Peter Altenberg - Telegrams of the Soul

“The things Altenberg writes, we already know them anyhow!”

Because he writes in such a way as to give you the impression that you’ve always known it anyhow.

But it’s only through him that you know that you’ve always known it anyhow, that is, ought to have known it!

You’re embarrassed in front of yourself, to have fathomed it only now thanks to that crazy eccentric Altenberg!

There’s only one way out:

“Well for crying out loud, I already thought that, knew that, long ago, do you have to spell everything out?! That Altenberg fellow is a nut, he has the need to enlighten!”

Do I really?! It’s fine with me if the others fumble and falter on their own foolishness.

Why am I unsociable? I’ll tell you. Say, for instance, I did not happen to be so, I would surely experience the following every evening at my regular café table where I retire to try and rest up after a hard day of doing nothing: “Do tell us, Peter Altenberg, I’m just dying to know, what’s your position regarding the works of Karl Schönherr?!”* First of all, of course, I have no position, and second, if I had a position, I would have no burning need to impart it at 10:45 on the dot after the seventh mug of Pilsner! Or: “Gee, Peter, it’s good to have met you in person, one thing I’ve always wanted to hear from your own lips, this business about women, dames, they always seem to have played a significant role in your life?! Do you really think they matter that much?!” But if you reply: “what matters to me is me and how I experience the various kinds of women!” then he says: “Naturally, you’re all swelled heads, you scribblers!”

So now do you understand why I’m unsociable?! To which you’ll promptly reply that that’s just the way life is! Yes, but in my book it’s different!

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*Karl Schönherr, 1867–1943, Viennese folk dramatist and doctor

Most people live out their life with an almost pathologically bottled up world view. The most insignificant occurrences in their own experience and the experiences of their few acquaintances not only preoccupy their thinking, but such people also unknowingly attempt to derive therefrom deep philosophical problems and universal judgments intended to open up wide-ranging perspectives! “So what are we to conclude from the fact that Anna had to go and buy herself this particular hat?! How are we to take an impartial position?! Is it just a whim, a childish folly, an impertinence, an extravagance, or should somebody in particular perhaps get upset about it?!? That too would be perfectly possible.” Everyone attempts with more or less skill to hang his own empty, irrelevant, ridiculous experiences onto the tail end of the conversation underway like a kind of “philosophical-historical” essay, which process one commonly calls “stimulating conversation.” “Wouldn’t you also agree, despite everything, that G does not really appreciate B quite as much as she rightfully deserves, particularly under such extenuating circumstances?”—“Unfortunately, as much as I would like to, I cannot, ‘for reasons of principle,’ give you an answer, madam, a principle, moreover, to which you yourself would surely adhere, although in any case a spark of truth appears to flicker forth from your question!” Such is “stimulating conversation!” No one is interested in anyone else, but he “psychoanalyzes” the other because it’s “stimulating to dig around behind things and set yourself on a pedestal above them!” The “silent man,” the “silent woman” don’t come off as wise or decent, but rather boring. “What does he, what does she take him or herself for?” Even the “ironic note” is a rotten dodge in the conversation. Should anyone ever seriously hazard a “fiery stand” in favor of something or other, then, following a brief artificial pause, the firebrand is taken aside: “But surely you couldn’t possibly believe that yourself, do you?!?” Conversation is the Moloch that gobbles up and decimates the non-existent spirits and souls! At home one is one’s own man, but in society one immediately becomes a philosopher of life in general. Butchers, bakers, busy businessmen, salesmen do not suddenly transform themselves for hours on end into “universally thinking” philosophers predisposed to “look down on the swarming masses of humanity.” “It’s easy enough to listen to Altenberg sound off; if it can’t help you it can’t harm you either, but that guy, he’s one curious customer!” But those that seek to make us measure up to themselves, to lead us back to the reasonable, salubrious, normal, decent, useful mien, only they make — conversation with us!

I received a Crown, dated 1893, the face of which was polished and in which the name “Albert” had been engraved. I immediately felt that in such an unusual case poets had the duty to let their imagination ramble. In any case, it was surely a “she,” who, through a circumstance unknown to us, had had this consecrated Crown — perhaps the first lavished on her or the last — so transformed, and in a moment of material need or out of hatred, jealousy, despair, contempt or the like, had sent it back in circulation, back into the current of life, till finally, in 1914, it came to me.

I cherished it for the longest time, and Maeterlinck would have made a one-act out of it: Crown 1893. But when the valet Anton requested payment for cigarettes and I said, at the moment I had no change on hand, he pointed to the 1893 Crown lying on the desk and said: “There’s a coin over there!”—“It’s invalid!” I said, “just look at it!”—“I’ll make do with it, you can count on my dexterity, Sir, nobody’ll notice that stupid word “Albert!” And thus did that 1893 Crown slip out of my possession and resume its worldly circulation, which I, in an application of “false Romanticism” had temporarily held up—.

At the entrance to the zoo with its black linked metal fence and the ring of dusty lilacs stood a little light brown Swiss chalet glimmering with a fresh coat of varnish baking in the afternoon sun in which the zoo attendant sat chomping on a pear. He sold lemon yellow entrance tickets and dark green reduced price tickets for groups, soldiers and regular visitors. “Les enfants ne comptent pas,” he muttered, as if to say: “Go on, get lost, you don’t hardly matter—. .” In a little cage near the sweating Swiss chalet sat two aguti, Dasyprocta aguti.* The cage floor was covered with broken bits of bread rolls and sugar cubes.

A young private tutor with a boy and a girl at his side said: “Stupid people. Fruit is all they eat! Watch this!” He gave them a little peach.

The aguti stood up on their hind legs and ate like chipmunks. The young girl was flushed with admiration and sensed how all the others standing around admired the tutor too or felt a like emotion.

“Remind me, Fortunatina, tomorrow I’ll read you in Brehm, all about the favorite live foods of the onza and jaguars of Brasil. These two creatures huddle in the harbor of life. But bread and sugar?! After all, they’re not monkeys, par exemple.”

Then they went to look at the bears, which lumbering beasts made stereotypical movements and smelled awful and which the public kept egging on to waddle over to the water tank.

“Wait—,” said the tutor and tossed an entire bread roll into the tank. Whereupon the bear was compelled to lean in, if only with its upper half.

At the lions’ cage, Fortunatina rested her elbows on the wooden railing and looked long and hard. The lioness slunk back and forth, as if slipping on the wet stone floor, as if, alas, creeping up upon some unsuspecting prey?!