Gargoyles (16 page)

political theater life he leads, at his horrible financial predicament. Madness is more bearable and the world at bottom is a carnival. For the women time drags more and more, for me the more it drags the less it drags. Absolute ataraxy, that is my state. Suicide,” the prince said, “a climacterium. We have the highest suicide rate in Europe. Why? Now, in the middle of the century, we have not been able to elaborate any other theme but that of suicide. Everything is suicide. Whatever we live, whatever we read, whatever we think—all manuals for suicide. The dead,” the prince said, “are more attractive than those who haven’t yet reached that stage. No matter what we are reminded of, what our attention is called to, we are reminded of death, our attention is called to death. Standing at the window in the night, watching several acrobats walking tightropes stretched across infinity—to call out to them is to incur the death penalty. But whenever we speak of suicide there is something
comical
about it.
I put a bullet into (or through) my head, I shoot, I hang myself
—all are comical. How can I ask you to trust me, I wrote to my son yesterday, when I do not trust you on a single point? I do not trust my son on a single point. It is true you have spent your money, but you have yet to prove to me that you have invested it well in your brain as one invests it well in a bank or in the stock market. I have always had my doubts about the brain as a stock market or bank. Of course you can also regard your brain as a power plant which delivers current to the whole world.… Do you know,” the prince said, “my son has had his eye on nothing but my fortune. I don’t believe in those studies of his. In London he is throwing himself away on a piece of sham. Losing his head over world history. A regrettable enthusiasm. What irritates me is that I
do not see my son spending much of his time in good restaurants in Haymarket, but always sitting over his essay in his scholar’s den. Incidentally,” the prince said, “the art of listening is nearly extinct. But I observe that you, Doctor, are still practicing it.”

Turning to me the prince said that my father should some day take me along on one of the Saurau hunts, which he held two or three times a year. “The Saurau hunts are famous. I personally am no longer interested in them, but to my family they are supremely necessary. We are continually trying out on others what we do not try out on ourselves,” the prince said. “We repeatedly kill people and observe this process and its result. Man constantly practices horror upon others, least of all on (or in) himself. We always try out all possible diseases on others; we continually kill others for purposes of study. This morning,” the prince said, “I suddenly felt the need to lie flat on the floor, stark naked. I undressed and lay down stark naked on the floor. At breakfast I told the others about it, but nobody laughed.” All his life, he said, his thoughts and actions had sprung from his estates, had grown out of Hochgobernitz. “Even what seems utterly remote has come out of my estates, out of Hochgobernitz,” he said. “The horizon is the handiest kind of nonsense. This morning,” he said, “I made an unusual remark to my elder sister. I said to her:
The poetic is suspect to me because in the world it arouses the impression that the poetic is poetry, and vice versa, that poetry is the poetic. The only poetry
, I said,
is nature, the only nature is poetry. The only consistent concept
, Doctor.”

Suddenly, that morning, he had felt the need to read aloud to the women a section from Goethe’s
The Elective
Affinities
. But when they were all assembled in the library, he suddenly had the feeling that it was pointless to read to them from
The Elective Affinities
, and instead he had read to them from an old
Times
. “I wanted to read to the women the chapter beginning
The scaffolding stood ready …,”
he said, “and instead I read to them how potatoes are stored for the winter in England. As soon as I had finished reading them how potatoes are stored in England, I bowed them out of the library and called: To work! To work! To work, idiots! Shortly afterward I went down into the yard and read the chapter
The scaffolding stood ready …
to myself. Undisturbed. Untainted. Unfeminized!

