He could explain the whole vicinity to us even in the darkness, the prince said after we had been walking slowly on the outer wall for a long time. “But whatever appeal it might have would be for myself alone. Therefore I won’t explain the vicinity to you. The darkness alone makes it possible, you know, that we are walking where we are walking right here and now,” he said. And then: “I often hear sounds that announce my son is coming, and I ask his sisters or my sisters whether they have also heard them. I heard them clearly. They do not hear them. I go to the window repeatedly and look out to see whether he is coming. I know that he will not be arriving for four or five hours, but I have already been looking out the window for the longest while. I hear him coming daily. Coming toward me daily, while I am more and more disappointed by him. For years now I have also seen my death distinctly before me. And as actual dying gradually emerges from imaginary dying, so the actual approach of my son gradually emerges from his imaginary approach. For hours I look at the quiet that prevails here. I know that this quiet has always prevailed; it is a completely unchanged quiet which has changed me, is changing me, is changing us all. Time, doctor, is quiet even in the face of nature. Once,” the prince said, “I gradually turned all the clocks in Hochgobernitz back an hour every day, until we in Hochgobernitz were suddenly three days behind. I actually could have turned the clocks in Hochgobernitz back by several days, weeks, years. I had fun with that. Anyone who lives a little longer every day, if only a few minutes, at the end has saved up a whole lifetime,” the prince said. “I have a habit you know, of taking all the pictures in Hochgobernitz down from the walls once a week and changing their places according to a system that I alone know, four ahead, two back, then again six ahead, eight back. All through the years up to the present day I have kept up this custom. Whenever my sisters or my daughters see me at that, I seem crazy to them. Perfidious mockery of perfidy,” the prince said, “that is what we have in the never-changing observational material at the disposal of all of us here in Hochgobernitz. When I think of the many costume parties, masked balls, garden festivals, pavilion festivals, and plays that we have already given, seen here! Of the thousands of people who have come up and gone down again! Sometimes I hear them arriving, driving away, turning up, going down; I see them in the rhythm of my old age. I hear them laughing. I hear them in their laughter, fading away. The laughter up here is plainly something primordially human,” the prince said. “Hochgobernitz as a center of pure entertainment,” he said, “of magic acts. In the past the most famous magicians showed their turns here, the most famous singers sang, the most famous actors acted, the most famous writers read from their works, the most famous philosophers philosophized. Here, at one time or another the most famous of all virtuosi assembled. The virtuosi of the world met here to take leave of one another. Here,” the prince said, “everything was once always the most costly, the most impressive, the most astonishing. At certain times all the languages in the world were spoken here. Hochgobernitz as a climactic point of its history in history,” the prince said. “The torment is inside my body like a second body, inside my whole body like a second whole body. I dream of my amazing studies, all of which I have given up, for I no longer study at all, you know. I always pace back and forth here dreaming of my abandoned studies, of the life I have given up. Back and forth independently in this mountainous prison. What is tradition if not a perfectly acted but unbearable comedy which because it has become so incomprehensible makes our laughter freeze, in this atmosphere that makes us freeze? A play is acted here, everything is frozen hard here, and so on. What dominates this play are frozen states of mind, fantasies, philosophical tenets, idiocies, a masked-ball madness petrified at its climax. Passing by these walks, walking on these walls,” the prince said, “I hear the cracks enlarging, see the complete collapse of the world’s imagination impending. Whatever is very closely related to me repels me, not what is perfectly familiar to me. The quiet spreads in my head and is on the point of shattering it. I hear the way those who know all about it speak about me in significant tones, try to fool me with their show of concern. But my weakness has always been my strength; I am what I am out of weakness. When I dream, I first direct my attention to the whole world and only then to the dream I am dreaming by examining myself in a strictly scientific spirit. The feeling that permits a person to elude death for a longer or shorter period—we have it of ten—has for me become crudely stapled together with long sentences, comprehensible or incomprehensible ones. In books I have always discovered how unhappy I am, how callous, how insanely irresponsible, how sensitive, how superfluous. Think of a whole nation,” the prince said, “in centuries of unconsciousness, making history in this unconsciousness! Never have I been so clearly aware of this state as I am now. The underlying meaning of several objects taken together is not necessarily revealed to us when the underlying meaning of each of those objects is revealed to us. There you have the problem of history. I have earned the right to an idea when I have worked (metaphysically) all my life for this idea, when I have lived for it, existed for it, been mistreated and denounced for it. In the nerves, Doctor, the relationships which result in total chaos are touched on. Another man may now, at this season and in this century, be walking on the wall, alternating