Agony of Flies Read online

  Many of us, thoroughly convinced that God is good, are more than content to behave like the worst of scoundrels.

  He placed all the usual demands on himself, but in a foreign language.

  It is difficult to love cautious people, unless one keeps in mind that their caution distorts everything.

  When the birds flock together to fly to Africa, they dance. Their rhythms, fuller and more subtle than our own, are born in the beating of their wings. They do not stomp the ground, but gently beat the air, which is well disposed toward them. We, on the other hand, are hated by earth.

  He is as ingenious as a wheel.

  No code is secret enough to allow for the expression of complete candor.

  The names of musical instruments have a magic all their own. Had we named nothing else, we still would have reason to marvel at ourselves.

  He enjoys praising people who clearly will never amount to anything. But he becomes wary whenever someone shows true talent.

  To inflame one’s friends and then abandon them to the fire—how cruel, and yet how natural for a poet!

  Only the Indian religions exhibit a distaste for repetition, and that only after unspeakable excesses in repetition such as no other people have ever experienced.

  His hope was to have a long life, unnoticed by God.

  People love a poet merely because he is profligate with his time. As soon as he begins to be stingy with it, they treat him like anyone else.

  You are afraid of everything that will not happen after death.

  He squeezed his heart out like a lemon just for her. But the man who won her was the one whose words were the sugar to go with it.

  He is so accommodating that he forgets with whom he negotiated the day before.

  There are many times when his own shadow is too much for him to bear.

  The gaps in our knowledge keep roaming.

  She is too short for her own greed: everything is beyond her reach.

  The road to immortality is hardest for the miser.

  Among the dead may be counted also those animals who were not devoured.

  The animals in our thinking must regain the power they held before we subdued them.

  Be more simple—you hold forth as if you had been sent from on high. Cast off the spurs of superiority, dismount from the flamboyant steed of the next three thousand years and, instead, live as long as you’re alive, don’t foist yourself upon a time in which you won’t even exist, let all intentions sleep, forget your name, forget yourself, forget your death!

  As far as I’m concerned, he despairs with excessive punctuality.

  He is so evil that his ear is terrified of his tongue.

  He is able to dismantle his convictions and then piece them back together.

  His dream is to settle the people he loves on separate stars.

  There are people so vile you can’t even tell them off; they possess not a single mask worth addressing.

  Whoever knows too few people, soon will know only devils.

  Phrases that were tried and true a hundred thousand years ago.

  He smiled with twenty faces and each one revealed a different man—he smiled amiably, he smiled fiendishly, he promised, he delayed, he refused, he betrayed, and yet no one seemed to mind, for the remaining faces shimmered as if from beneath the sea and it was a pleasure to await their rising to the surface.

  In times of deep mistrust one tends to transform close friends as well as chance acquaintances into mysterious and dangerous characters: guided by the worst of intentions, they tell you nothing that is not insidious and mean. You answer them sharply. They retort with even greater venom. Their sole purpose is to upset you more and more until anger and fear compel you to forget all discretion and to confront them with their own worst characteristics, distorted to demonic proportions. They blanch; they even may play dead for a while. But then all of a sudden they return to the attack, preferably from behind. You get locked in endless dialogues with them. They understand you, you understand them, always and without exception: in this mutual animosity everything is crystal-clear. In all probability, these creatures want to eat you alive, and so the part of you that happens to be closest to them feels the most threatened. Quickly you withdraw your hand, hide your liver, roll up your tongue—all the while continuing to move it in furious speech. Your enemy clearly is defined solely by the hatred he bears toward you and that you return in kind. But he cannot strike just anywhere, for he is strangely restricted through his dependency on you. Your enemy appeared just like smoke and, just like smoke, can be blown hither and thither. He trembles, he swells, he is not a vertebrate, and sometimes I’m convinced he is merely a memory of those times when we still lived at the bottom of the ocean and at the mercy of formless creatures.

