Loos immediately took hold of himself again and apologised for what he called his impulsive outburst. I asked him quietly if he really had the impression that our time was any more perverse than twenty-five to thirty years ago. He answered that he had already said the teary look backward was out of the question. Every period had its own novel mode of perversity, though there were of course epochs that strove to outdo others in infamy or imbecility. But as a basic principle he in no way regarded history as the history of a fall, that is, a process of ever-increasing misguidedness, nor was it a salvation history, where everything turns out for the best. Rather he saw historical development as a hectic exchange process: yesterday’s evil is immediately replaced by today’s newer version. It was like hoof and mouth disease: no sooner does it seem eradicated than mad cow disease breaks out. It’s the way of the world, and the sum of evils remains approximately the same, that is, on a depressingly high level, only now they spread faster over larger areas, thanks to the global cannonades, so that within a few weeks practically every child is playing on a Game Boy and almost overnight every woman is jumping into a pair of phosphorescent cycling tights or, as soon as the new decree goes out, three-quarter leggings with a predatory-cat imprint. These were rather harmless and already dated examples, he said, but indicative all the same.
I asked Loos if his wife had worn bike tights or leggings. He said no. “You see, that’s what bothers me,” I said. “You make these sweeping judgments. You regard cycling tights as an evil—fine, that’s your right. But you make as if the evil were ubiquitous, as if there were nothing else besides. I’m convinced that if someone gave you nine roses, you would only see the one that was a little damaged, and if someone praised the eight intact ones, you’d think him blind or stupid. People who see things your way would necessarily conclude that the world is a harrowing place, and one wonders how and why they would endure such bleakness.” “If,” answered Loos, “you compare the world to a bouquet of roses, then please at least preserve the right proportions. Of your nine roses it’s really eight that are damaged, at best one is whole. So who has the more accurate perception, the one who sees the bouquet’s dubious condition or the one who rapturously praises the single rose that’s beyond censure?” “Quite apart from the question of right proportions,” I said, “one answer comes readily to mind: the person with the most accurate perception sees both. Flaws sharpen the eye for perfection, and perfection for flaws.” “Not bad, not bad,” Loos said, “only a little too easy. You forget the crucial point, which I will gladly demonstrate with your own example. Let’s assume there are four roses objectively in the most perfect condition, and five are objectively damaged. If we allow ourselves to think that everyone would see it so, because it’s so obvious, we will be wrong. All you have to do is hammer it into people’s heads, as insistently as possible, that the damaged roses are splendid specimens, and the perception will correspond—people will experience the withered as fresh and full, and vice versa. Not all, of course, but generally so many that those who trust their own eyes and judgment begin to feel alien and even wonder whether they aren’t doomsayers, complainers, and blowhards after all.” “Excuse me, Mr. Loos, but if in this present pluralistic age people come along claiming they know what good and bad and right and wrong are, then they really are blowhards. We need to ask them where they get the criteria that allow them to make their so-called objective judgments.” “You indirectly confirm my point,” Loos answered. “You’re also one of the Zeitgeist surfers. First people get inoculated with the idea that everything is arbitrary and relative, and then they declare that others who insist on accountability are either blowhards or, even worse, bumpkins.” “All right, fine,” I appeased him. “But I’d just like to know what you base your value judgments on.”
Loos smoked, drank, and considered. Then he said, “Let’s take people instead of roses and take a look at other times and places. It has always been child’s play to convince the members of group X that the members of group Y are nothing but rats and should be exterminated. You just have to say it loud and long enough, and you’ll find as many men as you like who have just been waiting for the encouragement to deliver the deathblow, and just as many women who will foam at the mouth in screaming their approval. I regard this state of affairs as horrendous, and if you’re curious about what I base that value judgement on then I’ll have to leave this table.”
