Bernhard's "Extinction"

Dropped Hawthorne for now (he just toured the no-longer Crystal Palace in London) and have picked up another Bernhard. Apparently his last novel. Extinction.

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The epigraph is by Montaigne:

I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back.

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Two clips:

I had given Gambetti five books that I thought would be useful and necessary to him in the next few weeks, telling him to read them slowly and carefully: Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Kafka’s The Trial, Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, Musil’s The Portuguese Woman, and Broch’s Esch or Anarchy.

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For a thinking person it is possible first to arrive at an ideal concept of art by way of nature, and then to arrive at the ideal contemplation of nature by way of the ideal concept of art.