Extinction (50 page)

this was by no means the first time you’d had the idea. You’ve often entertained it. You’ve even forced it on others and seen them come to grief when they’ve tried to realize this absurdest of all ideas. You’ve deliberately driven people to embrace it, knowing that it was doomed to failure; you’ve kept quiet about your own experience with this absurdest of all absurd ideas and left them to find out the truth for themselves. That was monstrous. I walked away from the Children’s Villa and went to the office. The Huntsmen’s Lodge was open, presumably so that the huntsmen could go in and out in order to relieve one another during their guard duty. I wouldn’t come to the office every day as Father had done, I thought. I wouldn’t take up residence there in order to deal with the
business mail
, to talk to the farm manager and other employees in this stifling atmosphere. Unlike my father, I wouldn’t have to treat this office as my natural habitat, I thought. My existence won’t be constricted, like my father’s, by the three-ring binders that finally crushed him. These binders at first constricted his existence, I thought, then one day fell on him and crushed him. That’s not just a vision, I thought, it’s stark reality. The business mail made Father a slave to the business. He subordinated his whole existence to the daily business mail, I thought. My grandparents stuck him in this office, by which in due course he was crushed. But it won’t crush me, I won’t let myself be crushed. The way the office is furnished is enough to crush anybody, I thought. I did not turn the light on, as I did not want to be discovered, though of course the huntsmen knew I was there. I’ll never enter this office as a farmer, I thought. I’m not a farmer, I’ve no interest in farming. One of the binders must contain details of the allowance that’s been paid to me all the years I’ve been away from Wolfsegg, I thought. I got up and looked for the relevant binder, but could not find one bearing my name. All sorts of names were inscribed on the various binders, but not mine. What was this
immense sum
to which my father always referred, with which my mother constantly reproached me, and which drew malevolent remarks from my sisters? They always maintained that I was
kept by Wolfsegg
, that I never hesitated
to demand more and more from the Wolfsegg funds
, that I subjected them to ever greater extortion. There must be a binder in which this immense sum was recorded, I thought, but I could not find it. I took down a number of them and leafed through them, but I could not find
the one relating to me—the fatal binder, I thought, recalling that my mother had once said I would
drop dead on the spot
if I knew how much money they had expended on me. On the wastrel who exploited Wolfsegg for his
dubious and disgusting purposes
—for his disgusting intellectual purposes, I thought. His lordship goes for walks in Rome while we slave away here, my father would tell everyone when he felt hostile toward me, and in recent years he always felt hostile toward me, when it had become clear that I had no intention of returning to Wolfsegg but was determined to stay in Rome, or at any rate somewhere far away, in some remote territory of the mind, so to speak. He had no compunction in running me down to all and sundry because of my monthly allowance, to which I was in any case fully entitled, I now thought, remembering all the money that they themselves threw out the window for the most ridiculous purposes—my mother’s mania for clothes, my father’s enthusiastic support for various associations, and my brother’s craze for motor-boats and yachts, all of which cost them far more than I did. It was true, I thought, that my sisters cost less than any of us, but they weren’t worth any more: it was a pity to spend even a penny on them. This stuffy office was practically my father’s home, I thought. It was to this desktop that he fled from his family, on his desktop that he wrote all those senseless business letters, like the one still lying on it. Sometimes he would mount a tractor and endure the stench and rattle of the engine in order to get away from his family; at other times he would flee to his office. In the last ghastly years of his life he was totally isolated. Pitiful, I thought. But then he courted such isolation and did nothing to counter it. Father was too weak to counter anything, I thought—it wasn’t his way. He preferred to follow this miserable path leading to total atrophy. Such tremendous natural beauty, I thought, and such a tremendous estate, yet Father led this pathetic office-bound existence! The office was to blame for the expressionless face he had in the end. The office ultimately destroyed him. His twice-yearly cultural trips, so called, no longer brought him any benefit. He set out on them reluctantly, already worn out; when he returned he was still worn out, sickened by yet another failure to escape from himself, and the office was once more his refuge. By imperceptible degrees he was being destroyed, partly by the family, who were bent upon his destruction, and partly by the office, where the accumulation of
bureaucratic imbecilities seemed calculated to crush him and his existence. Yet Father took refuge in these bureaucratic imbecilities, I thought, to escape his hysterical wife, my mother, and most of the time he locked himself in. Only the huntsmen had free access, no one else. The family had to make appointments to see him. If they knocked on the door unannounced they were not admitted. His implacable destroyers were forbidden to enter. I won’t let myself be destroyed and annihilated by this office, I thought. It won’t be
my
refuge. I won’t make the three-ring binders my secret, silent companions, as Father used to do for half a day or a whole day at a time and often, obscenely, for half the night, even the whole night. Father often called his office
the captain’s bridge
, but that’s not what it’ll be for me, I thought. I felt a sense of personal humiliation on recalling how my father used to call the office
the captain’s bridge
, for he never wielded a captain’s authority at Wolfsegg. The real authority was wielded by my mother, who let him go on prating about
the captain’s bridge
because she knew how ludicrous it sounded. 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 be not only tyrannized but destroyed by them. I once told Gambetti that it was above all the Germans who had let themselves be tyrannized by three-ring binders. Even their literature is subject to their tyranny, I told him. Every German book written in this century is a product of this tyranny. German literature has been tyrannized and almost destroyed by three-ring binders, I said. And this present-day literature, produced under this tyranny, is naturally the most pathetic there has ever been. No other age has seen such a helpless, pathetic literature, a ludicrous desktop literature dictated by three-ring binders. At least that’s how it seems to me whenever I read a recently written book. All these books are utterly pathetic, I said, written by authors who all their lives have let themselves be totally dominated by three-ring binders. All we have now is a petit bourgeois bureaucratic literature, I told Gambetti. This applies even to the great figures in German literature, I said, even to Thomas Mann, even to Musil, whom I rate highest among all these exponents of bureaucratic
