The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) by Thomas Bernhard Page B

is a conspiracy against the brain. The rest is lies. The dying birds of Europe are being protected, Konrad is supposed to have said, but not the dying brains, not the dying ears. But all this is ridiculous, whatever one can say is ridiculous, Konrad is supposed to have said, the moment you say something you find you have made an ass of yourself, no matter what it is, we make ourselves ridiculous, whatever we read is ridiculous, whatever we hear, ridiculous, whatever we believe, ridiculous. Open your mouth and a ridiculous statement is sure to come out, some embarrassing absurdity or other, or else an absurd embarrassment, whichever. Then Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, aren’t you cold? Konrad was inclined to believe that his guest might be feeling cold, even though Konrad himself was not cold, he had his fur vest on underneath his jacket, one had to wear fur underneath one’s outer garments here in the lime works, this quite apart from the fact that Konrad was by now hardened to the cold. The conditions prevailing in the lime works had hardened him. Everything in the lime works was cold, the cold was everything here. In fact, all of the last twenty years, he said, you might even say all my life long, I have been preoccupied withthe sense of hearing. Only for as long as my book remains unwritten in my head, is it a scientific work; it will not be a work of art until after I have written it down. It is hearing that makes everything else possible. But for the uninitiated everything I say is no better than blasphemy. If I could, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, Wieser says, I would make you acquainted, even intimately acquainted, with the most important parts of my book, but it is not possible. The moment he began to explain matters he could see at once that it was absurd to try to explain. Every explanation led inescapably to a totally false outcome, the more things were explained the sicker they got, because the explanations were false in every case, and the outcome of every explanation was invariably the wrong outcome. This book of his was divided into nine parts or sections. The number 9, in fact, played a most important part in this work, everything in it was divisible by 9, everything could be extrapolated from 9; as the inspector might not be aware, the 9 was more important than the 7, and especially with regard to the auditory sense the 9 was of the greatest importance. The first section is an introduction to all the others, the ninth section is an elucidation of all the preceding ones, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, the second section naturally deals with the brain and the ear, the ear and the brain and so forth, the sixth section is entitled “The Sub-auditory Sense,” a lengthy treatise primarily on the so-called dysarthria of the ear, the seventh section dealt with hearing and seeing. The hearing is the most philosophical of all the senses, Konrad said to the inspector, as reported by Wieser, but he had all nine sections complete in his head, for decades by now, it was a monstrous strain on a man to keep so complicated an intellectual structure in hishead in every detail, carrying it around with him in the constant and continually increasing anxiety that it would fall apart and dissipate itself from one moment to the next, dissolve into nothing, and all because he was constantly missing the right moment for capturing it all on paper. I spent two whole years preparing for the first section of my book, and in the following eighteen years I was able to develop and complete my preparations for the rest, a feat that was enough in itself to make a man suspect, as he had unfortunately found out for himself, enough to bring him under suspicion and into disrepute as a total madman, frankly and obviously a clinical case. Of all those nine parts the fifth was the hardest, in fact he still had no title for it. Nothing could be easier, of course, than to go really