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.

Wittgenstein’s Nephew is an autobiographical work by Thomas Bernhard , originally published in 1982. It is a recollection of the author's friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a member of the wealthy Viennese Wittgenstein family. Paul suffers from an unnamed mental illness for which he is repeatedly hospitalized, paralleling Bernhard's own struggle with a chronic lung disease. Synopsis The author narrates moments of his friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, "nephew" (actually son of a first cousin ) of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (not to be confused with the latter's brother, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein ). The title is a reference to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew who also deals with the eccentric nephew of a preeminent cultural figure. A very sensitive man, unsuitable for the world, obsessed by an exclusive and cruel passion for music as well as for race cars and sailing , Paul Wittgenstein dissip...

No pics from my walk. A little rain and some wonderful clouds (reminding me of Otto Modersohn's obsessive sketching of Wolken). Waiting for Julian Barnes' new book on Shostakovich. Have been flip-flopping between Herbert and the early poems of Thomas Bernhard. From Bernhard's Auf der Erde und in der Holle  (very last poem): In the Bushes, I Know, Are the Souls In the bushes, I know, are the souls of my fathers, in the corn is the pain of my father and in the great black forest. I know that their lives, erased before our very eyes, have found refuge in the ears of corn, in the blue brow of the June sky. I know that the dead are the trees and the winds, the moss, and the night which lays its shadows upon my burial mound. [ Translation by Peter Waugh ]

Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin ( / k r oʊ ˈ p ɒ t k ɪ n , k r ə - / ; [9] Russian : Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин ; December 9, 1842 – February 8, 1921) was a Russian geographer , economist, activist, philologist , zoologist , evolutionary theorist , philosopher, writer, and prominent anarchist . Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops , and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution . He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition . [From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin ]

Flip-flopping between Bernhard's Lime Works and Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower (via Bernhard, Kropotkin and Novalis, I got to Fitzgerald's "opus" -- wasn't sure about historical fiction, not my fave genre, but I figured it would be relatively short and informational: OK so far). * Anyway, Blue Flower kicked up Dr. John Brown. From Blue Flower : Dr. Brown, of Edinburgh, had cured a number of patients by refusing to let blood, and by recommending exercise, sufficient sex, and fresh air. But he held that to be alive was not a natural state, and to prevent immediate collapse the constitution must be held in perpetual balance by a series of stimuli, either jacking it up with alcohol, or damping it down with opium. From the online Britannica : 

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.

Been busy with school but have been reading and writing quite a bit. Refuge. Recent reading: Nabokov, Coetzee, Coetzee, Nabokov, David Ferry (reread), Thomas Bernhard. Got Melville on the back burner, or I may reach for another Bernhard (we'll see). * From Bernhard's The Lime Works : Even though it was still referred to as the lime works, when it came up, it would after all be truer to speak of a shut-down or deactivated lime works, when referring to the lime works. People are always referring to all kinds of structures or mental complexes, Konrad is supposed to have said, that have long ceased to be the same structures or mental complexes they once were.

Finished with Concrete . Wondered where "concrete" and the suicide would come in: both at the end. * Loved this bit about writing: When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the idea in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence too early , the another too late ; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Then she displayed the most ravishing bosom the world had ever seen: Zadig. I don't know why this sentence occurred to me just now and made me laugh.

From Concrete : Now that there's no longer anything in me for the surgeons to cut out I'm entirely reliant on these medicaments. Every day I thank Switzerland and her industries on Lake Geneva for the fact that they exist and that I consequently exist, just as no doubt millions of people daily owe their existence, however wretched, to these people in their glass boxes near Vevey and Montreux, who are more denigrated than anyone else today. Since virtually the whole of humanity today is sick and dependent on medicaments, it's hardly too much to ask that it should reflect that it owes its existence, in the largest possible measure, to these chemicals which it so often curses.

