A Translation of "Ich beschimpfe überhaupt niemanden" (Thomas Bernhard Silently Interviewed by Kurt Hofmann)

I’m Not Going to Badmouth Anybody At All

Nobody is objective enough to be able to size another person up in any way.  Whenever somebody does that, he’s doing it out of interested motives: either he praises the other person out of a need for self-preservation or he disparages him.  It’s always a matter of diplomacy.  If you were to ask Pollini, “Signore Pollini, what do you think of Mr. Benedetti-Michelangeli?” he’d either give you a box on the ears or simply find it shocking.  You can’t answer a question like that.

Only when you’re really old, like Rubenstein, for example, can you say, “Everything but what I do is a pile of shit.”  And I’m also totally convinced that he is absolutely the best.  And so he can say that without breaking a sweat.  And once he’s said it three times, it’s completely indisputable that he still leaves all the young people trailing in the dust and is better than them.  But then he dies and somebody else is just as good as he was.

Of course as a young person you want to be published everywhere.  So you write and write and force open publishers’ doors and want to get printed in every newspaper.  When I started I was of course obsessed with things like that.  I entered every prize competition; I certainly tried to win the Trakl prize five or six times, but it always ended up going to [Gerhard] Amanshauser or whoever.  Of course I also went to the Youth Culture Week, and ten of Amanshauser’s poems were read there along with a ten-line one of mine; it was always nothing but degradation and rivalry, and then you want to get into print, and then, good Lord, I can still remember, I was so proud when a poem made it into the Münchner Merkur; at the time I thought, “This is really a pinnacle.  I really think it is.”  I sat down in the Mirabellgarten, I opened up the paper; I was really fascinated first of all by the poem, because I thought, “This is the best poem, not that’s ever been written—that would be an exaggeration—but of my time”; that’s what I thought.  “And in fact everybody who’s walking by me now knows that I’m the one who wrote this great poem.  This is happiness for example.”

I did that, sure, I certainly did it for ten years intensively, greedily in fact; I was game for anything back then, at the beginning, in my age of poetry, and then when I hit forty, it was over.  I traveled pretty much everywhere, and did radio, and Lord knows what all else I did.  And of course it was also my livelihood.

Suddenly it all horrified me, because I said to myself, “I can’t take this anymore.”  If you take a good look at them, you’ll see that of course they’re always the same thing.  I read aloud something that I’m already horrified by myself and that already hasn’t got anything whatsoever to do with me anymore, because of course it’s all behind me now.  And because even by then I didn’t need the money very badly any longer, and what’s more I live—of course I don’t spend very much money; of course I don’t lead the kind of life people like that normally live, I don’t do that, of course I hardly really need anything—so there wasn’t any reason for it anymore then and it was over.  And as for the prestige, that turns sour really early on; it went off right away.  It went off really quickly, and that whole phony business with those prizes and the brouhaha, it’s all truly ghastly.

It was even that way with the Büchner Prize; it really was nothing but atrocious, and even though it was twenty years ago, it’s still atrocious.  People don’t understand this, and so despite it they invite you through your publishers, or directly, to go here or there, to do this or that, and then I say no, and for years I’ve been saying no to my publishing firm; they don’t understand it, because they’re naturally all the same in that they crave all of that and are happy to get it and go running after every merit badge.  Horrible.

It’s really not only shameless and vicious but also idiotic on the part of these people to go flocking to all that when they know beforehand what it amounts to.  Namely something totally atrocious.  In any case, you obviously can’t form an opinion of any piece of literature just by listening to somebody read a passage from it.  It’s a total waste of time, because that’s not something you can take in acoustically at all.  You can take it in, but you can’t form an opinion of it.  And just think of the creatures who sit through it.  The whole thing is pure idiocy.  But of course such things have always existed, and they rise to the surface and then vanish again.  And what are a hundred thousand schillings? That’s really an insult as well.  I’d say that—why not?—that they should give out a million schillings; that’s how much a young writer should get from them.  Then he’d either be finished or he’d actually get something out of it.  That’s small change for a national government.  Our government, which throws billions out the window, could easily shell out some money for such things twice a year.  Of course that’s nothing, a hundred thousand schillings, right?—after all, [Marcel Reich-]Ranicki makes that much in a month.  He gets more, actually, namely a hundred and ten thousand schillings.  That’s just ridiculous.  And what sort of people are they, anyway?  He goes to the festival with his wife and she wears a long evening gown and he talks about literature there and then listens to Cosi fan tutte.  He waxes enthusiastic over a glass of wine at the Moser Wine Bar and thinks it’s simply grand.  Of course it’s all idiotic.

For fifteen years I’ve been throwing away everything that has a veneer of officialdom or anything like that.  I read through it because I find it interesting, and then I throw it away and naturally I don’t reply to any of that stuff either.  It really astonishes me that even though I’ve been throwing everything away for ten years, stuff still keeps coming.  It’s thinning out overall, but I still keep getting naïve direct invitations.  They’re clueless: “we’d like such and such, and we’ll pay you this much, and please get in touch with us”…I think to myself, “How wretched can these things get?”

I don’t pay any mind whatsoever to any of it anymore.  I chuck it all into the trash can.  I’m constantly getting invitations to go to conferences in Santander, in Salamanca or Madrid or wherever; it’s all just atrocious.  It’s a meeting of mediocrities whenever these kinds of people meet.  They stuff their faces for eight days straight; they have a chauffeur-driven car at their disposal; they’ve booked a suite at the Palace Hotel.  So they can afford to wait a good long time for a reply from me.

They really don’t believe—it’s really quite bizarre—they can’t imagine that anybody wouldn’t be dying to go someplace for free for eight days.  The very idea of somebody picking me up at the airport—somebody I find repulsive to begin with, and who I have to walk around with afterwards (of course I’ve plotted this all out in advance), and whose wife is patiently waiting for us and has cooked a dinner for me in advance—it’s simply ghastly, and you really can’t pay a person enough to put up with it.  Because once you’re there you’re trapped, and you’re being led around everywhere, and you’re knackered for weeks afterwards.

Take for instance the P.E.N. Club.  Of course I have nothing to do with it; of course I’ve never been to anything having to do with it without leaving straight-away.  So the P.E.N. Club, what’s the deal with it?  I was supposed to have dinner there with [Hilde] Spiel; she was staying with some acquaintances of mine, and I was staying with them too; then they told me that Spiel was on her deathbed.  On Sunday I was at the Kobenzl; I was getting up to leave after dinner, and she walked in as fresh as a daisy with her children and grandchildren.  So I think it’s a pretty strange world.  In America for a couple of weeks, then she was in Bled, where there was another stupid P.E.N. convention.  Of course it’s a moronic organization in any case.  They’re just a bunch of busybodies who spend a week in some nice place twice a year; it’s completely pointless.  And subsidized by the State; they get their five-star beggar’s cot.  It’s all atrocious.

But I’m not interested in other people anyway.  I really couldn’t care less about any of them.  I’m basically just not a clubbable person.  I just can’t participate in such things and such schmoozing-sessions.

You won’t ever find me at any of these gatherings, like the P.E.N. Club conventions, where there are hundreds of attendees.  Because of course it’s all nonsense and because it makes no difference whether these people drink and eat themselves under the table in Moscow or in New York.  Or in the Philippines or in Nicaragua.  They’re all horrible people who can’t deal with being on their own.     

So they get themselves invited somewhere!  At the moment it’s fashionable.  Because then the first thing on their mind is always: “And Umberto Eco has already said yes.”  Who else have they got anyway?  Norman Mailer.  It’s insufferable, because you can’t just travel to someplace; what the hell are you going to do there?  It’s so ghastly, gruesome, that this is their world.

I haven’t accepted a single prize in fifteen years.   But most of them are quite shrewd, because they ask you in advance.  But then again it’s stupid, because then they try to find somebody else.  Of course honor is a stupid concept anyhow.  It only means anything if you’ve got no money or you’re young, or if you’re old and you’ve got no money.  When you’ve got an income you can live on, as I have, you really don’t need to accept any prizes.  Of course honor isn’t worth a damn; of course it’s just nonsense.  I don’t know of anybody who doles it out who isn’t horrible.  When I picture Canetti standing at the top of that flight of steps in his tie and tails, and the king sitting there with his licked-clean dinner plate in front of him—nobody paid any attention to the poor weenie’s speech.

