Notes from Hampstead Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  1954–1956

  Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.

  I knew him back when he seemed to be made only of pretty little animals. Now grown like a weed, he has become a horse’s tail.

  He takes credit daily for having had a father.

  Speak to yourself, speak—perhaps she will answer as you yourself.

  He wavers uncertainly between his descendants and his forebears. Which are more reliable? Who offer him more?

  Shallow religions: those we feel no fear behind.

  To be sure, I was there; but sometimes when I read books about it, I manage to read myself away from there, and then I am quite desperate.

  She is not stingy; she just can’t stand people spending money on others.

  Second meetings always ruin first impressions; should there be only first meetings?

  He has settled himself in my territory but cannot stand the same sun shining through both our windows, so he burrows into the ground to hide.

  “I have as little faith in concepts that are clear as I do in those that are unclear: either can lead one into darkness.”

  Johann Georg Hamann

  To travel without dulling the edge of your sense of people.

  The petrifying effect that F. seems to have on his surroundings speaks for the sincerity of his nature. He is in fact that which he thinks he is only pretending to be. Everything he touches—whether with his hands, his words, his breath, his gaze—turns to stone. He does not need other people: he wants them to disappear. He does not even need posterity. For everything will revert to the stone he is made from.

  He worships only this: hardness.

  She wishes for a Jacob’s ladder, so she can count her money in heaven.

  The singers in the grave. “Thy son liveth, and hath the woman within, and they are singing. We went to look upon his grave, and we heard them; he hath the woman within, and they are singing.”

  Modern Greek

  She is concerned with my loss because she is facing one as well. Through my loss she prepares for her own. She hopes that one day our two losses will find each other.

  He studies and studies and can forget nothing: a dunce of dunces.

  He has to keep on reaching: the “higher” things won’t leave him alone.

  Sometimes he gets quietly drunk on thoughts he has secretly stored away, and his happiness is doubled because he knows he has hidden them so well.

  This aroma that surrounds people we don’t know.

  He explains all laughter as the laughter of derision.

  Above all he yearns for the people he has found most unbearable.

  The rapidity of intellect—everything else we say about intellect is just an attempt to hide its absence. We live for these moments of rapidity that spring like artesian wells in the deserts of lethargy; it is for their sake alone that we live, inert and barren.

  “People say curious things about the dead and their wanderings. It’s said, for example, that when one travels to faraway places—whether to Ife or Dahomey or Ewe Land—one meets them in the marketplace, people who died back home and have retreated here to avoid being recognized. If they see an acquaintance from home, they quickly slip away, making sure they are never seen again.” Leo Frobenius, On the Road to Atlantis (from the Yoruba)

  Voice-sick.

  He describes things in exclamations, he’s that natural.

  No sooner does the mere possibility of success appear on the horizon, than he tries to escape. His mistrust of success has become so great that he wants only to want it, not to have it.

  There they can switch their feet, and oh! the different ways they’re able to walk!

  We can always find fault with the living whom we know well. But we are grateful to the dead for not prohibiting us our remembrance of them.

  “It is noted as a special virtue of these people that they don’t include ‘tomorrow’ when they count off the days.”

  In that country, everyone sees themselves when speaking to others, as if blind to all but their own images. Thus they are all very polite; they couldn’t be more pleasant. Indeed, they are in a state of enthusiasm for everyone else, an enthusiasm only somewhat mitigated by their monotonous similarity. It is enchanting to see how they bow to everyone, when you know that they see themselves in everyone else.

  “As she molded a clay pot, a Pueblo Indian woman imitated continuously the resonant sound of a well-fired vessel, to ensure that her work came out right and didn’t crack in the kiln.”

  I should like to contain everything within myself yet stay quite simple. That is hard. For I don’t want to lose this variety, much as I wish to be simple.

  The mystic’s nature is not mine; it seems to me the mystic sacrifices too much for his happiness.

  I love to tell people who they really are. I am proud of my ability to instill in them a belief in themselves. I show them their own efforts. But I succeed only when I put myself into the effort. From my efforts their own take shape.