between the inner and the outer wall, just like us (perhaps that man is the doctor?), in keeping with the makeup of his mind, and he may say exactly as I do: I have nothing. Nothing. It does not hurt me, it merely torments me. Everything, I think, is only a geometry of bickerings, doubts, sufferings, ultimately torments,” the prince said. “I stand at the window and see myself in the yard, on the inner wall. While I observe myself I understand myself, I do not understand myself. I am four years old, I am forty years old. I play with myself, I play, I consider, I think. Someone calls me; it is a summer evening, my grandmother calls me, my grandfather, my mother, my father. They call me. Standing at the window I see, one after the other, my grandfather, my grandmother, my father, my mother, my wife. The seasons change continually while I stand at the window. They all call me. My father has on his winter suit, grandfather his winter coat, my grandmother her sheepskin coat, my mother her riding habit. I do not see my wife, I hear her but do not see her. For a whole hour I stand at the window and observe the scenery, which lies far back, very far in the background, and which I change according to my taste and by exercise of my own will. If I suddenly call out into it, this scenery dissolves,” the prince said. “I close the window, turn away from the scenery; it goes on. I forget it and it goes on. Without my constantly changing it, irritating it. Now this scenery is utterly without irritation. It often happens,” the prince said, “that I hear my wife. She very distinctly speaks sentences she spoke during her lifetime, but I cannot see her. For brief moments I think she is here; I turn around, but see nothing. My father-in-law, her father, frequently appeared in Hochgobernitz after his death; she met him, was able to see him and talk with him. But I only hear my wife, never see her. When she speaks I have the impression that the language she speaks has changed in the interval since her death, although she says the same things as she did in her lifetime. Her language, I think, is still aging while she herself is dead. Dead? She certainly is not one of those people who are completely dead when they are dead; she has died, but is not dead. But I am no longer writing such a study, although for a long time I wanted to do one, had in mind a study which describes this process. I no longer have any studies in mind. I hear my wife behind me, I turn around, she is not there, I call after her, out into the corridor, down into the vestibule, into all the upper and lower rooms. My sisters think me crazy, my daughters likewise think me crazy. I ought to go back to my room, they say. Who gives them the right to order me to my room? But I do not allow myself to challenge them and go to my room at once. My wife’s father appeared to her frequently after his death, everywhere in Hochgobernitz; she not only saw him but was able to experience him,” the prince said. “Whenever I myself have invited guests,” he said, “for years
I have had the feeling that I have invited enemies. Enemies of my mind above all. They think they can risk entering a league with my sisters and my daughters. I have always thought that I myself am paying for the impertinence of all my guests, first covert, then overt, in promptly taking the side of the women. I pay for everything that irritates me. And so I stopped inviting anyone to Hochgobernitz. Everybody dreaded my lectures,” the prince said. “It was my habit to deliver a matutinal address at breakfast, to place a philosophical question on the table. Political matters interested me above all; for decades they started me going when I awakened, or in fact before I had really awakened. Whenever I met someone, no matter where, someone suitable, that is, I began talking politics. And I defended my views at once even before I had heard the other person express his views, because I knew them before he expressed them. Nobody needs to open his mouth for me to know what his politics are. I feel that in advance, I feel it at once. Such and such a person has such and such politics in his head, I always thought whenever I met someone. I thought that about everybody all my life. In general everyone was and is afraid that I will address him. As you know I despise whatever is without effort. That is my highest principle, the only one I have. I always demand the utmost. But people are afraid of the utmost. I have almost always had nothing but domestic enemies. I am cold, I say to my sisters, and my sisters bring me my pullover. I say again, I am cold, and they bring me my overcoat, and I say again, I am cold, and they bring my fur boots and fur hood, and then I begin to undress and to feel better. I am saved, I think, I am no longer cold, I am completely naked, I am no longer cold, and that disturbs them. The cold that prevails here in Hochgobernitz has always had the greatest influence. It has always influenced everybody here. The cold in conjunction with the dampness of the old walls. Even in my most complicated thoughts I have always felt this cold and this dampness, always noted it. Yes,” he said, “possibly everything about me could be attributed to the cold and dampness. There are entirely different characters in the world, who are completely independent of one another and who yet are constantly being formed by climatic conditions. You can say of many of them that they grew up in a dry, a damp, a warm, or a cold house. Your home was cold, you could say to many, and to many others: You come from a dry home. And so on. People’s characters adjust to the climate; the climate changes them to accord with it. There are philosophies that could not arise in dry and others that could not arise in damp houses. There are concatenations of ideas which have their origin in cold walls. We assume the spirit of the walls that surround us. I often see groups of people and think: This group comes from a damp region, this from a dry one. Some come from a completely parched area. In the course of the centuries external nature has completely permeated Hochgobernitz. I also sleep in this nature, I frequently think; I sleep in the dampness and cold typical of Hochgobernitz. And so I think in this dampness and cold. Hochgobernitz is the proof that a building can destroy people who are completely at its mercy. But it does not do any good to leave the building that will destroy you, to go away from Hochgobernitz for example. It encloses you wherever you go. Whether you go to London or Paris, it crushes you. Traveling far away has no point. Even in New York I always had the feeling that Hochgobernitz was crushing me, not New York. But it is much better to be crushed by Hochgobernitz in Hochgobernitz than in New York. We always want to hear something even worse than what we have inside of us,” the prince said. “That is the sole reason we listen, force ourselves to hold conversations. The noiselessness sometimes makes everything in Hochgobernitz so distinct,” he said, “makes everything past and future into the present. At times, when this noiselessness prevails and when I want to, I can effortlessly identify all the voices I have ever heard or not heard in Hochgobernitz. The violence of external nature, which continually arises from the mind of internal nature,” the prince said, “is the quiet. In fact I once suddenly awakened in the middle of the night and saw a gigantic note pinned to the sky on which the word open was written. My laughter awakened everyone in the house. They rushed to the windows and saw nothing. I kept saying, Open! Open! is written up there, really, open is actually written up there, but they saw nothing, thought me crazy, and I chased them back to their beds. In the nature of things I am more and more afraid of myself,” the prince said. “I am actually frightened. I try to distract myself from this fear, but I succeed only sporadically nowadays. What satisfaction I felt only a few years ago when I went down into the valleys, down into the gorge, into the mountain forest on fine days and into the lowland forest on rainy days. I was often happy contemplating the surface of the water at the Ache, happy at the rhythm of movement of the water itself, absorbed in poetic appreciation of the earth’s surface. The lowland forest, the Ache itself, was enough to keep me from despair. And if not the Ache, if not the mountain forest or the lowland forest, then the library. Books that make for contemplation. My mind was all right, my brain all right, I was all right. Today? For years all I needed was to think of my son, of my own youth, and I would go out of my room and down to join the women. A meal with them. A conversation with them. In those days I was convinced of the proximity of infinity. Today? Everything is very far away today. Farther and farther away. Did I ever approach the explanation? Lying in bed I am ashamed of myself. Then I get up because I am hungry, go down to the women and eat something, and feel as if I am plunging into double shame, hundredfold shame. Life more and more has an ill-smelling breath. And I am afraid of someday being discovered in my feelings. My life consists of efforts not to be discovered. Have they discovered me, seen through me? I often think. Which of them has discovered, seen through me? I am the world and must also incorporate it into myself in the form of books, vast libraries,” the prince said. “Absurd. While reading, no matter what I read in the past, I always had the feeling that everything was divided into two halves, into a decent and an indecent half. That is what is repulsive about reading: the division into two halves. I won’t say Good and Evil, but decent, indecent. But thinking is free of this repulsiveness. In reading, one tries to ignore oneself,” the prince said. “Permanent identity as consolation. An initially melancholic but then more and more tormenting kind of imagining influences us. I always tell myself that I know everything is fatal, but I act contrarily. My head is often separated from my body by the span of several centuries or millennia and absolutely an empirical master of galvanization. I always have fever, Doctor, but it is the kind of fever the thermometer does not show. I am a barometer that is no longer functioning. In court I once met a person I had never seen before,” the prince said, “but who reminded me of all the people I have ever seen. He said he had something magnificent in store for his head. But I must not think he was going to cut it off himself. He put a knife into my hand and said: Cut my head off, my dear fellow. I have long waited for you to turn up to cut off my head. For I have something magnificent in store for my head. Don’t be afraid, this eccentric said, I have calculated everything in advance. It cannot go wrong. Here, cut! He gave me three minutes. Here, he said, this is the spot where I want my head cut off. I’ll continue to stand, because it seems to me thoroughly undignified to have your head cut off while lying down, let alone sitting. I won’t embarrass you! the stranger said. Incidentally, the knife is manufactured by the Christofle Company, he said. And I actually saw the name Christofle engraved on the knife. I seized the head and cut it off. I was quite astonished at how easy it was. The head then said: You see, you had no difficulty cutting off my head. But then I see that I haven’t cut off his head, and the stranger said: You didn’t seriously imagine you could cut off my head, did you? Or did you? Let us go on, the stranger said. He was my cousin. Actually,” the prince said, “I did not dream the story to its end. That was a pity.”
The prince said: “We are without parents. We are orphans. That is our condition, and we shall not, Europe will not escape from this condition ever again. The question has always been, how can I expand, how solidify Hochgobernitz even more. Never bef
ore has Hochgobernitz been so utterly cut off from the world and simultaneously so dependent on the world. I am always afraid of earthquakes. It is no longer possible for me to walk without thinking about earthquakes, feeling earthquakes, future earthquakes, noises, underground noises, and at the same time noises inside my head. I have the idea,” the prince said, “that we are writing letters, sending letters, and receiving letters, and that the signatures on all these letters are illegible. Who writes all these sent and received letters? I see how the catastrophe is shaping up; looking out of the window I see it shaping up noiselessly, taking place noiselessly. I am not allowed to speak of it. But the fact that I occupy the smallest room in vast Hochgobernitz is uncanny, Doctor. This room, moreover, is the dampest and coldest. Suppose I were to write an essay in my room, I think, a study bearing the simple title My Room, into which I would squeeze the entire world. I would squeeze the entire room into my room and into my study. No, not a study,” the prince said. “The thinking man’s task is more and more to remove images from his memory. His goal has been attained when there is no longer a single image in his brain. When the representational potentialities of his brain are exhausted. I bear no guilt,” he said. “I often tell myself, I know I bear no guilt. Guilt? For decades I tried to communicate; as long as I have been alive nothing but the attempt to communicate has consumed me. At first I started trying to communicate with my parents, my sisters, my children. I wanted to communicate with everybody. Now I am trying to communicate with you, and with your son. Actually,” the prince said, “these September nights can already be very cold. The cold comes up from below, from the gorge. It is usually ice cold here. Hochgobernitz is made of ice. People frozen into ice in Hochgobernitz. The times in which we live obviously are poor for furthering communication. At first,” the prince said, “my mother thought of me as a crime against herself, later as a crime she had committed. Then I became a nuisance to her. Then she began to despise me, then to love me, to hate me, because she always felt forced to identify with me. For the parents, children are an incurable tumor which deforms them for life. I withdraw more and more into my room as a sickroom. I have always taken everything I have in this room, the food, the reading, the thinking, as if it were medicine, emotional fluids, intellectual liquids, tablets of philosophy. Being incurable is a condition that has lasted ten years. I have been conscious of this condition for that long—a nondenominational disease inherited by right of succession,” the prince said. “You see, Doctor, I am putting on my jacket, and I am taking my jacket off again. I bought this jacket in Brussels, that one in London, that one in Cairo. I am putting on the Cairo jacket, taking off the London jacket, putting on the Brussels jacket, taking off the Cairo jacket. Curiosity, which costs so much money,” the prince said. “Naturally I cannot leave Hochgobernitz. I always bought newspapers and without reading them, merely leafing through them, threw them away again not a hundred paces away from the newsstand where I bought them. If I were to let the newspapers I have bought in my life blow down Kärntnerstrasse as a newspaper drift, a newspaper drift like a snowdrift, Kärntnerstrasse would be completely stuffed up in no time at all; everything in Kärntnerstrasse would be smothered, half of Vienna would be smothered; people would be smothered under the newspapers I have bought in my life, could be buried and smothered; a deadly newspaper winter would descend on Vienna. I see,” the prince said, “the fever of childhood in the faces of children. Childhood tires quickly; age is the recollection of childhood. Best of all to be in bed and be able to fall asleep—for a long time now that has been all I want or need. Have you properly made use of your body? I think. Of your mind? Of life? When you begin to worry about that, you’re already past it-Foolish statements,” the prince said. “On railroad platforms, often, I am struck by the notion of throwing myself under the train at the last moment, but in big city toilets I find I am still curious after all. Pleasure in inventing complicated, impeccable sentences. Grasping the meaning of the word ethometer. Grasping the helplessness of all people, but without pity. The necessity of letting everything you know freeze hard. Challenging the steward who dismissed five gravel pit workers,” the prince said. “I ask: Why? He does not answer me. I say the gravel pit workers are not to be dismissed; it is dangerous to dismiss even a single gravel pit worker. We must not dismiss any of them, I say, but the steward dismisses the five. Instantly I feel something sinister about the gravel pits.