But I could not think of what.

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In N. I lost
what had been dear to me.
I searched high and low
wondering where I'd left it
and gave up hope of finding it
and the fear of never finding it again.
I puzzled with downcast eyes,
forgot which way I had come
and then the smell of wood and tar, the color
of ashes,
and I forgot a year and a day,
sat on a bench in the park
for as long as I could remember,
could no longer find time,
no longer knew who I was, that man
sitting there so thoughtfully
as if he were thinking of something dear to him.

-Toon Tellegen, "I" from In N.





First it starts with the eyes to spare the man from witnessing his own vanishing. He would not believe it if he saw it. Then the hearing goes. This ensures that he does not hear his own groans, the complaint of the loved one telling him he’s left his foot by the door. Then the memory recedes. The man cannot remember his foot or ever having a foot. The man does not remember seeing it attached, despite the failure of his vision. The man cannot recall hearing the floorboards creak beneath his weight. This makes the man sad, though he can’t remember the cause of his sorrow. And so it goes… and so it goes.

-Oliver de la Paz, "How Domingo Disappears"





"to go without
comes naturally to me now, it costs me
almost nothing anymore.
I have let them go for so long,
and so profoundly,
that if you asked me about it I couldn't say
exactly what they were
and if I really wanted them. Their place
inside my head is empty.
Even the sense of missing them
has left no trace."

-Umberto Flori, from "Face"

(thanks to



5 notes

“You remain alive insofar as those who have known you outlive you. You will die with the last of them. Unless some of them have made you live on in words, in the memory of their children. For how many generations will you live on like this, as a character from a story?

[…]

Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you’ll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor.
Given that I am speaking to you, are you dead?”

    — Edouard Levé, from Suicide tr. Jan Steyn

“Thousands of his notes set end to end, I thought, and published under the title The Loser. Nonsense. I guessed that he’d destroyed all those notes in Traich and Vienna. Don’t leave any traces behind was of course one of his sayings. If a friend dies we nail him to his own sayings, his comments, kill him with his own weapons. On the one hand he lives on in what he said to us (and to others) all his life, on the other we kill him with it. We’re the most ruthless (toward him!) as far as his comments, his writings, are concerned, I thought, if we don’t have any more of his writings, because he prudently destroyed them, we go after his comments in order to destroy him, I thought. We exploit his unpublished papers in order to destroy even more the one who left them to us, to make the dead man even deader, and if he hasn’t left us the appropriate instructions to destroy his papers, we invent them, simply invent declarations against him, etc., I thought.”

    — Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser tr. Jack Dawson

“That’s just it! Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, all my friends always take possession of something I have written and then take me by surprise with a completed contract with the publisher. I do not want to cause them any unpleasantness, and so it all ends in the publication of things which are entirely personal notes or diversions. Personal proofs of my human weakness are printed, and even sold, because my friends, with Max Brod at their head, have conceived the idea of making literature out of them, and because I have not the strength to destroy this evidence of solitude.”

    — Franz Kafka, in Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka tr. Goronwy Rees [“In answer to Janouch’s question of why he allows his stories to be published if, as he put it, “publication of some scribble of mine always upsets me.”]

10 notes "Once he sat for eight hours in the icecold St. Stephen’s Cathedral and stared at the altar, the beadle showed him the door to St. Stephen’s with the words: Sir we’re closing. As he went out he slipped the beadle a hundred-schilling bill, a short-circuit operation, as Wertheimer put it. I wanted to sit in St. Stephen’s till I fell over dead, he said. But I couldn’t manage it, not even by totally concentrating on that wish. It wasn’t possible for me to be totally concentrated, and our desires are realized only when we are totally concentrated. From early childhood he had experienced the wish to die, to commit suicide, as they say, but never was totally concentrated. He would never come to terms with being born into a world that basically repulsed him in every detail from the very beginning. He grew older and thought that his wish to die would suddenly no longer be there, but this wish grew more intense from year to year, without ever becoming totally intense and concentrated. My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide, so he said, I thought. We never forgive our fathers for having sired us, nor our mothers for having brought us into the world, he said, nor our sisters for continuing to be witnesses to out unhappiness. To exist means nothing other than we despair, he said. When I get up I’m revolted by myself and everything I have to do. When I go to bed I have no other wish than to die, never wake up, but then I wake up again and the awful process repeats itself, finally repeats itself for fifty years, he said. To think that for fifty years we don’t wish for anything other than to be dead and are still alive and can’t change it because we are thoroughly inconsistent, so he said. Because we are wretched, vile creatures. No musical ability! he cried out, no life ability! We’re so arrogant that we think we’re studying music whereas we’re not even capable of living, not even capable of existing, for we don’t exist, we get existed, so he once said[.]"
— Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser tr. Jack Dawson
17 notes "We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process, he said. We just simply go away until we have given up, so he said."
— Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser tr. Jack Dawson
2 notes "So I go from one cage to the next, Wertheimer once said, from the Kohlmarkt apartment to Traich and then back again, he said, I thought. From the catastrophic big-city cage into the catastrophic forest cage. Now I hide myself here, now there, now in the Kohlmarkt perversity, now in the country-forest perversity. For life. But this procedure has become such a habit that I can’t imagine doing anything else, he said."
— Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser tr. Jack Dawson
52 notes "The brain is so unfree, and the system, into which the brain is born, is so free, the system so free and my brain so unfree, that system and brain are coming to an end."
— Thomas Bernhard, from “The Lunatics      The Inmates” tr. James Reidel
noted: “The italicized ‘quotations,’ which suggest the writings of Martin Heidegger, are invented.”
69 notes "Our unhappiness is by no means something that we have been talked into, like our happiness, which we daily talk ourselves into in order merely to [summon up] the courage to get up and wash ourselves, to get dressed, to take that first sip, swallow that first bite."
— Thomas Bernhard, from “Montaigne” tr. Douglas Robertson
18 notes "But I already doubted whether this work was truly worth something and was thinking of destroying it upon my return, everything we write down, if we leave it for awhile and start reading it from the beginning, naturally becomes unbearable and we won’t rest until we’ve destroyed it again, I thought. Next week I’ll be in Madrid again and the first thing I’ll do is destroy my Glenn Essay in order to start a new one, I thought, an even more intense, even more authentic one, I thought. For we always think we are authentic and in truth are not, we think we’re intense and in truth are not. But of course this insight has always resulted in none of my works ever being published, I thought, not a single one in the twenty-eight years I’ve been writing, just the work about Glenn has kept me busy for nine years, I thought. How good is it that none of these imperfect, incomplete works has ever appeared, I thought, had I published them, which would have posed no difficulty whatsoever, today I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying."
— Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser
25 notes "If we hear something, says Oehler… we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. Thus throughout our lives we never escape from what is horrible and what is untrue, the lie, says Oehler. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives. For, everything that is thought is superfluous. Nature does not need thought, says Oehler, only human pride incessantly thinks into nature its thinking."
— Thomas Bernhard, from “Walking” trans. Kenneth Northcott (via via)