One Final Quote from Thomas Bernhard

So finally finished reading The Loser. Bernhard sure is very addictive and he has driven some of my gloom away too. Now I have to find another book by him to read, though my library doesn't have anything else by him.

Anyway, here is one more passage from the book which stuck to my mind (next time remember this passage when you are looking at your bookshelf)...

In the end the so-called great minds wind up in a state where we can feel only pity for their ridiculousness, their pitifulness. Even Shakespeare shrivels down to something ridiculous for us in clearheaded moment, he said, I thought. For a long time now the gods appear to us only in the heads on our beer steins, he said, I thought. Only a stupid person is amazed, he said, I thought. The so-called intellectual consumes himself in what he considers pathbreaking work and in the end has only succeeded in making himself ridiculous, whether he's called Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, it doesn't matter, even if he was Kleist or Voltaire we still see a pitiful being who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense. Who's been rolled over and passed over by history. We've locked up the great thinkers in our bookcases, from which they keep staring at us, sentenced to eternal ridicule, he said, I thought. Day and night I hear the chatter of the great thinkers we've locked up in our bookcases, these ridiculous intellectual giants as shrunken heads behind glass, he said, I thought. All these people have sinned against nature, he said, they've committed first-degree murders of the intellect, that's why they've been punished and stuck in our bookcases for eternity. For they're choking to death in our bookcases, that's the truth. Our libraries are so to speak prisons where where we've locked up our intellectual giants,naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the other in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that's the truth.

And it goes on and on....

Anyway, I was looking at my virtual bookshelf on Library Thing and it informs me that The Loser was 30th book that I read this year! If only I read even half of it related to what I do for living! Sigh! Anyway, My new year reading resolution was to read more history, specially about the Russian revolution and the Austro-Hungarian empire and more philosophy, specially Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and the Romantics but actually hardly read anything on these subject. Next year may be...

I am also almost done with reading a brilliant companion monograph on W G Sebald, rather modestly titled Understanding W. G. Sebald, and I have no hesitation in calling it a masterpiece of explication and elucidation. I just wish there were more academic books like it. Will write about it later. I still have to read parts of it. Link to the publisher's page here.

Next book on the list is The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. Here is a nice essay in New Yorker that I was reading and another essay by Coetzee also gives lots of background on Roth's life and works. Also learnt a new word, "delirium tremens." Roth died in a state of delirium tremens.