Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

your writing is what he is supposed to have said. Oh no, Konrad lied, thinking that the lie was about the only means of contact with another human being. Let us attend to whatever needs our attention, Konrad is supposed to have said, and the works inspector said something about grading the road and Konrad, without being asked, as he admitted, said, as you know, I am working on that book I have so often told you about. I am so entirely caught up in it, you know, he said, it’s a mania I’m afraid, I seem to be possessed by it, all there is of me, as you know it is in the nature of a mania that a man will give his entire life to it and destroy himself entirely by his obsession alone and nothing else. It’s a study of the sense of hearing, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector. As you know, Konrad said, so much has been written about the brain, but virtually nothing, at least nothing of any consequence, has been done on the auditory sense. He had been working on it for about twenty years, Konrad is supposed to have told the inspector; I started by exhausting myself, he said, slowly but with gradually increasing intensity, with these experiments, then I summed it all up, did more experiments, summed up again, and again, etc., Konrad said, then I went back to experimenting, completed the experiments, wrote a summation and another summation, etc. I constantly experiment, and a series of experiments is always followed by another series of experiments, Wieser reports Konrad as saying. Then it all fell apart, at the very peak of concentration it all fell to pieces again. But now Konrad said he had the whole thing complete in his head, all the details together and in place, the most incredible material you can imagine, he said, everything to do with the auditory sense. But no sooner have I reached my peak of concentration than it all falls apart again, Konrad said. Now I have it , I think, but at that very moment it has all collapsed. But when one has had it all in one’s head for so long, completely in one’s head for all those years, he said to the works inspector, one is bound to assume that it is only a question of time, that the auspicious moment must come sooner or later when one will suddenly be able to set it all down on paper. This was the moment he had been waiting for, it had come, as he also said several times to Wieser, the moment was here, now, as he said to Fro too, as I know, and Konrad actually said this to the inspector, the moment came every day, indeed there was not a day without such a moment when he believed the time to begin had come, and that he would now finish writing his book, but every time it came, Konrad said to the works inspector, as soon as he sat down at his desk he would be interrupted, whether, as he said, by the baker or the chimney sweep or on one occasion by Wieser or else by Fro, or by the works inspector, or Hoeller, or his wife, or the forestry commissioner, or a noise, or whatever it was. But it was quite impossible not to go down and open the door when there was a knock at the door, he said to the inspector, to let someone knock incessantly on the door without responding was something impossible for him if only because it would drive him crazy in record time. People never cease their knocking, Konrad said, even when they know they are disturbing me, delaying my work, possibly ruining my book, ruining everything, but they will not stop knocking until I get up, move the papers aside, and go down to open the door. Invariably it is the most ridiculous trifle for the sake of which I am interrupted in my work, Konrad is supposed to have said, some enormous absurdity that threatens to ruin my life’s work. To think that he had always dreamed of the lime works as a place where he and his wife would be living in perfect isolation and freedom from interruption by people, that here in the lime works the destructive apparatus of the increasingly disturbed, nervous so-called consumer society, with its chronically irritating and ultimately ruinous effect on everything in the nature of intellectual effort could not touch them, that here they would have escaped all that, but in reality they continued to be irritated by people even here at the lime works, he simply did not have the strength, Konrad said to Wieser, to resist opening the door when someone knocked, he invariably yielded and opened the door, Konrad said, not from considerations of humanity, not from motives of civility about which he couldn’t have cared less, he hated every kind of propriety, he had learned to hate propriety in the course of decades of experiencing life, he hated everything to do with social forms, everything implied by civility toward people, and it was purely, as stated, a pitiable lack of personal energy that made him go down and open the door, made him desert his work, what could be more depressing than to desert a task like mine, so laboriously constructed in decades of hard work, to desert it for the sake of a chimney sweep, a baker, a works inspector, how low a man must have sunk to desert his work for the most absurd, the most trifling reason, because his wife upstairs wants her pillow straightened or needs a drink of water or wants to be read to from her favorite romantic poet, or wants the curtains drawn or opened, a piece of bread cut, her hair ribbon tightened, her garter tied, her sugar bowl filled, her spectacles