A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Read Online Free PDF

wanted something; it was ridiculous to express desires in earnest. In the meantime, she brought her third child into the world.
    She took to the native dialect again, though of course only in fun: she was a woman who had been ABROAD . Almost all her old girl friends had by then returned to their native village; they had made only brief excursions to the city or across the borders.
    In this life, confined almost entirely to housekeeping and making ends meet, you didn’t confide in your friends; at the most, friendship meant familiarity. It was plain from the start that all had the same troubles—the only difference was that some took them more lightly than others, a matter of temperament.
    In this section of the population, people without troubles were an oddity—freaks. Drunks didn’t get talkative, only more taciturn; they might bellow or brawl for a while, but then they sank back into themselves, until at closing time they would start sobbing for no known reason and hug or thrash whoever was nearest to them.
    No one had anything to say about himself; even in church, at Easter confession, when at least once a year there was an opportunity to reveal something of oneself, there was only a mumbling of catchwords out of the catechism, and the word “I” seemed stranger to the speaker himself than a chunk out of the moon. If in talking about himself anyone went beyond relating some droll incident, he was said to be “peculiar.” Personal life, if it had ever developed a character of its own, was depersonalised except for dream tatters swallowed up by the rites of religion, custom, and good manners; little remained of the human individual, and indeed, the word “individual” was known only in pejorative combinations.
    The sorrowful Rosary; the glorious Rosary; the harvest festival; the plebiscite celebration; ladies’ choice; the drinking of brotherhood; April Fools’ pranks; wakes; kisses on New Year’s Eve: in these rituals all private sorrow, ambition, hunger for communication, sense of the unique, wanderlust, sexual drive, and in general all reactions to a lopsided world in which the roles werereversed, were projected outward, so that no one was a problem to himself.
    All spontaneity—taking a walk on a weekday, falling in love a second time, or, if you were a woman, going to the tavern by yourself for a schnapps—was frowned upon; at a pinch you could ask someone to dance or join in a song “spontaneously”, but that was all. Cheated out of your own biography and feelings, you became “skittish”; you shied away from people, stopped talking, or, more seriously touched, went from house to house screaming.
    The above-mentioned rites then functioned as a consolation. This consolation didn’t address itself to you as a person; it simply swallowed you up, so that in the end you as an individual were content to be nothing, or at least nothing much.
    You lost interest in personal matters and stopped inquiring about them. All questions became empty phrases, and the answers were so stereotyped that there was no need to involve
people
in them;
objects
sufficed; the cool grave, the sweet heart of Jesus, the sweet Lady of Sorrows, became fetishes for the death wish that sweetened your daily afflictions; in the midst of these consoling fetishes, you ceased to exist. And because your days were spent in unchanging association with the same things, they became sacred to you; not leisure but work was sweet. Besides, there was nothing else.
    You no longer had eyes for anything. “Curiosity” ceased to be a human characteristic and became a womanish vice.
    But my mother was curious by nature and had no consoling fetishes. Instead of losing herself in her work, she took it in her stride; consequently she was discontented. The
Weltschmerz
of the Catholic religion was alien to her; she believed only in happiness in this world, and that was a matter of luck; she herself had had bad luck.
    She’d still show them, though.
    But