Thomas Bernhard: Extinction

LaTempesta, they told him, and so he took a train to Venice to see La Tempesta. You must go to Verona and see the grave of Romeo and Juliet, they said, and so he went and saw it. The Acropolis is something you must see, they said, and so he went to Athens and saw the Acropolis. You must see Rembrandt, you must see Vermeer, you must see Strasbourg Minster, Metz Cathedral. He went everywhere and saw everything that his so-called art experts recommended. And what frightful people they were, those advisers of his, dreadful people with petit bourgeois minds and professorships, whose only reason for approaching him was that it gave them a chance to spend a few days free at our lovely Wolfsegg. Those appalling specimens from Vienna whom he was forever inviting — university professors, art historians, etc. — because he took them to be cultured people. Those horrors from Salzburg and Linz who came to Wolfsegg on weekends and polluted the atmosphere with their malodorous presence, so-called philosophers, scholars, and lawyers who did nothing but exploit him. They came in droves and spent the weekends gorging themselves and regaling us over dinner with their pseudoscholarly garbage. And then there were those revolting doctors he sent for from Vöcklabruck or Wels. Who only ruined him — mentally. Your father was persuaded, quite wrongly, that high-sounding academic titles were a guarantee of high mental capacity. He was always wrong. All my life I’ve hated such titles and their holders. I find nothing so repellent. The very word professor makes me feel sick. Such a title is usually proof positive that its holder is an egregious nincompoop. The grander the title, the greater the imbecility of its holder. And then his wife, your mother! Where she comes from they’ve always trampled on the intellect. And in the years she’s been married to your father she’s added many refinements to the art. But your father was never capable of independent thought: he hadn’t the wherewithal. He always admired others whom he took to be thinking people and let them do his thinking for him. He’s always been indolent, of course. And this indolence has left its mark. He’s never developed. I’m sorry, said Uncle Georg, but your father’s a particularly stupid man. And such a man was just what your mother needed. She was always artful. Looked at in this way, your parents were an ideal couple. I can still hear him saying this. We were sitting in the open on the Piazza del Popolo late one afternoon, and Uncle Georg became more talkative than ever before because, contrary to his custom, he had drunk several glasses of white wine that afternoon. It’s because I’ve always loved your father, my brother, and still do, that I allow myself to speak of him like this, said Uncle Georg — you know that. I always hoped your father would marry somebody different from your mother. But after all, he said, suddenly looking at me in consternation, she is your mother. Maybe it was a mistake for you to get to know me. Perhaps you’d have been happier without me — who knows? I said, simply, No. He was staying at the Hotel de la Ville, his favorite hotel, by the Spanish Steps, only a few yards from the Café Greco. He came to Rome at least once a year — when Cannes gets on my nerves, he would say. Once a year Cannes got on his nerves. I don’t care for Paris, he often said, but I always enjoy Rome. Partly because you’re here. In a city you love there’s always a person you love, he said. It’s a pity that Rome has become so noisy. But then all cities have become noisy. Although Uncle Georg did not appear on the photo of my sisters Amalia and Caecilia taken at his villa, it was of him that I thought, with him that I was mainly preoccupied as I looked at the photograph and tried to divert my attention from the telegram from Wolfsegg, the full horror of which I had not yet taken in. My parents dead, dead beyond recall, and my brother, Johannes, dead too. I still could not cope with this fact and its consequences, and I put off trying. Uncle Georg would have been the best support to have at a time like this, but I had no support. I must not think of what lay in store for me. I placed the photographs one above the other on the desk, so that my uncle was on top, though he was not visible on the picture of my sisters taken in Cannes, occupying a position above my parents, and my brother, Johannes, below them. All three dead, at one fell swoop. How, I wondered, did they relate to one another and to me? At the Hotel de la Ville, where of course he occupied the best and most beautiful of all the rooms, my uncle had once told me that he was bound to love his family, though he could not help hating it. This was precisely how he described his relations with the family. His brother, my father, he both loved and despised. My mother he detested as a sister-in-law, while respecting her as the