Gargoyles

We were now walking on the outer wall of the castle. “Down there, do you see,” the prince said, “lies Hauenstein. And there is Stiwoll. And there Köflach. Last night,” he said, “I was down in the gorge. I intended to go into the mill, but I could not endure the noise the birds in the big cage behind the mill were making, that horrible screeching. I climbed up out of the gorge again at once,” he said. “Although I am not alone, I keep entirely to myself. Whereas I myself in the course of time have almost completely isolated myself from all society and no longer receive visits,” the prince said, “the women folk hurl themselves more and more into an absolutely bestial form of social absurdity. As you know, I have even given up playing chess with Krainer. I have discontinued everything that has to do with human associations. Nowadays I associate only with people with whom I must associate. I maintain only the most minimal kind of business associations. Doesn’t the grain interest you, doesn’t the whole farm economy interest you any longer? I often ask myself. The foresters, yes, they still interest me, the workmen on the Saurau estates. No one else. It is different for the women. Their Wednesday evenings are unbearable to me. Their Saturday evenings still more unbearable. I refuse to appear at any of these evenings. But I can hear all the way up to my room the way they call out to each other — and they have been doing it this way for decades — the names of those who will be coming up to Hochgobernitz on Wednesday evening or Saturday evening. Miserable people. Most people have gone into liquidation on the day of their birth. Repulsive people from the city, but even more repulsive people from the immediate vicinity, boring, torpid neighbors. By Tuesday they are already moving chairs and benches and tables about the whole house for the Wednesday people, and by Friday for the Saturday people. I hear the clatter of dishes, and I can no longer work, I can no longer think! The clink of silver and of glasses dominates Hochgobernitz, you see. They call me, but I do not answer. They want me, but I will not go down to them. These Wednesday evenings cost a great deal of money, but the Saturday evenings cost even more. On these occasions our graves are opened for hours at a time, their stench released; the huge family graveyards are opened and their peace shattered by talk. The whole countryside is talked to pieces, until everyone is tired and in common disgust trudges out of the castle and back down into the lowlands. On Wednesday and Saturday human vermin dominate here at Gobernitz,” the prince said. “Human defectiveness, the onanism of despair,” he said. His son could study his future life by the example of his father, he added. The aims for which his father has lived will also be his son’s aims, the father’s pleasures the son’s pleasures, the father’s disgust with the world also the son’s disgust with the world. After all, the son is going to die after his father, in a loneliness that can be entered and left only within his own brain. When the son looks at his father he sees the father’s wretchedness, just as the father constantly sees the son’s wretchedness. Father and son continually look at one another in their wretchedness. “But ultimately the son must be much more horrible than the father.” He often observed his family from the library window, the prince said, going back and forth in the courtyard in the midst of their conversations. “Locked up in their primitive vocabulary, radically idle creatures, my relatives are unthinkable without me,” the prince said. This thought would often drive away his boredom in favor of an irrelevant disgust for their bodies. “These bodies that have come from me,” he said, “begotten by me without the slightest partiality for life on my part.” Suddenly he remarked that at Hochgobernitz derangements often persisted for weeks. “What is the reason?” he asked. “I am not alone in being affected by these derangements,” he said. “We are all affected. We all live close together cramped into a building, don’t imagine it is big, and are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. We do not hear one another when we call. For weeks at a time we are ruled by the weather, like a catastrophic primal nervous system of which we are merely part. Until we have reached an ultimate degree of depression in which we suddenly begin to talk again, help one another up, begin to understand one another, only to revert once more to our old estrangement. Who is it takes the first step toward intimacy, toward familial attentiveness?” he said. “We eat together again, drink together, talk together, laugh together, until we are separated again. But the time of closeness becomes increasingly shorter.” In past years, he said, his son had come back from England to rest up, to show himself, for talk, summertime conversations, and to see the performance of the play—“A three act play is performed at Hochgobernitz every year,” the prince said, “with prelude and postlude.” But this year his son had been expected not only for pleasure, but chiefly for conversations with his father, “of a legal nature, concerning the property.” In letters to his son, which the prince wrote almost daily, he had repeatedly alluded to his plans for Hochgobernitz. He had stressed his resolve to increase the size of the property while at the same time drastically simplifying the methods for its maintenance and administration. “But such fundamental changes cannot be explained in writing,” the prince said, “and after all not only Hochgobernitz is involved, but also Ötz and Terlan, the gravel pits near Gmunden, and the town houses in Vienna.” But all the while his son had been in Hochgobernitz, the subject had been passed over as quickly as usual, with not a single discussion of these problems. “He thinks he will stay another four or five years in London,” the prince said. “I don’t know what he intends, I can only guess. This thing he is writing is an altogether political work. Even during the holidays I noticed that he devoted most of his time to this scholarly, actually altogether political work. But he told me that the holidays this year had been ideal. Sometimes he too suffers from inability to concentrate,” the prince said. “He again made me aware that it is sometimes worthwhile interrupting a prolonged scholarly task that demands the greatest effort to approach an intuitable though unattainable goal. On the Channel boat, he said, he realized that Hochgobernitz is wholly alien to him. I do not believe that is so. My son said he was afraid of Hochgobernitz, in spite of himself. On the one hand it is good to come home for holidays, he said; how easily an intellectual task can go wrong, he said, because one did not dare interrupt it at the decisive moment and at a crucial passage, because one did not obey nature. This decisive moment came for him, my son, shortly before the holidays. It had been right, he said, to interrupt the work at the moment that I wrote to him: Come here! But I wanted to have him in Hochgobernitz, with me, for a particular end. I did not attain this end. But the usefulness of his interrupting his work satisfied him,” the prince said. “I saw clearly, while my son was on his way from England and drawing nearer to Hochgobernitz, the rough spots, the deterioration in the relationship between us. They increased from hour to hour. Then my son arrived and I saw these faults distinctly. He said he was working on an essay he had been able to rescue. He lives in a perpetually sunless little room, bare and cheap, though in the vicinity of Hyde Park. My son has to exhaust himself,” the prince said. “Once he has utterly exhausted himself, he comes back.”