  But as soon as the real individual, whose name the imagined figure bears, steps up and faces you, the figment vanishes into thin air, and for the time being you are cheerful and relieved.

  A god who did not create humans but, rather, found them.

  An excess of spiritual experience takes a longer time to bear fruit; one cannot learn with impunity, what once has been learned is slow to be forgotten, and yet only what has been forgotten is liable to open new paths.

  He will never be a thinker: he doesn’t repeat himself enough.

  The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.

  We keep expecting that the breath of animals will turn into new words never heard before.

  His images are veiled with reproaches.

  I still hold no grudge against language: the triumphant beast of technology has restored some of its dignity.

  Success is only the tiniest fraction of experience.

  His memory hates him: it always intrudes just when he should hold his tongue.

  A certain man summoned everyone who unjustly had died before he did, and proceeded to deliver to them a sermon on his own competence, infallibility, and shrewdness.

  The crows above the yellow corn arouse in him the most intense feeling of life.

  He is so proud that he’s always trying to offer God a gift.

  He holds old people in the utmost esteem: he admires in them every year he has not yet experienced. He adores children: they evoke in him every year he no longer will experience.

  The only way to overcome misfortune is to act it out.

  The significance of a great mind may be measured by the number of years it can afford to lose.

  The future is always wrong: we exert too much influence over it.

  He desires the existence of the people he loves, but not their presence and not their preoccupations.

  Creatures who inhabit an in-between time which runs parallel to our own, a time that penetrates our own but does not touch it, as if there were such a thing as time-shadows forming a world of their own.

  He pronounces the word “gold” as if he had stolen it.

  Jealousy should be classified according to whom someone hates the most: past, present, or future rivals.

  He wishes for moments that burn as long as a match.

  A new kind of children who are not around in times of war.

  The saint: he spends his life explaining all the things he would never ever do.

  He eats wisdom with chopsticks, the Chinese way.

  He thinks in animals the way others think in concepts.

  Man likes himself best of all as a blindly raging disciple.

  He who is obsessed is never grateful.

  The vanished nations take their revenge.

  God made a mistake in his calculations at the Tower of Babel: nowadays everybody speaks the same technology.

  From time to time he washes the tatters of his life.

  He never says more than a single vowel.

  He who has learned enough has learned nothing.

  He boasts about his galleys, where the slaves sit on cushioned seats and row with silver oars.

  He is as smart as a newspaper: he knows everything and what h
e knows changes from day to day.

  He looks for happy adjectives, licks them clean, and pastes them together.

  He rates women by their capability for happiness, men by their capability for despair.

  The calamity of knowledge when it is passed on unchanged.

  Those who are very concerned with greatness should be able to grow and grow, physically, into infinity. Then they would leave the rest of us in peace.

  Even the great philosopher benefits from exaggeration, but with him she must wear a very tightly woven garment of reason. The poet, on the other hand, exposes her in all her shimmering nudity.

  She wants someone to take her whole, with all her baggage; but she fears that, in his joy, he might forget a needle.

  He collects scapegoats so as to redistribute their burdens more fairly.

  Each of his sentences contains at least one word from a language neither he nor anyone else present knows, at which all nod to one another in smug satisfaction.

  There are no real substitutes for anything, even the crudest goals continue to draw us on, and even though our instincts are quite flexible, they are also merciless and their memory for the few objects that really matter to them is indestructible.

  He scrapes together his fame, bit by bit.

  Needed: a large treasure trove of foreign names, the meanings of which one doesn’t care to inquire about.

  Hatred has its own peculiar heartbeat.

  That which has no form cannot transform itself.

  Every time he aspires to be a false prophet, everything he says comes true.

  He is unhappy if a single day goes by with nothing to count.

  It’s easy to be reasonable when you don’t love anyone, including yourself.

  If he could have his way, he would receive presents from just a few of the gods—though without ever asking. He would accept their presents and then dispose of them just as they do.

