Thomas Bernhard - Correction

Undisturbed we spent entire nights together up in the attic, considering and concerning ourselves with books we’d just been reading, studying, without noticing that daylight had broken already, because our discussions had always been full of the greatest intensity, yet also the greatest possible serenity. Our favorite place for these talks, critical reflections, suppositions, andsoforth, was always the attic, though very often, in summer, also the area behind the farm building from which you could see down country all the way to Stocket. Very often, too, we’d walk through the park, quite casually in every way, finding its neglected state more and more of a stimulus to conversation, because the park at Altensam was all the more beautiful for having been left to run wild, overgrown with weeds, and hence all the more conducive to our rambles back and forth. From a certain, no longer exactly identifiable point on, what I most enjoyed was to withdraw into my reading, my scientific, natural science, a kind of reading which my mother most particularly loathed my doing, just as she, the Eferding woman, also secretly hated my sister’s work, her miniature painting, though she didn’t dare hate it openly, for what and how my sister painted could not but please even my mother, and in contrast to my scribbling it wasn’t dangerous, either, but she could not quite suppress her dislike of everything that’s Altensam even in this respect. Actually I asked myself over and over again why I didn’t break off contact with my mother, simply stopped going to see her, but then I’d have had to stop going to see Altensam and after all I was attached to Altensam, just as I kept on feeling attached to my childhood, be it how it may have been, Altensam was my childhood and childhood is in every case an obstacle to making a final break, “final break” underlined. That woman, I keep thinking, so Roithamer, who hated my sister because I loved her and vice versa and who basically also hated our father because he couldn’t hate us, so Roithamer. How those two could keep on living together, I asked myself, my father and mother, I don’t know, I can only suppose that they’ve always lived with extremest difficulty. The question is, however, how these two could have joined together, married each other, when they had absolutely nothing in common, never anything in common, the whole thing goes back only to the unlucky circumstance that my father stayed the night in the Eferding hostelry, which happened to be my mother’s home, so Roithamer. My father simply must have totally lost his head, “lost his head” underlined. There was absolutely nothing to justify such a union at all. We always wonder, when we see two people together, particularly when they’re actually married, how these two people could have arrived at such a decision, such an act, so we tell ourselves that it’s a matter of human nature, that it’s very often a case of two people going together, getting together, only in order to kill themselves in time, sooner or later to kill themselves, after mutually tormenting each other for years or for decades, only to end up killing themselves anyway, people who get together even though they probably clearly perceive their future of shared torment, who join together, get married, in the teeth of all reason, who against all reason commit the natural crime of bringing children into the world who then proceed to be the unhappiest imaginable people, we have evidence of this situation wherever we look, so Roithamer. People who get together and marry even though they can foresee their future together only as a lifelong shared martyrdom, suddenly all these people qua human beings, human beings qua ordinary people, so Roithamer, enter into a union, into a marriage, into their annihilation, step by step down they go into the most horrible situation imaginable, annihilation by marriage, meaning annihilation mental, emotional, and physical, as we can see all around us, the whole world is full of instances confirming this, so Roithamer, why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of that bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be? that this highly intelligent, extraordinary, exceptional man could attract and marry this utterly common and ordinary, even thoroughly vulgar person and could even go on to make children with this person, it’s nature, we say, it’s always nature, every time, that nature which remains incomprehensible to us and unknowable as long as we live, that nature in which everything is rational and yet reason has nothing whatever to do with it, so Roithamer. At first we hear nothing unusual from all these people, if we do hear something about them, and then we hear only revolting things, only revolting things, so Roithamer, “only revolting things” underlined, just as, in our own case, we see nothing unusual in our parents at first, but later we see only revolting things. Nature is that incomprehensible force that brings people together, forcibly pushes them together, by every means, so that these people will destroy themselves, annihilate, kill, ruin, extinguish themselves, so Roithamer. Then they throw themselves down a rock cleft, or off a bridge railing, or they shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle, so Roithamer. We ourselves are the most suicide prone, so Roithamer, “prone” underlined. And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems, a marriage that simply couldn’t have worked out, so Roithamer, that handsome man, so Roithamer, “handsome man” underlined, who threw himself into a cleft in the rock in the Tennen Mountains, over a thousand meters down into a dark cleft in the rock. Because I wanted to see how deep that cleft in the rock was, I once made a detour on my way home from England to Altensam to this rock cleft in the Tennen Mountains, I went climbing up those high mountains in a constant and worsening state of vertiginous nausea, putting the utmost strain on my physical resources as I’m not cut out by nature for climbing high mountains, and I actually made it to that cleft in the rock and I looked