Immortality Is Impossible [1]
A trait shared by all the
members of my great family—a family whose roots may be doggedly traced into the
darkness of history, this gene pool stocked with all the categories of human
possibility and literally (nomen est omen) projected back uninterruptedly
from every point of the compass on to the large, hundred square kilometer-sized
tract of land south of the Wallersee, a family whose authorial scion I feel myself
to be—is contempt. Those of them who
have property contemn those who have no need of property, the sedentary contemn
the restless, the rich the poor, the poor the rich, the religious the godless, the
country people the city people and the city people the country people and so
on. But as characterological subtypes certain
of the country people contemn even certain of the other country people, and
certain of the city people certain of the other city people; the farmers
contemn the butchers, the butchers the farmers, the brewers the tanners, the tanners
the brewers, the innkeepers the truck-drivers, the truck-drivers the innkeepers,
the pig-farmers the pig-farmers, the parish priests the parish priests, the schoolteachers
the philosophers, the philosophers the schoolteachers, the schoolteachers the schoolteachers,
the philosophers the philosophers…each of them contemns each of the others. In contempt (and most of all in
self-contempt) they have cultivated their unmistakable style, their
unmistakable regulations. Their
intellect is as of yet (this is how clever they are!) dreaded only by
themselves. What they lack is the
stupidity that makes life bearable.
Until they either (as half of them do) voluntarily throw it away, kill
it off, or, in virtue of their aptitude for taking disciplined delight in a
wretched existence, rush headlong with passionate intelligence into a natural
death, they lead what is when all is said and done a more or less glorious but
unbearable life. In conformity with the
principle,
Death makes everything
unbearable.
the only principle nobody
can gainsay, they have annihilated themselves, continue to annihilate
themselves.
My family always strikes
me as a kind of infinitely capacious cupboard containing all even barely
conceivable possibilities of development, each of which in its own way seems almost
impossibly absurd by comparison with all the others. Very early on this cupboard’s
inexhaustibility, which stretches into every compass-point of human
purposelessness, became for me a state of consciousness hoisting me out of the
horizontal vacuity of the common run and into complete freedom. I always had the option of making myself into
anything, whence I eventually became what I am for the time being. Even today I find it infallibly fascinating vis-à-vis
my tribe, and secondarily, the system of nature, to reflect on the astonishing
fact that I am as many characters as can be imagined, characters that I must
bring to heel by means of ever-more refined varieties of continence (and
incontinence). I could have followed
the path of the butcher or the path of the sawmill worker or the path of the
parish priest or the path of the common criminal, could have emerged at the
best (or last possible) moment out of indecisiveness, out of the fatness of
childhood and youth into a normal profession or into a layman’s excuse for one
(e.g., real estate speculator), but I became none of these things,
unfortunately, rather I am everything all at once, and even the speculation
that I am more or less everyone and everything is theoretical. Thus I devote my time to trying to be
everyone and everything and devote my thoughts, thoughts that are ever-more
complicated because they are first and foremost productive of tidiness in every
cranny of my inner self, to my experience of being a pathetic wretch. From
time to time the network of kinship that has engendered me acknowledges—without
in truth (as its tenacity proves) being intrinsically scared to death by
this acknowledgment—that it is a corps of Alpine-foothill walk-on artists, a
corps that has become routinized and anaesthetized over the course of the centuries,
a corps of more or less healthy or sickly physical or mental competencies
occupying a center of theatrical activity that has completely ceased to exist. But it is precisely this no longer-extant
center of refractoriness, of stealth, of brutality and of the poetry of
possession and dissipation (on a stage that is always the same and yet always
changing) that is the cause of the illness that finds no solace in this cause, the
illness in which vigilant perfidy and chill-ridden melancholy (in me, as in the
others) shamelessly, endlessly alternate.
I walk to and fro, lately
in my thoughts and not in reality, into an intellectual mélange of naïve
despair and calculable curiosity, whence I emerged thirty-five years ago into
the landscape of my tribe (and of its sub-tribes) and I talk myself into
believing the whole time I was there I was aware of where the center of my
cataclysm was supposed to be, as I seek what I do not find, what I cannot find (The
“Nevermore!” of ridiculousness swells to maddening proportions!), my incognito,
and I deform myself into my lost youth, my lost childhood for purely academic
purposes—and I discover myself.