  The intimate ways and gestures of someone he finds enchanting—how he loathes it if they are bestowed upon everyone alike! How much he then would prefer the rankest, the most repellent coldness! He harbors the illusion that for every individual there is one and only one pattern of behavior, and that he who does not demonstrate this is simply mistaking one person for another.

  On fair days he feels too sure of his own life.

  Friendly heathens delivered him to his paradise and immediately took to their heels.

  The fiery wheels of Anaximander’s stars and their frenzy in Van Gogh.

  He deals with history so that mankind won’t have to do so.

  God does not like us to draw lessons from recent history.

  Witches became harmless the moment they no longer were subject to persecution.

  The greatest thing about love is that within its domain all rights are abolished.

  Man’s most perfect and awe-inspiring work of art is his organization of time.

  Facts cannot be pieced together. It is best to get them after they’ve been boiled hard and solid, then tossed to us one by one. This principle accounts for the lasting effect of the works of Suetonius.

  Only the erudition of those who show no respect for death is bearable.

  People speak as if they’d always spoken that way.

  She buys herself a bargain backbone.

  A man who hates mankind because it willingly submitted to the tyranny of explosions.

  One can write history as if it had always looked the way it does today. But then why write history at all?

  His thoughts have fins instead of wings.

  She finds that the greedier the fish, the better the taste.

  Once it happened, everything in history runs as smooth as clockwork.

  Suicide will stay with us, but it must become an odd and rare occurrence—every single suicide as singular as a war in ages past.

  The Scylla and Charybdis of the mind: to say either too much or too little too often.

  Other people’s misery makes him feel worse than his own.

  Philosophers should not be judged by whether they happen to be right just now.

  How much we know only because it’s none of our business!

  For the sake of the colors alone it would be worthwhile to live forever.

  History contains every meaning and is therefore meaningless.

  Whoever wishes to think has to give up promoting his own thoughts.

  The time he gives away is far too precious to be sold.

  God must have misspoken when He created Man.

  What would eyes be without their caution—without lids?

  Utopias possess a kind of modesty which repels people.

  The heathen voices of birds.

  A group of people, each frozen with his claws embedded in the flesh of another, laughing faces, bursting with lust and distorted in pain.

  The disheartening introductions to masterworks, desolate, arid, sublime, or impudent! Oh, why are people curious? Why must a poet be born and why must he die? Is it not enough that he must bear a name—isn’t that a sufficiently heavy burden by itself? But people have no mercy. They insist on cooking their poet, seasoning him, and then devouring him.

  He mostly keeps himself busy breaking other people of his own bad habits.

  Thinking becomes clearer as soon as one has learned the shapes of animals.

  The separate arts should live in the most chaste cohabitation.

  A love free of all mortal fear for one’s beloved? Even if such a thing existed, would it deserve to be called love?

  She eats out of rage, she eats out of disappointment, she eats out of love, she eats out of sorrow. She eats out of modesty, pride, and longing. She ate herself out of the womb of her mother. And once in the grave, lacking anything else, she’ll eat her coffin and its nails.

  He has a bag stuffed with names, in many languages, but he left the things themselves lying outside on the ground.

  Childhood becomes richer the older one gets and it is no idle task to take the measure of one’s first years.

  He wants to unify Europe through the story of his childhood.

  (1943)

  The rivers of poetry flow everywhere, and they do not necessarily converge.

  The only salvation for the systematic mind is the spontaneous random remark which is not to be further pursued but which also must not declare itself as the Law.

  Death tells all.

  When telling a very long story, the mind should collect itself from time to time. It cannot live off needles and cruelty alone. It also requires some tender threads.

  A myth is a tale that becomes fresher with every retelling.

  The painter and his politics: he believes that it’s enough to paint the earth with different colors.

  Man’s self-knowledge should have increased since ancient times by the number of animals described in the interim.