mother of myself and Johannes. They’ll live to a ripe old age, he once said. People like that reach a great age. Their stupidity encloses them for decades like protective armor plating — they don’t drop dead suddenly like us. He was wrong. They have chronic illnesses that prolong their lives instead of shortening them, he said. Such illnesses are irksome but not fatal — they don’t come along all of a sudden and carry you off. Such people aren’t worn down by their interests or driven mad by their passions, because they don’t have any. Their equanimity and ultimately their apathy regulate their day-to-day digestion, so that they can count on reaching their dotage. Basically there’s nothing in the world that attracts them and nothing that repels them. They don’t indulge in anything to the point where it could debilitate them. The moment they realized that I was a disruptive element, said Uncle Georg, they excluded me from the charmed circle, first covertly and then overtly. Basically they would have paid any price, however high, to be rid of me. Quite automatically I had assumed a function at Wolfsegg that they couldn’t accept. I was the one who constantly drew attention to their shortcomings, who spotted every symptom of character weakness and always caught them out in unworthy behavior. How surprised they were, said Uncle Georg, when I pointed out one day that they hadn’t unlocked our libraries for six months and demanded access to them. People were always surprised when I said our libraries, for others could at best have spoken of our library, having only one. But we, having five, had much more to be ashamed of intellectually than those who had only one. One of our great-great-great-grandfathers inaugurated these five libraries that I’ve been so proud of all my life. He certainly wasn’t a madman, a crazy intellectual, as they always said at Wolfsegg. He could afford to set up these libraries — with the greatest understanding of literature — instead of filling the house with drawing rooms, which serve only to promote boredom and brainlessness. One day, said Uncle Georg, I burglarized these dead libraries, as it were, and was never forgiven for it. But when I left Wolfsegg they locked them up again and didn’t set foot in them for years, until word got around that the libraries existed and they were obliged to show them to the curious rather than lose face. At Wolfsegg nothing was ever used, said Uncle Georg, until I suddenly started using everything, sitting on chairs that no one had sat on for decades, opening cupboards that no one had opened for decades, drinking out of glasses that no one had drunk out of for decades. I even walked down passages that no one had walked down for decades. Right from the start I was the inquisitive one, whom they couldn’t help fearing. And I began to leaf through our centuries-old documents, which were stored in big chests in the attics and which they had always known about but never looked at, as if they were afraid of discovering something unpleasant. I was interested in everything, said Uncle Georg, and of course I was especially interested in our family connections, in our history, though not in the way they were, not just in its hundreds and thousands of glorious pages but in the whole of it. I ventured to do what they had never dared to do — to look into the fearful depths of our history — and this angered them. Georg was a name they all came to fear at Wolfsegg, said my uncle. They were afraid that the child I was then might one day control them, instead of their controlling me. My parents, your grandparents, chained me to Wolfsegg and gagged me, he said, which is precisely what they shouldn’t have done. And your parents learned nothing from your grandparents’ mistake; on the contrary, they used even worse methods in dealing with you. But on the other hand, he said, what would have become of you if they hadn’t behaved to you as they did? The question needed no answer: it answered itself. When I look at you, said Uncle Georg, I’m actually looking at myself. You’ve developed exactly as I did. You parted from them, got out of their way, turned your back on them, and escaped from them at the right moment. They never forgave me, and they won’t forgive you. My God, he said, Rome is to you what Cannes is to me. In this way we can deal with Wolfsegg, from a distance. When I think of those dreary evenings with the family, when the most marvelous topics fizzle out as soon as they’re broached. Whatever you say is met with incomprehension. Nothing you mention is taken up. If your father reads a paper, it’s the Upper Austrian Farmers’ Weekly; if he reads a book, it’s the accounts book. And then, because they have to make use of their theater subscription, they go to Linz and see some dire comedy, without feeling in the least ashamed of themselves. And they go to those ridiculous concerts at the Bruckner House, where