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The notion that nothing can be taken seriously is an infrequent starting point for a novel, which presumably on some level has to take itself seriously in order to be written.
Ulysses has become the myth of the difficult book, eight hundred pages about a single day,
Reading The Sound and the Fury is like going into the house of a family you don’t know, where everyone’s talking about their relations and paying you not even the slightest attention; all you get is a number of names connected to various events and occurrences everyone knows about except you, which is why they are never related in their entirety but merely alluded to. Or rather, no, it’s like going inside the mind of one of those sitting there and being party to the way he or she experiences the conversation, the allusions and references being even more oblique; no one explains to themselves
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The lack of openness points directly inward toward the core of the novel, the fulcrum around which it revolves: something happened once, something no one can talk about, not even think about, but which nevertheless is present in the various streams of consciousness.
This is the case even in Dostoevsky; the fulcrum of his novels is never the spiritual or the religious in itself, but the reactions to it of the surrounding world. This is the novel’s basic constraint, chained as it is to life in the social domain, the way people are to each other, and the minute the novel departs from that human world and ventures into the nonhuman or the beyond-human of the divine, it dies.
Reading a novel after having listened to Bach’s cello suites is like leaving a sunset to descend into a cellar.
Reading is seeing the words as lights shining in the dark, one after another, and to engage in the activity of reading is to follow the lights into the text. But
blowing” or “it’s snowing,” but what exactly is doing the “raining,” the “blowing,” the “snowing”? The rain is, the wind is, the snow is; the actions are their own agents, conflated with the subject, and to denote that we use the pronoun “it.” “It” points toward a force that exists outside of us and over which we have no control.
God asking Moses to take off his sandals diminishes the revelation yet further: sandals or no sandals is a particularly human deliberation, one would think. And when Moses speaks to God, a misunderstanding
no traces at all of ritual or religion in Celan’s poem, on the contrary, the stone is shrouded in the quotidian, it
Earlier in the poem speaking was placed on an equal footing with not seeing, and with sleeping, which is another way of not seeing,
Water does not have duration, it forms itself according to the now,
What made the atrocities of the Third Reich possible was an extreme reinforcement of the we, and the attendant weakening of the I, which
Here we go
Even nature as it is, authentic and true, behind language, as it were, is colored by the ideology of the we, the project of striving to establish common meaning, including the Nazis’ own, in which it was one of the dominant ideas, evident not least in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where the idea of nature in itself is perhaps the most important element of all, but also in the philosophy of Heidegger, in whose work Celan immersed himself, going so far as to meet him in person, an encounter not entirely without controversy, Heidegger having aligned himself to Nazism, so not even the idea of the world as
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Trash
there?” I did not know they had got mixed up, did not think about enlightenment, did not think about myth, did not think about Adorno, did not think about Arendt, but about Grandad, who I knew had never been a Nazi, assuming by extension that his prejudice stemmed from the age from which he came and did not in any way express anything significant about the person he was inside.
When Dad died, Yngve and I found a Nazi pin among his belongings, a pin with a German eagle to put in the lapel of a jacket. Where did he get it from? He was not the type to have bought something of that nature and therefore he must have been given it or come across it in some way. When Grandma died, a year and a half after Dad, and we went through the house to divide things up, we found a Norwegian edition of Mein Kampf in the chest in the living room. What was it doing there?
it. I was due to go to Iceland for two days and had thought of reading the book on the plane, seeing as how I was intending to get started writing the first book of this novel when I got home again, and because it shares its name, My Struggle, with Hitler’s book, and because Hitler’s book and the Nazi pin were unexplained mysteries in that story,
I usually always sniff the books I buy, the new ones as well as the old, putting my nose to the pages and breathing in their smell because I associate that smell, and the smell of old books in particular, with something good, that element of childhood that was unconditionally pleasurable. The adventure, the abandoning oneself to other worlds. But I could not do that with Mein Kampf.
Being that visible made reading Hitler’s book out of the question, but it would have been just as impossible even if I had
been anonymous, since the book in itself is stigmatizing, and if anyone had seen me reading it there in public a mood of distaste would have spread through the cabin and people would have thought there was something wrong with me.
death. But with Hitler’s book it was different. Hitler’s book is no longer literature. What later happened, what he later did, the axioms of which are meticulously laid out in that book, is such that it transforms the literature into something evil. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is literature’s only unmentionable work.
Mein Kampf is more than text. It is a symbol of human evil. In it the door between text and reality is wide open, in a way quite unlike any other book. In Germany it is banned to this day. In Norway it has not been printed since the war.
He finds Frau K snobbish and uncritical, a person who repeats the dominant opinion in any circumstance,
Speer writes that he had forgotten what Hitler had said only hours later, whereas the mood stayed with him, the passion and the optimism: he had seen the new, he had seen the future.
