Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Page A

was in. What was causing him grief. Perhaps more than he realized. “Knowledge distracts from knowledge, you know!” People in uniform bothered him. “I hate the police, the rural constabulary, the army, even the fire brigade.” All of it gave him a sexual stimulus that he preferred not to entertain. He can’t deal with any of it, whether it’s railway employees, or actual soldiers. Officers disgust him. For their inhumanity, “which is bred into them to exacerbate it.” But they repel him as much as they attract him. “Yes, they attract me too. I’ve told you why. Problems that are stifled in the smell that makes way for the images.” Then: “In the age when I was susceptible, women tended to attract me more by their defects: older ones, ugly ones.” He had always been stirred anyway by absence, it drew him with an infantile, forbidden passion. He had never been clear about anything. “Clarity is something more than human.”He seeks and propounds simplicity, and detests it at the same time: always wanted to break clear of it. The certainty with which he devotes himself to quiet is no less than that with which he espouses disquiet, without him being able to tell you why. He decided: and also for the obverse. And yet it’s always him as well. Perfectly circumscribed by what defines his point of view. “Is that mad?” he asks, after explaining a certain set of affairs, as if it had been a room in an infinitely large building. “Incompleteness always makes what I wanted to reach fall in on itself.” To put the ground under his feet behind him, he walked, he moved, no matter where, no matter how: “but I can’t put the ground under my feet behind me.” It was a law of nature … sleeping and thinking and all the things in between, pushed in between, extruding from between—they were all distractions from himself. And yet there was no method for distracting him from himself. “Of course it’s all sterile because it’s all been mapped and well-established; and what I say is so basic as well.” The place where you see that it’s all ridiculous keeps recurring, each time you looked out the window, or looked into yourself. Wherever. “And then one time you pull off your great coup: you end it!”
    “When they present themselves, everyone I know looks the same. What’s within them looks the same too, whomever it belongs to. Everyone has the same. I find that repulsive. When I say ‘dismiss,’ a smell remains that darkens everything.” He said people were, initially reluctantly, later without any objections, bearers of various occupations, holders of opinions with varying top speeds and fuel-efficiency quotients. “A simple country girl as much as a CEO.” Of limitedfeeling and mind, the individual no longer mattered. “What’s the point if the most cunning, not the wisest, get the best seats? If they take out insurance policies in the millions? Future prospects worth millions? Hearsay? Hairsplitting? Balderdash?” We were preceded by a reputation that killed us.
    “Many ideas turn into lifelong disfigurements,” he said. The ideas often surprised one years later, but sooner or later they would always make the one who had had them look ridiculous. The ideas came from a place they never left. They would always remain there, in that place: it was the place of dreams. “The idea doesn’t exist that can be expunged or expunge itself. The idea is actual, and remains so.” Last night, he had been thinking about pain. “Pain doesn’t exist. A necessary illusion,” he said. Pain wasn’t pain, not in the way a cow was a cow. “The word ‘pain’ directs the attention of a feeling toward a feeling. Pain is overplus. But the illusion of it is real.” Accordingly, pain both was and was not. “But there is no pain,” he said. “Just as there is no happiness. Found an architecture on pain.” All thoughts and images were as involuntary as the concepts: chemistry, physics, geometry. “You have