innumerable wrong notes are played at maximum volume. These people — I mean your parents — haven’t just taken out subscriptions for the theater and concerts: they live their whole lives on a subscription basis. Every day of their lives is like an evening spent at the theater seeing some frightful comedy or at a ridiculous concert where wrong notes predominate, and they’re not ashamed of it. They live their lives because it’s the done thing; not because they want to, not because they have a passion for life, but because their parents took out a subscription for them. And just as they clap in all the wrong places at the theater, so they clap in all the wrong places in their lives, applauding when there’s no occasion for applause, just as they do at concerts, and making the ghastliest grimaces when they should be laughing heartily. And just as the plays they see are of the most dismal quality, so their lives are of the most dismal quality. On the other hand, he said, we should by now be indifferent to what they do and what they’ve made of their lives — it doesn’t concern us. And who’s to say that we’ve taken the right course? We’re not the happiest of people either — always searching for the ideal and failing to find it. The fact is that we’ve all tried to find a way of getting closer to one another and ended up farther apart. The closer we’ve tried to get, the farther apart we’ve become. Our overtures have ended only in bitterness, and we’ve only ever given up because otherwise we’d have been smothered with reproaches. We made the mistake of not resigning ourselves to the fact that Wolfsegg no longer concerns us. It’s their Wolfsegg, not ours. We always tried to force our Wolfsegg on them, instead of leaving them alone with theirs. We’ve always interfered with their Wolfsegg when we’d have done better to leave them in peace. They paid us off, and we ought to have been content with that, once and for all. We no longer have any right to Wolfsegg, he said. I looked carefully at the photograph of my sisters, taken when they were twenty-two and twenty-three. Their mocking faces have taken their revenge on them, I thought. They remained alone; they, didn’t have the strength to break away from Wolfsegg. These mocking faces were their only weapon against their surroundings and their parents, from whom they couldn’t escape, but it was a weapon that scared off all the men they wanted. My sisters were never beautiful, I thought. And they weren’t interesting either. They haven’t developed: they’ve remained the silly country cousins they always were. Twenty years on, their mocking faces, no longer fresh, are lined with bitterness. In fact they’re rather ugly. Caecilia is probably more good-natured than Amalia. The greed they inherited from their mother is compounded by bitterness. At one time they were both musical, and Uncle Georg tried to make musicians of them — a futile attempt that was doomed to failure. They lacked the staying power and had no real interest in music, and so naturally their talent was lost; they were just about good enough to be stand-ins for the church choir. At the age of four or five their mother started dressing them in dirndls, always identical in pattern and cut, in which they were bound to atrophy sooner or later. Both have delicate health, inherited from their mother, but it is the kind of delicate health that augurs a long life. They are always coughing. I have never known them not to cough. At Wolfsegg they cough all over the house, but their coughing is not to be taken seriously; it is not lethal. It is as though coughing were their one passion, the easiest fun that life could afford them. Their musical talent seems to have withdrawn into coughing. Even in company they cough all the time. They have nothing to say but never stop coughing. Each wears a silver chain around her neck, inherited from our grandmother, and if asked what they are, the first word they utter in reply is Catholic. They were both sent on cookery courses at Bad Ischl, where it was hoped they would learn Austrian imperial cooking, but neither learned to cook at Bad Ischl. Their cooking is even worse than Mother’s, whose incompetence always comes to light when the cook is on vacation at Aschach on the Danube. Potato soup is the only dish Mother cooks well. But none of us likes potato soup — except Father, who is passionately fond of it, or so he says. My sisters were always well brought up, as they say, but this does not alter the fact that they have always been the most devious creatures imaginable. If one of them picked up a book, the other would knock it out of her hand. They were always seen together, never alone. There is a year between them, but they behave like twins. If I say that I have always loved them, this does not mean that I have not always hated them in equal measure. When we grew up I naturally hated them more than I loved them. It