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  far Hera Canetti

  (1973)

  THE PROCESS OF WRITING has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems truest when it eschews artistic devices of any sort whatsoever.

  But that requires confidence in language as it is; I’m surprised I still have it as much as I do. I was never drawn to experiment with language; I take note of such experiments, but avoid them in my own writing.

  The reason is that the substance of life claims me completely. To indulge in linguistic experiments is to ignore the greater part of this substance, leaving all but a tiny portion untouched and unused, as if a musician were to ceaselessly play an instrument with his little finger only.

  Why do you resist the notion that death is already present in the living? Is it not within you?

  It is within me because I have to attack it. It is for this and for no other purpose that I need it, for this that I got myself infected with it.

  Collector of last looks: How I lament the resigned, who with their death give up all those who live and shall live.

  The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something tricklike about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

  Death used three things to bribe Schopenhauer: his father’s annuity, his hatred of his mother, and Indian philosophy.

  He thinks himself immune to corruption because he is not a professor. He will not admit that the most reprehensible, irreparable corruption is to accept the bribes of death.

  He is not a useful enemy in this regard. What could be said against him is more profitably directed at the Indians.

  Jacob Burckhardt: How little he discouraged you, despite his acceptance of Schopenhauer!

  You owe a great deal to Burckhardt:

  His rejection of any system derived from history

  His sense that nothing had gotten better but, on the contrary, worse

  His respect for expressiveness of form, as opposed to pure conceptuality

  His warm feeling for life truly lived, nourished by the tenderness of his renunciation

  His unprettified knowledge of the Greeks

  His resistance to Nietzsche, an early warning for me.

  The shadow that lay upon Burckhardt’s thought was not cast by feeling. His enthusiasm was reserved for particular things. If some have withered, others retain their significance. One need not accept him. One cannot dismiss him.

  There is no historian of the previous century for whom I feel such unreserved admiration.

  In the years of preparation, when I read the most diverse things in order to lengthen the road to Crowds and Power, I appeared to be lost in an ocean of reading. People who learned of this situation thought me obsessed; even my best friends offered tactful advice. They said it was pointless to read nothing but primary sources; the great ancient books had been sifted a thousand times and been reduced to a few lasting insights. All the rest was ballast. Getting rid of superfluous material, they said, was paramount in any major undertaking.

  But I kept rowing rudderless in my ocean and did not let myself be deterred. I had no justification for this attitude—until I came across the following sentence:

  “It is possible that Thucydides, for example, contains a fact of prime importance that will not be noticed until a hundred years from now.” This sentence appears in the introduction to Reflections on World History.

  My most intimate debt to Burckhardt, my justification for those years, is that sentence.

  Public life robs a person of his integrity. Is there still a possibility of public truth?

  The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs.

  Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.

  At the edge of the abyss he clings to pencils.

  To rescue exaggeration. Not to die reasonably.

  * * *

  Dependent on gods who died of thirst.

  On separations: Confess the nasty game you have always made of separations.

  Living dangerously? What life could be more dangerous than the life of separations?

  He who needs his own air to think in will acquire it by the terrifying means of separation. That is what you are now doing to the child at her tenderest age: in order to be with your thoughts, you are accustoming her to separations.

  He aspires to speak of the future, feels himself a bungler, and falls silent.

  Such good people—looking at others as if they were air.

  It’s awkward to have to explain one’s notes, it’s as if one were taking them back.

  He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.

  To know someone for a lifetime and keep him secret.

  Subordinating oneself in order to hate more accurately.

  Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

  Ceaseless constructions, instead of the stories you don’t write. What you extract from the people in your immediate surroundings belongs in a hundred characters.

  Looking for someone you don’t want to find.

  He watched all his characters hiding away in his youth.

  * * *

  World literature, to them, is something they can all forget together.

  Some sentimental characters become the soft inward parts of tougher ones and keep themselves cleverly hidden there.

  To obfuscate the end or intensify it: no other choice.

  Having realized the effect of his words, he lost the power of speech.

  You’ve had your doubts about it, but you must have wanted fame. And yet, didn’t you want the other thing a thousand times more, the return of a dead one? And it was not granted.

  Only the paltry, superfluous, shameless wishes are fulfilled, and the great ones, the ones worthy of a human being, remain unattainable.

  No one will come, no one ever comes back, rotted are those whom you hated, and rotted are those whom you loved.

