Gargoyles

“In conversation,” the prince said, “people constantly feel as if they are treading a tightrope and are always afraid of falling down to the low level more proper to them. I too have this fear. Therefore all conversations are conducted by people who are treading a tightrope and constantly in fear of falling to their low level, of being pushed down to the low level. In the nature of things it sounds completely different,” Prince Saurau said, “when my son in England, in London, says at Victoria Station, for example, that he hates people, completely different from the way it sounds when I in Hochgobernitz say that I hate people, yet it is the same ridiculous hatred for the same ridiculous people. If in Victoria Station we call our mother or our father, it is the same as when we call our mother, our father, from here in Hochgobernitz. Do you see? If we walk consistently, and especially in books, we are in reality always walking through landscapes we have long known. We come upon nothing new. Just as we come upon nothing new in the sciences. Everything is prescribed. The cold is inside me,” the prince said. “Therefore it makes no difference where I go; the cold goes along with me inside me. I am freezing from within. But in the library this cold is most bearable. Nothing but brains printed to death,” the prince said. “With every book we discover to our horror a human being printed to death by the printers, a man published to death by the publishers, read to death by the readers. Let’s say there’s a letter from a wool trader in Bombay to my younger sister, from a friend of her youth. The letter is lying in my sister’s desk. I know that. Nevertheless I ask my sister, after I have known for weeks that the letter is lying in her desk: Where in the world is that letter from Bombay? And she says, although she knows that I know that the letter is in her desk: In the desk. The absurdity in which people get up and in which they go to bed again,” he said, “always of course merits another sense of shock. Why not? After all there is always a different absurdity in their getting up and their going to bed. The absurdity in which we are now walking on the wall, for example — are you aware of this absurdity? And is your son aware of it? We face questions like an open grave about to be filled. It is also absurd, you know, for me to be talking of the absurdity,” he said. “My character can justly be called thoroughly unloving. But with equal justice I call the world utterly unloving. Love is an absurdity for which there is no place in nature.