He told us to look down into the valley at the workmen dangling from the wooden bridge. “I have to pay for all these people sitting around doing nothing, I have to pay for them. I pay these people for a disability of nature, for a disability of nature I pay all these useless people!” It seemed to me that the tone in which he says the word people indicates an enormous aloofness from people.
“In the past,” the prince continued, “in the past, I had difficulty, just as you do, Doctor, in probing and mastering a single subject within a single problem, in penetrating the perilously varied heights and depths of a single aspect of a single train of thought; but those difficulties now seem to me insignificant compared to the state of absolute necessity in which I am now forced to operate in the greatest imaginable number of simultaneous areas in order to make any sense at all. And it is horribly plain that no limits exist any more for those areas, for as far as I am concerned I have truly arrived at the point where limitlessness has become a certainty. I have reached the permanent derangement of advanced age, the more and more philosophical, philosophistic isolation of the mind: the point where everything is continually present in consciousness, where the brain as such no longer exists.… The truth is that I more and more believe I am everything, because in reality I am no longer anything, and in consequence I can only feel everything human, everything humanly possible, as shameful. After the play I became fully conscious of this state in relation principally to my relatives, those relatives whom I have always called incapable of perception. More clearly than ever before I became aware of a tremendous remoteness and alienation, which simultaneously is the greatest possible closeness and comradeship in suffering, but not a comradeship in torment. I have always shared suffering with other people, but never torment. It seems to me that throughout my life I have continually had only one single thought: What potentialities for unremitting effort there are in the human mind! And I have long thought,” the prince said, “that what I am immersed in is nothing but torment, a torment that is my own, that belongs only to me, that is inherent in my nature, that is my own nature, already removed from the human capacity for suffering, matured out of it, matured out of all human potentialities. Here in Hochgobernitz, where everything of late has given me continual pain, it has seemed quite natural that this thin air of the heights should be so destructive. Yet if I were but a generation back, or had a different sort of brain, I too would be fundamentally incapable of perception like the others. For a long time the realization of that fact has been a source of the deepest torment to me, and simultaneously of the greatest pleasure.”
From the outer wall we went to the inner wall. The prince pointed out that in the course of only thirty years he had been able to double the property he inherited from his father, “contrary to all rumors,” he said, “contrary to the whole political development in Europe, to the development of the whole world.” All his life, he said, he had thought about enlarging Hochgobernitz, and one day he had observed that Hochgobernitz had in fact been doubled in size. “But my son,” he said, “will destroy Hochgobernitz as soon as he receives it into his hands.”
Last night, the prince said, he had had a dream. “In this dream,” he said, “I was able to look at a sheet of paper moving slowly from far below to high up, paper on which my own son had written the following. I see every word that my son is writing on that sheet of paper,” the prince said. “It is my son’s hand writing it. My son writes: As one who has taken refuge in scientific allegories I seemed to have cured myself of my father for good, as one cures oneself of a contagious disease. But today I see that this disease is an elemental, shattering fatal illness of which everyone without exception dies. Eight months after my father’s suicide—note that, Doctor, after his father’s suicide, after my suicide; my son writes about my suicide!—eight months after my father’s suicide everything is already ruined, and I can say that I have ruined it. I can say that I have ruined Hochgobernitz, my son writes, and he writes: I have ruined this flourishing economy! This tremendous, anachronistic agricultural and forest economy. I suddenly see, my son writes,” the prince said, “that by liquidating the business even though or precisely because it is the best, I am for the first time implementing my theory, my son writes!” the prince said. “I have taken my first steps in reality, my son writes. From the office I see Moser coming, he writes (Moser is the town clerk); the man I hate is approaching, my son writes. I tell myself: I know what he wants, but he might want something else, but no, he is trying it for the third time. This is the third time I have observed Moser, my son writes,” the prince said. “From the window of the office, with the fog gone, that utterly Londonlike English fog, I can now see down to the woods. I see the whole area outside the window and all the way down to the woods when I look out, and it is a looking out against my personal elemental fear, my son writes. In reality, he writes, possibly due to my even more heightened antipathy against myself ever since my return from England and against everything else, and due also to my more or less catastrophic though fantastic solitude, and likewise to my base fear of suddenly being surprised by that intruder Moser, possibly also due to a frightful situation that I am afraid of—the drastic changes within the briefest time in my physical and mental state—due to all this, my son writes, not a minute passes without my looking out of the window. Or at least every two or three minutes I look out of the window and survey the fields, and I try to determine whether anything is moving in the woods. For it often happens, my son writes, that somebody is hiding in the woods, forcing himself to immobility among the trees, out of sheer cunning; but as soon as he thinks himself unobserved he moves swiftly and with incredible speed toward his victim. Actually, my son writes, Town Clerk Moser must have been standing immobile among the trees for some time. Everything about him as he trotted across the fields toward the castle indicated that a period of time had passed, and naturally it is connected with his intentions and therefore with me; he gave himself time to think out a plan which concerns me and of course is harmful to me.