“I very often see my son somewhere on a London street that I am familiar with from my own days of studying in London. Trees. People. People as trees. Trees as people. My son is wearing the same suit I wore when I was in London. Sometimes he walks across Trafalgar Square or through Hyde Park with
my
thoughts. With
my
problems. And I think: He is crossing Trafalgar Square and walking through Hyde Park with your problems. My son sits with my thoughts on the very bench in Hyde Park where I sat. And he thinks, while he is sitting on my Hyde Park bench, of Hochgobernitz, just as I thought of Hochgobernitz when I was there. When you think of Hochgobernitz while you are in London,” the prince said, “you imagine that Hochgobernitz is an entirely unchanged Hochgobernitz, just as in Hochgobernitz when you think of London you think that London has not changed, has remained unchanged although Hochgobernitz at every moment is a completely changed Hochgobernitz. And I think: He is sitting on the Hyde Park bench or walking through the Tate Gallery and thinking
about me, because when I was in London going through the Tate Gallery to see the Blakes, I thought of my father. I think: My son in London thinks of his father in Hochgobernitz just as the father thinks of his son in London. Constantly seeing Hochgobernitz in London makes you as sick and demented, I imagine, as constantly seeing London in Hochgobernitz. And I see and
hear
London,” the prince said, “just as my son in London sees
and
hears Hochgobernitz. But it is always a different London and always a different Hochgobernitz.”

Only in London, the prince said, did his son think his mind could develop in all directions, but he, his son’s father, was convinced that his son’s mind could develop in all directions only in Hochgobernitz. “Of course,” the prince said, “the mind is not limited by being in London. But it is also not limited by being in Hochgobernitz.”

The last time my father had visited him, the prince had kept repeating the phrase “tangle of lines,” the prince recalled. Everything had been appearing to him as a “tangle of lines.” He had said to my father then: “There is a tangle of lines in my head.” Once, when the two of them, after the steward’s death, had called on the tenant farmers, he had repeatedly remarked that the tenants were “corporeals” with whom he had to “settle accounts.” One had to settle accounts with the corporeals, he had said several times, and likewise: “One had to settle accounts with corporeality. Everything is a matter of settling with corporeality.” He was rapidly wearing himself out in frightful privations, he now said. He had been born into Hochgobernitz as into a vacuum, by an
unsuspecting mother
. And he was always speaking in words that really no longer existed. “The words we speak really no
longer exist,” the prince said. “The whole instrumentation of words that we use no longer exists. Still it is not possible to fall utterly silent. No,” he said. “The employment of life as a science, a science of political administration,” he said. “Among the special abilities I was early able to observe in myself,” he said, “is the ruthlessness to lead anyone I choose through his own brain until he is nauseated by this cerebral mechanism. For it’s fatal in any case, Doctor, in any case. My son blames me for my age,” he said, “and I him for his youth. My age is in itself naïve, but my son’s youth is not in itself naïve.”

The prince said he was forever compelled to make a stupid society realize it was stupid, and that he was always doing everything in his power to prove to this stupid society how stupid it was. But sometimes this stupid society would say that
he
was stupid. “That’s their only way out,” he said. “Of course, for a long period in my life I always had a friend, but my son has not had that. Why? The science on which he is engaged excludes a friend. This science destroys everything,
everything
there is, Doctor. One of these days this science will have destroyed everything. And because this science must destroy everything, it is naïve. We deal only with naïve sciences. For me it has never been difficult to share my brain with others at times, but my son can never share his brain with anyone else.

“The modernity
in
a brain refreshes me,” he said,
“the inner modernity
. The other modernity repels me. The modernity we don’t see refreshes me,” he said, “the invisible sort that propels everything onward, not the visible kind that propels nothing.” Last night, he said, he had got up and gone down into the library and had said to the books:
My
food!
“But now this food is all poisoned,” he said. “Deadly.”

