Extinction by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online

set foot in them for years, until word got around that the libraries existed and they were obliged to show them to the curious rather than lose face. At Wolfsegg nothing was ever used, said Uncle Georg, until I suddenly started using everything, sitting on chairs that no one had sat on for decades, opening cupboards that no one had opened for decades, drinking out of glasses that no one had drunk out of for decades. I even walked down passages that no one had walked down for decades. Right from the start I was the inquisitive one, whom they couldn’t help fearing. And I began to leaf through our centuries-old documents, which were stored in big chests in the attics and which they had always known about but never looked at, as if they were afraid of discovering something unpleasant. I was interested in everything, said Uncle Georg, and of course I was especially interested in our family connections, in our history, though not in the way
they
were, not just in its hundreds and thousands of glorious pages but in the whole of it. I ventured to do what they had never dared to do—to look into the fearful depths of our history—and this angered them.
Georg
was a name they all came to fear at Wolfsegg, said my uncle. They were afraid that the child I was then might one day control them, instead of their controlling me. My parents, your grandparents, chained me to Wolfsegg and gagged me, he said, which is precisely what they shouldn’t have done. And your parents learned nothing from your grandparents’ mistake; on the contrary, they used even worse methods in dealing with you. But on theother hand, he said, what would have become of you if they hadn’t behaved to you as they did? The question needed no answer: it answered itself. When I look at you, said Uncle Georg, I’m actually looking at myself. You’ve developed exactly as I did. You parted from them, got out of their way, turned your back on them, and escaped from them at the right moment. They never forgave me, and they won’t forgive you. My God, he said, Rome is to you what Cannes is to me. In this way we can deal with Wolfsegg, from a distance. When I think of those dreary evenings with the family, when the most marvelous topics fizzle out as soon as they’re broached. Whatever you say is met with incomprehension. Nothing you mention is taken up. If your father reads a paper, it’s the
Upper Austrian Farmers’ Weekly
; if he reads a book, it’s the
accounts book
. And then, because they have to make use of their theater subscription, they go to Linz and see some dire comedy, without feeling in the least ashamed of themselves. And they go to those ridiculous concerts at the Bruckner House, where innumerable wrong notes are played at maximum volume. These people—I mean your parents—haven’t just taken out subscriptions for the theater and concerts: they live their whole lives on a subscription basis. Every day of their lives is like an evening spent at the theater seeing some frightful comedy or at a ridiculous concert where wrong notes predominate, and they’re not ashamed of it. They live their lives because it’s the done thing; not because they want to, not because they have a passion for life, but because their parents took out a subscription for them. And just as they clap in all the wrong places at the theater, so they clap in all the wrong places in their lives, applauding when there’s no occasion for applause, just as they do at concerts, and making the ghastliest grimaces when they should be laughing heartily. And just as the plays they see are of the most dismal quality, so their lives are of the most dismal quality. On the other hand, he said, we should by now be indifferent to what they do and what they’ve made of their lives—it doesn’t concern us. And who’s to say that we’ve taken the right course? We’re not the happiest of people either—always searching for the ideal and failing to find it. The fact is that we’ve all tried