I didn’t find his threat congenial, I said, and besides it was superfluous, since it would never cross my mind to ask anyone on what grounds he found inhumanity inhumane. I had asked him, Loos, where he got the criteria that allowed him to pass judgement on the trends, currents, and fashions of the time, which were open to the most varying assessments according to point of view. The discussion had never been about atrocity, and as far as the rat principle was concerned, I was fully of his opinion, but I still had the impression, as I had said, that he looked only at the horrors that existed, and that is why I asked the question as to how and why he could stand it here. And included in this question was naturally another: whether the bright and the beautiful also existed for him? “And whether,” said Loos, without having to consider, “and whether, Mr. Clarin, for instance music—at least until recently, but actually still, in spite of the troublesome experience I had with it. Recently, you see, I spent a whole night listening to Mozart, the most buoyant, most magnificent things, and yet I couldn’t get rid of my disgust with the world, couldn’t overcome it. Just the opposite: the music made it clear to me that beauty is no consolation for but rather evidence of misery. It tries to make me forget the outside world and the rules that apply there, but precisely in so doing it recalls them. Or take Haydn’s Creation—you don’t have to be sentimental to be forced to tears when you hear certain passages, but you don’t know whether you’re weeping because of the beauty of the music, because of the resounding praise of the Creator, or because of the chasm that exists between praise of the Creator and the mutilated creation. The main thing is that you weep, isn’t it, that you’re shaken and softened, and you notice that you’re not a stone, although …”
“Although?” Loos blew his nose and said, “Although that too has disadvantages, since the human stone lives more independently of the weather. But however that may be, memory too belongs among the bright and beautiful things you’re asking about, and I mean the memory of my wife, of our life together, of particular moments, words, gestures. It’s beautiful to remember beautiful things, but even that doesn’t come without pain, since you can’t recall the beautiful without feeling the wounds its loss has opened up. Which brings me to your other question: how and why I can stand it here. You might have asked outright whether it isn’t more sensible for someone like me to arrange his own removal. I think about it all the time and am certainly ramshackle enough for it. I lack neither the rage at life nor the inclination to withdraw from it all. And believe me, dissolving into nothing is not a prospect of terror for me. And yet I hesitate. Are you familiar with Kleist? I feel a kinship with him, and his sole theme was the fragility of the world’s structures. But consistent as he was, he was inconsistent at the end, for just before laying hands on himself, he wrote in his suicide note: ‘The truth is that there was nothing on earth that could help me.’ That can only mean, ‘If I feel overtired, lay it not to the world, but to myself and my poor blood.’ But that’s just it, suicide notes tend to be hopelessly polite—they take the blame on themselves and exonerate the world. Shouldn’t the last communiqué sound much harsher? I would find it perfectly acceptable if Kleist had written: ‘The truth is that on this earth only criminals feel at home.’ But that would have been, first, self-praise, and second, an insult to those who were content to live, whom he wanted to think well of him, wouldn’t it? But as for me, I hesitate, as I said; and by the time I get to the point where I could extinguish myself in the way I have in mind, that is, serenely and almost as casually as you would pull up a stalk of grass from the roadside—by that time nature will presumabl
y have done the necessary thing on its own. And there’s one more consideration. As enticing as the end might be, it would be just as irresponsible for me to leave my beloved wife alone, abandon her to the horror unprotected.”
