Gargoyles

We had sat down on the only bench, installed on the outer wall of the castle. “The parents are perfected in the children,” Prince Saurau said. Then he added, as if peering through the darkness: “There are cities in which I should like to live a long time, for years, decades, and others that I cannot bear for even the shortest time. London,” he said, “is the only city in which I should like to live a lifetime. In London I could have developed in the most useful way. Unlike my son, I would have developed in London. In London I spent the happiest period of my life. Paris I fear. Paris irritates me. London calms me. Paris is nervous, London tranquil. I could have stuck it out in Hamburg for a few years, but in Vienna only for a few hours. But I do not know Stockholm, nor Marseilles, nor Lisbon. Cities that I would surely like. I am fond of Rome. Of Warsaw. But I would want to live a long time, the longest time, only in London. I am a person who was absolutely made for London but has been incarcerated in Hochgobernitz. I have always felt Hochgobernitz to be an absolutely deadly prison to me. That does not mean that I don’t love Hochgobernitz. I don’t love London, you know. I would like to be in London, would like to have spent my life there, but I don’t love it. Hochgobernitz I love and I feel it to be a lifelong prison. Calculating machines, that is all human beings are. We calculate, we virtually always think in figures. We are born into a numerical system and one day are hurled out of it, into the universe, into nothingness. If we talk with a person for a while,” the prince said, “we are alarmed because we become aware that we are talking with a calculating machine. The world is more and more merely a computer. It does us no good if we are indifferent; we are always locked up in everything and can no longer get out.”

He said: “Because my daughters are like my sisters, my daughters will some day be my sisters. I have always been deceived by everybody. Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraye …,” he said. “Everything I do not hold in my hand is taken away from me. If my son sells Hochgobernitz, he is lost.”

My father said: “But I don’t believe your son will sell Hochgobernitz.”