you—I’m just not up to it, my dear Gambetti. You’ve no idea what it means to me to be back in Rome, to be on the Pincio again, to see the Borghese Gardens, to look down from here on my beloved Rome. My revered Rome. My wonderful Rome! Anyone who’s been in Rome as long as I have has simply blocked off all access to a place like Wolfsegg. He can’t go back—it’s become an impossibility. For days I walk around in the various buildings at Wolfsegg, trying to calm myself, and I can’t. For days I walk up and down in my rooms, hoping I’ll be able to endure it, and of course it becomes less and less endurable. For days I try to find ways of surviving at Wolfsegg without constantly feeling that I’ll go mad, but I find none. Five libraries, I said, and such hostility to the intellect! In the Latin countries even the simplest people have some taste, some culture, I said, but at Wolfsegg no one has even a modicum of taste. The Austrians don’t have the slightest taste, or haven’t had for a long time. Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything—as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country—an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it. Such a wonderful age-old culture, and such a barbarous absence of culture today, a devastating anticulture. To say nothing of the dire political conditions. What ghastly creatures rule Austria today! The lowest of the low are now on top. The basest, most revolting people are in power, busilyengaged in destroying everything that means anything. Fanatical destroyers are at work, ruthless exploiters who have donned the mantle of socialism. The government operates a monstrous demolition plant that functions nonstop, destroying everything I hold dear. Our towns and cities have become unrecognizable, I said. Great tracts of our countryside have been despoiled. The most beautiful regions have fallen victim to the greed and power-lust of the new barbarians. Wherever there’s a beautiful tree it’s cut down, wherever there’s a fine old house it’s demolished, wherever a delightful brook runs down a hillside it’s ruined. Everything beautiful is trampled under foot. And all in the name of socialism, with the most appalling hypocrisy one can imagine. Anything even remotely connected with culture is suspect, called into question, and obliterated. The obliterators are at work—the killers. We’re up against obliterators and killers, who go about their murderous business everywhere. The obliterators and killers are killing and obliterating the towns, killing and obliterating the landscape. Sitting on their fat arses in thousands and hundreds of thousands of offices in every corner of the state, they think of nothing but obliteration and killing, of how to kill and obliterate everything between the Neusiedlersee and Lake Constance. Vienna has been almost done to death, and Salzburg—all these fine cities, Gambetti, which you don’t know but which are actually among the most beautiful in the world. The landscape we see as we drive through Austria from Vienna has been almost totally killed and obliterated. One eyesore succeeds another, one monstrosity after another forces itself on our eyes. It’s become a perverse lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country. The truth is that the country was destroyed long ago, deliberately devastated and disfigured as a result of perfidious business deals, so that one is hard put to find a single unspoiled spot. It’s a lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country, because the truth is that the country has been murdered. Was it necessary in this century, I asked Gambetti, for humanity to lay violent hands on this most beautiful of all worlds, to kill and obliterate it? The villages, Gambetti, are unrecognizable when we revisit
Similar Books
