/lit/ - Literature

"I do not care for walks either, and have been a reluctant walker all my life. I have always disliked walking, but I am prepared to go for walks with friends, and this makes them think I am a keen walker, for there is an amazing theatricality about the way I walk. I am certainly not a keen walker, nor am I a nature lover or a nature expert. But when I am with friends I walk in such a way as to convince them I am a keen walker, a nature lover, and a nature expert. I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me. I live in the country only because the doctors have told me that I must live in the country if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature. It is only with reluctance that I live in the country, which on the whole I find hostile."

I haven’t had the apartment painted for years because I can no longer bear to have workmen in, I told myself, looking at the cracks in the ceiling. I had to move into a Renaissance palazzo so that I could finally be alone, cut off from everybody, I told myself, for the truth is that I’ve cut myself off from everybody, not just from my family at Wolfsegg. The company I keep is reduced to a very small circle—Gambetti, Zacchi, Maria—and soon even this reduced circle will no longer exist, I told myself, and started to walk in the opposite direction. Come to think of it, I’m suddenly entirely alone, without a single human being, I told myself. I had my hands folded behind my back, a habit inherited from my paternal grandfather. If Uncle Georg knew how isolated I’ve suddenly become! I long to be alone, but when I am alone I’m desperately unhappy. I can’t endure being alone, yet I constantly talk about it. I may preach solitude, but I hate it profoundly, because nothing makes for greater unhappiness, as I know and am now starting to feel. I preach solitude to Gambetti, for instance, yet I am well aware that solitude is the worst of all punishments. In my role as his personal philosopher, I say to him, Gambetti, the highest condition is solitude, yet I know very well that solitude is the most fearful punishment of all. Only a madman propagates solitude, and total solitude ultimately means total madness, I thought as I turned to walk in the opposite direction. The apartment is so big that I have no cause to feel oppressed or restricted in my thinking. It affords my thoughts a freedom that they otherwise have only in large city squares. I took this into consideration when I rented the apartment, in a fit of megalomania, for indeed it was pure megalomania that made me take this big apartment in the Piazza Minerva, at immense cost, a cost that I could never have revealed to my family. I mentioned a certain sum to them because they wanted to know how much I paid for the apartment, but it was a fictitious sum, less than half the true cost. Had they known the true cost they would have said I was crazy. It’s one of the most reasonable apartments in Rome, I told them, and never said another word about its cost. But from time to time I feel that even this apartment is a prison, I told myself, when I sometimes pace up and down like a prisoner in his cell. I often call it my thinking cell, but only to myself, not to others, lest they should suspect insanity, for they would undoubtedly think that only a madman could describe an apartment as a thinking cell.

My brother in misery

He hated anything to do with family and the/word 'origins' nauseated him. He found it impossible to enter into a family, he never did so all the time I knew him. He despised like nothing on earth any so-called sense of belonging together. He dreaded the mass in every respect.

When a patient is confined to bed for months on end, he's consumed by a longing to get out; he can't wait for the moment he'll be able to leave the sickroom, and when that time comes he's not content to walk just a few paces into the corridor: he has to go out and kill himself.

He hated anything to do with family and the word 'origins' nauseated him. He found it impossible to enter into a family, he never did so all the time I knew him. He despised like nothing on earth any so-called sense of belonging together. He dreaded the mass in every respect.

Who are the edgiest writers?

>>17304975
Thomas Bernhard
>Anti-Christian
>Anti-Nationalist
>Pro-semitic

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 for 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... 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... 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... why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of the bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be?

The truth is that I am happy only when I am sitting in the car, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. Basically I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only between places.

Thomas Bernhard, my brother in misery. He is the only one that understands.

"The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me - I have no others. And I'd always found it hard to have any relationship with another person - I wouldn't think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one - I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but - what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought - needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick - impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word."

It is absolutely right to say, let’s enter this thought, just as if we were to say, let’s enter this haunted house.

I thought I'd choke on the error of believing literature was my hope. I wanted nothing more to do with literature. It hadn't brought me happiness, but trampled me down into that stinking pit from which there is no escape. I cursed literature and my prostituting myself with her.

The person of intellect has to make it their downright prerequisite and principle not to follow advice and, in fact, to do the exact opposite of what they have been advised to do.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

I cannot say
I have ever loved a single one
of my relatives
I have never been able to summon up
even the faintest trace of sympathy for any of my relatives
that is the truth
When we take away their hypocrisy
nothing is left of these people
but their loathsomeness

I hate nature
I have always hated nature
I am more familiar with the artificial
which does not mean
that I am a supporter of art
I hate art too

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 for 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... 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... 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... why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of the bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be?

For a long time, there had no longer been any books capable of saving him, but only sentences, individual sentences, from Novalis, for instance, from Montaigne, from Spinoza, or from Pascal, which he had to clutch at from time to time in order not to go under.

I'm made up of terrible people

“The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me - I have no others. And I'd always found it hard to have any relationship with another person - I wouldn't think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one - I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but - what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought - needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick - impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word.”

artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; painters, writers, musicians are the compulsive masturbators of the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral swellings, its pustular secretions…

I have always felt that being awarded a prize was not an honour but the greatest indignity imaginable. For a prize is always awarded by incompetents who want to piss on the recipient. And they have a perfect right to do so, because he is base and despicable enough to receive it.