Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard

allowed to flow into me for the very first time; they suddenly made me feel tremendously good, and I made no attempt to tone them down. I let them all descend on me like a refreshing rain. And today it seems to me that we can count on the fingers of one hand all the people who have really meant anything to us in the course of our lives, and very often this one hand protests at our perversity in believing that we need a whole hand in order to count them, for to be honest we could probably make do without a single finger. There are times, however, when life is endurable, and at such times we occasionallymanage to count three or four people to whom in the long run we owe something, and not just something but a great deal—people who have meant everything and been everything to us at certain critical moments or certain critical periods of our lives. Yet we know that as we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise, though it may be stretched to the limits of its tolerance even without having to perform such unnatural feats. Yet at the same time we should not forget that the few people in question are all dead, that they died long ago, for bitter experience naturally inhibits us from including the living in our calculation—those who are still with us, perhaps even at our side—unless we want to risk being totally, embarrassingly, and ludicrously wrong, and hence making fools of ourselves, above all in our own eyes. I would certainly have no such inhibition with regard to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s nephew Paul. On the contrary, this man, to whom I was linked for years, until his death, by every possible passion and disease, and by the ideas that were constantly engendered by those passions and diseases, was one of the people from whom I derived so much benefit throughout those years, who did so much to enhance my existence—in a way that accorded with my aptitudes, abilities, and needs—and very often made its continuance possible. This is now clear to me beyond all question, two years after his death, as I face the January cold and the January emptiness of my house. Now that I have no living person left, I tell myself, I will face the January cold and the January emptiness with the help of the dead, and of all these dead there isnone closer to me, at this time and at this moment, than my friend Paul. I stress the word
my
, for what is set down in these notes is the picture that
I
have of my friend Paul Wittgenstein, no other. We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into ever greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties. Yet I now see that throughout these years my whole being was in some elemental way controlled by this friendship, consciously or unconsciously—controlled by a friendship which neither of us found easy and to which we had to devote the most strenuous effort if it was to remain useful and profitable to us both, while at the same time taking the utmost care never to lose sight of its fragility. Sitting on the park bench, I recalled that at the Sacher he always preferred to sit in the right-hand lounge, because he found the chairs there more comfortable but above all because he judged the paintings on the walls to be better executed, while I naturally preferred to sit in the left-hand lounge, because of the foreign newspapers, especially the English and French newspapers, that were always available there and because of the more wholesome air. When we went to the Sacher, therefore, we would sit sometimes in the right-hand and sometimes in the left-hand lounge. When I was in Vienna (and in those years I spent most of my time in Vienna) the Sacher was our favorite resort, since it was ideally