  Today I got deep into Machiavelli. For the first time he really captivates me. I am reading him with coldness but little bitterness. It occurs to me that he studies power in the same way that I study crowds. He looks at his subject without preconceived notions; his ideas stem from his personal experience with the powerful and from his reading. One could say—mutatis mutandis—the same of me. Like everyone else of our time, I have experienced crowds of all sorts, and with my incessant reading I try to gain an idea of what the crowds of the distant past were like. I have to read much more than he; his past is the classical period, mainly Rome, while mine is everything we have the least bit of knowledge about. But I think we read in similar ways, at once distracted and concentrated, sensing and joining related phenomena from everywhere. Concerning crowds, I have lost my earlier prejudices; for me, the crowd is neither good nor bad but simply is, and our current blindness about crowds I find unbearable. I would have a purer relationship to Machiavelli if I were not also interested in power; here my path crosses his in a complicated and intimate way. For me, power still is evil absolute; I can deal with it only as such. Sometimes my hatred of it slumbers, as when I read Machiavelli; but my slumber is light, and I enjoy waking from it.

  I didn’t find the powerful figures I wrote about on the broad main road. The more I came across their names, the harder they were to approach. I am suspicious of fame based on acts in the distant past, and most of all I am suspicious of success. When the works of the great are texts, I can examine them the way anyone else does. But to what test can we put the acts of long ago? There is only the test of people’s opinions about them, and these I don’t ignore. But neither do I grant them honor or belief.

  1957–1959

  It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.
/>
  How ordinary a person becomes when we see him often; it is as if he meant to avenge himself for the inflated image we have of him.

  Changing one’s beliefs according to the time of day.

  For many people, the struggle to locate truth is like collecting beetles. Their beetles all look the same: gray and dubious.

  Most men, he said, are slaves of an ancient misfortune unknown to them.

  Somebody wants to get him to define things for money. But he won’t even define things for free.

  This tenderness toward everything we have seen before, and this revulsion toward so much we are seeing now.

  Caesar makes me uncomfortable: the monstrousness of action. It assumes we have nothing against killing.

  But do I experience less because I am just observing, or do I just experience differently? It’s certainly not true that I shy away from people, that I avoid them. I actually get quite involved with people, but always only so I don’t have to kill them. We may call this a priestly attitude. I find it humane. But we are deluded if we expect it from others. One must have the strength to see how they are. My cowardliness starts when I turn my eyes away. That is why I read till my eyes are sore, listen till my ears ring.

  But can a person who doesn’t kill ever accomplish anything? There is only one power stronger than the power of killing: reviving the dead. I am consumed with desire for this power. I would give anything for it, even my life. But I don’t have this power, so I have nothing.

  Even Caesar, who pardoned so many men, knew this power. How angry Cato’s suicide made him!

  Today I detected a downright murderous lust in myself as I was reading Plutarch’s Caesar. When the conspirators went after him with their daggers, as one after the other stabbed him again and again, as he tried to escape their blows “like a wild beast,” I experienced a sense of joyous arousal. I felt not a hint of pity for him. The unsuspectingness of this horribly intelligent “beast” did not move me to feel for him. His blindness was, in a way, a kind of retribution for all those whom he had blinded and trapped.

  “Great”: he who escapes seemingly imminent death often enough. How he brings about this danger in the first place is his affair.

  His fear of all his endless little notebooks! By now they are mounting into the hundreds, every page covered, and he never opens a one of them! This prolific writer of nothing, what is so important for him to tell no one?

  Anything to do with order is best learned from the Chinese.

  I haven’t read enough magic spells. Last night I was captivated by the Atharvaveda, the Indian book of magic. Uncanny things in that book—nowhere are human wishes expressed more openly. It is a completely elementary world, and if we really want to learn about humankind, then we should look not only at myths but also at spells, which are naked.

  Love for the forgotten gods, as if some kind of inner greatness had caused them to retreat.

  I admire those very broad people who through the decades become broader and broader yet do not give in. But the unyieldingly narrow are horrible.

  A sucker for cemeteries—anywhere else, he’s afraid.

  A world without gifts.

  I think it is the nearness of myths that has caused this uneasiness in me. I am drowning in them; all their power is turned against me. What an undertaking, to want to know them all—me, a small, solitary man of fifty, a nothing!

  I am fascinated by the ancestor stones of the Aranda.

  The naked old men crouch on the ground around the stones, the churingas. They gaze at them solemnly, picking some of them up in their hands and weeping.

  How poor I am compared with an old Aranda! All the myths and traditions are constantly with him, in all their clarity, and for him, what they say is what they mean. Compare that with our noncommittal sciences, their feeble attempts at “interpretation,” their endless vacuous analogies. When does one finally know what is important, what is immutable? No matter where one turns in our world, it is all equally huge, equally tiny; everything is equally distorted and out of proportion.

  The Arandas of old are all dead. Now they exist only in books. These books are my churingas, my ancestor stones.

  What I find most repulsive about people are their plans.

  As they do anywhere else, people here live under pressure, but they don’t yell about it, they just exchange pleasantries.