Loos blew his nose again, and I said, “Now you’ve got to help me: is your wife not dead after all?” He remained quiet, looking at me with eyes that struck me as feverish. “Dead, yes,” he then said, “but not properly buried, as it were. When I speak of abandoning her, it’s in a rather obscure sense. What I was trying to say is, ‘Who will love her, if I no longer exist, who will still remember her, who will honour and preserve her memory in this age without memory?’ You understand me now? Only if I live is she taken care of.” He wants to protect her beyond the grave, I thought and said, “Yes, I understand, only I find it strange that you largely define your life as a service to someone you’ve lost. It seems to me that you take the mere acceptance of loss as an act of faithlessness. That must cripple you; it means stasis. You have a right to your own life and everything that goes with it.” Loos wasn’t listening. He sat turned away, his gaze directed at the dark hills across the valley. “Fresh raspberries,” he said aloud into the night and then fell silent again. Were there still earthly pleasures for him? I asked whether he would like some raspberries, should I order them if there were any? “Over there, above, almost all the windows are lit now. We had our pre-execution meal in the dining hall at the health spa in Cademario, and my wife saw on the menu that they had raspberries as a dessert. We had started on the late side, and she was very worried that there wouldn’t be any left by the time we were through with the main course. And although I realised that she saw this as a catastrophe and expected me to do something about it, I saw no solution. That’s when she showed me how useless I was. She told the waiter she would like them served immediately, as an appetiser so to speak. She was very practical—she relished life so, things like eating raspberries.” “And why ‘pre-execution meal’?” I asked. “Because it was our last one. You can’t imagine how I hate her sometimes for the way she simply disappeared after twelve years of marriage, years of love all in all—dissolves, steals away, and leaves me a survivor on this barbarous planet. And all the while she was well on the road to recovery: they had removed the tumor, there was no metastasis, and the blonde hair that had to be shaved off before the operation was quickly growing back under her scarf.” “What happened?” I asked hesitantly. “I can’t speak about it right now.” After a pause I said, as something that might interest him, that the girlfriend I had once sat with here had also been a patient at Cademario. “I can’t speak about it,” Loos repeated. “I’ve said too much already. God knows why I abuse a stranger with my private concerns. Shall we order a last half litre?” “You’re not abusing me. The only thing is, how am I going to make the curves up to Agra if I drink any more?” “On foot, that’ll make you sober, and tomorrow you’ll sit fresh at your desk and write—about what, though, has escaped me.”
That wasn’t important, I said, and I said it not because his temporary absentmindedness had disgruntled me, but because I suddenly attached almost no further significance to my plan. Since Loos insisted on an answer, I explained again that it had to do with divorce law, more precisely with the variations in the formulation of laws touching divorce in individual cantons from the Helvetik to the beginning of the 20th century. He probably knew that the uniform civil code for the whole confederation was still a relatively recent phenomenon, in force only since January 1, 1912, to be exact. Before that most of the cantons had had their own civil codes, and it was their relevant passages that were the subject of my work.” “What a coincidence,” said Loos. “That’s also my father’s birthday. But you think you can do that over Pentecost?” “I can’t swear to it, but, first, writing comes easy to me, not least because of my two-year stint as a court clerk; second, I’m lucky enough to have an excellent memory; and third, I’ve got all the material with me.” “You lugged half a library with you to Ticino?” Loos asked. “What are you thinking? Just a single disk,” I said smiling. “Ah yes, of course,” he said. “Excuse me, I sometimes still think in old gross-sensory categories, which has recently been strengthened by my contentious relationship with Windows 2000.” I kept an uncertain silence, while Loos filled the glasses. He said he needed my expertise and advice. I asked what about. He said it was about how he could get rid of Windows 2000 so he could go on working with Windows 98 again. It turned out that after installing Windows 2000 he could only run his trackball as a PS-2 mouse with two click-keys. Added to this was the sad fact that his Page Scan didn’t want to scan anymore or his tape drive make backups. Also his WizardMaker refused to function—in short the whole configuration that ran perfectly under Windows 98 was virtually down the drain.” I stared at Loos. Moments long I saw him in double, in fact a trick of shadow gave him a moustache that looked like a black bird with outstretched wings over each of his two mouths. I eventually said that I had to pass, I had no idea. “No problem,” said Loos, “I know the answer.” “You wanted to test me then, or make a fool of me,” I said. “Not at all, Mr. Clarin. I only wanted to shine a bit, to impress you, but above all to let you know that a person doesn’t have to be a digital dummy or a yesterday yahoo to sometimes wish the whole electronic information-age shebang would go to the devil. You know what I sometimes imagine, lying on my sofa? The world after the lights go out all over the planet. All systems out, all batteries dead—the global clatter silenced. Standstill, ash-gray monitors. Stupefied people separated from the gadgets that had become part of their organisms, torn out of their shadow-world and blinded by the effulgence of other people! Are you even listening?”