The fact that (and of the fact that it is a fact there can be no doubt)
I am a victim of these objects that I subsequently recognize as my own progeny
is quite clear to me. Thou art the
cause, O geographical compartment, thou perverse substructure of existence! I
cry and am instantaneously left alone with the echo of my own voice. Nature is serious and deadly. The personal catastrophe of every individual
may be reconstructed from the mystification of his later years, of his
conditions in later life, which are medical conditions, thence passing across
the fraudulent vertiginousness of self-accusation, through which is attained a
degree of destruction that cannot but elicit not so much our compassion as our
revulsion, thence effortlessly into the landscape of childhood and, bereft of
especially intimate knowledge of the by-then depleted material, as a form thereof
that is spectacular only when seen from without ourselves and merely tentative. And so I practice etiology vis-à-vis my own
person (in rivers and streams, hills and valleys), in doing which I brush
against fatality, i.e., conjectures on the theme of the loss of meaning and
purpose in general, but in particular on momentary flashes of enlightenment,
under whose auspices I understand what I am (and at the same time what I am
not), and thus equally momentarily fashion my mother- and fatherland into a precise
certainty for myself: I step into houses and bedrooms, into sitting-rooms and
into dungeons filled with the battle-wounded, I ruminate on pig roasts, in
sacristies. I search for the origin of
my debacle. I investigate, intervene. But the homeland naturally manifests itself
to him who wishes to convey it as an arrogance, an ignorance, that has grown
nauseating. Irritated by a substance
that I do not comprehend, I swap seasons, people, and people’s methods, along
with their theatrical backdrops, with stratospherically astonishing dexterity. I befuddle myself in handiwork and in bodies
of thought (which are derivative of handiwork) and in tradition and conscience. I ruminate in [my] heritage. I wander about and multiply and divide. I draw from theirs my own conclusions, I
infer from theirs my own potency, impotency, insanity. Is it the nights slumbered away in the
innocence of childhood or the nights saturated with precocious perfidy and
megalomania and horror that preoccupy me?
Is it the natural or the supernatural moments of emotion that enchain
me? Does not my discomposure by this
childhood not escort me aloft into an emotional eminence that has long since
seemed lost (off-limits) to me? Who was
my mother? Who was my father? I ask these questions because I do not know
the answer to any of them. How often
have I asked them! I loved only my
grandparents, my mother’s parents. By
them my childhood had been launched.
Into improbability, to be sure!
There at that spot (under that tree) and at that moment I
discovered more than twenty-five years ago that thinking is the one
great folly. I always loved the hill
lands directly behind which are the mountains. Almost everything must still be explored, for
example: a lake that you can jump into and drown in, a stream that you can jump
into and drown in, a person who could kill you, a forest in which you inevitably
get lost, and so on. I have, probably I
have still not been able to speak [of], discovered a philosopher who discovered
me, who defines me: my grandfather. We
play a game that lasts twelve years, until his death, and in which I (because I
was the grandson) never lost. I am
introduced to natural science, to the human sciences. I learn to understand people. All of a sudden I have a plan: I am going to
live several lives at the same time.
Overnight the world is composed of philosophical elements. There are laws. Natural laws.
All of a sudden there is the illusion, concepts, nothing but
concepts. One fine day the word
“tragedy” is so hollow that I, a six-year-old, suddenly cannot help laughing at
it. It hurts, it doesn’t hurt, in
this game of bankruptcy I learn to tightrope-walk on the human level. I have teachers who affix themselves to mental
torpor. “Who is the teacher?” I
ask penetratingly. I receive no
instruction from a Montaigne, a Pascal, a Schopenhauer, names that I often
hear. I draw (accurately) a picture of
an oil lamp and am publicly (in my elementary school) applauded. I see: suspicion is warranted. But my intelligence is a stumbling block for
me, as I now realize. I am good at
geography and at history and love mathematics, which accounts for my
predilection for music. But when I wish
to have “the symphonic” explained to me, it is execrated. I have a friend who lives on the biggest farm
I have ever seen and resolve to grow up on this farm (Hipping) because it is a
farm in another place.
My grandparents (mother
and father are unknown quantities for me) instruct me, my grandfather in
philosophical subjects, my grandmother in all the rest, when I am not at the
farm. I grow up with horses, with cows
and pigs and with spectral philosophy.
At night I have everything at my command. I have concluded a friendship agreement with
the farmhands (boys and girls), now my relationship with the “universal errors”
(Grandfather), with the minds and superminds, is perfect. I do not read, but I hear how it is. Impartiality, like suspicion, is an
instrument by means of which the cornucopia of “personal nature-capacities”
allows itself to be engrossed in the most purposive way. We, my grandfather, the philosopher, and I,
we are in the forest, we are here and there, we bypass the greatest distances
in the shortest time, we are masters of detachment, of the lack of detachment,
we are, when he is not working, when I am not at the farm, together. I attend the school of silence. The school of irony. The school of independence. I am interrogated and I interrogate. Our togetherness is a perpetual court of
inquiry. My childhood is, like his old
age, tremendously effortful. And yet, we
tell each other, nothing is regrettable.
Death makes everything possible. We live in restlessness. We live in the world of doubt. We enjoy contemning as we enjoy loving. We
observe the world as though it would be nothing without us. We have two lives, two actual worlds
for our excursions, we have two executive powers, probably: what sad
word! We live through two completely
different, completely identical decades, we live through two wars, I live
through my war, my grandfather lives through his war. On my way to school I suddenly hear the
middle-of-the-road woman of the house next door [saying]: “I’ll pack your
grandfather off to Dachau Dachau Salzburg
[1] Editors’ note: First published in Neues
Forum, Vienna
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons. Herausgegeben von Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth. Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles. Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt : Suhrkamp, 2011).
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