literature. Even Musil produced only dreary bureaucratic works. The whole of this literature is middle class through and through, and for the most part lower middle class, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Even Thomas Mann and Musil, in every line they wrote, let themselves be dominated by three-ring binders. Reading this literature, we see how a bureaucrat writes, a more or less lower-middle-class bureaucrat who draws his inspiration ultimately from the three-ring binder files. The patrician Thomas Mann produced thoroughly lower-middle-class works, I told Gambetti, addressed to lower-middle-class readers who fall upon them with gusto. 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. One can’t say this of any of the so-called great German authors of our century, Gambetti, unless one wishes to make common cause with the millions of scribblers who write for the cultural pages of the press and in the past hundred years have turned the newspapers into a cultural soup kitchen, regurgitating their hair-raising misconceptions
ad nauseam
. In this century the Germans have basically produced literature dominated by three-ring binders, which I have no hesitation in calling binder literature, because I don’t want to risk being compromised at some future date, when this binder literature is recognized for what it is and consigned to the trash can of literary history, which is where it belongs. On the other hand, the literature of the present day is our literature, and we’ll have to live with it, like it or not, because we’re
committed to it
, I said, not without a touch of pathos. Our literature actually has many imposing peaks, I said, but we mustn’t compare them with the likes of Shakespeare. Gambetti listened attentively, I thought, but without taking me seriously. I thought it a pity that he did not take me seriously on the subject of modern German literature. I concluded my disquisition by saying, as if to console him, But Maria is the exception, meaning that some of Maria’s poems were superior to anything else written in German in her time—that is to say, in our time. He may have understood this as a charming jest prompted by friendship, but it was the truth. I
seriously believed that Maria’s poems represented a high point in German literature, not just in our own dingy decades but in the whole of the century, which would probably end without reaching another such high point. As I see it, Gambetti, the Germans and the Austrians are so enfeebled—and will continue so for at least another half century—that neither they nor we will reach another such peak. For I’ve given up believing in miracles, Gambetti. In any case, I added, it’s unlikely that by the end of the century the world will still exist as we now know it, as we have to put up with it day after day. I very much doubt that it will. Everything seems to indicate that it will change so radically as to become unrecognizable. It will be totally changed, totally destroyed. Everything points to this, I said, and then I added, But this vision of mine comes supplied with inbuilt error. Whereupon Gambetti burst into his usual unrestrained laughter. We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration 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. Gambetti again burst into his characteristic laughter, which promptly infected me, so that that afternoon on the Pincio we both laughed more than ever before. But of course this too is an exaggeration, I realize as I come to write it down—a typical instance of my art of exaggeration. The art of exaggeration, I told Gambetti, is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible. The older I get, the more I resort to this art, I told Gambetti. Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators. Whatever they were, whatever they achieved, they owed solely to the art of exaggeration. The painter who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor painter, the musician who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor musician, and the writer who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor writer, I said. With some, of course, the art of exaggeration consists
in
understating
everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerate understatement, that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration, Gambetti. Exaggeration is the secret of great art, I said, and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavor. I now left the Huntsmen’s Lodge without pursuing this undoubtedly absurd idea, which would assuredly have proved correct had I developed it. On my way to the Farm, I went up to the Children’s Villa, reflecting that it was the Children’s Villa that had prompted these absurd speculations.
Extinction
, I thought, turning away from the Children’s Villa and walking toward the Farm—why not? I’ll need a lot of time—more than a year, maybe two years, maybe even three. 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. Not wanting to expose ourselves to such discomfiture, we refuse to make a start, even when we think we are capable of doing so. We procrastinate, as though afraid of being grossly embarrassed, I thought, of grossly embarrassing ourselves. We expect others to perform well, outstandingly well, but we ourselves don’t perform at all; we don’t come up with even the most risible mental product. But that’s how it is, I thought: of everyone else we demand the highest achievements, but we ourselves achieve nothing. Not wishing to lay ourselves open to the awful humiliation of failure, we repeatedly shelve our plan for a written product of the mind and take refuge in any excuse, any subterfuge, that serves our turn. We are suddenly too craven to begin. Yet all the time we have this product of the mind in our heads and want to produce it, come what may. We’ve decided on it, we tell ourselves, and for days, weeks, years, perhaps even for decades, we go around telling ourselves that we have decided on it, yet we never get down to it. What we have in mind is something tremendous, we tell ourselves; sometimes we even tell others, being too vain to keep it to ourselves, but all we are capable of is something utterly risible. I’m going to write something tremendous, I tell myself, yet at the same moment I am afraid