I’ve already been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize for literature but by the Germans, not by anybody here.  Again it’s especially interesting, of course, that the president of the German P.E.N. Club has nominated me twice, because they apparently haven’t been able to find anybody else out there, and then afterwards, well, he’s had no luck.  But of course I’d be happy to win it so that I could then not accept it, but you can’t turn down something you haven’t been offered.

They’re just a bunch of pathetic clowns.  What the hell can you say about them?  Absolutely nothing, because you know them of course.  Of course that stuff plays a role everywhere.  I can’t show up there and find fault with stuff, and I push my way through, and then [Gert] Voss is sitting there in tie and tails—reportedly, I’ve only heard about it, not seen it—at the opera ball, in one of the boxes; stuff like that is just off-limits.  You really can’t have anything to do with it.

Or picture to yourself a prize award ceremony in Bolzano.  So the author accepts the prize and is just standing there on stage, then I made a speech, and then, this is the most shameless thing that’s ever been done anywhere, they hosted a banquet for five hundred people, so I didn’t show up—this is all documented, you’ll get an even better picture of it there—and I thought to myself, “How ghastly.”  Everybody there was bowing and collecting their measly checks; horrible.

I’m not going to badmouth anybody at all.  But of course almost all writers are pure opportunists.  They either hang to the right or to the left; they march this way or that and so on, and that’s how they make a living.  But it’s simply unappetizing.  Why shouldn’t one say that?  One of them works with his illness and with death and wins his prizes, and the next one runs around campaigning for peace and is basically a vulgar, stupid lummox.  What’s the big deal?

Whenever you open a newspaper nowadays, you almost always read something about Thomas Mann somewhere in it.  He’s been dead for thirty long years, and it keeps coming back, non-stop; it’s really insupportable.  What’s more he was a petit-bourgeois writer, an abominable, unintellectual writer who wrote exclusively for petit-bourgeois types.  Of course only petit-bourgeois types are interested in a milieu like the one he describes.  Of course it’s unintellectual and moronic.  Some fiddling professor who travels to some place, or a family in Lübeck, great!  But it’s really nothing more than Wilhelm Raabe.  You’ll always find something about Thomas Mann, be it in Le Monde or somewhere else.  To think of the things the guy actually wrote about politics!  He was completely uptight and a typical German petit-bourgeois type.  With a golddigger of a wife.  That for me is the usual mix you get with German writers.  Whether it’s Mann or Zuckmayer, they always have wives in the background.  They’ve always made sure that they’re sitting next to the president of the republic at every stupid sculpture exhibition or bridge opening.  What business do writers have being there?  They’re people who always make deals with the government and the powerful and sit on either their right or on their left.  The typical German-speaking writer.  When long hair is fashionable, they have long hair, when short hair is, theirs is short.  When the government in power is left-wing, they run to the left, when it’s right-wing, they run to the right.  It’s always the same.  Of course not one of them has ever had any character.  Except for the ones who’ve died young, for the most part.  If you’ve died at the age of 18 or 24, it’s obviously not all that difficult to maintain a good character.  Of course it’s only later on that it gets difficult.  That’s when you get weak.  Until you’re 25, when nobody needs anything but an old pair of trousers and when you run around barefoot and are content with a sip of wine and water, it’s not so difficult to have a good character.  But later on!  Then not one of them has got one.  By forty they’ve already become completely paralyzed and have been absorbed into political parties.  And the coffee that they drink with breakfast is paid for by the government, and so is the bed they sleep in, and even the vacation they take.  The government of whatever country they’re from pays for all that stuff.  So of course they haven’t got anything of their own anymore.1

Heidegger as well; the guy was just impossible; he had no sense of rhythm or anything else.  He learned some tricks from a couple of writers, and he milked them to the very end.  What would he have been without them?  He was a philistine, a fatso.  It’s nothing new, it’s a classic example of somebody who unscrupulously eats all the fruits of other people’s labors, and who overstuffs himself, thank God.  As a result he feels sick and he drops dead.

Or take the fact Ria Endres and types like her are totally unfeminine; of course I can’t do anything for them.  A woman who is genuinely natural, meaning like everybody’s idea of a woman, would never write and talk such bilge.  She wouldn’t get so worked up about something like that either.  Of course she’s got to get completely weird and wrongheaded and wrongly educated and screwed up so she’s capable of becoming a German professor.  Of course you only become one of those when you’re already stark raving mad and spastic and are looking for a way out.  Of course people don’t become German professors because they love literature or art but because all the other possibilities like being a chauffeur or a baker or a locksmith are completely out of their reach.  Or because they’re bone idle or too proud to work at jobs like those.  It’s nothing but a last resort, isn’t it?  One that’s of no use to anybody and is completely vacuous.  But it also leads to a pension, quite an early one at that.