In fact, while Loos seemed to be growing ever more wakeful, I had almost nodded off and was hearing his voice as if from a distance. “No, I am,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “You wanted me to think you’re not stuck in the past, but then sketched a scenario that belies you.” “That’s right,” said Loos, “that’s the dilemma of today’s sofa-dreamers: if you start from the existing situation, without tampering with it, if, that is, you stand on the platform of the status quo to imagine yourself forward into the future—hoping to envision a better reality—you’re going to fail, because today’s factual situation, which is necessarily implied by the dream, will then be three times more factual. There’s no place to lodge your castles in the air any more. Dreams of the future, in other words, can only be nightmares, at least for those who are already horrified by the present. And if you dream these away by decreeing from your sofa a partial deluge to overtake mankind, then you’ll naturally land back in yesterday’s world. You’ll have to swallow the reproach of backwardness. If you want everything to be slower, quieter, more sensuous, less shrill, you have no other choice than to imagine yourself back into the past. As I said, the future will be so powerfully real that cherished dreams no longer dare move forward, do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” I said, “which doesn’t mean that I have any sympathy for your attack on the electrical power system, which incidentally would hit you hard too: no more Haydn and Mozart at night.” “O God,” Loos said, “I hadn’t thought of that, but I can get around it. In a pinch I’ll make my own music.” “Wine,” I continued, “will be hard to come by, and cigarettes too, if only because of the collapsing logistics.” “You’re torturing me,” Loos said. “You’re ruining the deluge for me—that isn’t nice.” “I’m only warning you about the consequences to yourself.” “Good,” he said, “then we have to carefully consider where we can still wish ourselves. Forward, no storage space for dreams; backward, romanticism with scarcities; and in the middle, the tumid lunacy that makes us want to escape in the first place. What to do?” “I know something,” I said: “we should leave now.”
When we finally stood up—to the relief of the staff, since we were the last to leave—I almost lost my balance. Loos, also swaying a little, but more self-possessed than I was, saw it and offered to accompany me back to Agra.
I said I appreciated the offer but he could go to bed without worrying. He said it was not a question of an offer, but of a need. “I’m still fine to drive,” I said. “It’s practically all uphill. Downhill would be more ticklish.” “Come on,” said Loos, “no dramatics.” I got the flashlight out of the car’s glove compartment, while Loos stood beside me and said, “Ah, a Cabrio.” “Used,” I said, and tossed the flashlight, which didn’t work, back into the car. “We even have a half-moon,” he said, hooking his arm under mine and pulling me along. After a few steps he abruptly let go, as if startled by the sudden closeness. We walked through the village without speaking, but before the small kiosk next to the post office he stopped and said that they sold postcards of Hesse’s watercolours there, his wife had really liked them. “And you?” I asked. “What do you think of them?” For him, he said, whatever his wife had once liked was somehow sacrosanct. Was that the case while she was alive? I asked, as we walked on. If it was impossible for him to share her liking, he said, he nevertheless gave the object credence and could sense what was worth liking about it. And if she had one day brought home a garden gnome? You usually know before marriage, whether your chosen partner is likely to bring home a garden gnome, Loos said. And incidentally his wife liked Hesse’s literary work as much as his watercolours, probably because she was something of a seeker, and Hesse is an excellent venue for seekers—you could open his books to any page and find some wise saying or rule of life, something that drove him, Loos, to desperation, whereas his wife had made a collection of such sayings in a small, squared notebook. But he didn’t mean to sound mocking; as he said, he always respected his wife’s predilections, and when she once, about two years ago, expressed the desire to drive down with him to Montagnola for a weekend to visit the Hesse Museum in the Torre Camuzzi, he had readily agreed. Nevertheless—as he had to acknowledge once inside this small and really very charming museum—the exhibited relics, such as Hesse’s spectacles or the telegram from Adenauer on the poet’s 75th birthday, had not especially moved him, least of all Hesse’s umbrella. Yet it was precisely this that seemed to have positively captivated her.
On the Edge Page 3