now occurs to me that hate may be all that is left. They were always disappointed in me. They had only bad things to say about their brother, as I know, especially when others were present and they knew it would have a devastating effect. And what stories they invented in order to disparage me! Stupid people are always the most dangerous, it occurs to me. To say that I always loved them does not mean that I was not continually cursing them. Right from the start their mother chained them to herself and never let them loose. They were not allowed to travel or attend balls, and even at the age of about twenty they still had to ask permission to go to the Thursday market at Lambach. They got only so much pocket money, not enough for them to step out, just enough for a drink and a slice of bread to go with it. Their shoes were mostly made to measure by the shoemaker at Schwanenstadt, who had made our grandparents’ shoes. They were always unfashionable, and in time my sisters developed a rather clownish gait, which remained in later years, when they were able to buy shoes in Vienna. I cannot say which of them is the more intelligent. I cannot say that Caecilia has better taste than Amalia. I cannot say that Amalia knows more than Caecilia. Their voices are so alike that if one of them calls out it is difficult to know which of them it is. Since they were always together and neither felt the need to break loose from the other, they were for a long time unable to find a suitable husband. In fact I do not think either ever thought of marrying until last year, when Caecilia went to visit an old aunt of ours at Titisee in the Black Forest. There she met the wine cork manufacturer. Caecilia married him and thereby incurred the hatred of her sister Amalia. Amalia moved out of the main house into the Gardeners’ House, put in a brief appearance at the wedding breakfast after the church ceremony, and then left, not to be seen again. Knowing her, I guess that she stayed in the Gardeners’ House until she heard of the death of her parents and her brother and then, having a much greater sense of the theatrical than her sister, emerged from the Gardeners’ House and ran screaming to the main building, though of course I have no way of being sure. At the time of the accident Caecilia’s husband was probably still at Wolfsegg, I thought, as he didn’t intend to return to the Black Forest and Freiburg for two more weeks. Caecilia’s marriage was supposedly engineered, as they say, by our aunt in Titisee. It is typical of Caecilia that she should have thought she could stay on at Wolfsegg after the wedding. What it must have cost my mother to persuade her to go to Freiburg with her husband, considering that she had secretly sworn not to let either of her daughters leave Wolfsegg, as she had a lifelong dread of being left alone! Both her daughters were to stay with her at Wolfsegg so that if she should lose one of them she would still not be entirely alone. Mother always planned well ahead and took all eventualities into account, especially where her own future was concerned. She had always reckoned with losing my father, but then I’ll still have my daughters, even if both my sons are no longer at Wolfsegg. This was her plan. And if one daughter leaves home I’ll still have the other. Throughout the wedding festivities she was angry with Caecilia for deserting her and let her feel it, but as she is shrewd — or rather was shrewd — she was careful not to display her anger and sudden hatred for the deserter; on the contrary, she made a point of expressing her delight at what she called this happy union. Now at last she was the happy mother she’d always wanted to be, she said, to the disgust of all who knew the truth. She had herself photographed with her son-in-law all over Wolfsegg — although she had never let herself be photographed by a stranger, so to speak — in all kinds of silly and, it seemed to me, shameless poses. At every moment she would embrace her son-in-law and ask one or another of the bystanders to take a picture of them. Her histrionic skill undoubtedly reached its peak at this wedding. And from the Black Forest! she exclaimed more than once. I’ve always loved Freiburg! And Titisee! Her tastelessness knew no bounds. Secretly she longed for nothing so much as a speedy breakup of Caecilia’s marriage to her awkward husband, who probably has no idea what he has done to deserve it all. She had never been fastidious. It may well be, I think, that our aunt in Titisee fixed up her niece Caecilia with the wine cork manufacturer in order to avenge herself on my mother, for it is abundantly clear that our aunt is to blame for this grotesque marriage. She could never stand my mother, and now she had her triumph. While my mother was putting on that distasteful act of hers during the wedding festivities, she was, I believe, already turning her mind to the question of