I was very fond of Bachmann; she was just a clever woman.  A rare combination, no?  Most women are stupid, but tolerable and in certain circumstances charming, even clever, but rarely.

Sure, she experienced quite a lot of things and was acquainted with quite a number of milieus, from the top to the bottom of the social scale, from the bottom to the top, and you pick up a certain idea of things from that.  You’re only ever the final product of what you’ve been through, what you’ve experienced and seen.  And the more intensively you’ve looked at something, the farther you’ve withdrawn from it, logically speaking.  Seeing more means running farther away.  Because it keeps getting more dangerous.  The clearer a thing becomes, the more abhorrent it becomes.  And then you just take to your heels; it makes no difference whether you’re running away from literature or people or even nature—that’s the way it is.  When the lens is a bit unfocused, you prefer to stay put.  The moment you make anything clear to yourself, you just instinctively withdraw.  So it’s just not true that when you get closer to something it all gets clear and bearable and cozy; actually, the exact opposite happens.  It’s probably some self-preservative instinct on nature’s part.  Otherwise it would just pack up and shut down.  Of course we don’t know what it is.  The collective wisdom of all the Nobel Prize winners put together: if you put everything they’ve all thought together in a blender and press the button, you end up with a heap of drivel.  Nothing worthwhile comes out of it.  Apart from some old people with a sash around their neck and a ribbon on their lapel and some tasteless villa somewhere and tons of invitations to chancellors’ and presidents’ offices; that’s the only thing that comes out of it.  And fancy dinners.

Or take Freud.  I was a witness when the works of Freud were sold in London to Fischer Publications for 100,000 deutschmarks.  That’s my connection to Freud.  Right, so a hundred thousand deutschmarks; then they made a couple of million off of them.  And they immediately fired the guy who wangled them the contract, so he doesn’t have a position at that publishing house anymore.  Nobody would pay such a sum for them now.  There are other fashion plates around now; now they’re called Popper and whatnot.  They last for eight, nine years, and then others come along.

Freud himself was a real weirdo.  My aunt went to school with Freud’s daughter.  She could tell you lots of stories about how she was always pulling the wool over her old papa’s eyes.  He was a relatively good writer, meaning not an especially good one, with a forceful imagination, and he set in motion something that humankind got hot and bothered about in its usual way for a couple of decades.  But it’s not any more significant than what everybody else has [come up with]…  

1. The text of this entire paragraph is substantially identical to a passage in Werner Wögerbauer's 1986 interview with Bernhard.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Kurt Hofmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), pp. 93-105.

A Translation of "Natur" (Aphorisms on Nature) by Christian Morgenstern

Nature

1892

Of course we all live at the bottom of the sea (at the bottom of the sea of air).—Vineta.

1895

The stars nothing but whole notes.

The spring nixie’s hair undulating in fountains.

1896

The green obelisks of the cypresses.

The perfume of things is the yearning that they arouse in us in their wake.

Who knows whether thoughts themselves do not produce an infinitesimally faint sound that may be detected by the most sensitive instruments and deciphered empirically (i.e., by means of comparison and experimentation).

1897

Rhythmically animated air is in a certain sense colored air.  The effect of bells.

1904

Why are hills more beautiful than mountains?  Because they reveal the conceptual contrast between the mountain range and the lowlands, those gladdening natural refractions and elevations of level ground, with more vitality and expressiveness than do the unyielding rocky peaks, which in a manner of speaking have more naked conceptuality and less emotional warmth about them.

1905

Nature knows only transitions between colors, not colors.

Yesterday a gentleman from Bremen retorted to me: “What?  You lament the death of a seal?  Those animals should be exterminated.  Do you by any chance believe that they are useful?  They are the worst fish-thieves in existence, completely harmful, useless creatures!”  I recalled the moist, dark eyes of those good-natured animals, and they seemed to me to be much more likeable than these views of a pedant whose own boundless thievishness as a human being was self-evident.

