to understand these concepts to know something. To know everything.” Philosophy didn’t take you a single step nearer. “Nothing is progressive, but nothing is less progressive than philosophy. Progress is tripe. Impossible.” The observations of mathematics were foundational. “Oh, yes,” he said, “in mathematics everything’s child’s play.” And just like so-called child’s play, mathematics could finish you. “If you’ve crossed the border, and you suddenly no longer get the joke, and see what the world’s about, don’t see what anything’sabout anymore. Everything’s just the imagining of pain. A dog has as much gravity as a human being, but he hasn’t lived, do you understand!” One day I would cross a threshold into an enormous park, an endless and beautiful park; in this park one ingenious invention would succeed another. Plants and music would follow in lovely mathematical alternation, delightful to the ear and answering to the utmost notions of delicacy; but this park was not there to be used, or wandered about in, because it consisted of a thousand and one small and minuscule square and rectilinear and circular islets, pieces of lawn, each of them so individual that I would be unable to leave the one on which I was standing. “In each case, there is a breadth and depth of water that prevents one from hopping from one island to another. In my imagining. On the piece of grass which one has reached, how is a mystery, on which one has woken up, and where one is compelled to stay,” one would finally perish of hunger and thirst. “One’s longing to be able to walk through the whole park is finally deadly.”
I met him behind the hay barn, huddled on a plank of wood. It was already dark, and he said he had heard me approaching from the pond. “I know your walk exactly.” People like himself, who generally kept their eyes closed—“in itself another preparation for death”—had an extraordinarily keen sense of hearing. “You were still a long way off, but I could hear you. You slowly approached my grumpiness. Did anyone ever tell you you don’t walk like a young man?” It must strike me as odd to find him here behind the hay barn. In fact, he was displaying one eccentricity after another. “True, isn’t it, everything I do is eccentric? I hunkered down here, because I couldno longer stand. I’m afraid your suggestion of the compress”—it seemed to me he said the phrase with a certain relish, and repeated it several times to himself, as if poking his head out of a foxhole—“your suggestion of the compress was a poor one. My swelling is still there. I was right, it can only be a matter of the worst case. Before long, I won’t be able to walk at all. I hope you’ve revised your opinion that there was nothing to it?” He lapsed into a long disquisition on his illness, which was spreading “in positively philosophical fashion,” between his brain and his foot. Essentially, it was an affirmation of a “holy science.”
He had walked through the larch wood and then to the pond—“there are only two walks here, the one or the other”—and had actually been meaning to go down to the station, to supply himself with newspapers and “give himself a fright. Newspapers are the only luxury I have. What human beings no longer are, what nature never was, newspapers now supply me with: a little variety, a little distraction.” In the newspapers, he found confirmation of many of his theories. Newspapers constituted, effectively, the world, all of it, the world and the cosmos, in every issue he opened. “The world isn’t the world, it’s a zero.” Every day, through the agency of the newspaper, he was compelled to open the argument with himself. “In terms of the discomfort they provide to many, with every reason and justification, the newspapers are the only comforters of mankind.” Newspapers were to him what brother and sister and father and mother had never been. “What the
I met him behind the hay barn, huddled on a plank of wood. It was already dark, and he said he had heard me approaching from the pond. “I know your walk exactly.” People like himself, who generally kept their eyes closed—“in itself another preparation for death”—had an extraordinarily keen sense of hearing. “You were still a long way off, but I could hear you. You slowly approached my grumpiness. Did anyone ever tell you you don’t walk like a young man?” It must strike me as odd to find him here behind the hay barn. In fact, he was displaying one eccentricity after another. “True, isn’t it, everything I do is eccentric? I hunkered down here, because I couldno longer stand. I’m afraid your suggestion of the compress”—it seemed to me he said the phrase with a certain relish, and repeated it several times to himself, as if poking his head out of a foxhole—“your suggestion of the compress was a poor one. My swelling is still there. I was right, it can only be a matter of the worst case. Before long, I won’t be able to walk at all. I hope you’ve revised your opinion that there was nothing to it?” He lapsed into a long disquisition on his illness, which was spreading “in positively philosophical fashion,” between his brain and his foot. Essentially, it was an affirmation of a “holy science.”
He had walked through the larch wood and then to the pond—“there are only two walks here, the one or the other”—and had actually been meaning to go down to the station, to supply himself with newspapers and “give himself a fright. Newspapers are the only luxury I have. What human beings no longer are, what nature never was, newspapers now supply me with: a little variety, a little distraction.” In the newspapers, he found confirmation of many of his theories. Newspapers constituted, effectively, the world, all of it, the world and the cosmos, in every issue he opened. “The world isn’t the world, it’s a zero.” Every day, through the agency of the newspaper, he was compelled to open the argument with himself. “In terms of the discomfort they provide to many, with every reason and justification, the newspapers are the only comforters of mankind.” Newspapers were to him what brother and sister and father and mother had never been. “What the
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