At the moment he decided to lead us from the inner wall back to the outer wall again, he noted “a very painful continuity of the noises” inside his brain. “Sometimes I am delighted by the fact that I am left entirely to myself and am full of pain.” He often worried, he said, over the thought of his death not being discovered for a long time by the people around him. “Everything I am telling you,” he said, “is largely esoteric. I have never seen my son laughing. Nor his mother—Doctor, did you ever see your mother laughing? No, you never saw her laughing. And has your son seen his mother laughing? No, he never saw her laughing. But I myself often used to have reason to laugh, in the past. Now I often laugh without any reason, you see. I became aware of my son’s dislike for fairy tales when he was quite young. And on the other hand his sister’s frightening partiality for fairy tales. He attributes too much to me. Everybody attributes too much to me. The chaos is already so great that everyone attributes much too much. But whereas his sisters always express their opinions about a thing prematurely, he does not express his opinions prematurely. But, Doctor, I am speaking about myself only in quotation marks, as you know; everything I say is said only in quotation marks. Murmured! Every day I wake up and think: To whom am I going to bequeath everything? Since nobody else is even possible, I come back to the fact that I must bequeath everything to my only son. But when my son keeps silent, I continually have the feeling that I must defend myself.… In the presence of my son all those traits of mine that are repugnant to him (and to me also) come to light. These unbearable traits come to light only in my son’s presence, whereas in the presence
of other people still other … and so on. I ask myself: Does my son also have unbearable traits only in my presence? Nowadays we can analyze everything, Doctor, everything but nature. Everything is always a question of the
nous
. People,” the prince said, “early slip into a business as into a warming suit which they then have on all their lives until nothing but a tattered rag is left of it. They patch away at the tattered suit for decades, lining it, widening it, narrowing it, voluntarily or out of coercion, but it always remains the same tattered rag. You see whole nations running around in ridiculous, completely tattered rags. All Europe is running around in completely tattered rags. Everybody slips into a business as into a suit, and to slip into a course of study is exactly the same as slipping into a business or a suit. The majority of those who have slipped into the realm of the mind have on, in the final analysis, nothing but ridiculous rags. All of us have on nothing but ridiculous rags. Yesterday I had the notion—I was on my way to breakfast—that I had ordered all the trees cut down. I look down from the castle and see nothing but millions of felled trees. Then I have the idea, how would it be if I first had these millions of cut trees cut up into pieces three feet long, then into pieces an inch long, and finally if I had the workmen pulverize them! Suddenly I saw the whole countryside covered with the sawdust from my trees, and I waded through this sawdust down to the Mur and then down to the Plattensee. There were no people to be seen, none left. Probably, I thought, they all were smothered under the sudden rain of sawdust. Yesterday,” the prince said, “the memoirs of Cardinal Retz, which I have been studying for so long and which have constantly seemed to me worthwhile studying, suddenly began to irritate
me. How? you will ask. I had been unable to fall asleep because of Cardinal Retz’s memoirs. For hours I looked at Cardinal Retz’s memoirs and could not fall asleep. But I was incapable of getting up and throwing the book out the window. Finally I did get up and threw Cardinal Retz’s memoirs out of the window and realized that I had been looking at them for five hours and that they had been irritating me for five hours without my throwing them out of the window. There are people,” he said, “who die with the greatest decisiveness and are decisively dead once and for all. I too would like to die like that. But most people die vaguely, vaguely to the eye and vaguely to the brain. They are never dead. No matter what we amuse ourselves with, we are always preoccupied only with death,” he said. “That is essentially human,” he said, “that everything takes place in death.” Then he said: “My sisters, but my daughters also, try to keep me going by means of little or big deceptions, and by one outrageous deception above all :
their attentiveness
. Each of them knows in her heart,” he said, “that the world will collapse when I suddenly am no longer here. When I lose all desire to go on and have myself laid out in the pavilion, I shall have myself laid out in the pavilion like my father. A dead father,” he said, “actually inspires fear. For many hours at a time I often think of nothing but the letter carrier. Mail must be coming, I think. Mail! Mail! Mail! News! Some day a message must come that won’t disappoint me. From whom? Wouldn’t it be delightful, Doctor, to open a letter and say to yourself: Aha, on the twenty-fourth I’ll be dead? Suddenly comes the notion that the surface of the earth is gradually turning into completely airless space. I observe people who at first do not know what is happening and
stand still in the middle of the street, as is only natural, just as others, as is only natural, walk on, walk faster, walk slower, walk, walk, walk; they go into shops or come out of shops, and suddenly all of them discover this process whose meaning they don’t know; they don’t know what it is, and one after the other, the weaker first, the stronger next, they fall to the ground. Soon the whole street, all the streets, are littered with suffocated people, corpses; everything has come to a standstill; many disasters caused by unmanned machines are no longer perceived because they have taken place after the complete extinction of mankind and consequently are not disasters at all.… The end is a tremendous din followed by a natural process of decay.