Free The Loser by Thomas Bernhard Page B

matter, even if he was Kleist or Voltaire we still see a pitiful being who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense. Who’s been rolled over and passed over by history. We’ve locked up the great thinkers in our bookcases, from which they keep staring at us, sentenced to eternal ridicule, he said, I thought. Day and night I hear the chatter of the great thinkers we’ve locked up in our bookcases, these ridiculous intellectual giants as shrunken heads behind glass, he said, I thought. All these people have sinned against nature, he said, they’ve committed first-degree murders of the intellect , that’s why they’ve been punished and stuck in our bookcases for eternity. For they’re choking to death in our bookcases, that’s the truth. Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we’ve locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that’s the truth. And should one of these first-degree criminals of the intellect attempt to flee, break loose, he is immediately ridiculed and finished off, so to speak, that’s the truth. Mankind knows how to protect itself against all these so-called intellectual giants, he said, I thought. The mind, wherever it makes its claims felt, is finished off and locked up and of course immediately branded as mindless , he said, I thought while looking up at the restaurant ceiling. But everything we say is nonsense, he said, I thought, no matter what we say it is nonsense and our entire life is a single piece of nonsense. I understood that early on, I’d barely started to think for myself and I already understood that, we speak only nonsense, everything we say is nonsense, but everything that is said to us is also nonsense, like everything that is said at all, in this world only nonsense has been said until now and, he said, only nonsense has actually and naturally been written, the writings we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense, as history proves, he said, I thought. In the end I fled into the notion of the aphorist , he said, and when asked my profession I actually once responded, so Wertheimer said, that I was an aphorist . But people didn’t understand what I meant, as usual, when I say something they don’t understand it, for what I say doesn’t mean that I said what I said, he said, I thought. I say something, he said, I thought, and I’m saying something completely different, thus I’ve spent my entire life in misunderstandings, in nothing but misunderstandings, he said, I thought. We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live, we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn’t help. But everyone can see this, he said, I thought, for everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought. One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all, so Wertheimer, I thought. Wertheimer’s parents were small people, Wertheimer himself was bigger than his parents, I thought. He was of impressive stature, as they say, I thought. In Hietzing alone the Wertheimers owned three princely villas and when Wertheimer once had to decide if he wanted to have one of his father’s villas in Grinzing put in his name or not, Wertheimer let his father know that he didn’t have the slightest interest in this villa, nor indeed any interest in the other villas owned by his father, who also had several