THOMAS BERNHARD

“Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it’s the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we’re finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it’s better to die having made the journey we’re been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death” 
― Thomas Bernhard

“We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

“Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late;what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“In theory we understand people, but in practice we can’t put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn’t possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me–I have no others.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“Everything is what it is, that’s all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words (are) bringing everything down. Depression derives from words, nothing else.” 
― Thomas Bernhard

“After all, there is nothing but failure.” 
― Thomas Bernhard

…He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Frost

“All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren’t the way we’ve pictured them and that we absolutely don’t belong with them, as we’ve talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Frost

“For before I met my friend there had been a period when I was prey to a morbid melancholy, if not depression, when I really believed I was lost, when for years I did no proper work but spent most of my days in a state of total apathy and often came close to putting an end to my life by my own hand. For years I had taken refuge in a terrible suicidal brooding, which deadened my mind and made everything unendurable, above all myself—brooding on the utter futility all around me, into which I had been plunged by my general weakness, but above all my weakness of character. For a long time I could not imagine being able to go on living, or even existing. I was no longer capable of seizing upon any purpose in life that would have given me control over myself. Every morning on waking I was inevitably caught up in this mechanism of suicidal brooding, and I remained in its grip throughout the day. And I was deserted by everyone because I had deserted everyone—that is the truth—because I no longer wanted anyone. I no longer wanted anything, but I was too much of a coward to make an end of it all. It was probably at the height of my despair—a word that I am not ashamed to use, as I no longer intend to deceive myself or gloss over anything, since nothing can be glossed over in a society and a world that perpetually seeks to gloss over everything in the most sickening manner—that Paul appeared on the scene at Irina’s apartment in the Blumenstockgasse.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship

“The loser was a born loser, I thought, he has always been the loser and if we observe the people around us carefully we notice that these people consist almost entirely of losers like him, I said to myself, of” 
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Everything is what it is, that’s all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously , because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, so Roithamer, the kind they could, by the time they no longer thought about it, because they were afraid even to think about it, but then they did correct themselves, like my cousin, like his father, my uncle, like all the others whom we knew, as we thought, whom we knew so thoroughly, yet we didn’t really know all these peoples’ characters, because their self-correction took us by surprise, otherwise we wouldn’t have been surprised by their ultimate existential correction, their suicide.” 
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

Those Who Die Early

 

Everything fails in the end, everything ends in the graveyard. The young people of today are running into the arms of death at age twelve, and they’re dead at fourteen. There are solitary fighters who struggle on until eighty or ninety, then they die, too, but at least they had a longer life. Those who die early have less fun, and you can feel sorry for them. Because life also means a long life, with all of its awfulness.

The Lunatics – The Inmates

 

I must be the prisoner, unless I’m crazy, for my clothes are prison clothes, and I am wearing prison clothes, am I not? – The brain is so unfree, and the system, into which the brain is born, is so free, the system so free and my brain so unfree, that system and brain are coming to an end. – The hunchback with the water pail, the one with her braids all wild, the nuntails¹ white, the birds black in the green scene, the one with the index finger on his bloody forehead, the one with the yellow rope who climbs the cherry tree, the one in her black frock, with the yellow pants, the one with the girl’s face, the one with the red rose, the one with her hazelnut stick, the one who is weeping, the one bleating like a goat, with the bowed legs, – In rags goes man, in stinking scraps of cloth. The meat grinder wind says—I’m not dumb! Siccing my trouser legs and the dog, it comes inside my head and cuts me down. I have this whore tap on my conscience, this bundle biting into my hunched back. These shoes, this frayed coat, are making me sick. My soupspoon sticks through the pocket of my pants. There in the courtyard, there stand the Pharisees, Nothing but creature from the belt on down! The club swingers, squealers, gunmen, spies in the greasy boot-black of the prefecture. The state’s almighty, while you’re bitter and weak.

