Extinction

by Thomas Bernhard

What we have now is the artificial human being, and we’re alarmed when we come across a natural human being again, because it’s something we’re not prepared for, because for so long we’ve been confronted only with artificial human beings, who’ve been ruling the world for ages, a world that long ago ceased to be a natural world and is now thoroughly artificial, Gambetti, an artificial world. The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti—that must be obvious. The photo of my brother getting into his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee shows him posing as a happy person, but in the photo he is the unhappiest person imaginable.

You know, Gambetti, if we’re honest we have to admit that the universal process of stultification is now so far advanced that it can’t be reversed. This process of stultification was inaugurated well over a hundred years ago by the invention of photography, and since then the mental condition of the human race has been in permanent decline. This worldwide stultification was set in motion by photographic images and attained its present deadly momentum when the images began to move. Humanity has for decades been staring brainlessly at these deadly photographic images and become more or less paralyzed.