set on her nose, her back rubbed with alcohol, or else because of Hoeller’s wood-chopping or Fro, or the man from the sawmill, or on your account, Wieser. Actually, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser in a tone of utter weariness, this endless knocking on my door, though quite constant in its actual sound level and intensity, in my head swells to a terrifying, ear-splitting thunderousness and drives me completely crazy. It forced him to get up, drop everything, go down and unlock the door, just to stop the knocking. Having done this, Konrad said, there was no point in being impolite about it, because the damage is done by then, so I am exquisitely polite although of course I ask myself every time I am so exquisitely polite why I am being so exquisitely polite. The whole day is ruined, everything in his head is dissipated beyond recall, there is nothing left but a few polite formulas such as, Do come in, Come in, How are you, Ah yes, or maybe just Yes indeed, or You don’t say, suddenly issuing from his lips. This time you have really ruined my work completely, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, telling him the truth for the first time. First Hoeller started it with his wood-chopping, Konrad said to the inspector, and I went down and ordered Hoeller to stop it instantly, I ordered him to repair the waste baskets and went back to my room and sat down at my desk feeling that my book was saved, because Hoeller did not actually cause an interruption to the extent of completely dissipating my concept, but now you have come knocking at the door and you’ve wrecked the whole thing, to be interrupted twice in a row in so complex a mental effort as my book is fatal. While it was still possible to return to my book after Hoeller’s relatively superficial disturbance, this second interruption makes it impossible for me to go on with what I was doing. I hope you won’t mind, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, my speaking to you so frankly about it, and went on to say that the first interruption by Hoeller had been possible to overcome, with a little skillful effort, but not the second interruption by the inspector. Besides, it makes a difference, Konrad said, whether an interruption is caused by a man like Hoeller or a man like yourself; a simple man like Hoeller or a complicated man like yourself, after all, so complicated a man, Konrad is said to have exclaimed while offering the inspector some schnapps, but the inspector is said to have declined, at first, that is, but he ended by accepting, one always declines at first but one ends by accepting, Konrad said to the inspector, a type that Konrad felt quite familiar with, the type that always declines at first and then ends by accepting anyway. It’s a fact, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, no really informative work on hearing exists, the only honest study of the subject that has any value is some three hundred years old, all the rest is botch work. Which is why I have become wholly absorbed in the idea of writing about it, doing a serious book on the subject, on the sense of hearing, has come to be a totally absorbing task for me, not at the beginning, of course, not totally absorbing before my thirtieth year, nor did it absorb me totally as yet even between my thirtieth and fortieth year, but ever since my fortieth year I have been totally absorbed by the idea of studying the sense of hearing, and writing the definitive book on it, I have been relentlessly, more and more exclusively absorbed by it. It was a fact, he said, that all thinkers tended to develop a subject of their own, until their thirtieth year, that would begin to absorb them completely one day, some time after their fortieth year, but only a very few surrender themselves wholly to their subjects, most of them flirt with their subject after the age of twenty-five and develop it for a time, but after their thirty-fifth or fortieth year they tend to drop it and drift off into society or quite simply into a life of bourgeois comfort. In this way, most regrettably, hundreds of thousands of vital scientific studies are lost to the world, works needed to bring light into the world’s darkness. As regards hearing, that would tend to be written about, quite superficially at that, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, by a medical doctor, the wrong approach entirely, or else by a philosopher, also the wrong approach. Whatever a medical man wrote about it was sure to be worthless stuff, and whatever a philosopher wrote about it was also sure to be worthless. To tackle a subject such as the sense of hearing and write it up, one had to be more than a mere medical man or a mere philosopher. To do this it was absolutely necessary to be a mathematician and a physicist as well, that is to say, one should be a master of all natural science, as well as a prophet and a superlative artist. It was simply not enough to be a medical man, or a philosopher, or a physiognomist, to write the kind of book that was needed on the sense of hearing. To think that such specialists could do justice to the subject was a misconception. What I have in mind is the formulation of a definitive statement on the subject, Konrad is supposed to have said, the final word on it, though of course the moment you achieved such finality it ceased to be final, and so forth. The principle involved was one on which Konrad said he had spoken to