Without Lifting A Finger

Certainly one of his longest. And work keeps me from everything. Still, sticking with it. There are gems and precious stones from time to time. * The majority is not necessarily in tune with the times just because it’s the majority, I thought, though this too is a common belief that is often acted upon, to the detriment of the times. A minority may also be in tune with the times, often more in tune than the majority; even an individual may be more in tune with the times than the majority, indeed more so than everybody else. The majority has always brought misfortune, I thought, and even today we have the majority to thank for most of our ills. The minority and the individual are crushed by the majority because they are more in tune with the times and act accordingly. Ideas that are in tune with the times are always out of tune with them, I thought, for such ideas are always ahead of the times if t hey are truly in tune with them. Hence whatever is in tune with the times is in r...

The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti—that must be obvious.

The country he's referring to is of course Austria. But these days ... * Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything—as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country—an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it.

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 . * The epigraph is by Montaigne: I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back. * 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. * 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.