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chrisrohlev1234 's review for:
Woodcutters
by Thomas Bernhard
"Country doctors aren't squeamish, I thought."
Thomas Bernhard was a great, prolific, vitriolic, funny and depressing author. A native-born Austrian who had such a contempt for his country that, in the late sixties, wrote, “There are more Nazis in Vienna now / than in thirty-eight.”
I've always had a weird and sneaking suspicion that our brain fabricates this world to be one of joy and happiness when, in reality, it is something abhorrent and sad. People are run over by cars, killed in wars, and die of preventable diseases and it only takes a few generations for our memory of these people to be dissolved.
Thomas Bernhard formulated this when he wrote in the sixties. Imagine if he saw America today. 2023 is a year where you can graduate from a name-brand state school in any particular STEM field and design the homing system of a Tomahawk missile whose unfortunate collateral damage is the eradication of a random 5-year-old boy who was playing soccer near an Al-Qaeda training camp.
Thankfully, there's no blood on my hands. And while there are millions across the world suffering from pestilence, disease, and misery, I can go to sleep knowing that everything will turn out alright. Not to worry, there are antidotes in this stupid and rotten culture. Get married, have a couple of kids and a family, and live the remaining days of your life in a silent kind of resignation, enjoying your IPA at the local brewery. Maybe you didn't get to do anything really great or remarkable in this life, but hey, at least you get to see your grandkids once in a while. Bernhard would certainly agree that life today is a meaningless rat race. Every time I log on to LinkedIn, I want to rest my right temple on the cool steel of a railroad beam and end it Anna Karenina style.
Thankfully, we have authors like Thomas Bernhard and books like The Woodcutters to show us that we are not alone in this contempt for the world. I'm thankful for that.
"She had the audacity to pick up an empty cigar box and place her own five-hundred-schilling in it, then go from one mourner to another canvassing contributions, with an expression on her face that made one want to slap it rather than give her any money for John, poor though he may have been-holding out the cigar box and carefully noting the amounts her victims were prepared to contribute and actually did contribute. Everyone found this performance of hers quite tasteless, and curiously enough it was Auersberger who voiced their feeling by suddenly saying to her face, How tasteless you are, how tasteless, how tasteless! Twice he repeated the words how tasteless-in other words he uttered them three times altogether-and then threw a thousand-schilling note into the cigar box. Finally there was a sum of several thousand shillings in the box, together with a hundred and twenty pounds which I had put in. Jeanie walked over to the table at which John was sitting with the woman from the store and myself and tipped out the contents of the cigar box on the table in front of him, behaving as though it were her money, all her own work, but by no means her own money-her own tastelessness, but not her own money, I had said to myself at the time, though I refrained from telling her that I thought she was disgusting. That was the proper word for her, and it was on the rip of my tongue. The Virginia Woolf of Vienna, I thought at the time, who has used John as a means of once more parading her social concern, thereby facing him with one of the most embarrassing situations of his life! He would have liked to crawl under the table. People like Jeannie Billroth, who have a great understanding of art (or used to have), lack any instinct for real life, for dealing with real people, I thought."
Thomas Bernhard was a great, prolific, vitriolic, funny and depressing author. A native-born Austrian who had such a contempt for his country that, in the late sixties, wrote, “There are more Nazis in Vienna now / than in thirty-eight.”
I've always had a weird and sneaking suspicion that our brain fabricates this world to be one of joy and happiness when, in reality, it is something abhorrent and sad. People are run over by cars, killed in wars, and die of preventable diseases and it only takes a few generations for our memory of these people to be dissolved.
Thomas Bernhard formulated this when he wrote in the sixties. Imagine if he saw America today. 2023 is a year where you can graduate from a name-brand state school in any particular STEM field and design the homing system of a Tomahawk missile whose unfortunate collateral damage is the eradication of a random 5-year-old boy who was playing soccer near an Al-Qaeda training camp.
Thankfully, there's no blood on my hands. And while there are millions across the world suffering from pestilence, disease, and misery, I can go to sleep knowing that everything will turn out alright. Not to worry, there are antidotes in this stupid and rotten culture. Get married, have a couple of kids and a family, and live the remaining days of your life in a silent kind of resignation, enjoying your IPA at the local brewery. Maybe you didn't get to do anything really great or remarkable in this life, but hey, at least you get to see your grandkids once in a while. Bernhard would certainly agree that life today is a meaningless rat race. Every time I log on to LinkedIn, I want to rest my right temple on the cool steel of a railroad beam and end it Anna Karenina style.
Thankfully, we have authors like Thomas Bernhard and books like The Woodcutters to show us that we are not alone in this contempt for the world. I'm thankful for that.
"She had the audacity to pick up an empty cigar box and place her own five-hundred-schilling in it, then go from one mourner to another canvassing contributions, with an expression on her face that made one want to slap it rather than give her any money for John, poor though he may have been-holding out the cigar box and carefully noting the amounts her victims were prepared to contribute and actually did contribute. Everyone found this performance of hers quite tasteless, and curiously enough it was Auersberger who voiced their feeling by suddenly saying to her face, How tasteless you are, how tasteless, how tasteless! Twice he repeated the words how tasteless-in other words he uttered them three times altogether-and then threw a thousand-schilling note into the cigar box. Finally there was a sum of several thousand shillings in the box, together with a hundred and twenty pounds which I had put in. Jeanie walked over to the table at which John was sitting with the woman from the store and myself and tipped out the contents of the cigar box on the table in front of him, behaving as though it were her money, all her own work, but by no means her own money-her own tastelessness, but not her own money, I had said to myself at the time, though I refrained from telling her that I thought she was disgusting. That was the proper word for her, and it was on the rip of my tongue. The Virginia Woolf of Vienna, I thought at the time, who has used John as a means of once more parading her social concern, thereby facing him with one of the most embarrassing situations of his life! He would have liked to crawl under the table. People like Jeannie Billroth, who have a great understanding of art (or used to have), lack any instinct for real life, for dealing with real people, I thought."