the works inspector before, had indeed familiarized him with it sufficiently so that he could now proceed from the premise that any final point is a starting point for a further development toward a new final point and so forth, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, according to Wieser. However, it was all much more complicated than that, because basically much simpler than we assume, which is why nothing could be elucidated with any finality, ultimately. A so-called approach to a subject would get you nowhere. Communication was impossible except by means of the work as a whole. Radical changes were to be expected, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, and said again, significantly: radical changes that would be transformations, and despite the fact that the inspector had listened to this remark with particular interest, Wieser reports that Konrad said to the inspector at this point that people tend to turn a deaf ear to the significant point, they just miss hearing it, even you, my dear inspector, miss hearing the significant point, just as everyone tends to miss hearing the most significant, or at least the highly significant remarks addressed to them, they miss them all the time, though apart from that, Konrad is said to have added, there is really no such thing as a really significant remark, not even a highly significant remark, nothing at all has any real significance and so forth, but intentionally or not, listeners tend to miss a great deal that is said to them, so that in effect they miss everything, and so forth; the unintentional is the intentional, the most unintentional the most intentional, and so forth. Whenever I am not working on my book, Konrad is supposed to have said, then it is quiet, the whole lime works is completely encapsulated in the quiet characteristic of the place. No need to describe this quiet to the works inspector, who was sufficiently acquainted with it. It was totally quiet when he, Konrad, was not working, when he was walking up and down, this way and that, turning things over in his mind, because when I am turning things over in my mind, he is supposed to have said, I am not actually working, i.e., of course I am working when I am thinking things over, but basically I do not really begin to do my work proper until after the phase of considerations and reconsiderations is ended, which is when I begin to do the actual work, but by then it’s all likely to be all over with the quiet here, what with Hoeller starting to chop wood all of a sudden, or else the baker arrives, or the chimney sweep, or Stoerschneider turns up, or the man from the sawmill, or you arrive, Wieser arrives, Fro arrives, someone comes knocking at the door, or else my wife needs something or other. All in the midst of this enormously demanding task, this medico-musico-metaphysical-mathematical work of mine, which is at all times so totally disruptible! As soon as I dare to sit down and start to think that the moment has come when I might be able to write the whole thing down in one sitting, someone invariably knocks at the front door, or my wife rings for a change of stockings. Even though she happens to be the most considerate person in the world, Konrad is supposed to have said. At Laska’s, too, everyone is always saying that Konrad’s wife is the most considerate person there is, and at Lanner’s it’s the same story. The moment someone says, as someone did at the Stiegler, yesterday, for instance, that Konrad is the most inconsiderate person, then someone else instantly counters with the observation that Mrs. Konrad is the most considerate person in the world. Twenty years ago, Konrad said, he had in all secrecy set his mind on writing this book of his, behind his wife’s back. And this foolishness, undertaken behind his wife’s back, held him in its grip ever since. At first he managed to keep his preoccupation with his work a secret from his wife, fearing that if she should suddenly discover that he was busying himself with a scientific work the results might be catastrophic, since she naturally knew that, as with anything else he did, he would never relinquish the undertaking until he had completed it. For years he had been able to keep it a secret, not only from his wife, of course, but from everyone else as well. She had known nothing about it in Augsburg, as yet, nor had anyone else, nor as yet in Aschaffenburg, nor in Bolzano, Merano, Munich; then suddenly, in Paris, he had revealed to her in the most casual manner that he was at work on a book. I am working on something about the sense of hearing, he is supposed to have said to his wife, about the auditory sense, no one has done anything about it yet. At that instant she realized that he, who had been everything in the world to her always, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, was lost to her — it was then she knew for certain that it was all over. It’s a fact, Konrad said to Wieser, the moment I decided to devote myself to my book on hearing, I was lost to my wife, and that was actually four or five or even six years before the moment when she suddenly knew that she had lost him. All sorts of people have already written about all kinds of things, all kinds of excellent disquisitions, dissertations, whatever, Konrad said to the works inspector, but there is no first-rate disquisition, or dissertation, or even one good essay on the sense of hearing. This fact struck me most forcibly, but