  About the age of forty, men suddenly are gripped by the desperate urge to issue laws.

  Everything he wants always comes to pass, but only after four or five years, by which time he’s long wanted something else.

  An artist who, on the most important day of his life and in the midst of people singing his praises, forgets his name.

  The poet lives by exaggeration and makes himself known through misunderstandings.

  In most religions people fall to their knees in feigned humility, only to leap back up in perfidious rage.

  Ever since the earth became a ball, any scoundrel can cup it whole in his hand.

  How convincing everything sounds to someone who knows little!

  The dead people already wield too much power in him. What shall happen to him when the dead animals overcome him as well?

  The despair of the heroes at the abolition of death.

  216,000 words every day.

  The number of conversions he studies in order not to succumb to a single one!

  Reincarnations are too methodical for his taste; he aspires to live in any number of different creatures simultaneously.
br />   A single image, any image at all, can heighten to sheer lunacy the love we hold for our constant companions.

  II

  Er ist so klug, er sieht überhaupt nur, was hinter seinem Rükken geschieht.

  Wer Selbsterkenntnisse hinterläßt, wird beim Wort genommen. Welche Tollkühnheit, angesichts der Herzlosigkeit künftiger Geschlechter!

  Von allen Hindernissen sind Ströme die lockendsten.

  Alle Tatsachen meines eigenen Lebens, ob gut oder schlecht, haben für mich etwas Störendes.

  Die Handlungen der Menschen gehen mir so nahe wie anderen Wohlgeschmack oder Giftigkeit ihrer Speise.

  Seine Verzeichnisse sind seine Versäumnisse.

  Viele Philosophen sind des Dichters Tod.

  Es ist beschämend, wie man sich gewisse Verwandlungen auf keinen Fall erlauben mag. Der Charakter ist die Auswahl unter den Verwandlungen.

  Die Lust, neue Figuren zu spielen, vor Leuten, die einen sehr gut kennen, unter der Hand sozusagen ihnen zu entwischen, ist so groß, daß das Niederschreiben neuer Charaktere, wie es zum Metier des Dramatikers oder Romanciers gehört, daran gemessen langweilig wird. Gewiß sind viele der besten Figuren bloß darum nie an die Nachwelt gelangt. Man will sie sein, intensiv, und mit sichtbar unmittelbarer Zauberwirkung auf die anderen, nicht bloß sie verzeichnen und bewahren. Es ist befreiend, wenn diese alten Hände mit neuen Sprachen sprechen, die man noch vor kurzem selbst nicht kannte. Es ist beglückend, in ein neues Gesicht zu fahren und das alte wie eine Maske wieder daran zu hängen.

  Die Urenkelin des großen Astronomen hat mich empfangen. Sie lebt unter den Fernrohren, die die Sterne des nördlichen wie des südlichen Himmels aufgenommen haben. Ich war im alten Haus und im Arbeitszimmer Wilhelm Herschels. Genau gegenüber ein modernes Kinogebäude, vor dem in langer Reihe Besucher anstehen. Leicht könnten sie die Apparate und Papiere auf dem Tische Herschels sehen, wissen aber nicht, daß er gelebt hat. Die Urenkelin wünscht sich, daß jenes Kinogebäude in den Erdboden versenkt würde.

  Die Dichter, deren Stätten man besucht, lachen sich eins in ihre Werke.

  Es erregen ihn nur Verdächte und nicht Tatsachen. Diese können noch so arg sein, sie können ärger sein als der Verdacht selbst – sie machen ihm keine Angst. Sobald eine Tatsache einen Verdacht bekräftigt, wird er ruhig. Er kann zum Beispiel sehr fürchten, daß man ihn vergiftet hat, aber es gibt ein Mittel für ihn, seine Furcht loszuwerden: er muß sich nur davon überzeugen, daß er wirklich vergiftet ist, und schon ist alles in bester Ordnung.