  But what is the use of this sterile life of proofs, when we know everything beforehand anyway?

  There is something sickening about all advocacy: only pure admiration is real.

  I cannot even say how indifferent I am to the question of whether I will prevail. I want to find what I sense is there, that’s all.

  It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.

  Whoever knows the truth about someone destroys that person, unless he keeps quiet. But it is hard to be silent around those we see often. We have to say things to them that help them without changing them. They receive so much help that they form a false self-image, and for this image we must take responsibility. At every moment we see just how false, and it is precisely this insight from which we must constantly protect them. No matter that we have protected them from themselves so long; they need this protection indefinitely. So we must lie, and this kind of lying is what makes life unbearable: continuing to spin false, bad fiction.

  She walks as if she were being allowed to for the first time.

  Now that I have thrown myself completely into my “field” and am getting deeper and deeper into it, I sometimes ask myself: am I, too, a specialist? And how much have I set aside permanently, never to be interested in again? Or can someone whose passions are religion and mythology in fact never be a specialist? Do not myths include everything, as I often like to tell myself, or is there something that exists beyond all myths? Is there a new myth, completely unheard of, and is it my purpose in life to search for it? Or will I end up a pitiful wretch, with a mere inventory of all myths?

  I don’t want to know the answer to this question.

  The heat of eight suns: “In the mists of prehistory the sun had seven sons, which each burned down upon the earth just as hotly as the sun itself.”

  from the Batak

  Is it characteristic of “the beautiful” that it can never be seen again? Our perception of it is at once sudden and serene: we want to see it as a whole, without interruption, forever. Seen again, it is never the same—unless we failed to see it whole the first time.

  Wholly perceived, beauty continues to exist only within ourselves—it has lost its connection to reality. While we are taking it in, the image becomes tangible, as if we had carefully picked it up, and only thus can we receive it entire. This does not occur through suddenness alone, no matter how sudden it may have seemed.

  It probably has to begin suddenly, but without that subsequent moment of calm, it dissipates and disappears. For something to appear beautiful it must be permeated by both suddenness and serenity: the flash of the eye and the quiet patience of the hands.

  If we surround ourselves with “beauty,” we live in a grave of beauty. Painful to think of Pharaoh’s soul, oblivious to all those objects placed around him: practical, supposedly, but not beautiful, not to him—but surely to the one who opens the grave.

  A snail that can call and a snail that can jump:

  “The large Achatina Marginata, for instance, possesses the power of screaming. This fact is well known to the natives, who were much amused at my start of surprise when one of these Snails screamed on being taken into my hand. It is supposed that the noise is produced by the creature scraping against its shell. Anyhow, the sound is loud enough to prove distinctly startling on a first experience.

  “Another small land snail has the power of springing three to four feet.”

  P. A. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush

  He who would know all will lose his way in the expanding realm of his own ignorance. Every new insight I have won ha
s come to me out of the unmediated observation of a single concrete phenomenon, not through analogy, not by assembling masses of documents about one and the same phenomenon. No one thinks in statistics; for the profound questions, all statistical methods are worthless. I must have the courage to continue to select that which seems important or meaningful to me. I must risk being decried as ignorant by every expert, in every speciality. This vain desire to know everything, which has pursued me since childhood, is something I must get over.

  My library, which consists of thousands of books I have undertaken to read, is growing ten times faster than I can read. I have tried to expand it into a kind of universe where I can find everything. But this universe is growing at a dizzying pace. This pace will never slacken; I feel its growth physically within me. Every new book I add sets off a mini-catastrophe that only subsides when the book is seemingly brought into line on the shelf and temporarily disappears.

  “If one is a djama (a prophet in Malinka society) one no longer knows the difference between what has been and what will be.”

  Definition of the Prophetic

  The scars of zealots are still visible on his spirit.

  We often say things to ourselves to forget them. But sometimes we say them too well.

  Someone who doesn’t know he is breathing.

  He loves her; he can’t be as careful with anybody else.

  Sometimes in this dreadful wasteland a name is heard, and every grain of sand blossoms.

  Why are you always explaining everything? Why do you always want to find out what’s behind things—behind this? behind that? How about a life on the surface? Would that be happy? And would that be a reason to despise it? Maybe there is much more to a surface—maybe everything not on the surface is false, maybe you are just living in an ever-changing series of delusions, not beautiful like those of gods but empty like those of philosophers.

  Perhaps it would be better for you to just arrange words one after another (since it has to be words), but you’re always looking for a meaning, as if what you invent could give the world a sense it does not have.