“Actually anything written about Today should be destroyed immediately, just like all real letters are crumpled or torn up, unfinished and unmailed, all because they were written, but cannot arrive Today.” P.2
“Coming from Rennweg, I often traverse this bow; but I can’t get very far in my description, because new details are constantly arresting my attention: insulting innovations, office buildings and stores known as Modern Living—all of which mean more to me than our city’s most triumphant streets and square.” P.3
“Other than that we don’t need to talk about our good old days, because our days are getting better and better, and I have to laugh about the times when I was furious with Maline for having allowed me to squander so much time with other people and things.” P.7
“I guess even today we don’t have much to do with one another; we put up with each other, are mutually amazed, but my amazement is curious (is Malina really ever amazed? Less and less, I think), and there’s tension precisely because my presence never upsets him, since he acknowledges it as he pleases and doesn’t when there’s nothing to say, as if we weren’t constantly bumping into each other in the apartment, impossible to overlook, performing everyday actions impossible to ignore.” P.8
“The borders were soon defined, after all only a tiny country had to be established, without territorial claims or even a proper constitution, an intoxicated land with only two houses you can find in the dark, even during total eclipses (solar and lunar), and I know by heart how many steps it takes, going diagonally, to reach Ivan’s; I could even walk there blindfolded. Now the rest of the world, where I lived up to now—always in a panic, my mouth full of cotton, the throttle marks on my neck—is reduced to its petty insignificance…” p.13
“We have a lot of head-sentences, hoards of them, just like the telephone sentences, the chess sentences r the sentences about life in general, but we’re still missing a lot of sentence sets, we don’t have a single sentence about feelings, since Ivan never pronounces one and since I don’t dare create the first, but I wonder about this far-off, absent set of sentences, despite al the good sentences we already know how to make. For when we cross over from speech to gesticulation, to gestures which are consistently successful, a ritual begins for me which replaces feelings, not an empty process, nor an insignificant repetition, but rather an essence of solemn formulas newly distilled, accompanied but the only devotion of which I’m truly capable.” P.26
“Everyone would maintain that Ivan and I are not happy. Or that for a long time we have had no reason to call ourselves happy. But everyone isn’t right. Everyone is no one.” P.48
“My favorite, how did you put it now? Landscapes, animals, plants? Favorite what? Books. Music, architecture, painting? I don’t have any favorite animals, no favorite mosquitoes, favorite beetles, favorite worms, even with the best will in the world I cannot tell you which birds or fish or predators I prefer, it would also be difficult for me to choose, much more generally.” P.57
“We couldn’t make the confusion any greater than it is, nobody’s listening to us, questions are being asked and answered elsewhere as well, people are fixing their sights on even stranger phenomena; new ones are ordered daily from one day to the next, problems are invented and passed around, they don’t really exist, you hear people talking about the and so you start talking about them yourself. I, too, only heard about the problems, other than that I wouldn’t have any, we could sit quietly with our hands in our laps sipping a drink, wouldn’t that be nice Herr Muhlbauer?” p.62
“I must appear confident, well, be in a good mood, no one is permitted to see me here with an ashen face, it has to stay outside, here on the path, I may only have it in my room alone, and I step into the illuminated house and say radiantly: Good evening, Anni!…Neither Antoinette nor all St. Wolfgang will do me in, nothing will make me tremble, nothing will disturb me in my remembrance.” P.101
“My father is extremely dejected, he indicates he’s not feeling well, he’s no longer up to all this and I can’t bring him back to the discussion, he’s talking himself into a disease he doesn’t have at all just so he won’t have to think about Melanie and Me. Suddenly it dawns on me why he’s pleading every possible excuse—he’s living with my sister. I can’t do anything more for Eleonore, she send me a note: Pray for me, beg for me.” P.139
“My father first takes off my mother’s clothes, he’s standing so far away I don’t know which costume he’s wearing, he is constantly changing them, now he’s wearing the bloodstained apron of a butcher standing before a slaughterhouse at dawn, now he’s wearing a hangman’s red coat and climbing up the steps, now he’s wearing silver and black, with shiny black boots, standing in front of electric barbed wire, in front of a loading ramp, inside a watchtower, he’s wearing his costumes to fit the riding crops, the rifles, the execution pistols, his costumes are worn in the deepest night, bloodstained and horrible.” P.154
“What I owe these marsupial men, who carry in their pouches tidings of most precious joy or unbearable calamities, who wheel about on bicycles, on motorcycles which rattle up from the Heumarkt, who climb stairs, ringing doorbells despite their burdens, utterly insecure as to whether the trip will have been worth the effort, whether the addressee will be present, whether the addressee thinks the new sis worth one schilling or four—what we thus all owe these men remains to be said.” P.157
“…the chess sentences are lying fallow, other sentence sets are also suffering some loss. It just can’t be that the sentences which we discovered so slowly are also slowly leaving us. But a new group emerges.” P.167
“Esteemed Malina, there must have also been a few hours and one free day a week for very limited undertakings. But I don’t know how one does live the first part of one’s life, it must be like the first part of the night, high-spirited, it was just hard for me to find those hours, because at that time I was learning to reason, and that must have claimed the rest of my time.” P.173
“Malina:…Besides, the tears come later, in the middle of peace, as you once called this time, in a comfortable armchair, when no shots are being fired and nothing is burning. People go hungry at other times too, on the street, among the well-fed passersby. Real fear is first felt during some stupid horror film. People don’t freeze in winter, but at the beach on a summer’s day. Where was it? When were you most cold? It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm October day by the sea. So you can either keep calm for the others or be constantly agitated. You won’t change a thing.
Me: (piu mosso) But even if there’s nothing to be done, even if we are powerless to intervene, the question nonetheless remains: what is to be done? It would be unhuman to do nothing.” P.205
No comments:
Post a Comment