Gargoyles (15 page)

The prince said: “The last time my son was here I persuaded him to take a walk down into the gorge. At supper he agreed that we would take a walk down into the gorge early in the morning. And in fact we did rise early and go down into the gorge. This walk,” the prince said, “was once again one of those walks I love,
without a word spoken
. It goes without saying, Doctor, that on such walks there must
not be a word spoken. Anyone who does not abide by this rule will never share such a walk with me again. But on this morning, with the landscape suddenly darkening because of course we were descending into the gorge, even though the day was brightening, on this morning I myself suddenly began speaking. I said to my son that for some time I have had a pain in my head, that these noises are in my head, and I said that this pain and these noises were becoming more and more unbearable. These noises, I said, have made it impossible for me to think out anything, no matter what. And yet, I said to my son, it is tremendously important right now to think out the matter that at the moment occupies my thoughts, Hochgobernitz. These noises, I said, shatter everything for me. Pain and noises are the same thing, I said. Possibly, I said to my son as we reached the bottom of the gorge, these noises and this pain are no more nor less than my fatal illness.
Possibly
. I said: I am fatally ill, my dear boy. And I said: Isn’t that sad, my dear boy? But he said nothing. Whenever I look at people, I look at unhappy people,” the prince said. “They are people who carry their torment into the streets and thus make the world a comedy, which is of course laughable. In this comedy they all suffer from tumors both mental and physical; they take
pleasure
in their fatal illness. When they hear its name, no matter whether the scene is London, Brussels, or Styria, they are frightened, but they try not to show their fright. All these people conceal the actual play within the comedy that this world is. Whenever they feel themselves unobserved, they run away from themselves toward themselves. Grotesque. But we do not even see the most ridiculous side of it because the most ridiculous side is always the reverse side. God sometimes speaks to them, but
he uses the same vulgar words as they themselves, the same clumsy phrases. Whether a person has a gigantic factory or a gigantic farm or an equally gigantic sentence of Pascal’s in his head, is all the same,” the prince said. “It is poverty that makes people the same; at the human core, even the greatest wealth is poverty. In men’s minds and bodies poverty is always simultaneously a poverty of the body and a poverty of the mind, which necessarily makes them sick and drives them mad. Listen to me, Doctor, all my life I have seen nothing but sick people and madmen. Wherever I look, the worn and the dying look back at me. All the billions of the human race spread over the five continents are nothing but one vast community of the dying. Comedy!” the prince said. “Every person I see and everyone I hear anything about, no matter what it is, prove to me the absolute obtuseness of this whole human race and that this whole human race and all of nature are a fraud. Comedy. The world actually is, as has so often been said, a stage on which roles are forever being rehearsed. Wherever we look it is a perpetual learning to speak and learning to walk and learning to think and learning by heart, learning to cheat, learning to die, learning to be dead. This is what takes up all our time. Men are nothing but actors putting on a show all too familiar to us. Learners of roles,” the prince said. “Each of us is forever learning one (his) or several or all imaginable roles, without knowing why he is learning them (or for whom). This stage is an unending torment and no one feels that the events on it are a pleasure. But everything that happens on this stage happens naturally. A critic to explain the play is constantly being sought. When the curtain rises, everything is over.” Life, he went on, changing his image, was a school in which death
was being taught. It was filled with millions and billions of pupils and teachers. The world was the school of death. “First the world is the elementary school of death, then the secondary school of death, then, for the very few, the university of death,” the prince said. People alternate as teachers or pupils in these schools. “The only attainable goal of study is death,” he said. His son had told him that in London he sometimes woke up and dressed and tore out of the house and down Oxford Street imagining that at the end of Oxford Street there would be the Ache, from which Hochgobernitz can be seen. “All people are more or less crazy, of course, even my son,” the prince said. Actually, he went on, his son’s madness must be extraordinary “if it is true that he tears down Oxford Street believing he’ll find the Ache at its end. If you wish, you can look into the Ache always and everywhere,” the