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Authors: Peter Handke
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not cease to baffle me the more they revealed themselves, and on the other hand not one of them seemed inspired by anythingâa cause, a mission. (In my conception, âThe Society of the Inspiredâ had been the bookâs subtitle, after âThe Apothecary of Erdberg.â) After they unveiled their secrets I actually found not a few of them good and decent, and could even admire and respect quite a number of them, and not only a doctor for being on call at night or a politician for switching his allegiance from one segment of society to another or a bus driver on snowy mountain roads. The only problem: not one of them revealed anything that sparked my imagination.
And similarly I was preoccupied with the evildoers, no less numerous; they assailed me, would not leave me in peace, even in my dreams. Yet they, too, did not galvanize or stimulate me, not even the public speaker during whose hate-filled tirades I could picture all the manhole covers blowing off around his followers gathered on the open square, and the skulls of the dead emerging.
Neither the former nor the latter were anything for my book. Among all these many people, none provided the appropriate starting point, or even the most delicately traced first initial; this only my ancestors offered, the dead and the disappeared.
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A t the time I came to believe that people in a story could not have anything to do with the living, no matter whom.
When I explained this one time to the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, he replied that I should have started nonetheless. A false start was often more productive than the right one. And besides, nowadays there were nothing but false starts for books. How could I be sure that with the first sentence of my present project I hadnât turned my key in a door that led nowhere? And wasnât it possible that I had been deterred from writing my novel of society merely by the prospect that it would have to be one of those obscenely fat books that both of us despised on sight?
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E ven when writing was not yet my profession, as in those days when I was still an attorney, it already guided my life, less the how than the where. As the years went by and I realized that the country and people of Austria were antithetical to the book of my dreams, I went away to be among the most distant foreigners.
I never attended the School of Foreign Service. When I was with the United Nations, whether first in New York or later as an observer in Israel and Mongolia, where I was working for UNESCO, even if I was called an attaché or a vice-consul or something else, I was either an office worker or the right-hand man to one and the same clever diplomat I knew from my days in Vienna.
Almost every day in New York I would bump into our future federal president, who confused me with someone else, and always with the comment that I spoke remarkably unaccented German for a Slav. The woman from Catalonia said later that I had written my article attacking him just to get revenge; she herself, who at the time knew him from the East River, sometimes held him up to me as an example, with his way of never revealing his thoughts, also his bearing, his dress, his refusal to touch anything for which others, inferiors, servants, could be called upon, his way of never showing any feelings, either joy or sorrow.
In Israel, when she visited me, I found just enough time to get away from the gun emplacements on the Golan Heights for a week on the Lake of Gennesaret, lying there with its locked-up villas and tied-up boats like the Austrian lakeside resorts in winter, except that it was not frozen over but rain-gloomy, then farther into the basin of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, where, far below normal sea level, in that region that had always attracted me, we begat our child, amid her cries of painâfrom the saltâand then uphill through the desert to Jericho, with its sand-shimmering desolation, its rustling palms,
And similarly I was preoccupied with the evildoers, no less numerous; they assailed me, would not leave me in peace, even in my dreams. Yet they, too, did not galvanize or stimulate me, not even the public speaker during whose hate-filled tirades I could picture all the manhole covers blowing off around his followers gathered on the open square, and the skulls of the dead emerging.
Neither the former nor the latter were anything for my book. Among all these many people, none provided the appropriate starting point, or even the most delicately traced first initial; this only my ancestors offered, the dead and the disappeared.
Â
Â
A t the time I came to believe that people in a story could not have anything to do with the living, no matter whom.
When I explained this one time to the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, he replied that I should have started nonetheless. A false start was often more productive than the right one. And besides, nowadays there were nothing but false starts for books. How could I be sure that with the first sentence of my present project I hadnât turned my key in a door that led nowhere? And wasnât it possible that I had been deterred from writing my novel of society merely by the prospect that it would have to be one of those obscenely fat books that both of us despised on sight?
Â
Â
E ven when writing was not yet my profession, as in those days when I was still an attorney, it already guided my life, less the how than the where. As the years went by and I realized that the country and people of Austria were antithetical to the book of my dreams, I went away to be among the most distant foreigners.
I never attended the School of Foreign Service. When I was with the United Nations, whether first in New York or later as an observer in Israel and Mongolia, where I was working for UNESCO, even if I was called an attaché or a vice-consul or something else, I was either an office worker or the right-hand man to one and the same clever diplomat I knew from my days in Vienna.
Almost every day in New York I would bump into our future federal president, who confused me with someone else, and always with the comment that I spoke remarkably unaccented German for a Slav. The woman from Catalonia said later that I had written my article attacking him just to get revenge; she herself, who at the time knew him from the East River, sometimes held him up to me as an example, with his way of never revealing his thoughts, also his bearing, his dress, his refusal to touch anything for which others, inferiors, servants, could be called upon, his way of never showing any feelings, either joy or sorrow.
In Israel, when she visited me, I found just enough time to get away from the gun emplacements on the Golan Heights for a week on the Lake of Gennesaret, lying there with its locked-up villas and tied-up boats like the Austrian lakeside resorts in winter, except that it was not frozen over but rain-gloomy, then farther into the basin of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, where, far below normal sea level, in that region that had always attracted me, we begat our child, amid her cries of painâfrom the saltâand then uphill through the desert to Jericho, with its sand-shimmering desolation, its rustling palms,
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