Extinction

by Thomas Bernhard

Catholic National Socialist spirit, which is in fact a negation of the spirit, a peculiarly Austrian form of mindlessness, as I’ve said before. I withdrew from its ambience, Gambetti, but I’ll have to contend with it all my life, because it’s inborn. Inborn spirits either can’t be exorcised at all or can be exorcised only for a time, at tremendous cost, and never permanently.

In my role as his personal philosopher, I say to him, Gambetti, the highest condition is solitude, yet I know very well that solitude is the most fearful punishment of all.

Contrary to what one might think on observing them for a while, they do not belong to an age that is no longer relevant to our own. They belong to our own age. But in their own way. Everyone who exists in the present has a share in the present, I thought.

The majority has always brought misfortune, I thought, and even today we have the majority to thank for most of our ills.

There is nothing outside our heads that must be combated more resolutely than indolence, and we must be equally resolute in combating indolence within our heads and proceed against it with all the ruthlessness at our command.

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail.

To think is to fail, I thought. But we naturally do not act with the intention of failing, nor do we think with the intention of failing.

why should they act differently now? I asked myself Yet at the same time it occurred to me how deep-rooted my distrust must be if I could harbor such a thought at this moment, and I loathed myself for it.

Typo: missing period before “Yet.”

Ignoring me, she locked up at the pigeons sitting on the windowsills, which this year were so caked with droppings that they looked quite disgusting.

typo: should read “looked” rather than “locked”

However mendacious the press may be, I told myself, what it prints is nevertheless true. When the papers lie they’re in fact being truthful, and the more they lie, the more truthful they are. Reading the newspapers, I have always found them mendacious, yet what they print is nothing but the truth.

I often lay on my bed, unable to stop thinking of how our nation was guilty of thousands, tens of thousands, of such heinous crimes, yet remained silent about them. The fact that it keeps quiet about these thousands and tens of thousands of crimes is the greatest crime of all, I told my sisters. It’s this silence that’s so sinister, I said. It’s the nation’s silence that’s so terrible, even more terrible than the crimes themselves, I said.

I was infernally skillful at concealing my own beastliness.

Newspaper editors purvey nothing but dirt, I thought—but the dirt they throw at us is our own dirt.

The printed world is the real world.

stertorous,

it’s the stolid idleness of the pig, I thought, which today is possibly more human than the human being, who has become more and more piglike in the last hundred years.

the greatest doubter I have ever known, who far outdoes me in his doubting, who has made doubting a principle of life, and who once told me that with his doubting he had started to dismantle the whole world in order to study it properly; Gambetti, who would dearly love to blow the world sky-high but at the same time spends hours walking around Rome in a red sweater, carrying books by Jean Paul and Kleist and Wittgenstein under his arm, while dreaming of dismantling the world and blowing it sky-high.

I’ve thrown away more manuscripts than I’ve kept, I thought, and those that I’ve kept I can’t bear to look at; they depress me because they present my thoughts in a ludicrous form that’s not worth talking about. My manuscripts are worthless, I told myself, but I haven’t given up trying to write things down, to do violence to the intellect, as it were.

I was her extinction expert, she said: whatever I set down on paper was automatically extinguished.

I’m still waiting for the big bang, I thought,

The floor of the library was covered with thousands of dead flies that had accumulated over the years and never been swept up, because nobody had entered the library.

I dread nothing so much as these endless nights that cannot be shortened.

We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void.

Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be a gaping void.

I won’t let myself be tyrannized by the three-ring binders. Millions are tyrannized by three-ring binders and never escape their tyranny, I thought. For the last century the whole of Europe has let itself be tyrannized by three-ring binders, and the tyranny is increasingly oppressive.

The art of exaggeration, I told Gambetti, is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible.

With some, of course, the art of exaggeration consists in understating everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerate understatement,