My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard Page A

insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything; by mouth and on paper they abuse by means of their abusers; the very character of words and their abusers is an outrage; the spiritual condition of words and their abusers is that of helplessness and catastrophic good cheer.
    We say we’re putting on a performance in a theater that will last for all eternity … but the theater in which we’re prepared for everything and competent in nothing is, from the time we’re able to think, a theater of ever-increasing speed and lost shorthand … it is absolutely a theater of the body—and secondarily of spiritual angst and thus of the fear of death … we don’t know whether we’re dealing with tragedy or comedy, or comedy for the sake of tragedy … but all of it deals with the terrible, with misery, with mental imbalance … we think we should keep quiet: he who thinks destroys, annuls, metes out disaster, corrodes, demolishes, for thinking is consistent with the dissolution of all ideas … we are made up (and this is history and the spiritual condition of history) of anxieties, bodily anxiety,spiritual anxiety, and the anxiety about death that drives creativity … what we reveal is not identical with what is, being shattered is something else, existence is something else, we are something else, the unendurable is something else, it isn’t illness, it isn’t death, those relationships are quite other, as are those circumstances …
    We say we have a right to what’s right and just, but we only have a right to what’s not right and what’s unjust …
    The problem is to get work done, which means advancing over all one’s inner resistance and evident mindlessness … and this means advancing over myself and the bodies of dead philosophers, over all of literature, all of science, all of history, everything … it is a question of one’s spiritual constitution and one’s spiritual concentration, of isolation and distance … of monotony … of utopia … of idiocy …
    The problem is always to get work done while thinking that work will never get done and nothing will ever get done … The question is: to go on, heedless of the consequences, to go on, or to stop, to call it a day … it is the question of doubt, of mistrust and impatience.
    I thank the Academy, and I thank you for your attention.

On My Resignation
    The election of Scheel, the former President of the Federal Republic, as an honorary member of the Academy for Language and Poetry, was for me the final and definitive reason to separate myself from this Academy for Language and Poetry, which in my view has nothing whatever to do with either language or poetry and the justification for whose existence must self-evidently be denied by every thinking person with a good conscience. For years I have wondered about the point of this so-called Darmstadt Academy and I have always had to tell myself that the only point consists in an association which in final analysis was founded merely for the self-image of its preening members, comes togethertwice a year to indulge in self-adulation, and there, after traveling in luxury at the expense of the state, eats splendid high-class dinners and drinks high-class wines in good Darmstadt hotels for almost a week while beating around the bush, literarily speaking. If one poet or writer is laughable and hard for human society to bear, how much more laughable and ridiculous is a whole horde of writers and poets and people who think they’re writers or poets, all in a heap! At bottom, all these previous prizewinners come together in Darmstadt at the state’s expense, after a year of impotence and mutual loathing, to spend another week in Darmstadt boring one another to death. Writers’ chitchat in the hotel lobbies of provincial Germany is the most distasteful thing imaginable. The stink is however