Read Online Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke - Free Book Online

a child, if people came along while he was running he had always stopped and continued at a walk until they passed. Then he had broken into a run again. Now the men had passed—why didn’t he start running?—So many situations, so many places in which he had stopped for people had suddenly occurred to him—so many different people as well—that in recollection he could only walk. And something else had surprised him: that with his first running
steps the surroundings, which had receded from him until nothing remained but a number of vanishing points—nothing there for him to look at!—were again surrounding him protectively. Where previously he had seemed to be passing the backs of things, he now saw details, which seemed to exist for him as well as for others.—Running again, Keuschnig noticed glistening puddles in the gravel beside the freshly watered potted trees and in that moment he had a dreamlike feeling of kinship with the world. He stopped still outside the entrance and shook his head as though arguing against his previous disgruntlement. Now he was able to look freely in all directions. Before going in, he cast a last hungry glance over his shoulder to make sure he had missed nothing. How his surroundings had expanded! It took free eyes to see them so rich—so benevolent. Now the sky with its low-lying clouds seemed to be sharing something with him. Keuschnig gnashed his teeth.—As he ran up the stairs, he was surprised to find himself reenacting a run that had happened in a dream. Then, for the first time in a dream, there had been actual motion in his running.
    As a participant in a press conference devoted to the program of the new government, Keuschnig had nothing to worry about for the present. In such a place the omens of death seemed unthinkable. He no longer had to picture his own future, there was no further need to fear surprises; just to sit here—and better still, to sit here ecstatically taking notes along with so many others—was today his idea of peace. Up front, far in the distance, the President of the Republic was explaining the program, and as he spoke Keuschnig was conscious of an animal certainty that everything would get better and better. When a journalist asked
if a certain project wasn’t absurd, the President replied: “I cannot afford to look on what I am doing as absurd.” That answer struck Keuschnig’s fancy and he wrote it down. Here nothing was said that was not meant to be taken down; that in itself was comforting! Keuschnig no longer understood why he had been so relieved some months before when after the elections the good old advertisements had replaced campaign posters on the city’s walls. Had the campaign posters represented a threat that something would HAPPEN? Why at the time had he felt the elections to be meaningless and unreal? Now he felt strangely secure in the thought that a policy was being formulated for him. It was so comforting to be able to think about oneself in terms formulated by others; the program he, along with the others, was taking down told him what kind of person he was and what he needed; it even prescribed a specific order of succession! And that part of him which was not defined in the program could be ignored—since it was only a holdover from rebellious adolescence and he himself was to blame if he hadn’t got it under control. I’ve been defined! he thought—and that flattered him. Being defined had the advantage of making him inconspicuous, even to himself. How could he have let a stupid dream upset him so? Who was he that he should presume to see meaning in life only on high holidays? He had indulged his strictly private caprices long enough! He set too much store by mental games that other people simply couldn’t afford.—And what if he found himself in danger again as today? Then, if only he could learn to see everything in its proper place like an adult,