Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online

aberration of mine that I put on this jacket,” he said. “That I pretended I was the man I once used to be. Now I’m another, like a man after a further millennium. Maybe. After so many errors.” The landlady brought coffee and milk, and brought a young man sitting in another corner “whole mountains of food,” as the painter put it. “A proper person, he looks to me. I wonder what he’s doing here? Possibly a relation of the engineer’s. Possibly.” The landlady brought him a train timetable, which he flicked through for a while. Was it a good idea to take the shortcut, to get to the station, he asked. Generally it was, she replied, but in winter, it was impassable. The stranger got up, paid, and left. “My artist’s jacket,” said the painter, “is a ruin all of its own. When I took it off, I took off the ruin too.”That was the last time he would be wearing his artist’s jacket, he said.
    It occurs to me that it’s my twenty-third birthday today. No one, not a soul, was aware of the fact. Or if they were aware, then they didn’t know where I was. Except for the assistant, no one knows where I am.
    “There is a pain center, and from that pain center everything radiates out,” he said; “it’s somewhere in the center of nature. Nature is built up on many centers, but principally on that pain center. The pain center, like all the other centers in nature, is built up on more-than-pain, over-pain, it’s contiguous, you might say, with monumental pain. You know,” the painter said, “I could walk upright, but it’s not possible for me. I stoop more than most people, don’t I? Excuse me for walking with such a stoop. Probably it makes me look pitiful. But then you have no notion of the enormity of my pain. Pain and torment have moved in together; my arms and legs may fight back, but increasingly they’re becoming relegated to the status of innocent victims. And on top of that, this wet snow, those vast quantities of snow! There are moments in which I am incapable of supporting my head. Such an exertion, ten normal people wouldn’t be capable of supporting it, unless they’d had special training. So think: I have the strength of ten highly trained athletes, which enables me to raise my head from time to time. Imagine if I’d been able to develop such strength for myself! You see the way I fritter my strength on such a meaningless activity: because it’s meaningless raising a head like mine. Or if I’d been able to investone-hundredth of this strength in myself, somewhere where it might have been of significance … I could have overthrown every scientific idea and theorem. Reaped all the celebrity the intellectual world has to bestow. A hundredth of that strength, and I could have become something like a second Creator! Mankind would have been unable to oppose me. In the blink of an eye, I could have gone back thousands of years, and reset our development in another, healthier direction. But as things are, my strength has had to be concentrated on my head, on my headaches, and it has gone to waste. This head, you see, is useless. At the center of it there is a crude glowing planet, and everything else is full of fractured harmonies!”
    “Memory is a sickness. A word pops up that reveals entire neighborhoods. Ghastly architecture. You stare into crowds of people: futile to approach them! The day is over.” Ninety-eight out of a hundred people had a compulsive delusion with which they fell asleep and woke up. “Everyone is continually wading through the depth of an idea, some a long way down, others even further down. Until the darkness shows them the futility of what they’re attempting; police cells with their afternoon quiet, full of sleep and the reek of prisoners. One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years. Cornfields like whirlpools: forests, meadows, country roads, sections of fairs, torn apart by the