how to destroy this unwelcome marriage as soon as possible. As she projected the image of the deliriously happy mother to the wedding guests, the mechanism of destruction was already at work in her mind. How sad that Uncle Georg couldn’t have lived to see this day! she exclaimed. My father behaved with a good deal of indifference during these days of celebration, attending to his business and spending most of his time at the Farm or in the woods. He had always disliked such festivities and put up with them only to please his wife and because she forced him to do so. All the time he was calmness itself, as they say. It struck me that he had suddenly become old, weak and quite apathetic. But I cannot say that I felt sorry for him. In childhood I had what seems to me a normal, though not especially good, relationship with my sisters, but when we grew up it was always a bad relationship, and now, with my parents and Johannes dead, I was afraid of having to face them. They’ll cause me the greatest difficulties, I thought. I won’t be able to endure their mocking and by now embittered faces, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they dress, and the way they constantly hurl unfounded accusations at me. They had always reproached me for having rejected Wolfsegg and dealt my parents a cruel and more or less mortal blow, and now that our parents were dead their reproaches were bound to be even more shameless. They won’t shrink from the basest and most absurd accusation, I thought. It’ll be no good restraining myself and trying to keep out of their way: they’ll be there all the time, blaming me for the whole disaster. And Uncle Georg too, in spite of his having been dead for so long. They won’t miss a single opportunity of saying that I drove my parents crazy, that I drove them insane and wounded them mortally. Even though it has nothing to do with me. During their lifetime I was always to blame for their misfortune; not just our parents’, but theirs too. They had a theory according to which my leaving Wolfsegg and turning my back on Wolfsegg was the reason for their being chained to Wolfsegg and forced to languish there, unable to develop, unable to marry, and so forth. I was to blame for the fact that the whole atmosphere of Wolfsegg had darkened in the last twenty years, from the moment I moved to Rome. For the fact that their father and Johannes became ill and their mother started to surfer stomach and kidney disorders in addition to her lifelong migraines. For the fact that the health of all of them had deteriorated so much. For the fact that nothing had been renovated at Wolfsegg. Even for the fact that no repairs had been done to the roof. I was to blame when it rained in and they had to rush to the attic with their cloths and buckets to mop up the water. Earlier, before I left for Rome, Wolfsegg had always been fun, but not since. There was suddenly no music at Wolfsegg, for instance. Wolfsegg had become silent, Amalia once told me, because of me, because of my big-headedness, which had driven me to Rome, because I had no sense of responsibility, because I lacked all filial affection and had always hated my parents, whereas they had always loved them. My parents, they said, spent all their money on me and in doing so deprived them, because they had a claim on it too. According to Caecilia, my expensive lifestyle had reduced their standard of living and was responsible for the increasingly alarming depreciation of their inheritance, and so forth. They even went so far as to assert that my only reason for going to college and choosing to study at the most expensive universities in Europe was to keep them as short of money as possible. Why does it have to be London and Oxford, they repeatedly asked, when Innsbruck would do just as well? For as long as I can remember they always referred to me as their big-headed brother who squandered their money, though in fact it was my money, or at most my parents’. Because of my urge to show off I always went around dressed in the most expensive clothes, they said, while they were forced to wear the simplest. You’re to blame for our going around in rags, Amalia once told me. At first they blamed everything on Uncle Georg, and then they blamed me. My brother too had the gall to reproach me for the way I lived and informed me that Wolfsegg could not afford to keep me in such style. These were his very words. I could not believe my ears, but I had not misheard him. For the most part my brother and sisters only echoed my parents’ remarks, which they had to listen to all year round. Whenever I was at Wolfsegg they gave free rein to their malevolent idiocies and did not hold back. They repeatedly said that I led a useless and utterly futile life and tried to persuade my parents to discontinue my monthly allowance or at least radically reduce it, constantly urging them to make short work of me and