Power and the uniform are one in the same. You keep your mouth shut, your head in check, you walk through the wood no one cuts for us. What such a truncheon on the head ruins I know already, it breaks my eardrums. I’m outfitted by the most sub-moron and driven mad with sweat, ransacked, and shorn. These pants rub me raw and the backsides paint The heads of misery on the thick wall. Some get to drink and some have to pay. And the thing that you are drips in your hand. – The reason of the dream fears the reason of love, the reason of power, the reason of death, for the sake of pure reason, which influences no one. – Coming from the consequences for the addiction of thinking, we arrive at the question of meaning that regresses without leaving us behind. – the one with her red hair, with the long tongue, the one with the turnip knife, with the sick lungs, the one with her white veil in the black door, the one with the long neck, the one with her ear cut off, the one with her rosary, with apples, with pears, the ones with yellow, white empty faces, the one with the fear of doctors, the one in the cabbage leaf hat, the one letting her blood drip in the pool of water, – I don’t stand on my own, only on floors. Pierced by the eyes in their wood planks, I walk into my darkness, right into these thoughts where nothing remains but stench and stone. Why the dick? What right does it have to me? What did it do early this morning at three? I am sick to my stomach. My throat is raw. Somewhere in my skull, my dull brain’s crawled. This is the curse! This is the irony! And you, my moon, my yellow minister, you piss on the world, on philosophy, My last, greatest, and most sacred mentor! My payday’s spent. So’s my entire life. You are finished! You are long past due! I need no more buy into everything you spew for my red brain turns only more to mush. “. . . if one is less, if eight is only more,” that’s what my head says as my ankles collapse, “the one from the rooftop, who’s made a mess in the night,” the one you still hear gasp.

My twisted mind, that tit milk of crackups! I am one gifted fellow, officer! Up my ass the world still has some fire as soon as I fetch my lard bread and schnapps! – Clarity exists where the greatest helplessness pretends to be the greatest lack of clarity; in every composition, even in the composition of events inside the human (godlike) mind. – Man, who has the right to have control over himself, who can have control over everything and has the right to this as well; but no one has the right to have control over themselves. – the one who walks on tiptoes through the garden, the one who cuts wheat with her stare, the one with her hair tied to the fence who wants to scream, who’s covered with scratches, the one who comes from the chapel, who looks from the window, the one with the rusty sickle who cuts off flower tops, the one with the black stocking, the one on the hay wagon, the one the ones with the red skirts beat outside the threshing floor, – You have no diamond, no spade, no leaf cards. The jacks of bells trump your fantasias. The morning’s red stinks like one big carcass. Women scream through their hysterias. In my wood shoe skates, snowblind by plaster, pieces of skull snap orders at me from their nightwatchman stupor . . . in the stair the tripes of my soul make me a vegetable. My silly crap lies waiting in the shadows. With head burning from the cold, rod ready, you scratch the dog on his blue balls sourly, and it snarls, dictating its dictation to you. Drinking killed my Easter, my Pentecost, that turtledove madness tickles my thigh. The long nights never cease in the least when it comes to my diabetic insanity. Am I just a bucket’s worth of torture? Am I dead? Are my suicide threats lies? My froth has spun around half the globe.

I am stretched out in my prison clothes. My feet think and my mind wanders off. From head to toe the world’s nothing more than an age of depravity and rot. And the city itself is the murderer! – There exist irritating phenomena that are a means to irritate, as, for example, the phenomena between two phenomena and the phenomena that let such irritating phenomena be perceived. – The line is broken from all lines, which proves that there exists no line, and which also proves that one can regard everything as the line, presupposing a character that gets too involved in what inevitably drives it into ruin. – the one running from the kitchen with the soup pot, the one with the mourning veil over her red head, the one with the white coat, with the blue christening bow around the neck, the ones who look in the apple basket, who on green milk drift into the evening, who in the black woods sink into the cold night . . .

Schermberg 1949 – To me every star is the police. That marching firmament, every ocean a sea of billyclubs, uniformed shit!, madness is the red on the flag of my prison. As my snow-white loins are whipped, my red head swells in the afternoon wind. I walk flailed where I walk against it, where I cannot find anything to eat. In my eyes flashes the hurricane of laws that bite, that have a sharpness. I’m my own dog and you’re the companion I hound into the jailhouse of lewdness. What kind of wine are you, my Master Urine? I walk drunk through the shaven skulls of the under-underworld, through the ruin and out of my hunger braid him pigtails. – Garsten 1950

(Die Irren. Die Häftlinge – 1962)

Against the facts

 

‘If we look at a person, we are bound in a short space of time to say what a horrible, what an unbearable person. If we look at Nature, we are bound to say, what a horrible what an unbearable Nature. If we look at something artificial–it doesn’t matter what the artificiality is–we are bound to say in a short space of time what an unbearable artificiality. If we are out walking, we even say after the shortest space of time, what an unbearable walk, just as when we are running we say what an unbearable run, just as when we are standing still, what an unbearable standing still, just as when we are thinking what an unbearable process of thinking. If we meet someone, we think within the shortest space of time, what an unbearable meeting. If we go on a journey, we say to ourselves, after the shortest space of time, what an unbearable journey, what unbearable weather, we say, says Oehler, no matter what the weather is like, if we think about any sort of weather at all. If our intellect is keen, if our thinking is the most ruthless and the most lucid, says Oehler, we are bound after the shortest space of time to say of everything that it is unbearable and horrible. There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult.’

from Walking

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