Notes from Hampstead Page 2

  He collects his writers like butterflies, and under his care they turn into one great caterpillar.

  The man who was so good he forgot his name.

  The fearful angel of the eye: “Too much—you have seen too much.” No, much too little.

  “One heart told me this, one heart told me that.”

  Rwandan saying

  We forget nothing, and we forget it less and less.

  You want someone with whom to discuss everything afresh, everything that you have loved; you want to sing the praises of it all again. To praise is wonderful, irresistible. Happy the singer of the Psalms.

  Why do we suddenly have to have that which we really don’t want at all? As if we had to acquire the habit of wanting everything.

  Stories of people who do everything to stop being themselves. They transform themselves into their enemies.

  Speeches, crazy speeches, and it all comes true. The prescience of words.

  It is true that I wish to learn everything that men have believed in. But I want to experience it as it was when it deserved belief, and not in its exhausted form.

  The conceptual holds so little interest for me that even at fifty-four I have actually never read either Aristotle or Hegel. It is not just that I don’t care about them; I distrust them. I cannot accept that the world was conceivable for them even before it was really known. The stricter, the more systematic their thinking, the greater the distortions they brought to the world. I want truly to see and think in a new way. That is not so much out of arrogance, though it might seem so, as out of an inextinguishable passion for humankind and a growing belief in its inexhaustibility.

  Sahagun: a name of questionable wisdom.

  The priceless sayings of fools, so long as they’re not repeated.

  “Without the perfect law of freedom, man would be incapable of imitation, on which all education and received knowledge are surely based: for of all creatures, man is the greatest mimic.”

  Johann Georg Hamann

  You think you have everything, she thinks she has nothing. You live together. How do you live?

  It is apparent that the object of hatred does change, but not too quickly or too often. Hatred needs time to attract things; this is not hard to comprehend. But how do these astonishing shifts in hatred arise? Why this one today, and that one next year? Undeniably, it is easiest to hate the people one knows well. We remove them from the fabric of habit, we isolate them. Their menacing quality is our own creation. It’s unimportant whether they are dangerous or not. We lend them our old, unforgotten fears. And on these they feed—but all of a sudden we release them. We should understand this moment: when and why do we let them go? Have we recognized their menace as our own? Have we unveiled them and discovered ourselves underneath?

  But before this can happen, we make them perform a curious dance.

  1960

  Slowly he lifts the heavy stones, a little higher with every sentence, and there is nothing that can redeem him except his own words.

  The deceitful quality of noise.

  My god: all eyes, and all closed.

  All that he does not know might be beautiful. What he does know is covered with dark lava.

  How do I feel about my finished book? It reads well, better and better, perhaps. I am not unhappy with it. What alarms and depresses me is the time I spent on it. If it had been one book among five or six, how proud I could be of it! For half a lifetime it is too little.

  I think of the magnificent Chartreuse—a hundred years from now will I make even one person happy?

  I think there is no one I love as much as Stendhal. He is the one, the only one, I envy. Perhaps I could be like him if I were not myself. This is the first time I have considered the idea of a different birth, and this only out of love for Stendhal.

  What does this really mean? It means that I want to get out of the skin of my work, that I have carried my thoughts within me too long and now they have become my bones. In this sense, I am a churinga, or a stone in the Australian landscape. But I am still alive, and now my most ardent wish is to be transformed.

  To become incomprehensible even to you, to stammer.

  In my new existence I should like to be more caring but, at the same time, less ruled by compassion. As has become increasingly clear in the past years, the odd constitution of my nature has often led to a wasteful expenditure of energy without results. Filled with enthusiasm for the particularity of every individual who came my way, I have gone to great lengths to peel away the layers of their nothingness, to isolate and extract the unique quality of each. I have been so serious about this that people have become my “slaves.” But their helplessness has made me feel sorry for them, and instead of being hard on them for their own good, I have given in to them more and more, finally letting them consume me. It began with the pure glowing image that I formed of them and ended with their first presuming on me, then consuming me.

  My obstinate rejection of time is now taking its revenge on me. Its passing never existed for me. I never felt it as a river that could dry up. It was all around me, inexhaustible, a sea. I drifted about in all directions; it seemed natural to go on this way. My time would never run out. Everything I undertook was for eternity, and eternities were at my disposal, even for the smallest projects.

  I was in search of the old gods, wanted to reconcile them within myself. My intellectual ambitions were fulfilled in the study of many peoples: this was how I atoned for the arrogance of my own forebears. I did not look to history for guidance. The smallest things, because they were on the verge of disappearing, meant more than the biggest. I could not accept ignoring a single life. Whatever this crowded world had no room for, I made a place for within myself. And so now I feel as broad as the world: I feel I touch it everywhere. Year by year the arrogance of those who live for themselves alone seems more and more alien to me. Today I know how little I am myself, how much of me is in the universal breath of the spirit.

