Thomas Bernhard - Correction

Almost immediately my door flew open and there stood Hoeller, at the door, in his nightshirt. What happened, he said, and I pointed to the fallen clothes tree. He helped me to pick up the clothes tree. He expressed surprise that I hadn’t gone to bed yet but was still up and dressed. Once he had helped me to set up the clothes tree again, he left the garret without saying a word. So he hadn’t been in his workshop, in his preservatory, at all, I thought. I took off my clothes, turned out the light, and went to bed. It was half-past two and I thought, just before falling asleep, how utterly exhausted I felt. In the morning I’ll sneak up on Roithamer’s legacy, I’ll just sort of sneak up on it first, then I’ll sift it and sort it.

He, Roithamer, had never had to get away from Altensam, he had, in fact, struggled all his life only to draw closer to Altensam, to make himself understood where it had always been impossible, a crazy dream, where it always would be impossible for him to be understood, Roithamer had written, nor had he ever achieved the slightest rapprochement with Altensam, for he had always been a foreign element in Altensam. He simply wasn’t the man to adapt himself, against his grain, against the dictates of his character, the word opportune was totally alien, totally inapplicable to anything he could ever think or do, but as for me and my outlook and my ideas and everything, I’d always been an opportunist, Roithamer wrote. Everything in Altensam had always been impossibly hard for him, so he couldn’t stand Altensam from the beginning, he couldn’t give in to Altensam and its rules, he took the first opportunity to get clear of Altensam. Just as Altensam was alien to him, so he must have seemed a foreign element to his family, they had in the end worn each other out and used each other up in chronic mutual recriminations, primordial recriminations, Roithamer wrote, that is, he, Roithamer, on the one side and Roithamer’s family on the other side, were wearing each other out all the time in Altensam in the most inhuman way, a way least worthy of human beings, in this process of sheer mutual exhaustion. His natural bent for studying, i.e., for studying everything, however, had enabled him quite early in life, by studying Altensam, to see through Altensam and thereby to see through himself and to achieve insight and to take action, and thanks to these constant ongoing lifelong studies he’d always had to do as he ended up doing; all his life, though he’d rather call it his existence, or better still, his deathward existence, everything he’d ever done had been based on nothing but this habit of studying which he’d never been able to shake off, where other people get ahead easily and often quite rapidly, he’d never gotten ahead easily or rapidly, obsessed as he was with the habit of always studying, all of him, his organism, his mind, and everything he did, determined by this habit of studying. Everything had always come to him the hard way, the hardest possible. Yet it was evident almost from the beginning that such constant, above normal efforts paid off, Roithamer’s words, because of them everything I did went deeper, no step was taken without a thorough grounding in what preceded it, Roithamer wrote, nothing without completing all prior studies or at least trying to complete them, without trying to have first a clear understanding of everything that went before, although I knew, of course, that no clear understanding of anything is possible, only an approach to an understanding, an approximate though not an actual understanding, nevertheless an approximation. And so, while I loved Altensam more than anything in the world, because Altensam has always been closer to me than anything in the world, I also hated it more than anything in the world, because I’ve always been a foreign element there from the outset, and all my life, my whole existence, my deathward existence, had always been determined by that circumstance, causing a monstrous waste of all my energies. The question has always been only, how can I go on at all, not in what respect and in what condition , so Roithamer. But no one in my vicinity had even the merest inkling of what was going on inside the young man I was, they were never capable of conceiving the possibility of so devastating a state of mind that could determine and devastate and ruin an entire life like this, because they simply did not want to think about it, everything in Altensam always opposed thinking as such, it must be said categorically once and for all, to the discredit of Altensam, that Altensam was opposed to any kind of thought.

Altensam was always a place disposed to take action, there one took action without stopping to think, there action always excluded thought, and it still is like that, except that nowadays there’s not even any action left in Altensam, the Altensamers today are incapable of taking action, they are condemned to impotence, for lo these many years, they’ve been condemned to inaction, because their time is up, it’s all up with them. But what was Altensam like only thirty or thirty-five years ago? It’s a question I must face again and again, it’s the most important question of all, I must ask myself, What was Altensam, where I come from, thirty or thirty-five years ago, when I was beginning to think for myself? A composite of masonry and men where action was taken without prior thought, for centuries on end. At the outset, in earliest childhood, he, Roithamer, had not yet revealed himself as the person he manifestly came to be later on, not for a long time, not until he was well into grade school, had he himself understood who he really was, that basically, even though he was from Altensam or because he was from Altensam, he had always been against Altensam, as a child he had not yet been recognizably against Altensam though he’d turned against Altensam long since, but outwardly his childhood, at least his earliest childhood, had seemed to be a normal Altensam childhood, not yet an anti-Altensam childhood, although even then, as soon as I began to think at all, as I’ve said, everything inside me turned against Altensam, against everything connected with Altensam, connected with Altensam to this day, anyway there have always been two Altensams, so Roithamer, the one that I loved because it was not against me and the other one, the second one, which I’ve always hated because it was absolutely against me, from the start and with the utmost ruthlessness. The Altensam that I always loved, however, is not the Altensam that has nothing to do with the people in Altensam, Roithamer wrote, it is the one in which my nature always found sanctuary, while the other one, the one I hated, was always the one in which I never found sanctuary, the one that always rubbed me the wrong way. So when I say that I hate Altensam I always mean the Altensam in which I never found sanctuary, the one that always rubbed me the wrong way, rejected me, which is why I had to reject it in turn, and not the other one in which my nature always found refuge and where I was at least left in peace. Of course I tend to be preoccupied with the Altensam that refused me and rejected me and rubbed me the wrong way, not with the other one, as I am always preoccupied with everything that gives me no peace, repels me, rubs me the wrong way. There’s always the kind that leaves us in peace and lets us be ourselves and lets us develop in so many, sometimes quite wonderful ways, and then there’s the other kind that rubs us the wrong way and gives us no peace, no peace all our lives long, and so we are preoccupied with it all our lives long, it makes us fidgety, we become more fidgety day by day, there is no escaping it for the rest of our lives, and so we become angry with everything for the rest of our lives. All the stuff that’s constantly on my mind comes from this, this turmoil, and not from the other, the one that leaves me in peace, Roithamer wrote. From my earliest childhood, in Altensam, it was always the one that gave me no peace that I kept thinking about, not the other one, naturally. We speak, when we speak with all our being, only as we are driven by that unrest, not the other, Roithamer wrote. I have always spoken only out of that unrest, I was never driven to speak by the other one, which after all leaves me in peace, and so enables me to speak of my unrest.