Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke Page A

conscious of being permeated by a sadness he had never before experienced. His sadness dispelled his fear of the people outside and he looked forward to being with them again. He would sit there and pay attention and be able to look into their faces. “She fell asleep so peacefully she’s sure to sleep until morning,” he said, delighted to be saying something superfluous himself. It was like after a patched-up quarrel, when the quarrelers confine themselves almost entirely to saying the most obvious things, wishing only to show that they’re on speaking terms again. “What a wind that was today!” he said with conviction, and when the writer’s girl friend replied: “It demolished my hairdo,” universal trust seemed to have been re-established. He didn’t mind spreading his napkin over his knees, and he was touched when Stefanie asked: “Something aperitivish?” To respond with “So do I” to everything that was said—that was harmony.—Meanwhile, the writer was still taking notes. “Are you from the police?” Keuschnig asked.
    The writer was very fat and a little older than Keuschnig. Though not really clumsy, he seemed to wreck everything he touched. In lighting a match, for instance, he would crush the whole matchbox … Apparently thinking he deserved compensation for putting his notebook away, he began to talk about himself: “I haven’t anything in particular to tell you,” he said. “I’ve lost my curiosity about people.
I used to be so curious that if someone said to me: ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? Could you write about me?’ I’d think: ‘Why not?’ Today if someone even says: ‘My mother played the piano … ’ it turns my stomach. The more I realize how much I have in common with everyone, the less solidarity I feel with anyone. When I hear someone singing the praises of solidarity, I stick my fingers down my throat. Once on the stairs leading to the toilets a woman started telling me about herself. I wanted to ask her: How with that little face of yours can you presume to speak in the first person singular? On the street, when I look at the people coming in the opposite direction, I think: What a lot of biographies—and all equally boring! Sometimes I feel like asking the woman at the newspaper stand about her background—but only in derision. Once at the bar of a café a woman was telephoning in rather a loud voice. I held my hands over my ears because I wanted no part in her story. Or think of the fun we used to have listening to conversations at the tables around us. Oh, how sick I am of eavesdropping now! I see a column of cars and I think: Never again will these people interest me. Yesterday I was in Neuilly, at the house of an industrialist. His wife said: ‘I love to observe people, their hands for instance.’ And then after a while she said: ‘My little Portuguese pearl chooses to be in a bad humor today. I feel I’m entitled to harmony in my surroundings; after all, I don’t let people see how I’m feeling.’—I could hardly bear it. Good Lord, I thought, now she’s going to let her hair down. This morning I saw a death notice; it was somebody I didn’t even know, but instantly I thought: Ha, dead at last, the swine. Once when I was visiting someone, he said: ‘It’s so dusty here.’ It flashed through my mind that my place was a lot
dustier, but I didn’t mention it, because I didn’t want to comfort him.” (He interrupted himself and said on a note of surprise: “I enjoyed that tomato.”) “I never want to observe anyone again,” he went on. “Not long ago, when I was looking at the people on the street, I said to myself: Maybe I should see them at work or at home in their apartments. But then I realized that there they would be even more predictable than on the street