Showing posts with label Thomas Bernhard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Bernhard. Show all posts

Monday, July 29, 2013

On the revelation of the Ostmark Bell

Apparently, it wasn't just hyperbole:

The bishops...will be followed--with measured tread, as they say--by the Gauleiters, the SS officers, and the members of the Blood Order. And these will be followed by the National Socialist Catholic population, I thought. And the music will be played by our National Socialist Catholic band. The National Socialist salvos will be fired, and the National Socialist bells will toll. And if we're in luck, our National Socialist sun will shine throughout the ceremony, and if we're out of luck we'll be drenched by the National Socialist rain.

[From Thomas Bernhard's, Extinction, trans. by David McLintock, after the narrator Franz-Josef Murau sees the guest list for the funeral of his parents--who were Nazi supporters through the aftermath of World War II--and brother, at the family estate of Wolfsegg, in Austria.]

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Sketches, May 9 - In the tone of Bernhard

On the 14th of August, already suffering from a pulmonary infection that the doctor had said might not be remediable, I joined my ex-mentor for a trip along the Dardanelles, by sea, in fact, against my doctor's wishes and much too soon for any such engagement or activity, but keeping this in mind although weakened from the same infection I joined him at a disregard for any spreading, for he had required my attention and had required such attention immediately on the 14th with no wavering. It had been too long, he had told me with a stern coolness, asking if I had been keeping up with my reading of Kant, and as much as I wished to lie I had felt invigorated too much to be in his presence and told him I had not, and without any disappointment over the fact of my neglect he had instead set a table inside the sailing vessel we were about to embark on. I had steeled myself for this discussion of Kant, for his disappointment over my not having kept up with Kant, as my ex-mentor had on his last lesson been preparing me for his discussion on Kant, on Kant's sublime and how it relates to the overall full fleshing of Kant's very specific aesthetics, of how the sublime was at the heart of his aesthetics, and thus at the heart of all aesthetics after him, how the sensation of  beauty either mechanistic or awesome was at the base the starting point for a discussion of all learned discussions on the subject of beauty after Kant, but instead he asked me where I was now living, and as I coughed once, for the sea air tickled too harshly the base of the infection, I realized instead that his scorn was about to be placed elsewhere.