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

this head will never fit anywhere, not even in the landscape. Only pain. Pain and darkness. I can follow your words, I can follow the sounds of your feet. Some time, I know, my head will open. I have various notions of various endings,” said the painter. “If I permit it to come to a natural end; but I won’t permit it to come to a natural end. Suicide: primal thing in nature, quite naturally the hardest, toughest, nothing … the whole of development is confined to the investigation: the generations are seated in a sort of pretrial room … The pains in my head, at a fixed unscientific degree of unbearableness … you want to see in yourself what you are capable of: on the way to extreme insensitivity and oversensitivity in graduated torments up the pillar of pain at intervals of time … the temperatures given in thousands of degrees … I’m supporting a head in which the horizons are reeling. If I could offer you a hint which is more than a hint … I confine myself to the cursed propensities of age; and so it is possible for me to keep step with my agonies. You see those pegs,” said the painter; “I could happily drive every one of them into my brain! And my feet are hurting, my ankles. Everything. Nothing in me that is not in pain. You must think I’m a gigantic fusspot! But you can’t imagine what it’s like: suddenly everything swelling up and functioning on an enormous scale. Always the same roads,” he said, “it drives you crazy. Freely adopted pains that I find for myself, in addition. From clumsiness or calculation. From ignorance and too much knowledge. Freeze, because you forgot to take a precaution? … And then an infinite amount of raw data going through my head: things to do with journeys, with business, with uncontrollable, religiousschemes. You understand: everything is divisible! Just as: nothing is divisible! And the pain is driven on and up. It leaps more and more dementedly into the air. Capable of astonishing turns, it plunges down on me like a hawk. You hear?” said the painter; “you hear?” And I heard the dogs.

Seventh Day
    The knacker saw the painter on the track. Hunkered down. On a root. But the painter hadn’t even looked up at him as he passed. That had given the knacker a strange shock, and he had stopped and addressed the painter. “I’m working on a problem,” the painter is supposed to have said. Whereupon the knacker had turned to go on, but the painter had stopped him in his tracks with the single word “ice-cold.” “I’m trying out all sorts of things,” he is supposed to have said, “but all my efforts fail.” Then the knacker sat down with him, and began talking to him. Why not get up and go to the inn, and get the landlady to make him a hot cup of tea. The best thing would be to chase away the chill that was entering his bones with a couple of glasses of plum brandy. He is supposed to have had tears in his eyes when the knacker said, “Oh come, a painter like yourself surely won’t despair.”
    He apparently told him once or twice more to get up, till eventually the painter saw that it was futile, and in the long term merely painful to remain sitting where he was. Thenapparently he said, “It’s not getting me anywhere,” and got up. And they walked along the track up to the larch wood. “He crawled more than he walked,” says the knacker. Then he allowed the knacker to drag him by the end of his stick as far as the inn. “I always knew there was something not quite right about the painter.” The knacker says it well-meaningly, and so impassively that a great deal of feeling comes through. “That was practically suicidal,” the knacker is said to have said to the painter. The observation that the painter had changed from how he was before, “when he had always been laughing, in particular when he was there with his sister,” he had already made on the occasion of his previous visit. “He was here briefly in late