prince said. “Every man has his own Ache, every man has a different Ache. I myself,” he said, “often wake up and dress and go down into the yard and out through the gate to the inner or the outer wall, and am in reality going through Brussels.” Inside every human head is the human catastrophe corresponding to this particular head, the prince said. It is not necessary to open up men’s heads in order to know that there is nothing inside them but a human catastrophe. “Without his human catastrophe, man does not exist at all,” the prince said. Man loves his misery, he said, and if he is without his misery for a moment, he does everything he can to return into his misery. “When we look at people, they are either in their misery or seeking their misery. There are no individuals who are free of human misery,” he said. Man exists continually in an extremely dangerous state, the prince said, but he is not conscious of the fact that he continually
exists in an extremely dangerous state, forever opposed to himself. This is the basis of his existence, but this is also the basis of his sickness. “All dying,” the prince said. “Probably children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness. When we seek a person,” the prince said, “it is as if we go about in a vast morgue looking for him.” All the things that people say are said only in monologues, the prince said. “We are in an age of monologues. The art of the monologue is also a far higher art than the art of dialogue,” he said. “But monologues are just as pointless as dialogues, although in a way much less pointless. Whenever you engage in a dialogue with another person (with yourself!) because otherwise you are suddenly afraid of suffocating, you must be prepared for his doing his utmost to undercut you. That can be done in the subtlest, the most elaborate, but also the nastiest manner. Whenever people talk they undercut one another. The art of conversation is an art of undercutting, and the art of monologue is the most horrible kind of undercutting. I always think,” the prince said, “that my interlocutor is trying to push me down into his own abyss after I have just barely managed to escape from my own abyss. Your interlocutors try to push you into as many abysses as possible simultaneously. All interlocutors are always mutually pushing one another into all abysses.” The prince went on to say that he often went to bed with a particular classical melody, or a still irregular one, in his head, and woke up with the same melody there. “Must I assume,” the prince said, “that this melody remained in my head all night long? Of course. As you know, I always tell myself, everything is always in your head. Everything is always in all heads. Only
in all heads. There is nothing outside of heads. No matter what I am talking about with whom,” the prince said, “by the very act of talking with someone I am finished. A grownup person is in principle infinite; one not yet grown up is infinite like nature.” The majority of mankind devotes itself wholly to its two chief pursuits, purchasing and consuming, he said. “Strictly speaking, over the course of millennia, as we now see,” the prince said, “men have developed only these two instincts, the instinct to buy and the instinct to consume. Perhaps that shocks us,” Prince Saurau said, “perhaps we should be horrified by this.” Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which
now and then
is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood. If there were language that could be understood, nothing more would be needed. “We have always found refuge in a problem,” he said. “People walk with one another and talk with one another and sleep with one another and do not know one another. If people knew one another they would not walk, talk, or sleep with one another. Do you know yourself? I often ask myself,” Prince Saurau said. A depth is always a height, the deeper the depth of the height, the higher the height of the depth, and vice versa, he added. “You imagine,” the prince said, “that you peer down into an infinite well (as into an infinite person), into his infinite height, size, and so on.… I
believe
that my son is in London because I k
now
that he is in London; I
believe
I am writing him a letter because I k
now
I am writing him a letter, but I do not k
now
that he is in London because I
believe
that he is in London, and so on.… Impossibility is a ghastly foundation,” he said. “Everything is based on impossibility. I called my elder
sister. I asked her to walk down to the river with me and she walked down to the river with me. But as we returned I thought: Has she really been by the river with me? I am in a continual state of torment, Doctor. Aren’t all these things signs of a brutal realization of death in me? I never think of my wife any longer,” the prince said, although of all people she was the one he had loved most. He also wondered why he no longer dreamed of her. “For years I have not dreamed of my wife,” he said. “I neither think of her nor dream of her. She is
