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The thing that really impressed me about friend Kanitz from the start was his positively daemonic determination to add to his knowledge at the same time as his fortune.
I think it was the fourth he had smoked that evening, and it was this incessant smoking in particular which made me realize that the exaggeratedly comfortable, jovial manner he assumed in the role of doctor, his drawling way of talking and apparent nonchalance, were all part of a technique specially adopted to enable him to sort out his impressions (and perhaps to observe his patients) at leisure.
It was Napoleonic in its audacity, its perilousness, this plan to take the besieged fortress of Kekesfalva by storm before the relieving army approached. But chance is a willing accomplice of the man who is ready to venture all.
No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbour lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth rather than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.
‘Scampus maximus,
For when one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.
thank you very, very much.’
And so it was that the lamb took leave of the slaughterer. Kanitz, however, felt as though he had struck his own head with the axe.
The words had slipped out without his having, as usual, weighed them, thought them out, tested them. A wish that he himself had neither elucidated nor admitted to himself had suddenly been transmuted into speech, vibrant with meaning.
The little agent would never have summoned up the courage to propose to this refined, blue-eyed young woman to further his own ends; he was, rather, in spite of himself, taken unawares by an emotion that was genuine, and, strangely enough, remained genuine.
you may laugh, but it is always madness that first gives one an insight into the intensity of a passion
Believe me, as an older man, I know there is no need to be ashamed of being taken in by life now and again; it is, if anything, a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.
As though it were as simple as all that. Even “well” or “ill” are words that no self-respecting doctor should utter with a clear conscience, for where does illness begin and health end?
The exact opposite is the truth. I maintain that it is precisely the incurable one should try to cure, and, what is more, that it is only in so-called incurable cases that a doctor shows his mettle.
As for me, it seems to me as pitiable a thing as if a writer were only to attempt to say what had already been said, instead of trying to force into the medium of the spoken word the unsaid, nay, the unsayable;
as though a philosopher were to expatiate for the ninety-ninth time on what has long been known instead of tackling the unknown, the unknowable.
The utmost that I would say in the most desperate case would be that an illness was “not yet curable”, that is to say, that contemporary science had not yet found a cure for it.’
Nietzsche and Schumann and Schubert and I know not how many more of its tragic victims did not by any means die, therefore, of an “incurable” disease, but of a disease that was not curable at the time when they lived — yes, if you like, it was in a double sense that they died prematurely.
Yes, miracles happen even today in the world of medicine, miracles that are performed in a blaze of electric light, in the face of all logic and experience, and sometimes one can perform them oneself.
Fortunately for us, in the case of most patients Nature helps in the deception and becomes our willing accomplice.
I am sorry, but medicine has nothing to do with morals; every illness is in itself an anarchistic phenomenon, a revolt against Nature, and one must therefore employ every means to fight it, every means.
No, no pity for the sick — the sick person places himself outside the law, he offends against law and order, and in order to restore law and order, to restore the sick person himself, one must, as in the case of every revolt, attack ruthlessly, employ every weapon at one’s command, for goodness and truth have never yet succeeded in curing humanity or even a single human being.
Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.
There stole over me that mood of serene exaltation in which everything seems good and rapturous, the world and its human beings; that mood in which one has an urge to embrace every tree and stroke its bark as though it were the flesh of a loved one; in which one longs to enter every house, to sit down by the side of its unknown occupants and unburden oneself to them; in which one’s own breast is filled to bursting point, and one’s emotions are too much for one, in which one would like to open one’s heart, to give lavishly of oneself — to spend and squander some of the superabundance of one’s
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In an instant I knew what I had been refusing to admit to myself for hours and hours: that all my raptures had been nothing but the intoxication born of a lie, and that in my weakness, my fatal wallowing in my own pity, I had been guilty of deceiving both myself and the others.
the punctuality born of impatience
in medias res,
“finis”
Condor raised his head for the first time and looked straight at me. But there was no sternness in his gaze. On the contrary, I felt that he pitied me.
pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heart, off it.
It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison.
But there are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
ad infinitum
In medicine the use of the knife is often the kinder course. Never procrastinate.
This was my sore spot. In this respect I was lame, I walked on crutches. It was solely for this reason that I was so immoderately upset by the fact that this spoiled, pampered creature, who herself suffered all the pangs of hell at being at such a physical disadvantage, should not understand my feelings. In spite of myself I was almost rude.
I had envisaged every possibility but this: that a being whom Fate had so maimed, who had not the strength to drag herself along, could dream of a lover, a beloved, that she should so horribly misunderstand me, who, after all, visited and went on visiting her simply out of pity.
Not even for a fleeting moment had it occurred to me to think that under that concealing coverlet there breathed, felt, waited, a naked body, a female body which, like any other, desired and longed to be desired.
It was only from this moment that I began to have an inkling of the fact (suppressed by most writers) that the outcasts, the branded, the ugly, the withered, the deformed, the despised and rejected, desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy; that they love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love, and that no passion on earth rears its head so greedily, so desperately, as the forlorn and hopeless passion of these step-children of God, who feel that they can only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved.
I really only felt pity for her. Only pity, nothing else, nothing else whatever.’
In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one’s will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another’s passion.
Jonathan liked this
He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love, is lost beyond redemption; for it is not in his power to set a limit to the other’s passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another’s desire.
Our instincts are always more prescient than our waking thoughts; in that very first moment of horror, when I had torn myself away from her violent caresses, I had dimly foreseen this, known that I should never have the selfless strength to love the crippled girl as she loved me, and, probably, not even enough pity simply to bear with this unnerving passion.
a letter such as a person writes only once, and receives only once, in a lifetime.
billet doux
Every time I touched it I could feel the letter crackling through the soft, yielding cloth like the flames of a newly kindled fire; yes, it was there, it moved and stirred close to my breast like a living thing, and while the others babbled away happily over their food I could think of nothing but the letter and the desperate plight of the girl who had written it.
“it doesn’t matter a damn to me”.
tabula rasa!
de haut en bas,