not let themselves be led up the garden path. I happened to hear Caecilia say this one day when she and my mother were having tea in the summerhouse and I happened to turn up earlier than expected. I was continually subjected to their insolence, and for as long as I can remember they were secretly tormented by the thought that I got more than my due and seemed to lead a better and more agreeable life, to which they did not consider me entitled. What is he after all? they would say. Who does he think he is? If I was silent at table it displeased them; if I spoke it displeased them. You never say anything, they would complain, or alternatively, You’re always talking. If I stayed home they said, Why don’t you go out? If I went out they said, Why don’t you stay home? If I wore a light suit I should have been wearing a dark one; if I wore a dark suit I should have been wearing a light one. If I talked to the doctor in the village they would say disapprovingly, He’s always talking to the doctor, about us. If I did not talk to the doctor they would say, He doesn’t even talk to the doctor. If I said I preferred Rome to Paris they at once reacted by saying that I praised Rome only because they hated it. If I said I did not want a dessert they related this to themselves, though when I said it I was not thinking about them at all. Whatever I said, they assumed that it was directed against them. After a while I could no longer stand it at Wolfsegg. If I felt like driving to the lake they would accuse me of everlastingly driving to the lake, which was absurd, for I drove to the lake at most once a year, unlike my brother, who drove there every two or three days, and even more often in summer, but it never occurred to them to criticize him. If I went for a walk in the woods they thought I was crazy, but if my brother went into the woods it was entirely normal. When I once ordered a martini at the local hotel they immediately said, He always orders an expensive martini. If I sent them a picture postcard from somewhere they immediately said, He’s only sent it to offend us. He can afford to travel to Cannes, Lisbon, Madrid, and Dubrovnik, but we can’t. So I soon stopped sending them postcards. But when the postcards stopped coming they said, He doesn’t send us postcards because he’s too cheap. For a whole five or six days they would be angry with me because I had opened the windows in my room during a very cold spell in winter in order not to suffocate. I was accused of squandering their money at a time when it was in short supply and wood was so dear. Without fresh air I cannot exist, let alone engage in any mental activity, but I am never forgiven for ventilating my room in winter. They would rather suffocate than show any consideration for my wish to air my room at Wolfsegg, where they have enough wood to heat the house for a thousand years. The first time I returned to Wolfsegg from Rome, expecting a cordial welcome, I happened to say, in the first few moments, how beautiful Rome was in February, when one could sit in the open air outside a café, quite lightly dressed, and drink coffee. They were immediately angered by the thought of my drinking coffee in Rome in the open air and constantly reproached me for sitting around drinking coffee, while they had to work hard, not just in February but all year round. Can you imagine how hard we have to work at Wolfsegg? they repeatedly asked me. We can’t afford anything, not a thing. You live in luxury while we work our fingers to the bone to keep Wolfsegg going! In the years since I left Wolfsegg my sisters have taken to addressing me in a disagreeably patronizing tone that I simply cannot endure. Do you have to fly when it costs only a third of the price by rail? my mother asked last time, and this piece of nonsense was immediately seconded by my sisters. Just as they used to gang up with my mother against me in their shrill, squeaky voices, they now do the same in their grating middle-aged voices, which set my teeth on edge whenever I have to listen to them. My mother would make some vicious remark, and my sisters would mindlessly echo it. I would never have dared to show Gambetti that dreadful place, and in all these years I have taken care not to invite him. What I have so far told him about Wolfsegg is, I think, perversely anodyne compared with the reality. It would have been quite wrong to allow Gambetti a glimpse of this snake pit. My sisters were not liked in the village. If I kept my ears open I heard only the most unpleasant remarks about them. My mother was not popular either. My father, however, was respected, and people were secretly sorry for him, having to live with such a wife and such daughters. As for my brother, Johannes, they had to work with him on the farm, in the forest, and in the mines. Whether they liked this I do not know. He was not wholly unapproachable, and he was not really as