For the time being I have no need of anything but the chattering of the sea birds, the self-swaying of the prickly dune grass, a bit of sand running through my fingers, and the grayish-blue-green expanse before me with its curious unconditionality.

The wastefulness of nature is excessively great.  And this is the most bitter consideration: our accusatory thoughts, be they ever so lofty, are nothing but nameless, interchangeable birds smashing into a crystal-enarmored flame for the mere sake of falling to the ground discarded, squandered, like the essence that gave birth to them.

As I observe a hollow burrowed into the sand crumbling and trickling away, I am reminded of a pair of the most tragic impressions that have ever been made on me.  The first I experienced at the baths of Caracella, and that which is a mere image and semblance here was a melancholy reality there.  Almost uninterruptedly, mortar and weather-worn masonry trickled away from the mighty ruins of the vaults, and every now and then, when the gentle wind momentarily strengthened, even a fairly sizable stone would fly rumblingly into the depths. It was an uncanny and unsettling conversation from the past, a conversation inhabited by the wanderer in his vulnerability; and at the same time the sepulchral whispering of a civilization that will perhaps endure even if St. Peter’s Basilica hoists its own.  The second impression I was afforded by the mountains of Norway with their eternal rock-falls, in which their lofty peaks seemed to be gradually descending to the ground.

Great reposefulness and profound peace are to be found only among you, ye dear distant mountains.

Much worthier of wonder than a simple mirror is a translucent mirror—i.e., a window which looks out on a landscape and in which at the same time the objects of our room are reflected.  

1906

How can treetops resemble a young woman; nay, even more—seem to encapsulate her entire character?  And yet often enough they do.

Today I refrained from plucking a pair of flowers for you so that I could bring home to you their…life.

I hear a bird incessantly piping “sur-ger-y!”

These two young dachshunds here before me; how lovely they are in the youthful naturalness and tenderness they evince towards each other!  Truly, in point of charm no scene in human life surpasses seeing the male of this pair following his comrade with his eyes, or the female in the sun-gilded moss laying her head on her spouse’s back in a movement imbued with great grace and a need to nestle.

And what a profound contentment with life they evince when with their noses buried in the warm moss they soak in the solar warmth-drenched sylvan air with its manifold charms of which we have but a crude conception.  And what a perpetually lively interest in all the faint and mighty sounds that incessantly suffuse and invigorate the landscape.

The woofing sound of a dog’s “Attention!”

The nervousness caused by the sound of children crying.

A suspicion that it might be directed at him.

Danger! (Fear, Anger, Tension)

Verbal abuse (because it has no consequences)

Self-righteous anger (more monological)

Feeling of communication (need for gossip)

(he communicates the business of the external world)

Quittances over many matters

Rivalry       

                    with other dogs

Solidarity

Gratuitous indignation

A feline-induced hangover[1] that tries to benumb itself

It is the same with landscapes as with people: one never finishes getting to know them.  Under certain circumstances every person and every landscape is capable of passing by stages from the paltriest ugliness to the liveliest beauty.

A grove of birch trees shimmers through pines like your distant youth into and through my thoughts.

Nature is the great reposefulness poised against our mobility.  That is why humankind will love her more and more as it becomes ever more subtle and mobile.  Nature gives it the basic contours, broad perspectives, and at the same time the image of a lofty placidity in the midst of all unremitting evolution.

It is a curious feeling to think our way perpendicularly into the earth beneath our feet.  One doesn’t get very far; one’s imagination literally suffocates.

No locale consists of any elements but ones with which we are already familiar.  We know this, and yet we dally at surmising mysteries in a landscape as long as we are not familiar with it in precise detail.

1907

A sign from a dream: the sweet mountains struck me as soft and silver-embroidered.

There is something majestic about the springtime.  But this is the springtime that was never bound to come again, that has come once more only thanks to superterrestrial grace, the springtime that is unnamable.

What is the basis of, for example, the enchantment of the forest, the profound feeling of security that it imparts to humankind?  Perhaps the feeling arises chiefly from the fact that the forest confronts us with an incalculable number of individual plants of a specific species that unite contentment with life and the will to live with the most extreme purposiveness.  The trunk of a montane spruce is the archetype of a placid, internally consolidated strength; a powerful will to live that nothing is capable of destroying or even impairing once it has manifested itself.  But its boughs, branches, and needles radiate such an extreme purposiveness in all directions, and in their unity with the trunk and roots constitute a body so sagely attuned to the internal and external world, that one apprehends that here one is presented with the solution to a problem on which perhaps immeasurable ages have labored.  

