/lit/ - Literature

Thomas Burnheart

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.

This is all moot's fault

At first I was afraid of life, and then I hated it, I thought, standing by the open grave. And if we imagine that Rome is the solution, that’s also an error. We cling to someone like Gambetti, whom I may already have destroyed, or to somebody like Maria, but even they can’t save us, I thought, standing by the open grave. I recalled how one day, in front of the Hotel Hassler, I had said to Gambetti, You know, Gambetti, if we’re honest we have to admit that the universal process of stultification is now so far advanced that it can’t be reversed. This process of stultification was inaugurated well over a hundred years ago by the invention of photography, and since then the mental condition of the human race has been in permanent decline. This worldwide stultification was set in motion by photographic only advice I can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium , Gambetti—that’s my genuine conviction, I had said, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. All day it had looked like rain, but the rain had held off. I had made up my mind not to shake hands with any of the people who filed past me. Nor did I. Some held out their hands, but I did not shake them. I had deliberately imposed this embarrassment on myself. I recalled that only a few days before this unbearably tasteless funeral I had said to Gambetti, Just to think of Austria, a country that’s disfigured, degenerate, and done for, is enough to make you vomit, to say nothing of the utterly degenerate state, whose vulgarity and baseness are unparalleled not only in Europe but in the rest of the world—a state that has for decades been run by unprincipled, degenerate, brainless governments, and a people that’s been mutilated beyond recognition by these unprincipled, degenerate, brainless governments. First by the vulgar, vicious National Socialist regime, then by the no less vulgar, vicious, and criminal pseudosocialism that succeeded it, I had told Gambetti on the Pincio, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. The destruction and annihilation of our country has been encompassed by National Socialism and pseudosocialism , aided and abetted by Austrian Catholicism , which has always cast its blight upon Austria. Today Austria is a country governed by unscrupulous profiteers belonging to parties devoid of all conscience. In the last few centuries, Gambetti, Austria has been cheated of everything and had all its sense knocked out of it by Catholicism, National Socialism, and pseudosocialism. In the Austria of today, Gambetti, vulgarity is the watchword, baseness the motive, and mendacity the key. Every morning when we wake up we ought to be utterly ashamed of today’s Austria. Time and again I tell myself that we love Austria but hate the Austrian state, Gambetti.

I don’t associate with a living soul. I’ve given up all contact with my neighbours. Unless I have to shop for groceries I no longer leave the house. The result is that I hardly speak to anyone any longer, and I get the feeling I can’t speak at all, that I’ve forgotten how to.

>>16943287

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.

"Oslo is a boring city and the people there are completely uninteresting and unintellectual, like all Norwegians. Norwegian food is lousy and their taste in art is abysmal. Norway is a country in which every form of thinking is stifled in no time flat."

"I loved New York right from the start. It’s the most beautiful city in the world and it also has the best air, nowhere in the world have I breathed better air. New York is the only city in the world where a thinking person can breathe freely the minute he sets foot in it."

Based

Thomas Bernhard thread. Rank his oeuvre

Extinction>Gathering Evidence>Woodcutters>Correction>The Lime Works>Old Masters>Wittgenstein's Nephew>Concrete>The Loser>Walking>Gargoyles>Playing Watten>Yes>Goethe Dies>Amras>The Voice Imitator>My Prizes

"I am a socialist
the only true
the only real socialist
everybody else is in error"
Based

Gulping down the body of Christ every day – in other words about three hundred times a year – was really no different from rendering daily homage to Adolf Hitler. While the two figures are totally different, I had the impression the ceremonial was the same in intent and effect.

In this country there is absolutely no work for the brain, it is unemployed.

>>15809522
But of course Heidegger cannot be compared to Wagner, who really was a genius, a man to whom the concept of genius really applies more than to anyone else, whereas Heidegger has always only been a small philosophical rear-rank man. Heidegger, that much is clear, was the most pampered German philosopher of the century, and simultaneously the most insignificant. The people who made pilgrimages to Heidegger were mainly those who confused philosophy as something fried and roasted and cooked, which is entirely in line with German taste. Heidegger used to hold court at Todtnauberg and at all times would allow himself to be admired on his philosophical Black Forest plinth like a sacred cow. Even a famous and much feared North German publisher of periodicals kneeled before him devotionally and open-mouthed, as though, in a manner of speaking, he was expecting the host of the spirit from Heidegger sitting there under the setting sun on his bench before his house. All these people made their pilgrimages to Todtnauberg to see Heidegger and made themselves look ridiculous, Reger said. They made their pilgrimages, as it were, into the philosophical Black Forest, to the sacred Mount Heidegger and knelt down before their idol. That their idol was a total spiritual wash-out - that they could not know with their dull-wittedness. They did not even suspect it, Reger said. Nevertheless the Heidegger episode is revealing as an example of the German cult of philosophers. They invariably cling to the false ones, Reger said, to those who suit them best, to the stupid and the suspect ones.

*dab*

I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me.

Anja Zeidler: When did you last feel happy?

Thomas Bernhard: One feels happiness each day, you're happy to be alive and not dead already. That's a great capital.
From the person who died, I know that you love life to the very last moment. Basically, everyone loves to live. Life cannot be so terrible that you don't keep on with it after all. The motivation is curiosity. You want to know: what will come next? It is more interesting to know what will come tomorrow then what is here today. When the body is ill the brain develops astonishingly well.

I prefer to know everything. And I always try to rob people and get everything that is in them out of them. As long as you can do so without the others recognizing it. When people discover that you want to rob them they shut their doors. Like the doors are shut when someone suspect comes near. But if nothing else is possible you can also break in. Everyone has some cellar window open. That also can be quite appealing.

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself.

Books about having a sickness/disease and death?

You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

I know nothing about nature. I hate nature because it is killing me.

All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.

itt writers that truly understood the human condition

Is Bernhard any good?

Bernhardbros rise up