  But having attained this goal, I recognize my own futility. I have scorned time, and now it is running out on me.

  The things one depends on in the course of a life are grotesque, and it is hard to see how one can guard against them without models.

  Telling stories to anyone who will hear them as stories, who doesn’t know you, who doesn’t expect literature. Life as a wandering storyteller would be nice. Someone says the word, and you tell the story. You never stop, day or night, you go blind, you lose the use of your limbs. But your mouth still serves its function, and you speak whatever is in your head. You have no possessions, only an infinite, ever-growing number of stories.

  Nicest of all would be if you could live on words alone and did not even need to eat.

  Cover any traces of the work.

  Pavese was my exact contemporary. But he started working earlier and took his life ten years ago. His journal is a kind of twin to mine. He cared mostly about literature, unlike me. But I happened onto myths and ethnology earlier. On December 3, 1949, eight months before his death, he wrote the following in his journal:

  “I have to find:

  W.H.I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore, London, 1911.”

  This book has been in my possession for sixteen years, since 1944. I have often considered it the most important book I know. The sheer quantity of new information about the unknown makes it my most important book: I have learned the most from it, and it is still not exhausted. This book, which Pavese turned to just before his death, is what we have most in common, and I wish I could give it to him.

  On March 14, 1947, there is this sentence: “Hemingway is the Stendhal of our time.”

  I find this appalling and outrageous. Perhaps there is something to it, but I am too upset about the statement to judge. I am horrified that anyone could make it. It is as if someone wanted to dispel the mystery of Stendhal, the source of his greatness, with a cheap and obvious Americanism. Pavese was an admirer of Americanism; I am not. Thus Pavese could be calle
d a modern writer; I could not. I am a Spaniard, an old Spaniard of today …

  It is very odd that I feel such a kinship with Pavese, of whom I know nothing outside his journals. I feel so related to him that such an unexpected utterance angers me profoundly.

  I am under the impression that he destroyed himself for an American woman.

  “26 April. Wednesday. Certainly in her is contained not only herself but my entire past life, an unconscious preparing—America.…”

  Strictly speaking, I have actually hidden myself from America up till the present. Its only real influence on me has been Poe, whom I read very early, perhaps at twenty. In this respect I am not different from many nineteenth-century writers. Hemingway rolled off me like water.

  From 1942 to 1950 Pavese’s journals run parallel with my own. Never before have I been so astonished by such parallelism. But I must assemble my earlier, sparer writings and bring them into some kind of order. Even prior to 1942 I was not mute, just less resolute.

  You should read your contemporaries as well. You can’t get nourishment from roots alone.

  You spoke about it to everyone so much and for so long, with nothing to show for it—there never was anything to see. Then people just believed you. Now they have it in hand, a book: what is the use of their believing something now?

  How do you forget a work like that? How do you erase the traces? It is like a horrible deed. You can’t get it out of your head. For a while you can hide everything associated with it. But you are totally covered with it, as if it were vermin. Inside, outside, everywhere the same pestilence.

  Perhaps you should invent yourself a new biography. Still you, but everything different from the way it was. Other places, other origins. Make up the most improbable tales for your own life story. Look for anything that wasn’t the way it was. Thus you evade the hundred different paths that led you into the work. Were you, say, born in another time? Or will a completely different place suffice?

  I need new churingas. New ancestors. New destinies. New memories.

  You need an army of termites that will undermine all your ties and habits from within.

  I must find my way back to my bushmen as an innocent, as if I had used nothing from them for the book. After all, what I used was only for those few pages about premonitions. All the rest is still “immaculate.”

  I am happy about my new brother, Pavese. But this should not occur often. We only learn from those who are quite different from us. With relatives, we are complacent.

  Pavese’s journals: all the things that preoccupy me, crystallized in another way. What luck! What a liberation!

  His death prepared for: but nothing is abused, no emotion for him aroused. It just comes as if it were natural. But no death is natural. He keeps his death to himself, private. We hear about it, but it sets no example. No one would kill himself because he did.

  And yet last night, when in my deepest depression I wanted to die, I reached for his journals, and he died for me. Hard to believe: through his death, today I am reborn. This mysterious process should be looked into, but not by me. I will not touch it. I want to keep it secret.

  The blind man as traveler.

  Barking men: it’s a matter of marrow.

  A ceremonial beast, assembled from tiaras.

  A man who has yet to see himself.

