Thursday, January 11, 2007

As people say

"I often tried to come closer to the truth, to this understanding of truth, even if only through silence. Through nothing. I didn't succeed. I never got beyond the attempts. There was always an ocean in the way, my inability to tie her heart, as people say, to mine. Just as I never succeed in coming into harmony with the truth, so nothing in my life succeeded, except my dying. I never wanted to die, and yet never tried to compel anything more rigorously. To make the world die in me, and myself die in the world, and everything to cease as though it had never been. Night is much darker yet than any notion of night, and day is just a gloomy and unbearable interval." He wanted to go home. We walked up the ravine.
From Thomas Bernhard's Frost, page 179, translated by Michael Hofmann.

6 comments:

  1. god, this is amazing, extraordinary, shattering.... thankyou for posting it.

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  2. "Interesting man, this Thomas Bernhard." (Beckett, very shortly before he died.)

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  3. thanks for posting that. it has a big star next to it in my edition.

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  4. Anonymous8:27 pm

    @Qlipoth

    How did you find that out?

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  5. qlipoth must be thinking of this quote from SB: "Erzählen Sie mir von Bernhard, wo wohnt er? Wie ist er?"

    I got this from:
    http://ausloeschung.spirgi.com/

    ReplyDelete
  6. The SB quote is from James Knowlson's Beckett biography, 'Damned to Fame'.

    ReplyDelete

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