arrogant as he was said to be. True, he did not have an agreeable manner, and most of the time he gave the impression of arrogance, but this was a misleading impression, due to shyness rather than conceit. Unlike my mother and my sisters, but like my father and me, he was always on good terms with the local people and knew how to win them over. But it is fair to say that my sisters were unpopular with everyone. And they never tried to make themselves popular. The fact that even in later life they were always seen together was not just comic but offputting, not just grotesque but actually repellent, and so was their continued habit of dressing alike. Even now they are still their mother’s squeaky-voiced marionettes through and through. If they ever agreed to darn my socks, the stitching was so wide that the socks were unwearable, and the color of the darning wool seldom matched. They thought nothing of darning green socks with red wool and were profoundly hurt when, instead of thanking them, I threw their frightful handiwork in their faces. I found it particularly silly that they always went around in the atrocious local costume. Every year they had dirndls made for them by Mother’s dressmaker. I found these distasteful, and whenever I returned from Rome and they ran to meet me, dressed in their dirndls, I had to take a firm hold on myself lest I said something offensive. When they were little they wore pigtails, but later they put their hair up in buns. The blond buns have meanwhile grayed. I recall that even as small children they never let me sit in the garden and read a book. They would not leave me in peace but incessantly taunted me by calling me a failed genius, an expression borrowed from their mother’s vocabulary. I found it highly offensive, and they would shout it at me until I threw down my book, jumped up, and slunk off to my room. I wish I could think of something pleasant to say about my sisters, but nothing occurs to me. Given time, of course, I could tell a few stories that would show them in a better light, but so few, compared with the dreadful things that went on between us, that they would not be worth recounting. I must say that I am not afraid to record the truth about this pair, who throughout my life have done nothing but torment me and have begrudged me every breath I drew. I would be guilty of gross dishonesty if I forbore to mention the torments and indignities they inflicted on me. They deserve no such forbearance, and neither do I. Once or twice a year I cheer myself up by buying one of those Roman straw hats that are sold in Trastevere for next to nothing and, being lighter than other hats, afford the best protection against the Roman heat, which is at times unbearable. I once turned up at Wolfsegg, which I still thought of as home, wearing one of these cheap straw hats and was taken to task by my mother. Did I have to buy myself such an expensive straw hat, she asked, when there was such a catastrophic economic crisis and the upkeep of Wolfsegg had become almost impossible? This is just one instance of the awfulness of my family, to whom, when I come to think of it, the words shame, sensitivity, and consideration meant virtually nothing. And who never felt the slightest need to improve themselves, having stopped in their tracks decades ago and been content to stay put ever since. I have always been eager to improve myself, to take up and assimilate whatever I could, but they have not made the least effort in this direction. Just as most graduates, like many doctors of my acquaintance, believe that after completing their studies they have done all that is required of them and need no longer try to extend their knowledge, broaden their understanding, or develop their character, having already reached what they consider the high point of their existence, so my family, once they had left high school, made no further effort but stayed where they were for the rest of their lives. It is appalling that anyone should think it unnecessary to broaden his mind and regard any extension of his knowledge, in whatever sphere, as superfluous and any development of his character as a waste of time. My family very soon gave up extending their knowledge and developing their characters. Having left high school at age nineteen, they grossly overrated themselves and were so satisfied with what they had achieved that they stopped working on themselves. Whereas Uncle Georg spent his whole life endeavoring to extend his knowledge, develop his character, and realize his full potential, they had no time for any such endeavor when once they had reached the minimal acceptable level of attainment. At about age nineteen they stopped assimilating anything new, ceased to exert themselves, and shunned any effort at self-improvement. Yet it goes without saying that we should continue to extend our knowledge and strengthen our character as