The flies, those sparrows of the insect world.

In the cat you have suspiciousness, lechery, and egoism, the three virtues of the Renaissance man since Stendhal and certain others.  It is for this reason, I would hazard, that it is the most concentrated of animals.  The dog, in contrast, is faithful, selfless, and erotically philistine.  At present our civilization is approaching the level of the dog.  Christianity is a priori anti-feline in orientation.  When everything has run its course, in a few centuries, we may expect the arrival of the human being.

The amour-propre of a cat is extraordinary.

The cleanliness of the cat is completely different in character from that of the human being.  A human being washes himself, combs his hair, brushes and beats his clothes; in a word, he divests himself of his dust and returns it to the water, to the air, to the earth.  A cat, in contrast, laps up its own dust with its indefatigable tongue, merges with this dust, demolishes it—but in the most fruitful way, by frankly incorporating it into its living organism.

For an entire big-city winter you have been yearning in vain for an instance of unaffected natural grace.  Perhaps sitting behind you on the otherwise empty sofa there is a roughly one-year-old cat that visits you every now and then to spend a half an hour elaborately grooming itself and then another half an hour slumbering with profound contentment—and you behold what you were seeking, the aboriginal suasiveness of unconscious nature.

One of the most egregiously impertinent attributes of humankind is its tendency to give an emphatically erroneous name to this or that animal, as if there had ever been a being more erroneous in its relation to other beings than a human being!

Why do grasses, a meadow, a fir tree, fill us with such unalloyed delight?  Because we behold in them something living that can be destroyed only by external forces and never by itself.  The tree will never die of a broken heart, and the grass will never lose its mind.  From without they are menaced by every possible danger, but within they are invulnerable.  They do not stab themselves in the back like a human being with his spirit, and they thereby spare us the repeated spectacle of our own equivocal life.

Why should we not settle for living in a temperate, a highly temperate landscape, inasmuch as we only need raise our eyes in order to plunge into an utterly intemperate one, and our thoughts in order to feel how little it would take to be set adrift in the savage ocean of eternal uncertainty, on a smoothly planed shelf, or on an uprooted tree trunk.  

Perhaps someday the clouds will be accorded a peculiar veneration in virtue of being the sole barrier separating humanity from endless space, of being the propitious curtain hanging before the exposed fourth wall of our terrestrial stage.

It is a remarkable feeling to realize that we are attached to this native earth of ours in a manner not much different from that of those little rubber suction cups that you stick to the wall so that you can hang watches and keys on them.

Just as a despairing head seeks protection, rest, and warmth in its hands, in its arms, so does God or man seek protection, rest, and warmth in that other, duller side of his being that we term nature.

A dark blue Chinese lantern, lit from within by a single candle, hung against the night sky.  A vision of a phantasmal planet in the nocturnal twilight.

Via nature God pacifies himself over and over again.  Woe indeed will have prevailed if God as embodied in man ever destroys himself via the unhappy fever of civilization.

1908

Anybody who had not grown up accustomed to the world would be bound to lose his mind thanks to it.  The miraculousness of a single tree would suffice to annihilate him.

I believe that any blind person would necessarily have a highly superior understanding of plants.

What is the use of a flower to God?  It allows God to be pleased.  In the flower, as a flower, he dreams his happiest dream, in which nothing strives against him.      

I don’t recognize any “separate territories.”

How beautiful a hen becomes as a mother.  Before she always seemed a bit ridiculous.  But with the chick attached to her, in my view she belongs among…the constellations.

A handsome, stalwart white cow with curved horns and a large, sonorous bell—that is a fine symbol of a people’s devotion to church-going.  So is a bull…

Who can know what dark, peculiar feelings the peal of bells triggers in the minds of, say, birds.  Perhaps they too then momentarily “rise above themselves,” but only in a kind of vague yearning.

1909

A bone-idle dog that hunts at its own slack pace; and a loyal, obedient dog constrained by deeply inculcated rules to do what it is told in the midst of the fiercest fire—even these are degrees of divinity.

It is delightful to observe that wasps and ants are every bit as perturbed and irritated as we humans are by the importunateness and thick-skinnedness of flies.