Go to a theater performance and witness a play at three o’clock in the afternoon and the same play with the same actors at eight at night, and you will be amazed at the difference in effect and impression.
It is the most infamous book of our time, not because of what it says in itself, but because what it says was carried out in real life, and it is impossible to read Mein Kampf today without immense distaste, for something terrible and repulsive is attached to it, as if it were written by the devil himself.
Like any other memoir or autobiography, Mein Kampf begins with the main character’s birth. But no sooner are we informed of it than this “I” recedes into a “we,” so essential that the first thing it does there is to define its borders.
The father is the only person in Hitler’s life, during his first thirty-five years, to be described in more than a few words and accorded some biography. Like everyone belonging to Hitler’s closest family in Mein Kampf, he appears without a name. Of “my father,” Hitler writes that he was from
Ok so Karl does the same thing
one of the immovable premises from which the rest of its ideology issues. Nature is above culture. In nature the sick die, the weak die, the tardy die, the injured die. The
Ludwig Wittgenstein, born in the same year as Adolf Hitler, went there,
after once again rejecting my father’s favorite notion, I was asked what I myself wanted to be, and I rather abruptly blurted out the decision I had meanwhile made, my father for the moment was struck speechless. “Painter? Artist?”
Oh god he doesn’t identify with H does he?
Yet this is what he wants to be when he grows up. Not a soldier, not a priest, not a teacher, not a civil servant, but the absolute opposite of a civil servant, an artist.
and provides at the same time the best documentary insight into Hitler’s personality, Kubizek being the only real friend he had in his life.
Deine freunde ist geir
One evening in 1905 when Kubizek and Hitler are out taking their usual stroll,
The different style he uses to narrate someone else’s life
am in love with her, Hitler says.
The biographical stuff isn’t bad but the pronoun meditation is yikes
at last I had a chance of pulling his leg. I proclaimed with a straight face, “You must take dancing lessons, Adolf.” Dancing immediately became one of his problems. I
At one point he announced that he wanted to learn the piano, his mother bought him one and paid for lessons, all presumably beyond her means. After four months Hitler gave up, enraged by his teacher’s insistence on “stupid” finger exercises. Music was about inspiration, not finger exercises, he declared, and laid his ambitions to rest. Placing the blame for his inadequacy on his music teacher was typical of him.
Stuuupid
Another obvious reason for art being so important to him as a teenager was that it was the only way he could see of moving beyond the social class from which he came.
In a certain sense art is classless insofar as it is available to all;
In another sense art too is a class issue. The fact that it exists and is available does not mean that it is actually accessible to all; anyone growing up in a home without books, without pictures, without music, among people who never speak of art and do not care for it, perhaps even think it to be a waste of time and money, has no easy path in art’s direction. And even if they discover that path and venture along it, they will more than likely find themselves lacking the basic means possessed by those belonging to more elevated classes, the self-assurance with which they embrace culture and
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no one can remember exactly what was said in a given situation decades later, the way Kubizek pretends when quoting both Hitler and Hitler’s mother. But memoirs are no exact science, readers understand this and know from their own lives how later events twist and turn what happened at some earlier time, adding new shades, illuminating from new angles according to where we are in life. We need to be alert whenever events shape themselves into narratives, for narratives belong to literature and not to life, and occurrences of the past seep into and absorb expectations of the future, for the true
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Oooooookkkkkk
He finds Hitler spoiled, a manipulator who twists his mother around his little finger and needs to shape up and get a job, learn something decent.
No way
As a youth he was quiet, well-mannered, and neatly dressed. He was tall, sallow, old for his age. He was neither robust nor sickly. Perhaps “frail-looking” would best describe him. His
Reading this you hope he’s not trying to garner sympathy or end up.. identifying with him
The little “but” in the sentence concerning his mother and father, “but my mother I had loved,” more than suggests that he did not love his father,
That is true we don’t hear about the mom at all
Was Kubizek duped? Was he too stupid to realize that Hitler was using him? Did he not understand that viewing a cathedral in the mist is a washout, not an unearthly experience?
there were no women in Hitler’s life in the four years they spent together and he did not masturbate. This latter point is of course impossible to verify,
and he led his life in such a way as to make his friend believe he had been accepted and attended its lessons.
Jennifer Lin lololol
Choking with his catalog of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted. I see him before me, striding up and down the small space in boundless anger, shaken to his very depths. I sat at the piano with my fingers motionless on the keyboard and listened to him, upset by his hymn of hate, and yet worried about him.
His friend’s success throws his own failure emphatically into relief. And while he may still dominate him when they are on their own together and appear totally superior, when things are boiled down, the fact of the matter is that he is outshone and overlooked.
Thirty years would pass before Kubizek again laid eyes on Hitler.
Wow. His friend gets one good recital in and then he pouts for 30 years
