Extinction

by Thomas Bernhard

I had given Gambetti five books that I thought would be useful and necessary to him in the next few weeks, telling him to read them slowly and carefully: Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Kafka’s The Trial, Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, Musil’s The Portuguese Woman, and Broch’s Esch or Anarchy.

Italian, which bears the same relation to German as a child reared in complete freedom, in a happy and prosperous home, bears to one who has been cowed and beaten into low cunning in the poorest of poor families.

every sentence forces to the ground whatever they venture to think, and thus forces everything to the ground.

I was alarmed by my ruthless honesty.

The photograph is a perverse and treacherous falsification. Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity.

Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one.

I have yet to see a photograph that shows a natural person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature.

The whole of humanity teems with countless beauties and possibilities, he said. Only an imbecile believes that the world stops where he stops.

The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle.

The grander the title, the greater the imbecility of its holder.

But your father was never capable of independent thought: he hadn’t the wherewithal. He always admired others whom he took to be thinking people and let them do his thinking for him.

Right from the start I was the inquisitive one, whom they couldn’t help fearing.

They live their lives because it’s the done thing; not because they want to, not because they have a passion for life, but because their parents took out a subscription for them.

Human beings, it seems, exert themselves only for as long as they can look forward to idiotic diplomas that they can boast about in public.

To put it baldly, human beings count for nothing: only titles and diplomas count.

Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on the pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives.

Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state—remember that.

The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity,

You think you’re visiting a beautiful country, but in reality you’re visiting a monstrous business enterprise.

The Germans have a mother fixation, I said, and so have the Austrians. Mothers are not to be questioned, mothers are sacred, but in fact most of them are perverse puppet mothers who tug at the heads of their families until they’ve tugged them to death.

The good-looking person in a photograph is invariably the ugliest, the happy one invariably the unhappiest. They have photographs taken of themselves and hang them on their walls as representations of a happy and beautiful world, though in reality it is the unhappiest, ugliest, and falsest of all worlds.

If you deprived people of their photographs, if you ripped them off their walls and destroyed them, once and for all, you’d deprive them of more or less everything.

forenoon fantasist.

Without the art of exaggeration, I told him, we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch, I said. To explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear.

the Black Forest, where the foxes say good night

Not many writers become more important, more impressive, on a second reading. Most of them, on a second reading, make us feel ashamed of having read them even once.

Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child’s soul,

Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience

poetasters

Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

Johann Peter Hebel’s Calendar Stories.

Kropotkin and Bakunin, I told Gambetti, to Dostoyevsky, Tols...

There was a time when I was fired with a desire to travel the whole of Europe, seeking out the places where all these philosophers, poets, writers, or whatever had lived, but having done so I understand them far less than before.

Our concealed thoughts encompass everything, while our published thoughts amount to next to nothing. But if we were to publish our secret thoughts, if we were once to express them, we’d be done for.

All dictators have been passionate huntsmen who would have paid any price and even killed their own people for the sake of hunting,

But one day, I said, I’ll set about recording all the things about Wolfsegg that obsess me and give me no peace. For decades Wolfsegg has given me no peace. It haunts me day and night. And since my family have neither the will nor the ability to describe Wolfsegg as it is and always has been, it’s clearly incumbent on me to do so. At least I’ll try to describe Wolfsegg as I see it, for everyone has to describe things as he sees them, as they appear to him. And if I had to admit to myself that I saw Wolfsegg as a terrible place inhabited by terrible people, I’d be obliged to state it.

The fact is, Gambetti, that I’ve often started work on it, only to be defeated by the first sentence. I’ve given up again and again, clapping my hand to my head and reflecting that it’s probably madness even to think of writing an account of Wolfsegg, because only a madman would do such a thing.

Yet it’s always been clear to me, and it’s become even clearer to me recently, that it has to be written, that I can’t get out of writing it, and that one day I’ll have to write it, whatever misgivings I may have. My mind demands it of me. And my mind has become implacable, above all toward myself.

The only thing I have fixed in my head is the title, Extinction, for the sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything, you understand, Gambetti, really and truly everything.

We think we can embark on such an undertaking, yet we can’t. Everything’s always against us, against such an undertaking, and so we put it off and never get around to it. In this way many works of the mind that ought to be written never see the light of day but remain just so many drafts that we constantly carry around in our heads, for years, for decades—in our heads.

The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy—a perfect, perfidious comedy.

I’d been completely obsessed with myself and had therefore neglected myself in the grossest and most unpardonable way.

We must be grateful for all the sleepless nights of our lives, Gambetti, as they enable us to progress philosophically.

Shopping can sometimes be our salvation, if we brace ourselves and don’t shy away from the greatest luxury, from the most exquisite and expensive goods, the very costliest goods, no matter how grotesque, like this suit of Maria’s.

Pelléas et Mélisande.

Vienna, which was after all her home, she said. I always greeted this with a laugh, because the word home, coming from her lips, sounded as grotesque as it would coming from mine, though I never use the word, which I find too emetic, whereas Maria used it nonstop, saying that home was the most seductive word.

it is this dangerous mental and emotional condition that generates her superb poems.

if it weren’t my mother tongue I wouldn’t speak it,

if we are honest we have to admit that we ourselves are far weaker than those we wish to see as weak, far more ridiculous than those we wish to see as ridiculous, comic, and characterless.

today, I told Gambetti, there are a hundred times more people in photographs than there are in reality—than natural people, in other words.