#david mclintock

[thomasbernhard]

And today it seems to me that we can count on the fingers of one hand all the people who have really meant anything to us in the course of our lives, and very often this one hand protests at our perversity in believing that we need a whole hand in order to count them, for to be honest we could probably make do without a single finger. There are times, however, when life is endurable, and at such times we occasionally manage to count three or four people to whom in the long run we owe something, and not just something but a great deal—people who have meant everything and been everything to us at certain critical moments or certain critical periods of our lives.

--Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (translation by David McLintock)

[garadinervi]

Thomas Bernhard, (1982), Wittgenstein's Nephew. A Friendship, Translation from the German by David McLintock, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 1989, pp. 86-90

[eunoiareview]

Yours

You own a house, I rent a council flat. Mostly we stay together round at yours, Cos you have a dog to walk and I do not. (That bloody dog once got me in its jaws: If I’d jaws like a dog’s I’d have had its throat: That would’ve been an end of scooping spoors.) So mostly we’re at yours. I prefer mine. What you call oppressive I find rinky-dink: The lounge convivial enough with a glass of wine, The…

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[thomasbernhard]

If we’re honest we have to admit that the universal process of stultification is now so far advanced that it can’t be reversed. This process of stultification was inaugurated well over a hundred years ago by the invention of photography, and since then the mental condition of the human race has been in permanent decline. This worldwide stultification was set in motion by photographic images and attained its present deadly momentum when the images began to move. Humanity has for decades been staring brainlessly at these deadly photographic images and become more or less paralyzed. Come the millennium, Gambetti, human beings will no longer be capable of thinking, and the process of stultification, inaugurated by the photograph and universalized by motion pictures, will have reached its apogee. It will scarcely be possible to exist in a world dominated by brainlessness, I said, and we’d do well to kill ourselves before this process of stultification has engulfed the whole world. To this extent it’s only logical, Gambetti, that by the millennium those who exist by thinking and through thinking should already have killed themselves. The only advice I can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium, Gambetti—that’s my genuine conviction.

–Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (English translation by David McLintock)

[thomasbernhard]

Every so often we feel fully competent to create a work of the mind, even one like Extinction, which has to be written down, but then we shy away from it, knowing that we shall probably not be able to stick it out, that we shall make quite good progress at first and then suddenly fail, with the result that all will be lost, and not just the time we have spent—and therefore wasted—in the attempt. We shall have made utter fools of ourselves, maybe not in front of others but in front of ourselves.

–Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (English translation by David McLintock)

[thomasbernhard]

We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggerations to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration. I’ve always found gratification in my fanatical faith in exaggeration, I told Gambetti. On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of. I know of none greater. No one has carried the art of exaggeration to such extremes, I told Gambetti, and if I were suddenly asked to say what I really was, secretly, I’d have to say that I was the greatest artist I knew in the field of exaggeration.

–Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (English translation by David McLintock)

[thomasbernhard]

For at least a hundred years we’ve had nothing but what I would call binder literature, lower-middle-class bureaucratic writing, and the masters of this literature are Musil and Thomas Mann, to say nothing of the others. The one exception is of course Kafka, who actually was a bureaucrat, though he didn’t write bureaucratic works, but none of the others could write anything else. Kafka, the bureaucrat, was the only one who produced not bureaucratic literature but great literature.

–Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (English translation by David McLintock)

[thomasbernhard]

No, this won’t be my office, I thought. I won’t let myself be tyrannized by the three-ring binders. Millions are tyrannized by three-ring binders and never escape their tyranny, I thought. For the last century the whole of Europe has let itself be tyrannized by three-ring binders, and the tyranny is increasingly oppressive. Soon the whole of Europe will not only be tyrannized by them but destroyed by them.

–Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (English translation by David McLintock)