#thomas bernhard

[punti-disutura]

“Ho passato la vita cercando di liberarmi di me stesso, […] invano.”

Thomas Bernhard, Amras.

[edwordsmyth]

"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. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, 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

[amicus-noctis]

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

Painting: "Still-Life with a Skull" by Philippe de Champaigne

[lascitasdelashoras]

Thomas Bernhard, Café Bräunerhof ,1988, por Sepp Dreissinger

[derangedrhythms]

Now he understood her, who had lived beside him so many years and been loved but never understood. You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles, tr. Richard and Clara Winston

[schizografia]

I genitori non esistono, esistono soltanto dei criminali che procreano nuovi esseri umani e che procedono con grandissima stoltezza e ottusità contro il nuovo essere umano da essi procreato, e in questa attività criminosa sono appoggiati dai governi, i quali non hanno alcun interesse ad avere un essere umano informato e quindi effettivamente adeguato ai tempi, poiché costui agirebbe, come è ovvio, contro i loro fini, e così da milioni e da miliardi di imbecilli saranno generati in continuazione, verosimilmente per altri decenni e probabilmente per secoli, milioni e miliardi di imbecilli.

Thomas Bernhard, Autobiografia

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Marcel Duchamp

* * * *

“The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.”

- Joseph Campbell

+ “We brood about what we should have done differently or better or what we should not have done, because we are doomed to do so, but it does not lead anywhere. The disaster was inevitable, is what we then say and for a while, if only a short while, we are quiet. Then we start all over again asking questions and probing and probing until we have gone half crazy. We constantly look for someone responsible, or for several persons responsible, in order to make things bearable for ourselves at least for a moment, and naturally, if we are honest, we invariably end up with ourselves. We have reconciled ourselves to the fact that we have to exist, even though most of the time against our will, because we have no other choice, and only because we have again and again reconciled ourselves to this fact, every day and every moment anew, can we progress at all.”

- Thomas Bernhard Yes [both via Whiskey River]

[proustiansleep]

"The truth is that I am happy only when I am sitting in the car, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. I am happy only when I am traveling; when I arrive, no matter where, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only between places. Years ago I believed that such a fatal condition would soon lead inevitably to total madness, which I have dreaded all my life, but in fact it preserved me from it. My friend Paul suffered from the same disease: for many years he was always traveling, simply in order to get away from one place and go to another, but he never succeeded in finding happiness on arrival. This was something we often talked about. In the first half of his life he traveled back and forth between Paris and Vienna, between Madrid and Vienna, and between London and Vienna, as was normal for someone of his background and means. I did the same—naturally on a more modest scale, though no less obsessively—switching between Nathal and Vienna, between Venice and Vienna, even between Rome and Vienna. I am the happiest traveler—when I am on the move, moving on or moving off—but the unhappiest arriver. Clearly this is a morbid condition."

—Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew