Gargoyles

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.