long as we live, and that anyone who fails to do so, who stops working on himself and exploiting his potential to the full, has simply stopped living. They all stopped living at age nineteen, and since then, I am bound to say, they have merely vegetated and become a burden to themselves. Every hundred years the family has produced an extraordinary character like Uncle Georg and then pursued this extraordinary character with hatred and animosity all his life. Looking at these pictures of my family, I am inclined to think that they could have made something of themselves — and perhaps even achieved something great — yet they made nothing of themselves, because they settled for indolence and were content with the daily round, which demanded nothing more of them than the traditional stolidity they were born with. They staked nothing, risked nothing, and chose to take it easy, as they say, when they were still young. They never exploited the potential that they undoubtedly had, that everyone has. And if one of them did exploit this potential, as Uncle Georg did — I do not wish to dwell on my own case — he was punished with incomprehension and disfavor. My sisters stopped in their tracks as soon as they had graduated from high school. They left it with their heads held high, clutching their graduation diplomas, which they regarded as lifelong guarantees of something extraordinary, when all they guaranteed was extraordinary mediocrity. They stopped in their tracks, and now, at about forty, they are still where they were at nineteen. Everything about them is little short of ludicrous, and at their age, of course, not pitiable but pathetic. Father too came to a stop early in life. Having qualified at the forestry school in Wiener Neustadt, he thought he had reached the culmination of his existence and began to ease up. After coming to a halt at twenty-two, he became increasingly rigid, and atrophy set in. And my brother, Johannes, ceased to develop after graduating from the forestry school at Gmunden. Like ninety percent of humanity he believed that, with good final grades on his certificate from the last school he had attended, his life had reached its apogee. This is what most people think. It is enough to drive one up the wall. They collapse in upon themselves, one might say. And anyone who fails to exert himself is bound to be a disagreeable person whom we can view only with distaste. At first he depresses us, then distresses us, and finally infuriates us. No action we take against him is of any avail. Human beings, it seems, exert themselves only for as long as they can look forward to idiotic diplomas that they can boast about in public. Having gained enough of these idiotic diplomas they take it easy. For the most part their sole aim in life is to obtain diplomas and titles, and when they think they have collected enough of them, they lie back and relax, featherbedded by their diplomas and titles, and appear to have no further ambition in life, no interest in an independent existence or indeed anything but these diplomas and titles, under which mankind has for centuries been in danger of suffocating. They do not strive for independence and self-sufficiency or for the natural development of their personalities; they are utterly obsessed by these diplomas and titles and would gladly give their lives for them if they were conferred unconditionally. This is the depressing truth. They set so little store by life itself that they see only these diplomas and titles, which they proceed to hang on their walls. These diplomas and titles hang on the walls of butchers and philosophers, of scullions, attorneys, and judges, all of whom spend their lives staring at them with greedy eyes, eyes made greedy by their constant staring. When they speak of themselves, they do not say, I am this or that person; they say, I am this or that title, this or that diploma. They associate not with this or that person, but with this or that diploma, this or that title. Taking mankind as a whole, then, we may say that most associations take place not between human beings, but between diplomas or titles. To put it baldly, human beings count for nothing: only titles and diplomas count. One does not meet Mr. Huber at the coffeehouse: one meets the doctorate of that name. One has lunch not with Mr. Maier but with the engineering diploma of that name. Human beings, it seems, have not really arrived until they have ceased to be mere human beings and become holders of engineering diplomas; when they are no longer merely Mrs. Müller but the counselor’s wife. And in their offices they engage not Miss So-and-So but her first-class diploma. This addiction to titles and diplomas is of course endemic throughout Europe, but there is no doubt that in Germany, and to an even greater extent in Austria, it has developed a monstrous, grotesque, and quite staggering virulence. Читать дальше