Gargoyles

“The shattering thing,” he said, “is not the ugliness of people but their lack of judgment. I often walk for hours through the woods with my elder sister without saying a word to her. She does not notice that all the time we are walking through the woods without a word we are talking only about her. Her boredom is the very opposite of my boredom: the attempt to penetrate into a subject (marriage, philosophical speculation, etc.) while simultaneously trying to get out of this subject. In the past,” the prince said, “I always had good relationships with people at first; now the first relationship is always a bad one. It is less strenuous to move from an initially bad relationship to a good one than vice versa, from an initially good one to a bad one. If you listen closely,” the prince said, “what is told to you, played for you, is always your own story, adjusted to your rhythm. You can make this observation everywhere, no matter where, especially when traveling, at railroad stations, in waiting rooms. You are reading the newspaper and can feel the way your sickness, which is in the newspaper, in every line you read, is weakening, dominating, killing you. If we always moved in a single direction,” the prince said, “we would be inside nature in the most natural way. I have often been asked why I do not keep a dog. Why there is no dog at Hochgobernitz. I always answer: Because there is no dog here. Darkness depends entirely on geometry. We should always look straight at the geometry of things, on which everything depends. What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,” the prince said, “is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous. I have never yet seen a ridiculous person, although everything is ridiculous about most of the people I see. In this house,” he said, “everything makes a reasonable impression, and I have never heard anyone speak of this house as anything but a reasonable house, but in fact there is not the slightest trace of reason in this house. Just as there is not, cannot be, the slightest trace of reason in most of the people whom we meet and call reasonable. Hochgobernitz is altogether reasonable, but without the slightest trace of reason. For decades I have tried to plant trees everywhere, wherever I wanted some. As you can see, I have planted hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of trees. Now I am no longer planting trees; now I merely look at the hundreds of thousands of trees I have planted. I regard them. There is no satisfaction in merely looking. All roads are roads laid out by men. In your best moments you speak a language that everybody understands,” the prince said, “but nobody understands you. The resemblances to myself (to everything) often go so far that I no longer know whether I am there (where I cannot be) or here, where I no longer am. Faces grow old, as does the vulgarity or refinement in them,” he said. “I hear the strangest birds in the night; although I know what kind of birds they are, they become totally different at night. Outside the window, circling over Hochgobernitz, they are different. If I hold these birds in my hand they are birds everybody knows. My relationship to animals is such that I make them speak human language, a newly emotional language, and they practice human thinking. I ascribe philosophical meaning to animals, and feel that they are very close to commanding the grammar of nature perfectly, for which reason I am also afraid of animals. The intellectual always thinks he has to take Nature under his protection, although he is completely dominated by her. Last night, in my dream, travelers informed me that in the midst of their journey all speed limits were temporarily abolished, with the result that anything was possible. That moment existed. Life is exactly as long as needed for preparation for death. We talk to a person hundreds, thousands of miles away without his knowing we are talking to him. We ask questions in his stead. We answer for him. If we meet him, it seems to us that he actually had the conversation with us, the conversation that has moved us even farther apart. I often speak in such a way as to leave my interlocutor plenty of time for reflection, for talking with himself.” He said: “Higher society regards lower society as useful, but the lower thinks of the higher as useless.” Then the prince said: “People or rather each person by himself, can very well be viewed as a novel serialized in a daily newspaper which is printed by nature. In the editorial office, however, a horrible arbitrariness prevails, and as we see, the world daily looks forward to that arbitrariness with great eagerness. And the writers,” the prince said, “make use of the truth which is useless to the philosophers.”