… From the first moment I saw him, my son writes, this man has been suspect, suspect, and less because of his repulsive physical appearance than because of his base cast of mind, in which all the nastiness of his disgusting categories seemed to come together in a single, continuous evil dangerous to everyone. The man is a constant, disgusting outrage—listen, Doctor, to what my son writes. He writes: For my father this man did not exist at all (actually he is an excellent man because he is endowed with a dismal despicableness in the most dreaded sense; at every moment his physiognomy gave the lie on every count to the entire world of humanity); but I have managed to escape entirely the impact of this habitual criminal who has run around at liberty all his life, who has never come into conflict with the law and never will because the world is too stupid. I actually watched Moser long before he emerged from the woods, listen, Doctor, listen, and I even know precisely, my son writes, that he appeared at the very moment in today’s reading that I had come to that dangerous agitating sentence which says that in bourgeois revolutions bloodshed, terror, and political assassination are the indispensable weapons in the hands of the rising classes. I saw Moser emerge from among the pine trunks in one of the most rapid movements the eye can possibly observe, and then, after two or three minutes, when I looked out of the window again as is my habit, I suddenly see him crossing the meadow, coming along the outer wall of the castle. I recognized him at once as Town Clerk Moser, and I say to myself: Vulgar motion in itself. I stand up, my son writes, and go into the vestibule and close the front door which I had left open because it had suddenly turned warm, but probably left open too long anyhow because it was suddenly cold again; in this house you have to be very sensitive about when to open the doors and windows and when to close them again, so that it is neither too warm nor too cold, and every window and every door demands a different rhythm of opening and shutting,” the prince said, “and the weather here, I see, is unlike the weather in England, changing completely every hour, it could
certainly drive you out of your mind if you plunged too deeply into this absolutely unlearnable science. Even as I closed the front door, my son writes,” the prince said, “disturbed in my reading as I was, wrenched out of it, I suddenly no longer knew what was the point of the sentence which after my fashion I had multiplied and divided again about a hundred times, or the second sentence which I had repeated loudly and clearly: The proletarian revolution needs no terrorism to accomplish its aims, for it despises killing people—even as I closed the door I thought that I would not admit the Town Clerk Moser. I draw the curtains, my son writes,” the prince said. “After all, I might be away, he writes, and he writes: I actually draw the curtains, but then open them again because it seems to me ridiculous that I should draw them on account of Town Clerk Moser. After all, I think, has Town Clerk Moser already so much power over a Saurau that I have to make any pretenses for his benefit? To make any pretenses to him and to myself? To have to draw the curtains to shut him out, close the door to shut him out … and I draw the curtains open again as far as possible and return to the vestibule and open the door as far as possible. Suddenly it is warm again; Moser is only about a hundred paces away from me, already on the inner walls, is now walking more slowly. I had wondered at the speed with which Moser trotted across the meadow, for he is said to suffer from heart disease, and as I know for sure, once or twice a year spends several weeks in a sanatorium for cardiac patients in Holzöster, paid for by the District Health Insurance Fund. On the inner walls he trotted even faster than he had on the meadow, which I haven’t had mowed for the past eight months. As long as I live, my son writes,” the prince said, “I am thinking now of my breakthrough into reality, of my triumph over my theories, as long as I exist this meadow will never be mowed again; as long as I exist nothing profitable or useful will ever again be done on these fields—on mine! on mine! I think. Never again, do you hear, Doctor, never again, never again,” the prince said. “From now on the Saurau fields are nothing but useless, unprofitable fields.