet and call reasonable. Hochgobernitz is altogether reasonable, but without the slightest trace of reason.

The intellectual always thinks he has to take Nature under his protection, although he is completely dominated by her.

We talk to a person hundreds, thousands of miles away without his knowing we are talking to him. We ask questions in his stead. We answer for him. If we meet him, it seems to us that he actually had the conversation with us, the conversation that has moved us even farther apart.

I often speak in such a way as to leave my interlocutor plenty of time for reflection, for talking with himself.”

In books I have always discovered how unhappy I am, how callous, how insanely irresponsible, how sensitive, how superfluous.

The underlying meaning of several objects taken together is not necessarily revealed to us when the underlying meaning of each of those objects is revealed to us. There you have the problem of history.