Telegrams of the Soul by Peter Altenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

is his tragedy. He has no reason to be unhappy and yet he is, and so must bear it in silence. But when grief finally explodes it generally explodes wrongly and unjustly. Which is far worse. So to “grin and bear it” is the best thing to do. A “flare-up” calls for an immense reserve of spiritual strength and brutality, disregard for others. Who has it?! Who benefits from it?!?
    So grin and bear it! Yuck!
    Can you possibly know what plagues another, say your fellow man? The fact is, you don’t even want to know. What a miserable doddering camel you are, loaded down, burdened with your own intimate woes. Your concern for others is a forced comedy you put on for your allegedly kind heart! Nobody has natural Savior-like inclinations. There is only one. And he got his just due, they finished him off, in fact. Interest?! At best you’re interested in yourself and not even that, you’re not wise enough to be so farsighted. You lend an ear, but that’s the most tiresome thing of all, the fate of others. “Here, take twenty Crowns, but do shut up!” No, better let him get it off his chest—.

The Reader
    â€œThe things Altenberg writes, we already know them anyhow!”
    Because he writes in such a way as to give you the impression that you’ve always known it anyhow.
    But it’s only through him that you know that you’ve always known it anyhow, that is, ought to have known it!
    You’re embarrassed in front of yourself, to have fathomed it only now thanks to that crazy eccentric Altenberg!
    There’s only one way out:
    â€œWell for crying out loud, I already thought that, knew that, long ago, do you have to spell everything out?! That Altenberg fellow is a nut, he has the need to enlighten!”
    Do I really?! It’s fine with me if the others fumble and falter on their own foolishness.

Albert
    I received a Crown, dated 1893, the face of which was polished and in which the name “Albert” had been engraved. I immediately felt that in such an unusual case poets had the duty to let their imagination ramble. In any case, it was surely a “she,” who, through a circumstance unknown to us, had had this consecrated Crown—perhaps the first lavished on her or the last—so transformed, and in a moment of material need or out of hatred, jealousy, despair, contempt or the like, had sent it back in circulation, back into the current of life, till finally, in 1914, it came to me.
    I cherished it for the longest time, and Maeterlinck would have made a one-act out of it: Crown 1893. But when the valet Anton requested payment for cigarettes and I said, at the moment I had no change on hand, he pointed to the 1893 Crown lying on the desk and said: “There’s a coin over there!”—“It’s invalid!” I said, “just look at it!”—“I’ll make do with it, you can count on my dexterity, Sir, nobody’ll notice that stupid word “Albert!” And thus did that 1893 Crown slip out of my possession and resume its worldly circulation, which I, in an application of “false Romanticism” had temporarily held up—.

The Private Tutor
    At the entrance to the zoo with its black linked metal fence and the ring of dusty lilacs stood a little light brown Swiss chalet glimmering with a fresh coat of varnish baking in the afternoon sun in which the zoo attendant sat chomping on a pear. He sold lemon yellow entrance tickets and dark green reduced price tickets for groups, soldiers and regular visitors. “Les enfants ne comptent pas,” he muttered, as if to say: “Go on, get lost, you don’t hardly matter—. . .” In a little cage near the sweating Swiss chalet sat two aguti, Dasyprocta aguti. * The cage floor was covered with broken bits of bread rolls and sugar cubes.
    A young private tutor with a boy and a girl at his side said: “Stupid people. Fruit is all they eat! Watch