at the same time I perceived in it a chance, if not the only chance, for me. Especially because the ear is indisputably more basic than the brain, if you take the ear as your point of departure, and as long as you do not take the brain as your point of departure in this context. The works inspector did not understand this point, Wieser is supposed to have said. There were so many inadequate, amateurish doctoral theses about the hearing, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, and of course the amateurishness of a doctoral dissertation was the most embarrassing kind of amateurishness. The dilettantism of the specialists was the most embarrassing kind, the most distressing thing about the specialists was their boundless dilettantism, every time. I can tell you, Konrad is supposed to have said, that I sweated through no less than two hundred dissertations on the hearing, and not one of them contained an inkling of what the hearing was all about. None of the authors had any ability to do their own thinking, at all, Konrad said; all they are is professorial ruminants. The salient characteristic of our era is, after all, the fact that the thinkers no longer do any thinking of their own. What we have nowadays is whole armies, numbering in the millions, of apprentice workmen in science and history. But anyone who dares to say so runs the risk of being declared insane. These days, the clairaudiant as well as the clairvoyant is instantly branded as a madman. The keen of ear as well as the keen-eyed are not wanted these days; when a man is keen of ear or keen of eye they simply wipe him out, lock him up, isolate him, destroy him by locking him up and isolating him. Society exercises great vigilance in guarding itself against its geniuses by being vigilantly on guard against its so-called madmen. Society is in favor of the dim, vegetative existence and nothing else. People want to be left in peace, and consequently they hate nothing more deeply than the ear and the brain. The social ideal is the totally deaf and dumb mass, and so society naturally inclines to shoot on sight any ears or brains that crop up; here is a brain, they say, shoot to kill; here is an ear, shoot it down. From the beginning mankind has been waging a war, Konrad said to Wieser, an increasingly costly, monstrous campaign against the ear and the brain; everything else is a lie. History proves that the ear and the brain are always being hunted down, shot to death. Wherever you look, ears and brains are being murdered, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Wherever there is an ear or a brain, there is hatred; where there is an ear, there is a conspiracy against the ear, where there is a brain, there is a conspiracy against the brain. The rest is lies. The dying birds of Europe are being protected, Konrad is supposed to have said, but not the dying brains, not the dying ears. But all this is ridiculous, whatever one can say is ridiculous, Konrad is supposed to have said, the moment you say something you find you have made an ass of yourself, no matter what it is, we make ourselves ridiculous, whatever we read is ridiculous, whatever we hear, ridiculous, whatever we believe, ridiculous. Open your mouth and a ridiculous statement is sure to come out, some embarrassing absurdity or other, or else an absurd embarrassment, whichever. Then Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, aren’t you cold? Konrad was inclined to believe that his guest might be feeling cold, even though Konrad himself was not cold, he had his fur vest on underneath his jacket, one had to wear fur underneath one’s outer garments here in the lime works, this quite apart from the fact that Konrad was by now hardened to the cold. The conditions prevailing in the lime works had hardened him. Everything in the lime works was cold, the cold was everything here. In fact, all of the last twenty years, he said, you might even say all my life long, I have been preoccupied with the sense of hearing. Only for as long as my book remains unwritten in my head, is it a scientific work; it will not be a work of art until after I have written it down. It is hearing that makes everything else possible. But for the uninitiated everything I say is no better than blasphemy. If I could, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, Wieser says, I would make you acquainted, even intimately acquainted, with the most important parts of my book, but it is not possible. The moment he began to explain matters he could see at once that it was absurd to try to explain. Every explanation led inescapably to a totally false outcome, the more things were explained the sicker they got, because the explanations were false in every case, and the outcome of every explanation was invariably the wrong outcome. This book of his was divided into nine parts or sections. The number 9, in fact, played a most important part in this work, everything in it was divisible by 9, everything could be extrapolated from 9; as the inspector might not be aware, the 9 was more important than the 7, and especially with regard to the auditory sense the 9 was of the greatest importance. The first section is an introduction to all the others, the ninth section is an elucidation of all the preceding ones, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, the second section naturally deals with the brain and the ear, the ear and the brain and so forth, the sixth section is