  Would it be possible to love more? To revive a dead one by loving him more, and has no one ever loved enough?

  Or would a lie be sufficient, a lie as great as creation?

  Hopes, dried up into warts.

  To limit the zones of respect one expects to be shown. To keep the greater part of oneself open.

  Always after sunset the spider came out and waited for Venus.

  He asks me why he needs to blaspheme. Out of smugness, I should say.

  But I cannot let him notice my judgment. I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.

  He turned into every animal that showed an appetite for him.

  * * *

  A lamenting herd of elepha
nts: the most heartrending lament of all.

  The incorrigible one: Despite the hundred spiderwebs he feels every day, he wants eternity—for whom? For the victims or for the spiders?

  Now the stars shine as victims; now they are no longer anything without us.

  The generation that lost heaven by conquering it.

  He pulled the legs off spiders and threw them helpless into their own nets.

  He who has too many words can only be alone.

  A country where the language is changed every ten years.

  Language-exchange booths.

  Huge spiderwebs for people. At the edges, animals settle down cautiously to watch the trapped human beings.

  The most unbearable thing is having to narrow yourself down: having to spend too much time with a person who guards his limits.

  It could be someone whose honesty coincides with his limits and who protects his narrowness against restlessness, but also against evil. But it doesn’t help much to be aware of that: for one who is after truth, even the neatest narrowness is intolerable.

  He races along the borders and curses their impassability.

  To drain the swamp of self-satisfaction.

  One who, alone, would be unconquerable. But he weakens himself by allegiances.

  * * *

  Whether you could admit an injustice if you despise the one you injured.

  Blossoms, composite like cathedrals.

  They constructed a new firmament for themselves and escaped.

  The hidden economy of hesitation, effective throughout a lifetime, without his ever understanding it. This hesitation is the weight of his thought; without it his thinking would be an empty wind.

  He dislikes in people what they have forgotten. He likes in them what they remember.

  The Codex Atlanticus, which contains Leonardo’s sketchbooks, is going to be published in facsimile, in a twelve-volume edition of 998 copies.

  “For the leather cover, the skins of about twelve thousand cows are required, since each one is sufficient for only one volume.”

  It is not the contradictions that are terrible but their gradual weakening.

  How his breath grows hot among young listeners!

  Even a return that would have seemed contemptible to him in the past would be acceptable now.

  The only thing that does not avenge itself upon him are his notes.

  Pictures that change; the picture by a great painter which after a while is transformed into one by another painter. Transformations secret and indeterminate: you never know what a picture may hold in store for you.

  What becomes of the images of the dead you carry in your eyes? How will you leave them behind?

  It’s difficult enough to bear one’s own self-satisfaction. But the smugness of others!

  The catastrophic quality of God was his greatness.

  When K. says “rich,” of whomever, he makes a long face and suddenly resembles a greyhound. He almost becomes beautiful when he says the word, that’s how swiftly he’d be rich.

  The admired woman who reciprocates each glance with such fateful gravity, as if one had prayed to her. She herself remains silent. The moment she smiles, she is lost. She has granted her favor too early, her gratitude destroys her beauty.

  He is attached to his old works as if to past cultures.

  The philistine, disguised as a horse addicted to sugar.

  That is an aphorism, he says, and quickly shuts his mouth again.

  He introduces two newspaper-free days a week, and behold, the news is as new as ever.

  It could be, after all, that God is not sleeping but hiding from us out of fear.

  In old age the senses get sticky.

  Philosophers one gets entangled in: Aristotle. Philosophers to hold others down with: Hegel.

  Philosophers for inflation: Nietzsche.

  For breathing: Chuang-Tzu.

  Forgetful citations.

  Goethe succeeded in shunning death. It is chilling to observe how well he succeeded—too well. What is amazing, on the other hand, is that every testament of his life counts.

  My melancholy is never free of anger. Among writers, I am one who rages. I don’t want to prove anything, but I always believe intensely and spread my belief.

  Is that why I have a need for Stendhal? I recognize myself in his freedom and his immoderate love of people. But his faith is a purely personal matter; he believes all sorts of things, always something different, and since I cannot do that, since I am always tormented by the same thing and want to inspire everyone with it, I admire him, not as a model, but as a better self, one that I shall never really be, not for a moment.

