From Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser"
Re Thomas Bernhard's "ovular logic": still enjoying it. Only now it'll have to be in smaller bites: Summer is over (too soon). * Excerpt #1: The trip from Vienna to Chur took thirteen hours, Austrian trains are a disaster, their dining cars, assuming there is one, serve only the worst food. A glass of mineral water set in front of me, I planned to reread after twenty years Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless , which however I didn't manage, I no longer tolerate stories, I read a page and can't read further. Excerpt #2: The mind, wherever it makes its claims felt, is finished off and locked up and of course immediately branded as mindless , he said, I thought while looking up at the restaurant ceiling. But everything we say is nonsense, he said, I thought, no matter what we say it is nonsense and our entire life is a single piece of nonsense. I understood that early on, I'd barely started to think for myself and I already understood that, ...