… Moser is typical of the baseness and depravity of the individual human being, my son writes; Moser is typical, he writes, of the baseness and depravity of the state. Moser can be used for proof of anything except the slightest touch of idealism. He embodies the fact, which surely no one can be entirely ignorant of, that man is base and depraved, and that his begetter, insofar as he is the begetter, is even baser and more depraved than he himself. Moser discredits the world and its creator. Suddenly I think, my son writes, isn’t it wretched to play a part before such a person as Moser? I should have received him right at the door, where I was still preoccupied with the most ludicrous thoughts about Moser. But no, my son writes, I won’t receive him at the door. That would only be reacting as if I were ready for the poorhouse. For even without the slightest, strangest secret fear of Moser I should from the first have stayed sitting behind my desk in the office and I should have received Moser where I was before I discovered Moser coming. Imagine, I am not able to cope with Moser, whom I always call an idiot whenever I think of him, although I never say the word aloud. A Saurau is not able to cope with a Moser! But there was no longer any means of undoing the situation, and so it no longer mattered where I received the town clerk, at the door or in the office. In any case, I think, the man is one of the sort who without more ado would walk right in through an unlocked door into a house or even into a castle, and then open one door after another, hypocritically asking in each room whether anybody is there. But Moser knows, my son writes, that I spend all the time I am not asleep in the office; how he knows that I don’t know, but I know that he knows. In saying the name Moser you are naming a person who knows absolutely everything that is useful to him. And he knows, my son writes, that in order to read—the last time, too, he interrupted me in the middle of my reading: Schumpeter, Rosa Luxemburg, Morus, Clara Zetkin—I stay in the office because of the view, not in the library, whenever I am not asleep. And for him it is important to know that when I am in the office I am not there, as my dead father was, working hard on the estate, except insofar as I plan to destroy it, to destroy the entire estate, do you hear, Doctor, to destroy the entire estate is not precisely a way of working hard for the Saurau estate! I spend my time meditating on my revenge upon my father—possibly not only for an injustice centuries old, but thousands of years old. In the time remaining to me I shall still be able to define it exactly. This whole vast ancestral agricultural enterprise has more and more come to seem to me a mistake grown to vast proportions, my son writes. I read in the office, he writes, and the reading disgusts me too, but still I read. Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust. For Moser it is valuable, my son writes, to know among other things that I stay in the office in order to read. The fact is that I regard the absurdity of reading among hundreds of files and calculating machines meant for the farms and forests, in which nothing is filed and nothing calculated any more—I regard that absurdity as my father’s absurdity. Here, now that he is dead, I am working out my revenge complex. Here, where I inhale to the brink of losing consciousness five hundred years of disciplined labor on farm and forest, I read Kautsky, Babeuf, Turati, and such people. My father knows that I have already, although so far only inside my head, alienated the whole of Hochgobernitz from its true purposes. And he certainly scents that total alienation where he is. In heaven? So I sit reading in the office, my son writes—listen to what he writes, Doctor,” the prince said, “and Moser goes around saying: Young Saurau now reads in the office where his father worked! Moser often asks, and always at the moment most favorable to him, my son writes,” the prince said, “what I am or what I am not, but he always says that I am crazy. I hear, even when I do not hear, how he constantly says I am crazy. Whenever he speaks of me anywhere the word damaging occurs, neither too frequently nor too rarely, even though whenever he says a spoiled son it sounds miserable because everything about Moser is miserable. But Moser is careful not to appear miserable. I think: Actually and oddly enough, Moser never appears ridiculous to my eyes, my son writes,” the prince said, “never, because his baseness is without sharpness, without any comical or tragicomical element. He annoys me and is hated by the few people who have schooled themselves to insight into human nature, but whenever I think of Moser, my son writes, even my annoyance turns into hatred. The defect annoys me, but I hate Moser. Here I am engaged in a task which demands the fullest mental effort, the capacity to exert ever more painful discipline in order to draw everything insofar as it is possible on the thread of a single thought from far below the horizon up out of the void. When such a person as Moser appears, he scatters by his approach all that has been painfully pinned down for use and for consumption. To the degree that Moser approaches, he destroys what I have discovered in the course of reading for a whole morning and half an afternoon, and as soon as Moser is there, nothing at all is left, my son writes. Moser, my son writes; proved this contention by his present approach. I suddenly felt a depressing relaxation of the brain, an increasing sense that I am lost, obviously; because of Moser the intensity is displaced into what is trivial to me. I could say it more simply, my son writes,” the prince said. “Moser comes and my intelligence goes. I was struck by the self-importance with which these base creatures walk, my son writes, for Moser was now no more than a few steps away from me. Every step a Moser takes is taken as if he were important. Stupidity takes these steps, I think. Whereas people of acceptable intelligence walk casually, often utterly casually, the base, low person walks self-importantly. The extraordinary person walks casually, my son writes. But workmen, for example, and farmers, people who work with their hands in general, walk self-importantly. But I also reckon among the self-important walkers three quarters of the entire intelligentsia, my son writes. The journalists, the writers, the artists, all bureaucrats, walk self-importantly, and the most self-important walkers of all are the new politicians. Those who take the most casual steps of all,” the prince said, “those who walk utterly casually and therefore have the ga
