It is impossible to progress beyond nonsense. I have listened to everything and conformed with nothing. I still go on experimenting: what fascinates the solitary person I have once more become is not knowing how something will turn out. I have long ceased to wonder about the meaning of words, which only ever make things more incomprehensible. Life as such, existence as such - nothing but commonplaces. When we recall the past, as I am doing now, everything gradually falls into place. We spend all our lives with people who do not know the least thing about us yet constantly claim to know everything about us. Our closest relatives and friends know nothing, because we ourselves know very little. We spend our whole lives trying to discover ourselves, and having reached the limit of our mental capacity, we give up. Our efforts end in total frustration and in fatal and unfailingly deadly depression. What we ourselves never dare to assert because we are not qualified to do so, others have no compunction in using as a reproach, intentionally or unintentionally ignoring everything about us and within us. We are continually being discarded by others, and every day we have to find ourselves again, piece ourselves together, reconstitute ourselves. We ourselves, as we grow older, pass increasingly harsh judgments and have to put up with judgments twice as harsh in return. Ignorance vitiates all relations with others and in due course, quite naturally, breeds indifference. After so many years of sensitivity and vulnerability we have become virtually insensitive and invulnerable...
Bernhard, T., Der Keller, 1976, Residenz Verlag, Salzburg.
trns. by David McLintock, Knopf, New York, 1985, p.206