  He is more natural, does not deceive himself about success; fame is not a dubious thing to him, nor does it seem a disgrace. Without being calculating, he recognizes his own advantage. He is quick, he takes a lot of notes, he drops them. I used to think I did the same thing.

  I would no longer be able to count them, all my dead ones. If I tried, I would forget half of them. There are so many, they are everywhere, my dead are scattered all over the earth. Thus the whole world is my homeland. There is hardly a country left for me to acquire, the dead have obtained them all for me already.

  When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

  I like Unamuno: he has the same bad qualities I know in myself, but it wouldn’t occur to him to be ashamed of them.

  * * *

  It turns out that you are composed of a few Spaniards: Rojas (who wrote La Celestina), Cervantes, Quevedo, a bit of each.

  Stendhal is more Italian, via Ariosto and Rossini. His explanation for Napoleon was that he was Italian.

  I would very much have liked to hear Stendhal speak Italian.

  Stendhal stimulates me at all times, in every mood. Is it permissible to let oneself be stimulated that way?

  Perhaps one should be stimulated only by what is new and surprising. Perhaps that would be legitimate, everything else has a medicinal flavor.

  “When Solon wept over the death of his son and someone said to him: ‘You won’t accomplish anything this way,’ he replied: ‘That is why I am weeping, because I am not accomplishing anything.’”

  Perhaps one senses that the dead still exist, but in very few words, and one who knew these words would be able to hear the dead.

  Slowly your conceit is withering in you and you are becoming simple and useful. Since it was very hard to become like this, it wasn’t in vain.

  (1974)

  HE CONSIDERED HIMSELF smart because he thought differently the next day.

  The semicolon’s dream.

  Very beautiful, the reanimation of early experience. Having been so long forgotten, it now becomes truer.

  Can it be forgotten over and over, can the truth be heightened?

  In order to become more proud, he let himself be insulted again and again.

  How many things you evaded in order not to diminish the impact of death!

  * * *

  Nine years between Braunschweig and Bonn: basically the same thing.

  I never experienced the ferocity of The Wedding on the stage, otherwise I would have been torn apart by the mob.

  The old man who then appears on the stage, defiance, perhaps composure as well, the opposite of Bock: it puts some of the outraged voices to shame. Which means nothing as far as the play goes. For the first time in Bonn I felt like casting it behind me. I can’t, it’s too accurate, it has—in a different way—remained valid, and it is completely unimportant if the author feels insulted by its misuse or its reception.

  The shining faces of lovers: publicly, as I see them, they court one another or are in the perfect state of their happiness.

  I shall not see them when they leave each other.

  You are obsessed by animals. Why? Because they are no longer inexhaustible? Because we have exhausted them?

  A whole book could be written about a single person as he really is. Even that
would not exhaust him, and one would never come to the end of him. But if you examine what you think of a person, how you conjure him up, how you keep him in your memory, you arrive at a much simpler picture: there are just a few qualities that make him noticeable and distinguish him from others. One tends to exaggerate these qualities at the expense of the others, and as soon as one has named them, they play a decisive part in one’s memory of that person. They are what has impressed itself most deeply; they are the character.

  Everyone carries a number of characters within himself; they make up one’s store of experience and determine one’s image of humanity. There are not too many such types; they get passed on and are inherited from one generation to the next. In time they lose their distinctness and become commonplaces. You say: He’s a skinflint, a dumbbell, a fool, a dog in the manger. It would be useful to invent new characters that aren’t used up yet and that help one to see them with fresh eyes. The tendency to see people in their variety is fundamental and ought to be nourished. It shouldn’t let itself be discouraged by the fact that a complete human being is made up of much more than fits into such a character. One wants people to be very different from each other; one wouldn’t wish them to be the same, even if they were.

  Some of the new “characters” I have invented could be seen as sketches for fictional characters; others are occasions for self-observation. At first glance, one sees acquaintances, at second, oneself. Not once, while writing, did I consciously think of myself. But when I put together the book with its fifty characters—selected from a larger number of characters I had written—I was amazed to recognize myself in twenty of them. That’s how people are, richly endowed, and that is how we would look, in each case, if just one of our constituent elements were consistently pushed to a head.

  Like many animals, characters seem to be threatened with extinction. But in reality the world is swarming with them, one has only to invent them in order to see them. Whether they are malicious or comical, it is better if they don’t vanish from the face of the earth.