The Secret Heart of the Clock Read online

  Ever since we know of years by the millions, it’s all over with time.

  Vienna is again as close to me as if I had never left. Have I moved in with Karl Kraus?

  Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day’s insolence.

  The child is not yet afraid of any human being. She doesn’t fear any animal either. She has been afraid of a fly and, for a few weeks, of the moon. “Now she’s afraid of flies. When a fly gets too close to her, she cries. Seeing a fat fly taking a walk on the walls of her crib, she’ll anxiously cower in a corner.”

  One is free only if one wants nothing. What does one want to be free for?

  His gratitude turns people’s heads and they open their jaws.

  Withered by Karl Kraus. All the time I now lack was invested in him.

  After the sad condition I was in since yesterday, I read Karl Kraus. I read the grumbler’s monologue in Act 5, I read in the Epilogue, and for once allowed the “armored language” to affect me without prejudice.

  It took hold of me and strengthened me, it gave me back the bones I had forgotten in my rigor mortis; at last I am once again going through what happened to me fifty and forty-five years ago: the experience of being inwardly clarified and strengthened by Karl Kraus.

  Part of it is the organization of the sentences themselves, their inexorable length, their countless number, their unpredictability, the lack of an encompassing goal; every sentence is its own goal, and the only important thing is to let oneself be affected by their regularity for as long as one is able to feel their excitement. This capacity seems to increase if one has some excitement of one’s own to draw from, whatever its character. One can’t read Karl Kraus’s armored sentences with indifference. Nor can one read them from the vantage of the examining intellect. The inquisitive mind is light, real knowledge can only be gained on the wing, it isn’t possible to acquire knowledge through Karl Kraus. He is indifferent to knowledge, because it can’t be condemned. What Karl Kraus gives us are acts of seeing through, and when we experience them with his fervor, he strengthens the force within us against what we don’t want. It is important to know what one should not want, but one must know it with revulsion and with strength. One could refer to this by some thin concept like “moral laws.” Calling them that, applied as such, they immediately seem boring, and that makes them ineffectual. In the armored sentences of K.K.—when one approaches them in anguish, in a state of upheaval, in weakness—one receives them as if from the burning bush or on Mount Sinai.

  And yet, remarkably, there is nothing godlike about him; what he does have is the absoluteness of the demand that was once a religious one. The absolute has become worldly and has possessed itself of God’s threatening voice without giving a thought to what it is doing: it fulminates, it punishes, it is relentless.

  This is an aspect of the satirist than can nowhere be studied as well as in Karl Kraus. It has to do with the fact that his greatest and principal object of chastisement was the world war, that no one recognized the nature of modern technological war as perfectly and in all its facets as he did, that he fought against it with the same strength from its beginning to its end, and not as a convert of defeat, like most of the others. Right from the start, like many a prophet, his hatred of war made him wish for the defeat of his own side (if such a notion can be applied to him at all); the side he really belonged to was that of the victims, and that included animals as well as people.

  It would be childish to expect that such an activity could be carried out without pathos. We who have very good reasons to mistrust pathos cannot retroactively reprove him, of all people, for his pathos, let alone seek to exorcize it. If there is such a thing as legitimate pathos, it is his. In no case does it seem hollow, even when it is directed against objects that are less convincing to us; it is always filled with a matchless passion and can seem histrionic only to those who have not heard him in person.

  It is not possible to take oneself back. I can’t be twenty-two again. I can’t subject myself again to the same compulsion that, at the time, appeared to me as freedom and gave me wings.

  When I read the letters of Karl Kraus today, they are something new for me. I must not read them with gratitude. I may only make the attempt to understand what this writer is. I must listen to him as if I were the woman to whom these letters were addressed and not just myself.

  More and more I believe that convictions arise from crowd experiences. But are people guilty of their crowd experiences? Don’t they fall into them completely unprotected? What does a person have to be like to be able to defend himself against them?

  That is what really interests me about Karl Kraus. Does one have to be capable of forming crowds of one’s own in order to be impervious to others?

  The father’s intellectual paralysis: the child who is beginning to speak is so much more remarkable than he.

  Joubert: the lightest, most tender, to me the dearest of the French moralists.

  Joubert was born where in this century Lascaux was discovered. I was close to Montaigne, not far from Montesquieu, and if I had driven on a little past Montaigne, I would have arrived at Montignac, Joubert’s birthplace.

  “Un seul beau son est plus beau qu’un long parler.”

  (1975)

  DON’T LET YOUR EARLIER TIMES be spoiled by letters written then.

  The nut of default.

  “More than a recaptured horse, bearing not only branding marks but also the imprint of a saddle, would rather fight to its death than submit again to human domination.”

  The land without brothers: no one has more than one child.

