Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page B

everything abhorrent to me and, what I regret most deeply, made it abhorrent to my wife too. For years, he said, I have only managed to exist by and as a result of this method of making things abhorrent. Now I know that I must not read totally or listen totally or view and contemplate totally if I want to go on living. There is an art in not reading totally and not listening totally and not viewing totally or looking totally, he said. I have not quite mastered that art yet, he said, because my natural inclination is to approach everything totally and to persevere totally and bring it to a conclusion totally, that is, you should know, my real misfortune, he said. For decades I have wanted to do everything totally, that was my misfortune, he said. This highly personal disintegrating mechanism always focused on the total, he said. But then the old masters did not paint for people like me, nor did the great old composers or the great old writers produce their works for people like me, naturally not for people like me, never would any of them have painted or written or composed music for a person like me, he said. The arts are not made for total viewing or for total listening or for total reading, he said. This art is made for the pitiful portion of humanity, for the everyday, for the normal, for, I am bound to say it, the gullible portion, none other. A great piece of architecture, he said, how quickly it is diminished under the scrutiny of an eye such as mine, no matter how famous it may be, and especially if it is famous it sooner or later shrinks to a ridiculous piece of architecture. I have travelled, he said, in order to see great architecture, naturally first to Italy and to Greece and to Spain, but the cathedrals always soon shrank under my eyes to nothing but helpless, and indeed ridiculous, attempts to juxtapose to heaven something like a second heaven, from one cathedral to the next always an even more magnificent second heaven, from one temple to the next always something even more magnificent, he said, yet the result has always been something bungled. Naturally I visited the greatest museums, and not only in Europe, and studied what they contained, with the greatest intensity, believe me, and it soon seemed to me as if these museums contained nothing but painted helplessness, painted incompetence, painted failure, the bungled part of the world, everything in these museums is failure and bungling, he said yesterday, no matter what museum you enter and get down to viewing and studying, you study nothing but failure and bungling. Very well, the Prado, he said, surely the most important museum in the world as far as the old masters are concerned, but each time I sit at the Ritz across the street, drinking my tea, I reflect that even the Prado contains only imperfect, unsuccessful, ultimately only ridiculous and dilettantish things. Some artists, he said, at certain times, when they are in vogue, are quite simply inflated to world-rousing monstrosity; then abruptly some incorruptible mind pricks that world-rousing monstrosity and the worldrousing monstrosity bursts and is nothing, just as abruptly, he said. Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe, he said, just as Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities. That Stifter, he said yesterday, an author I myself had always so enormously revered that it became more like artistic addiction, is just as bad a writer on closer examination as Bruckner, on intensive listening, is a bad if not a lousy composer. Stifter writes in a terrible style, one which grammatically is beneath contempt, and Bruckner has similarly slipped the reins with his chaotically wild, and even in old age, religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds. I have revered Stifter for decades without actually concerning myself with him accurately or radically. When, about a year ago, I did concern myself accurately and radically with Stifter, I could not believe my eyes and ears.