What a sense of itself a tree may come to during a proper storm!  What a marvelous sight is a birch in the storm!  How divinely graceful it is!  How ineffably picturesque!

Larches, birches, alders, a womanly forest!

The tall firs say: we are not sorrowful and we are not mirthful; we are steadfast.

Behold a tiny scrap of a spider’s web full of raindrops—who imitates this?

On reflecting that the earth like the sea ebbs and flows under the influence of the moon, I ask myself why the human body’s combination of blood and brain should not have tides of its own.

Air travel will impart new nutriment to the religious genius of humanity.  To the great furtherance of comic moods: the airspace will now still come to the forest, the sea, and the desert.

We rather seldom attain more than a modest measure of strength and success when we have a try at limning other inhabited heavenly bodies.  And yet—a landscape, varied ad infinitum!  What a spectacle!

Every landscape has its own peculiar soul, like a person who is living face-to-face with you.  You will feel this most distinctly if you compare the impression made in your soul by a landscape of the present with the impression formerly made in it by a different, earlier landscape.  Perhaps if you contemplate a slice of the present landscape that quite easily could form part of the one from the past—such that for a while you are possessed by a highly uncanny sensation akin to that of seemingly holding the hand of a person who is absent, or even dead, when you know full well that this hand belongs to the person standing face-to-face with you.  

I foresee a far from distant time when the air and the sea will have been so thoroughly explored that humanity will proceed to install a shaft in some prairie or desert and, using all the available means accumulated by generation upon generation, bore its way ever deeper beneath the surface of the earth.

1910

The reason that nature is so profoundly comforting is that it is a world asleep, a world dreamlessly asleep.  It feels neither joy nor pain, and yet both before us and for us it lives a life full of wisdom, beauty, and goodness.  We, too, once slept thus, and to this state we shall someday return, but with the difference that we shall then be aware of this surplus of joy, this surplus of sorrow, and that we shall no longer have any need of dreams then either, for we shall have a direct and open view of the heavens themselves.

1911

The small in nature is usually greater than “the great.”  For the small is quite often the ongoing labor of God, whereas the great is the finished work of mere gods.

The seeds of life lie everywhere, everywhere.  Such being the case, you may proceed as follows—and here it is a question of heeding either of these two complementary calls: “Thwart not the prosperity of the living in any place!” or “Pay no great mind to the occasional individual in your household who is forever preaching and courting wastefulness!”

The mushroom is the parvenu of the plant world.

1912

For you the Alps are not high, not mysterious, enough; you dream of the Andes, of the Caucuses, of the Himalayas.  And yet here more than anywhere else it is possible to stretch one’s soul to its limits and experience ultimate elevation.  Are not all these mountains identical cliffs of the great blue radiant divine and spiritual sea that it is our noblest destiny and liberty to gaze into time and again, nay, sooner or later, to navigate with manful intrepidity?

1913

Humankind still has very little sense of reality.  It seems to maintain only an approximate idea of the habitual position of the sun.  Can one really be said to experience reality when in the course of a lifetime one is untouched by such a phenomenon except as a general occurrence?  Or isn’t the truth rather that people don’t even look at the sun at all?

Not even the trees, not even the flowers, simply wait for our recognition.  With their beauty and wisdom they tout in all directions for our comprehension.

Have you never yet felt: things must change!  When, for example, you were sitting in the forest and gazing at all the lovely trees and grasses around you, from which you were nevertheless separated by such a world-sized abyss of non-recognition!  What essentially were they; where was their soul; where was the point at which you could meet each other fraternally, not only in vague love on your part, but rather as it were while gazing into each other’s divinely fraternal eyes?  Would it not be preposterous if in such a world, one so expansively and lavishly laid out, everything always stayed the same, never changed? Must it not change?  And does not this need and necessity trigger something in you that says: Yes, it must become better, and day after day I will run to meet the spirit and the spirits of things, even though they have surely been on their own way to meet me for the longest time.

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[1] in German: ‘Katzenjammer’

THE END

Translation Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Christian Morgenstern, Stufen. Eine Entwicklung in Aphorismen und Tagebuch-Notizen (München: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1918), pp. 35-47.

I thank flowerville for drawing my attention to Morgenstern’s aphorisms and advising me on this translation, selections from which have previously appeared in Reliquiae.