  He does not want to invent a life in detail and therefore writes his own.

  Difficulties of perpetual wrath.

  * * *

  To say the same thing again, in the form of the early years.

  Doubt-twisters.

  As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn’t know the bad he might do.

  What long-omitted thing now comes rushing upon you!

  You don’t lose anything by articulating your youth; between the sentences of remembrance, the neglected life makes itself felt and you find yourself richer by all that you’ve lost.

  There is nothing to do but deceive the famous as well as fame itself.

  No one has a friend for all that he is, that would be corruption.

  One can only live by often enough not doing what one has intended.

  The trick is to choose the right things for not-doing.

  One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others. Only the inconsistent one, who gives himself orders which he then evades, does not suffocate.

  Sometimes, under special circumstances, it is right to suffocate.

  It all depends on the rifts and leaps in a person, on the distance from the one to the other within himself.

  The mind lives on chance, but it must take hold of it.

  To release a man into the languages of the world. He becomes wiser by the whole wealth of the incomprehensible. He avoids making a virtue of obscurity. But he feels it everywhere around him.

  * * *

  Your breaths cannot be condensed into conclusions.

  The world getting older and therefore wider, and the future contracting.

  The revolt of the alphabet.

  Manual for the forgetting of language.

  Penance for the new interconnections he brought into the world.

  Scruples about his gratitude, a subtler way of overestimating himself.

  A land where people burst with a little pop. Then they are gone without a trace, no remains.

  He is surrounded by ever more stupid characters, who are all himself.

  I know that I have done nothing. Of what good is it to tell yourself that there are some who don’t even know this about themselves?

  It could be that history was more alive in him than in the historians. It was his despair and continued to be that.

  You are less credible than Kafka because you’ve been living for so long.

  But it could be that the “young ones” look to you for help against the scourge of death in literature.

  As one whose contempt for death grows with each year, you are of some use.

  * * *

  One can be nothing, can have failed in the most pathetic way, and yet be of some use by being consistent in just one thing.

  It would be wonderful to still find a brother who has said it with the same hardness.

  The picture of my father, who was no longer alive, above the beds in Vienna, in the Josef-Gall-Gasse, a pale picture that never meant anything.

  Within me was his smile and were his words.

  I have never seen a picture of my father that I did not find meaningless, never a written word by him that I believed.

  In me he was always more for being dead. I shudder to think what would have become of him in me if he had lived.

  Thus you hold up death to yourself as if it were the meaning, the glory, and the honor.

  But it is that only because it ought not to exist. It is that because I hold up against it the man who died.

  There is no honor in death accepted.

  No death has yet taken from me my hatred, wherever I have truly hated. Perhaps that, too, is a form of nonrecognition of death.

  “My horizon, my circle of vision, on which, after all, my existence depends.”

  —FROM A LETTER OF JACOB BURCKHARDT’S

  He has forgotten how to praise and no longer feels like living.

  The contempts that made up his life!

  Perplexity, for they have abandoned him.

  Anxiety, because he no longer feels them.

  Mental hypocrisy: Whenever a truth threatens, he hides behi
nd a thought.

  * * *

  Christ on the cross, and next to him hang the thieves. Their pity for one another.

  So much, so much, and everything wants to exist. Mysterious, the place things find for themselves: so many penetrations, and everything preserves its consistency.

  Is there a thought that would be worthy of not being thought again?

  The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.

  This mistrust of anything thought-conceived, merely because it concludes and explains itself!

  I still remember the way he pronounced the word “Konsum” (“consumerism”), lustfully, the way many people still say “rich,” perhaps a little like a wine connoisseur, and at the same time as if he wished he were speaking of a degenerative disease. But the last was not quite believable, due to the red tongue that darted out and licked his lips. “Konsum” remained for him a key term which he never really analyzed. It stands out as a much too understandable and therefore frightfully foreign word in his language.

  People who can still say “objective” after the atom bomb.

  A world without years.

  The kitsch of demonstrative sensitivity.

  * * *

  Complicated circumstances were often solved by legal experts, for example when a slave belonged to two masters and was released by one.

  —PERSIA

  To observe the decay in which old age expresses itself, to take note of it without emotion and exaggeration.

  A wearying of all the passions, but especially of the one for eternity. “Immortality” becomes bothersome and uncanny. This could have to do with the fact that one will leave behind only dubious things and would like to be rid of them.

  More contempt for oneself, but it isn’t painful enough. One wants voyages, movement, but without a change of place. Tougher reactions to insult, one is more cantankerous.

  Adorations diminish, their impact lessens.

  Lapses of memory. Yet everything is there. Even what is most forgotten comes back, but in its own time.

  Turning the heart inside out until it no longer wants to count for something.

  To burn out for a certain time, but making sure that one will ignite again.