entitled “The Sub-auditory Sense,” a lengthy treatise primarily on the so-called dysarthria of the ear, the seventh section dealt with hearing and seeing. The hearing is the most philosophical of all the senses, Konrad said to the inspector, as reported by Wieser, but he had all nine sections complete in his head, for decades by now, it was a monstrous strain on a man to keep so complicated an intellectual structure in his head in every detail, carrying it around with him in the constant and continually increasing anxiety that it would fall apart and dissipate itself from one moment to the next, dissolve into nothing, and all because he was constantly missing the right moment for capturing it all on paper. I spent two whole years preparing for the first section of my book, and in the following eighteen years I was able to develop and complete my preparations for the rest, a feat that was enough in itself to make a man suspect, as he had unfortunately found out for himself, enough to bring him under suspicion and into disrepute as a total madman, frankly and obviously a clinical case. Of all those nine parts the fifth was the hardest, in fact he still had no title for it. Nothing could be easier, of course, than to go really insane, Konrad is supposed to have said, but my task is too important to let myself be deterred by the fear of insanity. Nothing would be easier than to go crazy from one minute to the next and thereby be relieved of so monstrous a burden. To be suddenly totally psychotic, without any preceding craziness, a sudden full-fledged psychosis. But as long as he had not gotten it all down on paper it was wasted, and he said so every day to his wife, that all his work was wasted as long as it remained in his head without being set down on paper, and she would say, then why didn’t he get it down on paper, she’d been saying this for years in the same tone of voice, Konrad is supposed to have said, because she still had not caught on to the fact that it was possible to carry a book like this around in one’s head for years and even for decades without ever being able to get it written down. Women were all alike in this respect, they were simply incapable of understanding peculiarities of this sort, they will not accept them and they can go on refusing to accept them for decades on end. A book a man has in his head but not on paper has no real existence, after all, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser. I must write it down, simply write it down, he kept thinking, that’s all there is to it, to get it written down, sit down and write it, this was the thought that had begun to dominate his every waking moment, not the thought of the book as such, but the thought of writing it, of getting it written down from one moment to the next; but the more obsessed he was by this idea, the more impossible it became for him to write his book down. The problem was not so much that he had something in his head, everybody had the most monstrous things in his head, where they went on without a break to the very end of the man’s life, the problem was to get all this monstrousness out of one’s head and on to paper. It was possible to have anything in your head, and in fact everybody did have everything in his head, but on paper almost nobody had anything, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, according to Wieser. While the heads of all mankind were crammed with every kind of monstrousness, what they had on paper amounted to only the most lamentable, ridiculous, pitiful stuff. If his book did not turn out to be the most sensitive distillate of the subject conceivable, Konrad is supposed to have said, a sensitive distillate by a hypersensitive brain overstrained to that end for decades … It was in the lime works, in the total seclusion of the lime works, that he had always believed he would be able to get it all written down, all at once. A head that was totally secluded, isolated from the outside world, would be able to write this book more easily than one involved with the outside world, with society. But think what an extra effort of concentration it takes, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, to work up such a book for the first time in such a head as his and hold it there, when this head was not completely sequestered from the world, from society, let us say, because it is linked with a person who is not completely sequestered from society. Head and person, as you know, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, are inescapably linked together. Body and head are hopelessly interlinked, or, as he often thought, most gruesomely interwedged. Well, who could even begin to describe nature and its machinations, anyway. In the lime works, at any rate, Konrad is supposed to have said, lay the best imaginable chance for his work. But nothing could be accomplished without ruthlessness, you can ask my wife, Konrad is supposed to have said, I know that everyone is saying that she, my wife, is the most considerate person, while I, her husband, am the most ruthless, I am fully aware of it, nor does it upset me, because if it did all these opinions would long since have upset me to death, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, nobody’s opinion upsets me any longer, on the contrary, all these opinions, and all of them are against me as a matter of course, take me progressively a step further. To reach one’s goal one simply has to accept