are the same, and its only real measure is the desolation it leaves in its wake.
History is an uninterrupted series of catastrophes – shipwrecks, avalanches, take your pick – where nothing is less important than whether my poor self is going to be dragged under or buried alive. Only arrogant fools expect satisfaction from history; the ordinary, little person is always on the losing end in every brush with history.
And yet that house of ruins, that past built of catastrophes, is all we have.
Maria and I shared a love of Walter Benjamin. Both she and I placed him before all other philosophers, even before the majority of poets, but not above Trakl and Celan. How many bleak winter nights we spent in drunken discussions about his Arcades and the Angel of History... We both had a passion for knowledge, which is so rare in our time. Living in a provincial backwater surrounded by people who consider selfishness and greed an expression of faultless utilitarianism only intensified that passion. If you’ve never lived in the backwoods, you don’t know to what extent your enjoyment of knowledge sets you apart from others... How complete is the solitude of bibliophiles and thinkers, and how strongly such people bind together and become totally dependent on each other when they meet, against all probability, near the scaffolds of the soul that are our small towns.
I’m sure I still know all of Benjamin’s historic-philosophical theses off by heart today, just as Maria did. In the second thesis he says:
“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature, writes Lotze, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, is the freedom from envy, which the present displays toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly coloured by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to and women who could have given themselves to us (...)”
3
As if it wasn’t bizarre enough that I experienced the memories of other people, whose identity I woke up in, what I considered my own memory now lost all narrative continuity over time. Not only did I not know what I had in common with the people I remembered, but I didn’t even know what I had in common with the me I could remember.
My time seemed to shrink and then to scatter in all directions, forwards and backwards, up and down, into yesterday and tomorrow, exploding into thousands of droplets – fragments I tried again and again to unite, in vain. It was like a ball of wool that rolls down the hill into a stream and ends up all tangled in the waterweed, or like a piece of Czech porcelain from grandmother’s chest of drawers that falls to the terracotta floor. It demanded an exceptional effort to re-sort the findings about my own existence and assemble an even slightly convincing narrative about myself. Social contacts were becoming ever harder for me. I was terrified of questions and prop-phrases like ‘remember the time we...’ or ‘you know how...’ because I had no answers to them. Actually I did, but they weren’t socially acceptable. A short, honest ‘no’ was out of the question. No, I don’t remember. No, I don’t know you. No, I really don’t know who you are. Lots of little ‘noes’, which each individually and all together meant one thing: no, I don’t know who I am.
In turn, finding consolation in solitude now ceased being a matter of choice and became a necessity. If I wanted to stay outside of institutions I could be put into for my own good by people I knew nothing about, but who claimed to be well-intentioned and even friends, I had to reduce my contacts with the outside world. In that way I created the time I needed to tell myself about myself.
I built myself of water. I tried to give the water shape and hold it back, at least for long enough to glance at myself briefly in the mirror. All that I touched and all that I owned ran between my fingers, trickled away from me, met weirs and then changed course and shape, flowing, falling, gushing away and sinking into the ground, only to well up again, elusive and completely unable to retain any shape.
It was no easy task, but I managed to put my life in order so that I could function in spite of my ‘condition’, which was constantly worsening. There is only one recipe for happiness, and that is to desire as little as possible. A simple life, even if spent in privation, is the closest you’ll get to happiness. When you accept that you have little, most of the problems that have dogged you will vanish – because those problems were fuelled by all the futile efforts to gain more. It’s a simple matter: to have a lot takes a lot. Everything I had gained cost me dearly. It wasn’t worth it.
4
I only went out at night, when I could stroll through the deserted town to my heart’s content. No one was out in the streets after one in the morning except the schizophrenics hurriedly walking in the squeaky flip-flops they wore summer and winter alike, looking straight ahead. They were my brothers. Their families kept them under lock and key during the day because people in small towns try to hide what is considered shameful. They would let them out at night to get their fill of fresh air and wear themselves out on their sometimes long and always frenzied walks. Before dawn, they would be rounded up, like animals that have strayed from the flock, and returned to their rooms, where they would sleep all day on sedatives.
Drugged-up kids would squeeze into unmanageable cars and race to discos in the suburbs. They didn’t notice me. Young couples had fast sex in the woods and on the beaches. They had enough problems of their own even without me turning up – difficulties and embarrassments that, when the night’s amorous experiences were recounted the next day, would morph into anatomically impracticable acrobatics and fireworks of passion. Teenage sex is proof that Karl Kraus was right when he maintained that intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation. Out of consideration for the ordeal they were going through, I always gave the young people a wide berth and tried not to disturb them.
But most of all I liked the dawns. In nature, I have to admit, there is no kitsch. That is also the nicest thing that can be said about nature. It is people’s perspective that fouls everything up. When dawn comes like the writing on the wall and the day that arrives in its wake is unwelcome, like all it can possibly bring, there can be no kitsch even in the scene of a person standing at the shore and watching the morning rear up, slowly and terrifying like Godzilla – that gleaming monster one should flee before, to find a refuge and try to survive until the following night. Yes, the dawns were beautiful.
Beauty is difficult.
5
I wrote for the newspapers and that’s how I made ends meet. For a while, I used the money my grandmother had left to me, but I soon learned to save, and what I earned from six articles would last until the end of the month.
I wrote quickly and with ease, and what I wrote had an audience. They were commentary pieces at first, fiery and provocative. People liked to read them, especially those who didn’t agree with me – and there were quite a lot of them. If you tell people what they don’t want to hear in the way they least want to hear it, you’ll have their undivided attention and they will become your most loyal readers. I owed every single ‘success’ of my journalistic career, if we can call it that, to people who would curse and swear when reading my pieces, who would screw up the newspaper and trample on it, only then to wait impatiently for my next article that would drive them around them bend all over again.
Over time, I developed a special style of my own – a kind of hybrid – mixing investigative journalism, cultural criticism and conspiracy theories. The ‘investigative’ bit shouldn’t be taken literally. Naturally I didn’t have any ‘insider’ sources, access to classified information or anything like that. I examined information that had already been published and drafted my articles in the margins. But I dissected these texts like a forensic scientist, and a whole host of things came to light. I discovered logical lapses, discrepancies and incongruities
