The Tidings of the Trees Quotes

“Oh, how I've envied the lives of those who could spend life sitting down. A place to sit, a place to sit! I'd lament, circling my empty chair.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“Even I was increasingly unclear about where I'd been, and which time I'd been in: so I had to explain myself to myself! It was for myself that I needed a justification ... but these would no longer have been stories describing the life of The People I lived among ... they were no longer legal stories. They were stories of the refuse, the refusal of this People! They were cast-aside stories, found only in the troubling places outside town.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. And people who prefer misfortune out here to misfortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“Normality was normal because it had lost its stories ... only when the mask of normality was torn off did reasons for stories exist once again.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“I've watched these waves of writing rush back and forth, though Waller, along the lines of the paper, like thoughts that wrote and instantly erased themselves. And in the lower margins, forgetfulness seemed to toss the fleeting eddy of its signature upon the empty pages.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“Little by little I came to the conclusion that in this day and age only the garbagemen could bring a poetic thought to fruition. Was it because they spent every day in the immediate proximity of an almost mythical experience? It was to them alone that things still spoke of their decay ... in their presence things had at last achieved a state of utter worthlessness: and with that they could be contemplated in their authentic being. The essence of substance opened up before the garbagemen ... while all the others, the consumers whose place was back in town, turned away from this essence in horror. In the garbagemen's presence things had escaped the constraints of their utility and begun to tell stories ... in our eyes they transcended their transience.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“From sheer nervousness, or to linger for a moment, I'd urinate at the wayside; scanning the darkness before me, a cherry stump behind me, I'd piss a meticulous semicircle in the ashes at my feet. Crossing this line and looking back as I walked onward, I'd think I saw foggy vapors rise from the place I'd circled with my water, and those vapors took on almost human form, those figures' spectral silhouettes beckoned, and words came, barely audible: Don't forget us! -- They couldn't follow me; their souls were bound; I'd nailed them to the imaginary cross of a nonexistent cherry tree.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“And I rushed outside to memorize a tree ... for all time, if I can, I want to have it present, for at least one of all the stories that remain to be told, for a tree-lined lane down which I want to wander darkly someday, in one paragraph at least amid the maze of writing may the word 'tree' one day resound! Yet the dusk was falling, and my eyes, which were weary and which I didn't trust, could no longer make out the precise ... the true nature of a tree.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“I tried to picture a future reader for my output so as to take my cues from him. My themes were utterly foreign to him, indeed the whole environment I conjured up before his eyes could only seem abstruse and outlandish, as though I sought to transport him to a world that, though familiar to him from earlier times, now seemed thrust to the margins, so that no previously valid form of description could be used for it ... I wrote for an utterly impossible reader, for one reader alone, and that reader was myself.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“What drives me is the fear of forgetting the stories. I don't feel threatened, it's the stories that are threatened: I see a darkness preparing to fall upon them. Write ... write, I say to myself, or everything will whirl into forgetfulness. Write so the thread won't be severed ... a thousand stories are too few. So the flow won't be broken, so the lamps over the desks won't go out. Write, or you'll be without a past, nothing but a will-less plaything of bureaucracy. You'll lie stored in their databases, retrievable, a calculation, an accounting factor, just part of a sum whose loss was factored in from the beginning ... you'll be cannon fodder.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“What drives me is the fear of forgetting the stories. I don't feel threatened: I see a darkness preparing to fall upon them. Write ... write, I say to myself, or everything will whirl into forgetfulness. Write so the thread won't be severed ... a thousand stories are too few. So the flow won't be broken, so the lamps over the desks won't go out. Write, or you'll be without a past, nothing but a will-less plaything of bureaucracy. You'll lie stored in their databases, retrievable, a calculation, an accounting factor, just part of a sum whose loss was factored in from the beginning ... you'll be cannon fodder.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“Lacking actual stories, as often as I could I've let this plight stand in for the missing material. Now the whole thing has so exhausted me that in all seriousness I'd need a new biography in order to wriggle out from the rough drafts of my non-authorship. For these drafts have become the only ground on which I can still move.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees