Thomas Bernhard - Gargoyles

I had wanted to go into the castle to see the inside, but the prince had no intention of terminating his “walk” for any reason whatsoever. Usually he and my father walk on the outer or the inner walls for several hours, and my father is always the prince’s auditor. On this day my father wanted to be home early in the evening; he had given appointments to patients who, I thought, had probably been waiting for a very long time in his consulting room. But the prince held us. It was impossible for my father to leave. I myself, however, took the greatest interest in what the prince was saying. Moreover, it was not cold that evening. On the contrary, we could easily have taken off our jackets. But in the prince’s presence I did not want to take off my jacket.

“Freedom encloses my mind like a suit of armor,” the prince said, “the complete freedom that I have and that is stifling me. I am so constructed as to be entirely against reality,” he said. “Most of the time I find my consolation, laugh if you like, Doctor, in inconsolability. If I am alone I feel like being with people; if I am with people I feel like being alone. I go to the greatest pains to understand others as though they were myself and I am utterly unable to understand any mind but my own. Fundamentally I am impoverished. It is quite possible that I am dying from the madnesses of others, from the illnesses of others, not from my own madnesses, not from my own illnesses, or at least not only from my own, not only from those of others. You see, Doctor, nature takes up all my thoughts and I am suffocating from having all my thoughts taken up by nature. Reality always presents itself to me as a ghastly procession of every possible concept. Theatrical effects, I always think; trying to escape from thinking, I am always thinking. For of course we are all condemned to thinking that nothing at all is actually real. Let us try it philosophically, the early centuries say; let us try it practically, the later centuries say; let us try it practically philosophically, nature says. And of late,” the prince said, “people believe that progress is a matter of mathematical cumulation . No matter how we look at things, we can feel that the tendency is directed entirely toward death. Our teachers are dead and by always dying very early have escaped from responsibility. Our teachers have left us alone. There are no future teachers and the ones of the past are dead. You can see that everything about many people (and everything in them) is pure theory, while others are the products of neither theory nor practice. Then what? But no human being ever has the possibility of being practical . We live by the assumption that problems are insoluble at night, soluble by day. That makes philosophizing possible. If we start to think about how we walk, it is soon no longer possible to walk,” he said. “If we start to think about how we philosophize, it is soon no longer possible for us to philosophize. And if we start to think about how we exist, we disintegrate ourselves in the briefest time. We can also draw a boundary through a person any way we please,” the prince said. “We can then enter this person from one side of the boundary or the other and not cross the boundary and then go out of him again. Cultures,” the prince said, “make exorbitant demands upon us. The oldest cultures the greatest demands. But what destroys us is our own culture. Just as what destroys us is our own religions, though we assert that it is nature doing it. What is needed,” the prince said, “is for us to destroy the image of the world, no matter what it is like. We must always destroy all images. Reason,” he said, “is dictatorial. There is no such thing as republican reason. The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents. We all have no parents; we are never lonely but always alone. For a long time now we have been forming a world foreign legion of the mind, all of us together. And knowing that we cannot exist without being condemned, what we wish for ourselves is a constant, strict tribunal which we always understand and therefore tolerate. We always approach ourselves as if we were character traits, until we grow tired. Women naturally are not so adroit in their command of this technique. Would it be possible,” the prince said, “that the air here is metaphysical air?”

My father did not answer.

“Let us continue,” the prince said. “What we inhale is nothing but figures and numbers; we only assume it is nature. To us every object is one that has the form of the world, that leads back to the world’s history, no matter what the object. Even the concepts that enable us to understand it have the form of the world for us, both the inner and the outer form of the world. We have not yet overcome the world in our thinking. But we make more progress in our thinking when it leaves the world completely behind. At any moment we must be prepared to jettison all concepts. Childhood,” he said, “is not a foundation; therefore it is deadly. Just as I often used to leave Hochgobernitz and leave everything connected with it in charge of a steward, so I now frequently leave my brain and place it in charge of a steward. Every situation,” he said, “is always at the given instant a political fatality. At any moment my consciousness is always completely categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive. It may well be that sharks actually fly through the air, over the woods, since nothing is fantastic, you know.… In all letters which say not a word about it,” the prince said, “I always read the writer’s bitterness at his fate. I see him communicating on the surface though he remains deep under the surface of his despair; I see his misled self misleading others, and so on.… Slowly the stars, all the heavenly bodies [we could not see any], are becoming the symbols we have always regarded them as being. In that way we give ourselves the illusion of a creator. The intellect, Doctor, is nonlogical. Rescue lies in the place we do not go to because we cannot turn back. The greater the difficulties the more I enjoy living — I have often run this sentence through my brain and polished it for whole nights. Because we are determining the object by imagination, we think we are having experiences. But in reality the phenomena which we make our premises are impossible. We have an imaginary consciousness with which we must make do. It is poetry, because rationally we are aloof from reality. Once we become aware of the complex of problems relating to our existence, we think we are philosophical. We are constantly contaminated by whatever we touch; therefore we are always contaminated by everything. Our life, which is not nature, is one great contamination. In bad weather (visibility is bad) we are warned against climbing high peaks, let alone the highest. Moreover,” the prince said, “we are fatigued when speculation has fatigued us. Of course everyone is constantly protecting himself by saying: I don’t belong there! And he has every right to do so. I too am continually saying that I don’t belong there, don’t belong anywhere. But all together we are really accidental. We tire quickly whenever we don’t tell lies. The foundations are in the earth, we feel, but we do not add the thought: in the lower strata , and we are afraid. Are we always asking too much of others?” the prince asked. “No,” he answered himself, “I think not. I confront a person and I think: What are you thinking? Can I, I ask myself, go along with you inside your brain for a little? The answer is: No! We cannot go along with someone inside the brain. We force ourselves not to perceive our own abyss. But all our lives we are looking (without perceiving) down into our physical as well as psychic chasm. Our illnesses systematically destroy our lives, just as an increasingly defective orthography destroys itself.” The prince said: “Everybody is continually discussing things with himself and saying: I do not exist. Every concept contains within itself an infinite number of concepts. I have always had the need, from my earliest childhood on, to enter into my fantasies, and I always have gone far into my fantasies, farther than those I have taken along with me into my fantasies, such as my sisters, for example, or my daughters, or my son. Just as they do not dare to enter infinitely deep into reality, they also do no dare enter infinitely deep into fantasies, into the realm of fantasy. We talk about sicknesses a great deal,” the prince said, “about death and man’s fixation on sickness and death, because we cannot really grasp sickness and death and fixation on sickness and death. Why should we sacrifice ourselves to the external spectacle, to an external act on the surface of life? Why should we so senselessly humble ourselves if we are made for the inner spectacle and all that? The mystic element in us leads directly into the allegories of the intellect: We are desperate. Yesterday,” the prince said, “I was asked where Hochgobernitz is actually situated. Is it situated east or west? I was asked. I promptly answered: East! And I said: Naturally to the east. But on the way home — I was in the gorge at the time — I thought that I should have said: West. Naturally to the west. The listener is always told what he knows but does not understand,” Prince Saurau said. “But we understand a great deal that we do not know. Of course, Doctor, we must do something to counteract our inborn weaknesses. Thus in regard to my son, I wonder what a man should do when nature has given him a talent that is undoubtedly unusual, although political. Especially when this man reveres his father, as he alleges, and idealizes his mother (not because she is dead!). The parents think they can expect their son to live a proper though not necessarily extraordinary life. I also can expect that, I think. Here you have your education: a young man studying in London and becoming an ecstatic visionary who only feels comfortable abroad.… A man wearing himself out, living in his political categories and thereby growing more and more remote from me, already a dubious character who for long periods does not answer my letters at all, and then sends only the tersest replies. I accept this son! All these letters my son writes me,” the prince said, “are in reality not letters at all. They are mere signs my son has posted all around him, like: No entry! These letters, which give no answers whatsoever to all my questions, come from the stinking atmosphere of his room in London. My son, a scholar gone to seed, investigating something that was investigated long ago — the masses, for example. Nobody is interested in them any more. The masses no longer interest anybody because the masses have already come to power. And this son, I think, sits in England and never lets it cross his mind that he has a great guilt to atone for.… My son’s existence seems to me a dull drifting in all the fields of knowledge. In that existence, decency gets short shrift. In my relationship with my son I have never had the pleasure of a regular correspondence, never. Actually he writes only for money, that is all. He does not care a damn that we are going to pieces here. That our lives are chained to Hochgobernitz. What he writes me are extracts from a piece of human hackwork which prove to me that he is uselessly squandering both his gifts and my money. I see more and more clearly that he has followed in the footprints of the mass madness of mass politics. And that madness is not so ridiculous that it may not yet, in the future, destroy everything. We have all,” the prince said, “suffered frightfully because of my son. But of course he can do as he pleases. The sciences,” the prince said, “can be regarded as a kind of landscape in which all the seasons occur at once. Our republic,” he said, “constitutes a legal system based on all possible vulgarities. Every administration ends in incompetence. We sleep and dream of a world which has been engendered by several other minds along with our own, and we are astonished at it because we cannot know that we are not always ourselves. Now and then we find a person, more often in the city than in the country, in whose face we can detect absolutely nothing that causes us pain. And we cannot say that the person is stupid. I often pace back and forth in the library thinking that the others are thinking that I am pacing thoughtfully back and forth in the library, whereas I am pacing back and forth in the library without a thought . Just as children often pretend to be sleeping or dead in order to frighten their parents, I pretend to be thoughtful. During a conversation,” the prince said, “we are often reassured by the supposition that our interlocutor’s world is just one fatal element higher or deeper than our own. We are quite capable of visually penetrating a thing simultaneously along its infinite breadth and along its infinite length. In letters we always report to others what seems important to us. We often mention details for the sole purpose of describing the path by which we ourselves are moving toward our end; we trust another person who is traversing the same path. In the spectacle we are mounting we do not permit certain unpleasant characters to appear; should they force their way into our spectacle, we chase them out. If we were fully conscious of the mechanical aspects of our bodies, we could no longer breathe. Of late,” he said, “I more and more see through people, seeing each as a mechanism, and I always detect the places where mechanical failure will (must) first occur. And I see quite clearly that I am the one who keeps all these mechanisms going. At first we go into cities to visit many people,” he said. “Some that we know, others we don’t know. We think we have to visit them — that is why we have gone into the cities in the first place. We try by means of human contacts to spread ourselves out over whole cities and ultimately over the whole world. But later,” he said, “we go into cities in order not to visit anyone any longer, in order to hide better, to concentrate better on ourselves; we go into cities in order to disappear among the masses. I often dream extravagantly of those cities in which I can disappear, and so die away. Thought,” the prince said, “is always represented as a building inhabitable for shorter or longer periods. It is generally pictured as an intellectual edifice in which everybody, the philosophers and their followers, can go in and out with more or less excitement. But thought cannot be represented. To me my thought is: Velocities that I cannot see.” The prince said: “My sisters, like myself, were begotten unintentionally. My father often tried to convince me of the opposite; so did my mother. At such times I would suddenly feel frightened of them both.