it of genius, my son writes, are only the independent in spirit. But when do we ever see someone who is independent in spirit? Actually my father had, my son writes, not entirely a casual walk, but still a more casual one, and my grandfather set no store on his walk at all.… Oddly enough, Moser’s walk always reminds me of the walk of many different kinds of convicts at one and the same time.… Moser really has some of the air of a captured criminal, but in everything about him there is also something implying a secret that only he knows. Something triumphant. I have frequently thought about what the underlying nastiness of Moser is, wherein his baseness lies. The moment he stands before me, I think: He dares! Without managing to sum up in my mind just what it is he dares. I say to myself: How dare this man! And he wants to shake hands with me, but I don’t take his hand. Moser doesn’t even expect me to admit him, my son writes; I have never yet admitted him to Gobernitz. He doesn’t know the castle from inside, not at all, but he would not be Moser, my son writes,” the prince said, “if he were not acquainted with the interior of the castle in spite of that. There it is again, the uncanniness that invariably comes at me when Moser approaches. If Moser so much as entered the vestibule I would have felt that the place was soiled for a lifetime. The cunning with which these Mosers lie in wait for some poor devil and denounce him, the way these Mosers are always sniffing out circumstantial evidence on everything; these Mosers bring everybody into court, I think, or at least into disrepute. Because I did not shake hands with him, my son writes, and because I gave him no greeting at all, Moser has taken a step backward. These Mosers are always on the lookout for something that can involve others in criminality. What a nose they have for every slightest weakness, what an instinct for exploiting weaknesses. I think, my son writes: Imagine masses of Mosers who suddenly emerge from everywhere and begin running things everywhere and finally dominate everything! I have cheated Moser out of his preface, my son writes; now he has to come to the point immediately: the harvest! I said I had no time, my son writes; I said he was disturbing me, that I was working, that I imagine he is not unaware that I work by reading, that I am working on Marx’s dissertation, on his Opinions on the Relationship of the Physics of Democritus and Epicurus, on The Difficulties in Regard to the Identity of the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. And I actually said a word to Moser for the first time, my son writes, the word reading, to indicate that I had no time for his pleadings. I said I wondered that Moser had come, my son writes. After all, he was aware of my decision to let the harvest rot, aware of my decision to let Hochgobernitz decay, to liquidate Hochgobernitz, aware of my consistent resolve to destroy Hochgobernitz, my son writes, Doctor. I said I did not understand his not understanding what I am doing, but I know what I am doing, my son writes,” the prince said. “Nevertheless Moser now proposes to me, for the third time, imagine, my son writes, that I allow some of the townspeople, the majority recruited from the old-age home, into the Hochgobernitz fields, into my fields, so that they can harvest the crops! They would like to harvest before everything rots! Moser dared to say that already a good deal has rotted and furthermore to ask was I aware of that and, but he did not say this outright, that I am crazy and my father would turn over in his grave on my account, that only a madman did not harvest, only a madman would let such a flourishing farm run down. And actually, my son writes, Doctor, the fact that I am letting my paternal inheritance run down and be destroyed is in truth a monstrous act! Actually I am surely the only person in Central Europe who is letting nine thousand six hundred acres run down! Now for Moser’s world, the whole world of the township—the whole ordinary world is a Moser world, the whole state is a Moser state—it is in itself a monstrous act that for a reason they absolutely cannot fathom I have sold all the livestock, have sold off all the movable inventory from the Hochgobernitz fields, have driven all the people out of the house—within one week after the old man’s suicide I had them out of the house! Today that seems to me my greatest feat, my son writes,” the prince said. “My son writes: It is splendid that I also sent my father’s sisters packing, every single one of them! That with one fell swoop I had Hochgobernitz entirely to myself, that is splendid! But then, my son writes, everyone might have thought that I meant to run a completely automated farm, without livestock and without people.… But soon they saw that I was not running any kind of farm at all, that my whole aim was to destroy the entire business, to destroy all of Hochgobernitz. Within a single morning I got rid of all the machinery and tractors. The monstrosity of my act surpassed their strength, and they informed the courts, the district and state governments. In vain.