gone
. Gone where? Of course she still exists, because I am now speaking of her. You know, Doctor, the tragedy is that nothing is ever really dead. About my son: I want to meet him at the station. I write that to him, and he replies that he does not want to be met. He
suddenly
comes in at the door. His actions have always been completely unpredictable. We always shared a fondness for reading newspapers. Even in its initial stages a personality like my son’s is complete. I don’t like expressions such as
sense perception
and so on, which my son uses so often. Moreover, I, in contrast to him, am totally opposed to quotations. Quoting gets on my nerves. But we are sequestered in a world that is constantly quoting, in a constant quotation that
is
the world, Doctor. And what do you think of a sentence like:
But chance, not God, as the common herd believes, must be assumed
. My son deals in such sentences. All actions are punishable actions and that is why it is so easy to straightway make a punishable action out of any action. That is why it is possible to pronounce and to carry out justified sentences of death upon everyone. The state has recognized this fact. The state is founded on it. I still employ words that my son finds unendurable, such as
melancholia, loyal, tremendous, painful
,
fatal
. My pantheism, his apostasy,” the prince said. “My son has actually succumbed to a sham metaphysics. We are, to be sure, neutral apparatuses driven by a tremendous galvanism. The aimlessness in which we more and more lose our sense of direction has been constantly in my thoughts of late, catastrophically concrete. My son,” the prince said, “used to dress very elegantly. Now he doesn’t care what he has on. He has donned the proletariat, and the horrible part of it is that at any moment he can strip himself of it again. That is what is terrifying. In the past he swiftly arrived at good opinions; now he slowly comes to wrongheaded ones. Our distance apart increases, and the tension between us likewise. The world as a whole has already become entirely provincial. For a long time Nature permitted him, my son, to develop quite unobtrusively among his sisters. But all of a sudden this same Nature in the most amazing manner cruelly developed his intellectual endowments as if they were exclusively directed against those sisters still drifting in the daze of childhood and youth. He has always been a problem in the sense of being continually disjunct from us. We, his parents, bent all our efforts to leading him ever closer to the boundaries of truth. Even though we ourselves could not perceive the truth, we nevertheless knew, his mother and I, where its boundaries are. Whenever he was in cities he always reported that he was happy, but about his stays in the country the word was always
unhappy, unhappy
. Later, during his university studies, he always left us unexpectedly; he even got up and went out of our thoughts without excuse. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three he would shut himself up in his room for days, not even leaving it for meals, for the sake of his thoughts. Each of us has protracted
periods in which we do not exist at all, only pretend to exist. Sometimes the actual existence and the pretended existence of a person merge in a way that is fatal for him. Everything in Hochgobernitz is focused on my son, but my son is only dominated by Hochgobernitz; he does not focus on it. Sometimes he unexpectedly has knowledge of things that astonish me, though what he knows has
absolutely no application
to anything. When he comes home and assumes his inheritance, everything will rot. He started going to school at the age of four and a half, feeling it to be a means for
relaxing
his mind. We always associate him with accidents. Whenever someone has tumbled into the gorge, we think it must be our son. An entirely ontological type,” the prince said. “His last visit was one unbroken period of gloom lasting over four weeks and spreading through all of us. All Hochgobernitz was under a pall of gloom. Even while he was still in England my son cast this pall over Hochgobernitz weeks before he arrived home, and then when he did come to Hochgobernitz he cast that pall of gloom over all of us. The nervous states of the women often permeate the entire landscape too. In the lower rooms, the women’s rooms, there is order, in the upper rooms, mine, disorder. But the order is where the disorder is. Strictly speaking,” the prince said, “the methods my son uses to distance himself from me are really my own. There are people who manage quite well with the raw materials of life and do not refine it; the raw materials suffice them. Everything in my son’s letters, except for himself, is mere backdrop; ideas are nothing but sets dropped from the grid of the universe, and his brain is nothing but a highly complicated modern stage-lighting system which constantly influences these sets. I am constantly looking through this