down into that cleft because I couldn’t believe that so deep a cleft in the rock could exist, but that cleft is even much deeper; so it was here, into this very cleft in the rock that my cousin threw himself, I thought, standing at its rim and looking down into its depths and for a moment I was tempted to throw myself into that cleft too, but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there. I know how much I hate the high mountain country, but my curiosity to see that deep cleft in the rock, of which I’d only heard up to that point and the depth of which I couldn’t believe, drove me to climb up all the way to that cleft. But it takes a great sense of life, in fact it takes the greatest will to live and to exist, not to throw oneself down such a cleft when one is actually standing at its rim. But I didn’t throw myself down that cleft. He, my cousin, had thrown himself down into it, why into this particular cleft I don’t know, I certainly don’t, so Roithamer, “I certainly don’t” underlined. They’d found his shoes at the rim, his jacket too, six months after they noticed that he was gone, his young wife hadn’t missed him until then, from the fact that his shoes and his jacket were found on the rim of that cleft in the rock they deduced that he had thrown himself down the cleft, but there’s no real proof, these clues, yes, but no proof at all, because nobody can get down into the bottom of that cleft. Many people had supposed he’d gone abroad, but then some mountain climbers found his shoes and his jacket at the rim of the cleft, so he must have, I suppose, taken off his shoes and his jacket before he threw himself down into that rock cleft, he didn’t want to throw himself into that rock cleft in his jacket and shoes, so Roithamer. Another of those lonely men, underlined, acquiring a wife at the unhappiest time of his life, a wife who brought him to the point where he threw himself down that rock cleft. The inclination to suicide as a character trait as in the character of my cousin who finally threw himself into that rock cleft, a specific kind of suicide, first climbing up those high mountains, just to throw himself into the depths of that rock cleft, so Roithamer. Because he spoke of it so often and with such passion and such scientific precision at the same time, they no longer believed that he would actually commit suicide, for anyone who talks about it as much as our cousin did, as incidentally the others did too, his father for instance always talked about suicide and kept bringing it up and every time in a better organized frame of mind, such a man, they think, won’t really commit suicide, on the contrary, such a man keeps clarifying the idea of suicide in his head and as a result he doesn’t commit suicide, having this clarification in his head and being constantly capable of analyzing this clarification, he simply can’t commit suicide anymore, because he has this constant clear understanding of suicide, so Roithamer, to act out in reality something he’d always been talking about and which must basically always be repellent to him, he simply couldn’t do it, every possible argument, every possible reason, every possible negation could lead to anything, usually to a mortal disease, but not to suicide, so Roithamer, because ultimately everything inside such a head is against self-destruction, and ‘ yet it’s remarkable how regularly such a man will talk about suicide and about self-destruction, the subject gave him no peace, it tended to warp his reason, which he then proceeded to restore again, and yet one couldn’t help being struck, so Roithamer, by the way our cousin kept talking almost incessantly about suicide after his marriage to the doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf, but nobody took him seriously, so Roithamer, nobody had the slightest apprehension that he would actually commit suicide, because he was constantly talking about suicide as if he were talking about a subject he entirely understood, though it did remain fascinating to him, just as though he were talking about some work of art, with the most scientific detachment. And anyone who talks so scientifically about suicide, as though it were a work of art, talks about it with a clear precision that humbles the rest of us, why, such a person simply doesn’t commit suicide. Not until he nevertheless did commit suicide, of course, throwing himself down that fissure in the rock, so Roithamer. But to return to my subject, I was speaking of human unions, of living together, of marriage, so Roithamer. People are forever denying the proven fact, so Roithamer, the simple fact of nature’s workings, that the female sex, because it is female, nobody dares to say it in so many words nowadays, that the female sex is anti-intellectual and emotionally predisposed to champion emotion, that it is in fact against intellect in all its possible aspects just as it is emotionally predisposed to emotion in all its possible aspects, so Roithamer. The current fashion is one thing, nature is something else. But then, our times are given over to nonsense and to warping all ideas and all the facts and turning them topsy turvy. I personally know from experience, so Roithamer, that the female human being, “female human being” underlined, that the female sex is incapable of going beyond the first impulse in the direction of the life of the mind. In our case, that of my mother and me, she was only interested in winning me over even if in the process she had to destroy everything I am, my personality, my character, my mind, she had to try it, again and again, in her perverse determination that it must be possible eventually to turn so stubborn a mind as mine, a mind so crazily intent on its own inventions, from its single-track obsession with itself, my self that is, and push it into a crude, Eferding-type domesticity, so Roithamer. She had to cut me down to her own Eferding size, her own existential minimum, and with me she meant to achieve this fully, not only partially as with my father, whom she certainly managed to alienate from himself to at least a high degree, she did alienate my father