Excerpt from Bernhard's "The Lime Works"


Of late he had become so desperate about this deadlock that he boldly called it an absolutely epoch-making scientific work. But she only laughed and said: Whatever it is that you have in your head, I'd rather not see it; if your head could be tipped over to empty out its contents, what is likely to fall out is some ghastly mess or other, some indefinable, horrifying, utterly worthless kind of dung or rot. Your so-called book -- this is how the Konrad woman dared to refer to her husband's work-in-progress toward the end -- is really nothing more than a delusion.

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