an enormity, or even a crime against all of so-called mankind or against an individual, as part of the deal. In my case it happens to be a book for the sake of which I am prepared to do anything and everything, and I mean prepared to sacrifice everything, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Nothing can be accomplished without a measure of ruthlessness, Konrad said, because once you let yourself in for such a piece of work as this, you are letting yourself in for doing it with extreme ruthlessness, usually against the person with whom you are living, sharing your life, and who becomes your chief victim; looking at it this way, my wife is Victim Number One, but I cannot allow myself to be in the least concerned about that. This victim is defenseless, we know that. This horrifying thought is what alone enables a man to make the horrifying mental effort he believes he has to make. Of course he knows that he will be regarded as a madman from beginning to end, precisely because he is the exact opposite of a madman, and he can expect to be incessantly jeered at. He goes through the mill of being incessantly derided. No one goes with him, unless he forces someone to go with him, a woman, for instance, whom he simply forces to come with him, because no one will, otherwise. But even if someone does come with him, Konrad is supposed to have said, he still walks alone, he walks alone into an intensifying solitude. He walks into an intensifying darkness, alone, because the thinking man always moves alone into an intensifying darkness. But back to my work! he said to himself, and: No excuses! Yet even in the lime works, nearly empty as it is, there is continual distraction. No friends, actually, Konrad is supposed to have said, actually no real friends at all, only curiosity seekers, trouble sniffers, enemies only, in fact, and one’s bitterest enemy was oneself, of course. Nevertheless progress was being made, despite all the constant impediments of one kind and another, including being negatively impeded, by omission; omission, in fact, is more decisive than its opposite. To do something by not doing it, he is supposed to have said. For example, not to do something that could be done and about which they say (on all sides!) that it must be done, was a kind of progress. It’s maddening, he is supposed to have said, but I do not permit myself to go insane. Then: my book is, at first, simply a lone decision, which later turned into being the loneliest of tasks. Virtually nothing coming from the outside. Fragility itself. A man like himself in constant fear that this ultimate in fragility would break up his head, and vice versa. Fear that everything would break in his hands. A man like himself frequently looked around for a way to defend himself, but couldn’t find anything, because defenselessness was all there was. Incessantly he was faced with the absolute threatening to destroy him. Whatever point a man like himself reached, arrived at, all he ever reached or arrived at was irritation, further irritation. But all of it is ultimately so comical, it’s all more comical than anything, which is why, he is supposed to have said, it is all quite bearable after all, because it is comical. All we have in this world is the very essence of comedy, and do what we will, we can’t escape from this comedy, for thousands of years men have tried to turn this comedy into tragedy, but their effort had to fail, in the nature of things. This whole business with the lime works here, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, as Wieser says, is of course nothing but comedy, too. But to endure this comedy one has to empty one’s brain from time to time, sort of like emptying one’s bladder, that’s all it is, my dear inspector, micturation of the brain, to relieve the brain as one relieves the bladder, very simply, my dear inspector. Or else, think of the brain as a spiritual lung. He poured another glassful for the works inspector, who by this time was completely drunk, saying: probably it’s the interruptions that do my book the most good. To Fro: That everything he, Konrad, said, was nonsense; to me: nonsense, all nonsense; to Wieser: it’s all nonsense, naturally, Wieser, what else. Fro says that Konrad would open a window and hear the branches of the pine trees, when he opened the window overlooking the water he heard the water. He could hear the pine branches and the water even when there wasn’t a breeze stirring, even though the eye perceived no movement at all in the branches, on the water, Konrad heard the trees and the water. He could hear the incessant motion of the air. He could hear the surface of the water moving even when no such motion was perceptible to the eye, or: he could hear the movement in the deeps, the sounds of movements in the depths. He heard movement in the deepest places, he said so over and over, not only to Fro but to Wieser also, under my window the lake is at its deepest, you know, just under my window, it is as though I had always known that the deepest point is just under my window. Naturally only an ear trained to hear movement in the deepest places actually does hear what goes on in the deepest places, no other ear can hear anything coming up from those depths, none of my human guinea pigs ever hear anything there, I can take whoever I want to the window, he is supposed to have said to Fro, and ask him, do you hear anything coming up from the water? and getЧитать дальше