This phrase, originally mouthed by the actor (whom Bernhard's avatar hates), becomes something like a philosophical mantra toward the end of the book, and reminded me very much of Heidegger's Holzweg = woodpath. A quick google didn't connect the two and I don't know if they're using the same German word, but my guess is: Yes. * I've been saying The Woodcutters (a slip on my part because it's right on the electronic cover in bits or bytes) but it's Woodcutters . * Finished with Woodcutters and have started Concrete. Ending of Woodcutters : And as I went on running I thought: I'll write something at once , no matter what -- I'll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse at once , now . Now , I thought -- at once , I told myself over and over again as I ran through the Inner City -- at once , I told myself, now -- at once , at once , before it's too late.

Just as Bruckner is unendurably monumental, so Webern is unendurably meager, yet the meagerness of Anton Webern is as nothing compared with the meagerness of Auersberger, whom I am bound to describe as the almost noteless composer, just as the mindless literary experts have dubbed Paul Celan the almost wordless poet.

Interrupted The Woodcutters for the oft-alluded-to The Wild Duck by Ibsen (downloaded a very cheap copy of Ibsen's plays from Kindle). Not sure how much it has to do with Woodcutters (though Bernhard keeps alluding to it re the yet-to-arrive actor), but it was bugging me: knew I had read it but I couldn't remember the story. Anyway, the ending of Wild Duck: Gregers. If you are right and I am wrong, then life is not worth living. Relling. Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal. Gregers . [looking straight before him . ]  In that case, I am glad that my destiny is what it is. Relling. May I inquire, -- what is your destiny? Gregers . [going.]  To be the thirteenth at table. Relling. The devil it is.     

There is the trademark Bernhardian repetition of phrases; another suicide; and he seemingly sees everything from that "wing chair" -- what more could you ask for? Excerpt: I have a gift for behaving in such a way that people leave me alone whenever I wish, and as I sat in the wing chair I showed myself to be a past master in the art of being left alone; people recognized me in the half-light of the anteroom and tried to strike up a conversation, but I at once deterred them simply by remaining seated and pretending not to understand what they said, and then, at precisely the right moment, looking down at the ground instead of into their faces.

The Trial : sparkling in patches, dragged at times (or was it me?). I liked the hyper-parabolic penultimate (doorkeeper, law, K. -- frontloaded in Orson's take) and the ending very much. From the finale: He saw how a light flickered on and the two halves of a window opened out, somebody, made weak and thin by the height and the distance, leant suddenly far out from it and stretched his arms out even further. Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who wanted to help? Was he alone? Was it everyone? Would anyone help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? There must have been some. The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it. Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised both hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesig...

Finished The Loser (will probably hit TB up again real soon) and have returned to Kafka: The Trial . Though certainly school has taken a toll on reading and writing. Drib-drab. Here-there. Lots of good biographical info in the Afterword (Mark M. Anderson) of The Loser , but I've chosen this bit because I found it quite telling and near the mark: Bernhard later noted that it was his grandfather who instilled in him a fierce intellectual independence, warning him, for instance, not to take school seriously or to believe his teachers.

Beer-truck drivers have fascinated me since my earliest childhood, so too that day. I was fascinated by the way they unloaded the beer kegs and rolled them through the lobby, then tapped the first one for the innkeeper and sat down with her at the next table. As a child I had wanted to become a beer-truck driver, admired beer-truck drivers, I thought, couldn't look often enough at beer-truck drivers. Sitting at the next table and watching the beer-truck drivers I again fell prey to this sentiment from my childhood, but I didn't dwell on it for long, instead I got up and left the Dichtel Mill for Traich, not without having told the innkeeper that I would be back toward evening or even earlier, depending , and that I was counting on an evening meal. While going out I heard the beer-truck drivers ask the innkeeper who I was and since I have sharper ears than anybody I also heard her whisper my name and add that I was a friend of Wertheimer's, the fool who'd killed himsel...