Frost: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

helplessly. Stood there disconnectedly. Woke up there. Not where I should have woken up, to suit my nature. My childhood and youth were brutally alone, just as my old age is brutally alone. As if nature had a right to keep pushing me away, back into myself, away from everything else, toward everything else, but always up against the limit. You understand what I’m saying: one’s ears are full of self-reproach. And if you think what you’re hearing is song, some wild or domesticated music, then you’re deceived: it’s still nothing but being alone. That’s the way it is with the birds in the forest, with seawater, lapping around your knees. I never knew what to do for myself, and now I know it still less. That’s a little surprising, isn’t it? I think people only pretend not to be alone, because they’re always alone. If you watch them in their societies, aren’t they proof of the fact: the gatherings, the meetings, the religions, aren’t they all endless solitude? You see, they are always the same thoughts. Unnatural, perhaps. Too much continuity. Dilettante, possibly. If a little self-reliance is brought to solitude,” he said, “that makes it bearable, but I never had the least bit of self-reliance. I didn’t know how to go about anything. I couldn’t cope with influences, surroundings, self. With what it was I was full of. You see. Right!” He said: “People who make a new person are taking an extraordinary responsibility upon themselves. All unrealizable. Hopeless. It’s a great crime to create a person, when you know he’ll be unhappy, certainly if there’s any unhappiness about. The unhappiness that exists momentarily is the wholeof unhappiness. To produce solitude just because you don’t want to be alone anymore yourself is a crime.” He said: “The drive of nature is criminal, and to appeal to it is a pretext, just as everything people do is a pretext.”
    He turned to face the village which lay before us: “It’s not a good cast of human being here,” he said. “The people are relatively short. The infants are given ‘brandy rags’ to suck, to keep them from screaming. A lot of miscarriages. Anencephaly is endemic. People don’t have favorite children, they just have a lot of them. In the summer they suffer heatstroke, because their frail tissue can’t stand up to the often fierce sun. In winter, as I say, they freeze to death on their way to school. Alcohol has displaced milk. They all have high squeaky voices. Most of them are crippled in one form or another. All of them are conceived in drunkenness. For the most part criminal characters. A high percentage of the younger people are in and out of prison. Assault and battery, and underage or unnatural sex are standard offenses. Child abuse, killings, are Sunday afternoon stuff … The animals are better off: after all, what people would really like is a pig, not a kid. The schools have very low standards, and the teachers are cunning and despised the way they are everywhere. Often suffer from ulcers. Tuberculosis suspends them in a milky melancholy, from which they never emerge. Gradually the farmers’ sons are integrated into the urban workforce. I have yet to see a good-looking individual in this region. And yet nothing is known of the people here, or of what they think: at the most you might brush against their occupations, existences, torments, their rapid increase. Just brush against it.”
    •   •   •
    As a child, he had been raised by his grandparents, and been allowed to run wild. In the wintertime, kept closely. Then he had often had to sit still for days on end, and learn combinations of words. By the time he started going to school, he knew more than the teacher did. The classroom in his country school in a quiet hamlet in Lower Austria “is unchanged to this day.” On a whim, he had gone back on a visit. The same smell, he said, that had always bothered him as a child, a mixture of tar, bathrooms, corn, and