… All that comes back into my memory now, my son writes, the very moment that Moser again throws at me that word harvest. You see, Moser says, they’d like to harvest before everything rots. I can’t be serious about letting everything rot, he says! But Moser too knows there is no law that can prescribe what I must do on the combined estates that make up Hochgobernitz. Harvest! Again I hear what I have heard often before, about distress in the township, distress of the people, human distress, poverty, community, race, the problem of vermin, and so on, my son writes. But how does this man dare, he writes, to repeatedly bring up a subject that is finished with. Hochgobernitz is finished! I am totally committed to my consistent decisions. I say: Herr Moser, you are disturbing me! my son writes. That is all. I do not have the strength to turn my back, to ignore Moser. He is here! Moser is here! For a moment I see all the roads and paths leading to my fields, which I have blocked off. Everywhere signs have been posted : No trespassing. The town clerk, too, has to obey that prohibition, for here on my property trespassing is forbidden to all, to everybody! Except the deliverers of newspapers. I now see myself once more digging ditches in the roads, felling tree trunks over them, unrolling hundreds and hundreds upon hundreds of yards of barbed wire, my son writes. Doctor,” the prince said, “doesn’t all this strike you as uncanny? Naturally, my son writes, what I am doing cannot help seeming insane, but that does not disturb me. The Moser tone has always pained me; these Mosers don’t give up, they keep trying again and again, always under some different pretext; but today there is an unbearable stench of insistence about him. He talks about public health! I am abandoning theory for practice, my son writes: But I discover, he writes, no trace of uncertainty in myself. At the moment the uncertainty is all Moser’s, and I think: I do not recall ever having greeted Moser, not a single time. And now, listen, Doctor, he writes: My father too never greeted Moser, but that did not prevent the town clerk, whenever I met him or whenever my father met him, every single time, from pushing his way into me or into my father for one painful moment by greeting us. The utter trickery of it! His purpose was to soil one or the other of us. Once the Mosers penetrate into you everything inside you is leprous, my son writes. Such a person can never be tolerated, he writes, no, such a person can never be tolerated. I hear, my son writes, that he has already recruited the people he needs for harvesting the Hochgobernitz fields, and he says on behalf of the mayor, of course, and on behalf of public health. They have all been told to be at the town hall at six tomorrow morning, he says; all they are waiting for is my permission! For permission from above, handed down from Hochgobernitz! I think that people are always obtaining permission from above, always handed down from a Hochgobernitz. But I will permit nothing! The township will supply the implements, the machines, Moser says. It is estimated, Moser says again and again, looking at me and not looking at me, my son writes, that the yield will suffice to feed a few thousand people for a period of more than half a year! No, I say, and Moser says that this year’s crop is the best crop. The town clerk is clever at cutting his sentences short because he knows that even his hints are enough to get on my nerves. Before everything rots, Moser says emotionally. I hear him speak several times about doing good, but I am deaf to this notion; there is no such thing as doing good, I say. A high hourly wage has been agreed on for harvesting my fields, Moser says, but he does not say how high an hourly wage. No matter what the
season, I think, this man always has the same winter woolens on, these cheap, heavy winter wartime woolens that his body slowly fills out, his body which I once saw completely naked, my son writes,” the prince said. “I see Moser’s flesh more and more growing into those wartime woolens. I once saw him naked by the river, together with his equally naked wife; I remember that infantile penis. There they were, indulging their pitiable Sunday connubiality behind the bushes, away from the clear water, where they thought they were alone and could indulge themselves in their revolting intimacies, succumbing to their stupor in the sunset. The harvesting had to be started at once, Moser said, otherwise everything would rot. A short while later I hear the word inhumanity repeated. Again and again I hear the word inhumanity. Now, at this third attempt to save Hochgobernitz, Moser dares to use that word, and I think: As long as I exist, nothing more will ever be harvested here, on my estates; that is going to be my object for all the future; I am destroying Hochgobernitz. He dares! the masses have become megalomaniac. The word inhumanity, which the masses through Moser have dared to utter here in the courtyard of Hochgobernitz, preoccupies me for some time, time that, failing in my attempt to return to my reading, to return to my science, I fill by reading through sentences I do not understand. Moser has failed, I say to myself, but I too have failed. Moser is escaping, but I too am escaping. Where to? Moser’s defeat, the defeat of the masses, is also my own defeat. But my defeat is much more depressing a one than Moser’s, I think. Vexation gives way to a weariness that leads to nothing significant. I look out through the window, my son writes, and see Moser between the walls. A short while later I think: Moser walked there, walked away, I can see where he walked away. Inhumanity! I could no longer bear staying in the castle and put on my boots and went out of the castle and walked first on the inner and then on the outer walls, and peered down with my binoculars to determine to what extent everything has already rotted, my son writes,” the prince said. “Isn’t it curious,” the prince said, “so long a roll of paper and I see every word of it. So it is no longer a mystery to me what will happen after my death,” the prince said. “It is all perfectly clear to me.”
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