Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page A

imagination, rivers rumble in slices, workers pull long blades through the brains of paupers.” There were quite literally ancient dreams, a so-called “science of simple people.” A law by which all things permanently repeat themselves, while at thesame time being unrepeatable. Everything at once in a cycle of permanent return, and terminally entropic. Joy attracts more joy, sins attract sins, exhibition exhibition, love love. “What connects me to myself is the thing that is furthest away from me,” and “time is no means with which to engage with time,” and “I am a victim of my theories, and at the same time their controller.”
    He asked what that was: memories, scraps of singularities that one no longer understood. Memory stayed behind and carried on producing itself everlastingly, in the same form in which, not yet memory, one had first left it behind. As on a stage, people receded. Kept receding onto one and the same plane. His head was like the wings of an infinite theater. And? The volume would diminish, and finally also the impression “that the eyes have of the thing that, years earlier, they were forced to withdraw from. Over the years, all things become air.” Eventually, every so often, an image would surface out of the stream, become distinct and magnificent as the thing in which you despair. The past: childhood, youth, pain that is long since dead, is not dead, a piece of winter, a piece of spring, of summer—which summer?—whatever you loved most dearly. Gravel paths and roads, the burial sites of family and loved ones: men carrying a woman’s coffin, the whole thing darkening, draymen loading up barrels, brewery employees, cheesemakers, a broken bough in front of his parents’ house: the fear going down to the lake. The accumulation of coincidence turned what had been healthy into equally inexhaustible morbidity. “Everything in the world is just an essence of one’s self.” It was an effortless procedure for holding together a fantastic creature like a human being.Memory was merely preference. “If not, it will destroy everything, even the toughest substance in oneself.” Madness, joy, contentment, stubbornness and ignorance, belief and unbelief were at all times at its disposal. “It’s pure pleasure, dissolving even death.” To stand in relation to memory as to a human being, from whom one might part from time to time, only to welcome him back with renewed cordiality into one’s home, that was the thing “that benefits the memory and the man who has it, more with each occasion.” Memory followed a plan that remained unexecuted. A plan. Many plans. Looking back, it seemed that, though capable of charity, it wasn’t always prepared to give. Caused birthday surprises, document forgeries. Turned funerals into softly resonant afternoon ceremonials. It pretended to be deaf, just as the world was sometimes deaf, and often addressed one in unwittingly harsh tones, in the manner of a beloved brother, say, asking after his sister. It grew increasingly refined, between the theory and the feeling of a human being, a character, and, it appeared, “always turned up at precisely the right time.” Never a lie. Calculation, yes. Not mind. Not stinting. Sunk way down in the possibilities of memory, a human being went around dumbly, deaf to everything that didn’t stir from memory. It was a perpetual “thinking and-immediately-feeling-sad,” not just for its own ends either: for “daily unclarity and daily despair.”
    “I have such pain today,” he said, “that it’s almost impossible for me to walk. Every step is agony. You must imagine: that enormous head and these tiny shriveled-up legs … that have to support it. Way at the top that massive head, and right down at the bottom, incessantly those frail, weak little legs.Imagine some liquid in your head, something like boiling water, suddenly stiffening to lead and striking against the inside of your skull. Now I have the feeling