from himself to a very high, to an ominous degree, as she knew, to her lifelong (Eferdingian) satisfaction. To be fascinated by a man who is different from his observer, viewer, antagonist, yet pitting everything against this man and against the fascination he exerts, to be bent on taking from him everything that makes him fascinating. That woman from Eferding basically hated everything I did or didn’t do and everything my sister did or didn’t do and everything my father did and didn’t do, the victims of her hatred were primarily all those with whom I had intellectual intercourse, beginning with all natural scientists, writers, even poets, philosophers named in my books, in whom she thought she recognized me, and she thought she recognized me in all the books I had in my room, in the most widely differing books belonging to me and used by me all the time. In each one of these books she was bound to recognize me and she hated these books as she hated me, but she didn’t dare to destroy the books, to do away’ with them, she didn’t have the nerve to do that even though her thoughts and everything in her tended in that direction. If I merely think of all the things we came to quarrel about on our socalled walks, with such regularity and occasional obsessiveness, we’d taken our nature walks only to quarrel, always, we walked through the woods, and quarreled, over the meadows, and quarreled, through our gardens, and quarreled, even on the grassy riverbanks, always outwardly exemplars of the greatest serenity at the outset, we quarreled and transformed those grasslands in no time into a noisy, suddenly malignant landscape, where our attacking voices, shouting nothing but insults, could be heard, so Roithamer, all up and down the river. And it always began with trivia, but all these trivia had soon triggered off enormities against our fellow beings, against everything. Even in company the Eferding woman was incapable of controlling herself, of restraining herself, and so our father never took her out socially, after his first efforts along those lines had failed lamentably. Because the good name of all Altensam was always at stake, he had never taken his wife, our mother, the Eferding woman, to any social gathering, though she craved going out socially, but because of my father’s adamant refusal to take her out she soon found it possible to go out only to her own kind of social gathering, the so-called Eferding social gatherings and no longer to the Altensam social gatherings, but her own kind didn’t interest her, what she wanted was to get into Altensam society, which my father, however, denied her; I barred her way, so my father often said, so Roithamer, otherwise she’d have robbed Altensam, which had already lost most of its good name in her time, the Eferding woman’s time that is, she’d have robbed Altensam of all that was left of its good name, so my father, so Roithamer, “all that was left” underlined, but the consequence of this, that my father, after those first failed tries, simply no longer took her along into society but left her sitting at home, was that our mother, the Eferding woman, suddenly hated Altensam more than anything in the world, “more than anything in the world” underlined. My father had fallen prey to the error that he could turn a person like the Eferding woman, an Eferding person that is, into an Altensam person, one kind of person can never be made into another kind of person, so Roithamer, “never” underlined, most especially not an Eferding person into an Altensam person, it was probably because of this error that he took her home and married her, because he understood too late that you can never make an Altensam person out of an Eferding person, never change one species into another. Now and then she tried reading a book, it was all a hypocritical pretense, “hypocritical pretense” underlined, a book of which I had a very high opinion, a book about which I might have said something in her presence showing my great esteem for it, but these efforts of hers were from the first a transparent pretense, of course the Eferding woman’s position in Altensam was always untenable, she should never have come to Altensam in the first place, for if such a person, who isn’t an Altensamer, goes to Altensam, so Roithamer, that person will be destroyed, everything will be done to destroy such a person, to remove the person from Altensam because this is a person who doesn’t belong in Altensam, because this person is different by nature, “different by nature” underlined, the Eferding woman should never have committed the crime of coming to Altensam, our father should never have brought her to Altensam, he should have explained to her, but he brought her up to Altensam out of embarrassment and weakmindedness and exposed her from the first to a situation she simply wasn’t equal to handling, even if she never realized it, she, the Eferding woman, simply never had been equal to Altensam, though most of the time she might have thought she was equal to Altensam, even that she dominated Altensam, most of the time, she was not equal to Altensam, though she actually came to dominate Altensam, so Roithamer, as I know, actually did dominate Altensam, but she was never really equal to it, so Roithamer, our father had to pay dearly for the crime of marrying an Eferding woman, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman had to pay for her crime of coming up to Altensam with lifelong unhappiness, for it was by the fact of coming to Altensam that the Eferding woman became an unhappy person, prior to that, in Eferding, in her father’s house, as the daughter of a butcher and an innkeeper, she’d never been unhappy, or she wasn’t likely, during those years, to be considered an unhappy person, not until she came to Altensam. The photographs I’ve seen that show her as the butcher’s daughter, innkeeper’s daughter from Eferding, don’t show an unhappy person, they show a young, though already old person, but’ not an unhappy person, the pictures of her in Altensam that I’ve seen, and my own experience are of an unhappy and always old person who is constantly ailing.