Free A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS
    T HE SUNDAY EDITION of the
Kärntner Volkszeitung
carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged fifty-one, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills”.

    My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide. Yes, get to work: for, intensely as I sometimes feel the need to write about my mother, this need is so vague that if I didn’t work at it I would, in my present state of mind, just sit at my typewriter pounding out the same letters over and over again. This sort of kinetic therapy alone would do me no good; it would only make me passive and apathetic. I might just as well take a trip—if I were travelling, my mindless dozing and lounging around wouldn’t get on my nerves so much.
    During the last few weeks I have been more irritable than usual; disorder, cold and silence drive me to distraction ; I can’t see a bread crumb or a bit of fluff on the floor without bending down to pick it up. Thinking about this suicide, I become so insensible that I amsometimes startled to find that an object I have been holding hasn’t fallen out of my hand. Yet I long for such moments, because they shake me out of my apathy and clear my head. My sense of horror makes me feel better : at last my boredom is gone; an unresisting body, no more exhausting distances, a painless passage of time.
    The worst thing right now would be sympathy, expressed in a word or even a glance. I would turn away or cut the sympathiser short, because I need the feeling that what I am going through is incomprehensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem meaningful and real. If anyone talks to me about it, the boredom comes back, and everything is unreal again. Nevertheless, for no reason at all, I sometimes tell people about my mother’s suicide, but if they dare to mention it I am furious. What I really want them to do is change the subject and tease me about something.
    In his latest movie someone asks James Bond whether his enemy, whom he has just thrown over a stair rail, is
dead
. His answer—“Let’s hope so!”—made me laugh with relief. Jokes about dying and being dead don’t bother me at all; on the contrary, they make me feel good.
    Actually, my moments of horror are brief, and what I feel is not so much horror as unreality; seconds later, the world closes in again; if someone is with me I try to be especially attentive, as though I had just been rude.
    Now that I’ve begun to write, these states seem to have dwindled and passed, probably because I try to describethem as accurately as possible. In describing them, I begin to remember them as belonging to a concluded period of my life, and the effort of remembering and formulating keeps me so busy that the short daydreams of the last few weeks have stopped. I look back on them as intermittent “states”: suddenly my day-to-day world—which, after all, consists only of images repeated
ad nauseam
over a period of years and decades since they were new—fell apart, and my mind became so empty that it ached.
    That is over now; I no longer fall into these states. When I write, I necessarily write about the past, about something which, at least while I am writing, is behind me. As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine. I am writing the story of my mother, first of all because I think I know more about her and how she came to her death than any outside investigator who might, with the help of a religious, psychological, or sociological guide to the interpretation of dreams, arrive at a facile explanation of this interesting case of suicide; but second in my own interest,