And if I would then appear once before that sentence, lured by that sentence, as I was last Christmas, for example, when I had gone so far that I could only barely contain myself and when I really seemed to be on the last rung of my ladder, which, however, stood steadily on the ground and against the wall. But each day at least one line should be pointed at me as people are now pointing telescopes at the comet. That’s not all, of course, and such a question still isn’t enough to make me speak. This is more than I can manage, not to mention the fact that my ladder doesn’t have even those soles at its disposal. Perhaps some can, Japanese acrobats, for example, who climb a ladder that isn’t resting on the ground but on the upturned soles of a partner lying on his back and isn’t leaning against a wall but goes straight up into the air. Just let someone try to hold them, let someone try to hold and cling to a blade of grass that only starts growing from the middle. For whatever things occur to me occur not from the root, but beginning somewhere toward their middle. And this is something I think I understand without knowing its cause. My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either, not indifference not weakness, not fatigue, not interest in anything else, so what is it then? The fact that I don’t know is probably connected with my inability to write. If only that would happen to me! And it should happen to me ten times over, for I don’t even regret the unhappy time. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report.“When I really asked myself a question, I still responded, here there was still something to be wrested from me, from this heap of straw that I have been for five months and whose fate, it seems, is to be set alight in the summer and to burn away before the spectator can blink. I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. In any case, I am not appealing to any man’s verdict. But do not tell me that it was not worth the trouble. On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I have set out to achieve. By day I cannot bear to see her for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye, no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. Nearly every evening I give a performance, and I have a success that could hardly be increased. My manager sits in the anteroom when I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. With my hands in my trouser pockets, my bottle of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and gaze out of the window: If a visitor arrives I receive him with propriety. There was nothing else for me to do, provided that freedom was not to be my choice.Īs I look back on my development and survey what I have achieved so far, I do not complain, but I am not complacent either. There is an excellent idiom: to fight one’s way through the thick of things that is what I have done, I have fought through the thick of things. In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity. With an effort which up till now has never been repeated I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European. But I must also confess: I did not overestimate it, not even then, much less now. That progress of mine! How the rays of knowledge penetrated from all sides into my awakening brain? I do not deny it: I found it exhilarating. As I became more confident of my abilities, as the public took and interest in my progress and my future began to look bright, I engaged teachers for myself, engaged them in five communicating rooms, and took lessons from all at once by dint of leaping from one room to the other. Fortunately he was soon let out again.īut I used up many teachers, several teachers at once. My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it and was taken away to a mental hospital. One stands over oneself with a whip one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. Ah, one learns when one has to one learns when one needs a way out one learns at all costs.
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