  Becoming as incomprehensible as the babble of angels. Pentecost 1960. As warm as summer, a southern day, a Sunday of slow people in the heat. I read here and there, in this language and that: the day before yesterday Democritus, yesterday Juvenal, today Montaigne; a few days ago poems of Tasso. There is neither tension nor anger in me. I speak to whoever calls. Since the book appeared, total silence has reigned. At first I was puzzled, maybe a little bothered, but now the silence has entered me and I am happy. I am not tempted to go anywhere. I don’t know what to do next. I am waiting, waiting for the thunderbolt and the powerful voice. I am still not free from all I have written up to now. What’s past does not appeal to me, and I see no new goal. I often regret that my mind never acquired an English wardrobe. I have been here now for twenty-two years. Certainly I have listened to many people speaking to me in the language of this country, but I have never listened to them as a writer, I have merely understood them. My own anguish, my wonderment, and my exuberance have never made use of their words. Whatever I have felt or thought or had to say has presented itself to me in German words. Asked why this has been so, I have had persuasive explanations: the most important reason, and the one in which I have believed myself, has been pride.

  Today I am tempted to begin life in a new language. I love this place I live in more than anywhere else; it is as familiar to me as if I were a native. Ever an alien, I have found a home here: the split between this homeland and my internal monologue is complete.

  I would really like to loosen up. Everything in me is too tightly wound; I am always aware of a direction, a goal. Nothing around me breathes. I have a world of my own, but how narrow it is! It is stifling me: what kind of world is that? I must let myself be borne along by my own invention again, without knowing where it will take me.

  To dismantle noise.

  Find a man who fears no one because he has never known anyone well enough.

  Painting the cheap cloak of happiness.

  The grateful—a burlesque.

  I cannot help myself. In the greatest misfortune I, the unbeliever, await miracles. Of all the old doctrines of faith, only one has remained intact for me: the miracle. But I don’t want to know where it comes from; I don’t want to make one happen. It should remain just what it is, inexplicable, intractable, just a miracle.

  The miracle as the all-encompassing, supreme transformation.

  He never lived so intensely as when under the burden of direst defeat.

  The idea of a human being without hope is unthinkable. What is hope? Hope is the knowledge of continuing cycles of respiration, as long as they are not numbered.

  The hardest thing is to stop learning. It amazes him that a student can die.

  Your early difficult relationship with God was nothing but an attempt to wrest power from him.

  I breathe free only over blank paper. My atman, my soul, is in paper.

  Stendhal has become so important to me that I have to turn back to him every five or six months. It does not matter at all which work it is, so long as the sentences contain the breath of his spirit. Sometimes I’ll read twenty or thirty pages of Stendhal and think I will live forever. I have countless projects of my own before me, and then with incredulous horror I tell myself that he died at fifty-nine.

  Stendhal’s head was filled with things of “culture”—pictures, books, music—many of which are as important to me today as they were to him then. Many more are indifferent or repellently “sentimental”; the important point is how he was taken up by these things. He extracts from everything only that which is like himself. Thus I can perhaps console myself for being so preoccupied with barbarians and religions, since it is possible that they have become very much like me. Whether it’s Canova or Wotruba, the accident of birth plays only an external role here. The passion with which one possesses every object and the passion with which one distances oneself in contemplation of it—that is everything.

  Only the skeptic can really gauge the joy of belief.

  The sole splendor of your language is the names of all the bygone gods.

  Vanished thoughts that are felt but never found again.

  All that delights him passes like a cloud over the earth.

  With the passing years, even Despair eats itself full and fat. Then it loses its name.

  The furthest thing from myth is description; I am ashamed of it for that very reason, I think.

  You would like to pass freely and carelessly through the world, as though you never had any convictions. What do you care about being “in the right”? Do you want to live, or do you want to be “in the right”? You don’t lack emotions, and you hate it when any kind
of calculation is proven.

  A person who escapes death because he has never heard a thing about it.

  The disadvantage of religions: that they always speak of the same things. Perhaps this is one reason a lively mind like Stendhal’s will hear nothing of religion.

  A man who does not speak anymore, except for statements that stay with us.

  A woman who knew all the great men and outlived them. One of them will not die. Her desperation.

  Names—names in particular—need to be repeated. They are easily put into circulation, but they shouldn’t stay in one place. One family, for example, can imperil a name. It can ingest the name completely, make so much use of it that for others it becomes empty and bloodless. A name within one family is shoved back and forth instead of rising up and taking flight. Among family members a name is never really let loose; it is burdened with habit as if with stones.

  Religions that believe in their own decline. Fewer and fewer adherents belong, until there are just four left, as with the Jains.

  His belief: that nothing is ever lost, particularly nothing that has taken place between people. The compulsion to rediscover everything that ever happened to a person, but always in relation to specific figures, never merely for itself, never outside the personal sphere. The changes in the places where events occurred turn into masks, and these masks are waiting to be seen through. We love these old places for their existence and hate them for their distortion.

  Names, the most enigmatic of words. I have long been bothered by a sense, which has disturbed me more from year to year, that unraveling the enigma of the essence of names would provide the key to the process of history.

  Just as the decoding of ancient scripts has brought vanished civilizations back to life, so too in the interpretation of names could be found the actual law of all that has been done by and to mankind.

  Compared with this, the ominous depletion of numbers that started with Pythagoras would seem paltry and of limited import.