  An important testimony:

  “A man told me he believes that white people are not as troubled and upset when a white man dies as bushmen are when one of their own dies. ‘There are many white men,’ he said, ‘but so few bushmen.’”

  —LORNA MARSHALL

  “For example, we must by all means see to it that the pigs go to their deaths untroubled, for otherwise the quality of the meat suffers from such a high adrenaline content in the blood.”

  —ONE OF THE MOST PROGRESSIVE PIG BREEDERS IN DENMARK

  More and more often he catches himself thinking that there is no way to save humanity.

  Is that an attempt to rid himself of responsibility?

  Every self-display diminishes the value of what you were.

  Describe a person who lets himself be celebrated out of existence, till there’s nothing left of him.

  Made harmless by reverence. One is washed clean, smoothed out, plucked of all one’s bad qualities; even the eyeless one is transmogrified into a beacon of radiance, and a suspicious, mean-spirited character scatters kindness in all directions. He sits by the coupé window and lights up the landscape.

  A poet who always seeks the middle—is that a poet? Whatever reaches him, he moderates, so he can stay within his framework. Can a life that isolates itself that much really know something about the life of others?

  The way his works are rounded off embarrasses me. He never fills me with terror. He always manages to calm his readers. He lacks the impulse of darting, of rending, he’s never beaten down or enraged, he lacks the perspective of outrageousness and persecution. There’s a coziness in his irony, his humor never overshoots the mark. He likes to be thin and considers it a virtue.

  A genuine praiser becomes isolated, otherwise his praise isn’t worth anything.

  A peculiar figure like Robert Walser could not have been invented by anyone. He is more extreme than Kafka, who would never have come about without him, and whom he helped to create.

  Kafka’s complexities are those of place. His tenacity is that of bondage. He becomes a Taoist in order to withdraw.

  Walser’s opportunity was his unsuccessful father. He is a Taoist by nature; he doesn’t need to become one, like Kafka.

  His beautiful handwriting becomes his fate. Certain things cannot be written in it. Reality adapts to the beauty of this script. So long as his handwriting brings him good luck, he can live by writing.

  When the handwriting fails, he gives it up. Possibly he was afraid of it during the decades at Herisau.

  Robert Walser moves me more and more, especially with his life. He is everything that I am not: helpless, guiltless, and, in a beguilingly silly way, truthful.

  He is truthful without making a frontal attack on the truth, he becomes truth by walking around it.

  These are not the victorious and sage arabesques of Thomas Mann, who always knows what he means and circles around it only for show. Walser wants sagacity and cannot have it.

  He wants to be small, but he cannot bear to be accused of smallness.

  Interchangeable newspapers, always the same one.

  Glorification by satire.

  This indestructible feeling of duration, undiminished by death, by despair, by any passion for the other and better ones (Kafka, Walser): I can’t do anything about it. I can only record it with revulsion.

  Yet it is true that I am myself only here, at my desk, facing the leaves of the trees, whose movement has stirred me for the past twenty years. Only here is this feeling, my horribly wonderful security, intact, and perhaps I need to have it in order not to lay down my arms before death.

  * * *

  The high priest, banal in his thinking, tells me that in a previous life I lived in China.

  I was startled, and for several days, China has been spoiled for me.

  This G. whom you meet here and there, every few months, you tell him the most personal things and feel, even as you say them, how far from the truth they are.

  This is due to the fact that he, who used to be a poet, has become a priest, a very beautiful priest. He has found a path to the dead and relies on it.

  For you, a source of grief; to him, a séance.

  I know only one redemption: that what is endangered be kept alive, and at this moment of redemption I do not ask myself how brief or how long it will be.

  Sometimes he is overwhelmed by the feeling that it is not too late for anything.

  So he still hasn’t despaired of eternal life?

  Your only escape would be through a different attitude toward death. You can never escape.

  In Byzantium, blinding was the method for depriving a man of his power. But Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, the conqueror and eventual lord of three-eighths of Byzantium, was blind.

  I cannot bear writers who connect everything with everything.

  I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence, as it were, who seek refuge from their own cleverness, ducking low, but without throwing it away or losing it. Or those for whom their cleverness is new, something they acquired or discovered very late. There are some who become illuminated by minor things, suddenly: wonderful. There are some who are constantly illuminated by “important” things: terrible.

  A man condemned to reread all his letters. Before he gets far, he has a stroke.

  He woos for my enmity, in vain: I no longer take his hatred seriously.

  Amazement at every life: is this mercy?

  Things one has considered in a hurry and said casually, without ever giving them another thought—is it permissible to place them next to the fruits of decades of deliberation and testing?

  One immensity, a single one, is left to him: patience. But everything new must be the product of impatience.

  You want to strike him in the heart? Which one?