… Or,” the prince said, “I walk on the outer wall, right here where we are walking now, and pick up a chestnut leaf. The chestnut leaf reminds me of my mother; as I look at it I see her. Its smell reminds me of Measure for Measure. I see Measure for Measure. Measure for Measure reminds me of a pair of old shoes I wore as a child, and so on.… We see a person and instantly pass judgment,” the prince said. “This is a clever person, we say, a stupid person, a rabid person, a happy person, a cultivated, foolish, sociable, always laughing, always hopeless, always businesslike, always vulgar, always pitiable person … and we understand nothing. If we say, he is a catastrophic person, without knowing him, if we say, he is dead, and so on.… We see in a person frailties which at once make us see the frailties of the community in which we live, the frailties of all communities, the state; we feel them, we see through them, we catastrophize them. The greater the capacity for judgment, the greater the wariness. Our wariness slowly permeates everything. Even as a child my father toyed with the thought of killing himself. It cost him the greatest self-control, whenever he crossed the Ache, not to throw himself into the Ache. To hang himself. To shoot himself. This thought dominated him. Thinking in possibilities of suicide as a learned discipline subordinate to science,” the prince said. “The mystical element in my thinking has almost been switched off. Isolation. Nothing has purpose,” he said. “The millions of experiments,” he said, “lead back to the source, if we look at them with open eyes. These experiments in the mass and in so-called untrammeled nature. Nothing is easier than to escape into the commonplace. I say something,” the prince said, “and I immediately perceive the opposite of it in myself. We can persuade ourselves that we are not alone with a book, as we can persuade ourselves that we are not alone with a person. When we hire an actor, we want to be entertained; we blast him if he forgets that. We always live in the delusion (because we think it will enable us to live) that we can escape completely from at least one of the elements of nature, that for example we are able to make a revolution, to topple a king from his pinnacle, and so on.… The eye is often abandoned by the intellect, the intellect by the eye. Nowadays,” the prince said, “we feel at ease in biblical descriptions; we have discovered the poetry of Sodom and Gomorrah and feel it. We are no longer fearful unto death, we go to death. Illnesses lead man by the shortest path to himself. Of course we must demand precision at least in our first premises. A man without a brain would be thoughtless. Our teachers have been enemies of our intellects. What does not concern us vexes us. For a long time now I have been concerned not with the idea of who will be on the moon tomorrow, but who will be the first to travel through the earth. The complete conversational incapacity of my wife, who could be sentimental about the whole world in regard to any single thing. Fatal diseases spreading everywhere. Always thinking in comparisons between the upper, my, and the lower, their, rooms. Habits, tendencies that have slowly consumed us all. Our impoverishment in action. In the lower rooms philosophy is no more possible than mysticism in the upper rooms. Sometimes I hear all the clocks in the house so loudly that I must get up and stop them. That requires several hours. Then I can fall asleep. Formerly, as children, we knocked on the walls to communicate with one another. Now nobody has knocked on the walls for half a century. In no time at all Hochgobernitz will be tenanted by the beetles and spiders,” the prince said. “Beetles and spiders as nature’s craziness, I often think. Everything is mystification,” he said.
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