Here in the United States we are enjoying a holiday called Labor Day, dedicated (in theory) to celebrating American Working Men & Women.1 It’s celebrated in September so that we Americans can feel exceptional, unlike all those dirty foreign communists who celebrate labor on May 1. The holiday weekend that has Labor Day appended to it is regarded as the end of summer.
My pleasant diversion for this somewhat-melancholy holiday has been various memoirs of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), which have been collected into an English edition called Gathering Evidence.2 What a splendid use for the weekend to sit in one’s old wicker rocking chair on the back porch in the sunshine and breezes of the dying summer and watch a genius unload on the world with both barrels.
Bernhard is an overlooked hero of antinatalism. In the course of his discussion of his life as a young teenager in a ghastly Salzburg grammar school (much of which are devoted to showing how little it changed with it passed from Nazi to Catholic control in 1945) he offers this reflection.
There are no true parents, only criminals whose crime consists in bringing new human beings into the world and then abusing them in the most brainless and mindless fashion. And they are supported in their criminal behavior by all the world’s governments. For no government has any use for someone who is enlightened and actually in tune with the times, because he would naturally be opposed to its purposes. It is thus inevitable that millions of weak-minded people will continue to produce untold millions of weak-minded offspring, probably for decades and possibly for centuries. The new human being, in the first three years of his life, is made by his procreators or those acting on their behalf into what he will be and cannot help being throughout his life — an unhappy person, a totally unhappy human being. (pp. 112-3)
Bernhard eventually becomes so embittered at grammar school that he leaves to become a grocer’s apprentice in the the very worst neighborhood in Salzburg. He actually enjoys working in a grocery, but the job ruins his health. At about eighteen he develops a serious lung infection. His condition is so grave the he finds himself consigned to a hospital ward filled mostly with elderly men whom the hospital authorities expect to die imminently. Many of them indeed do. Bernhard witnesses these and sardonically names the ward the “death ward.” There he ruminates on death.
We begin to die the moment we are born, but we only say we are dying when we have reached the last stage of the process, a stage which may be appallingly protracted. What we call dying is only the last phase of a life-long process. To want to evade this last phase is to refuse to pay the bill. When the bill is presented and staring us in the face, we think of suicide; and as we do, we seek refuge in thoughts which are utterly base and ignoble. We forget that the whole business is a game of chance, and so we finally become embittered. Nothing remains to us in the end but hopelessness. The last stop is the death ward, where there is no reprieve. When we come to consider the matter, we realize that our whole life is nothing but a grubby calendar of events and that by the end of it all the pages have been torn out. (pp. 245-6)
While Bernhard clings to life in the hospital, Bernhard’s grandfather3 –one of the few people Bernhard genuinely loves — dies as the result of a botched operation. Doctors order Bernhard’s family not to tell him this news; he will only learn it when he finds his grandfather’s obituary in a newspaper that has somehow found its way into the death ward. (Not too much later in his life, Bernhard will learn of the death of his own mother by the same means, with the added detail that the obituary will misspell his mother’s name.) Bernhard will then be transferred to a tuberculosis sanitarium, a shadowed place with a reputation worse than that of Austria’s nastiest prisons. While there, Bernhard has a lot of time to think about life and what his grandfather had taught him.
This world now appeared to me exactly as my grandfather had described it to me when I was still incredulous and unwilling to endorse his description. I had listened to him but was unwilling to believe him, at least in the early years. Later, however, I had evidence that his assertions were correct: for the most part the world is nauseating, and when we look into it we are looking into a cesspit. Or was he mistaken? I now had an opportunity to examine my grandfather’s assertions. I had an obsessive desire to gather the evidence in my head, and so I began a strenuous search for the evidence, tracking it down in every direction, in every corner of the city of my youth and its surroundings. My grandfather had been right in his judgment of the world: it was indeed a cessspit, but one whihc engendered the most intricate and beautiful forms if one looked into it for long enough, if one’s eye was prepared for such strenuous and microscopic observation. It was a cesspit which yielded up its own natural beauties to the sharp revolutionary gaze. Yet whoever contemplates it for long, whoever spends decades gazing into it, eventually becomes exhausted and dies, or plunges headlong into it. My grandfather had described nature as cruel — and it was. He had described human beings as desperate and vicious — and they were. I was always on the look-out for counter-evidence, thinking to prove him wrong in this or that particular, but I failed: all the evidence I assembled in my head confirmed his views. (p. 305)
“The world is a cesspit which yields up its own natural beauties to the sharp revolutionary gaze.” There are few better summaries of the mental process behind behind a writer.
Thomas Ligotti gets the whole flavor of Bernhard just about right:
[Thomas Bernhard] knows that arguments are useless and pathetic. If you’re not fortunate enough to be above having opinions, and almost no one has this luxury, then the only course available to you, the only source of satisfaction, is to attack inspires what hate in you. You could also celebrate what inspires admiration or even love, but this doesn’t happen very much in Bernhard. In this sense, he very much resembles E. M. Cioran, whose philosophical essays are an assault on the highest level of the pure crumminess of all creation, a position that has led some commentators to classify him as a latter-day Gnostic—minus any god.4
“The only source of satisfaction is to attack what inspires hate in you.” I think that can be a response-of-all-work to those who hate certain aspects of my own writing.
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1Naturally, in the contemporary American environment American Working Men & Women are not much celebrated. The heroes of the present are those who own income-generating assets, known “job creators.” Those who actually hold the jobs are regarded as losers and parasites. At least one wag has suggested giving up on the concept of Labor Day and replacing it with “Asset Day” instead. Back to post.
2Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence and My Prizes, trans. David McClintock and Carol Brown Janeway. 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2011). Back to post.
3Johannes Freumbichler, (1881-1949), himself a writer of some note. Back to post.
4Neddal Ayad, “Literature is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti” in Matt Cardin, ed., Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti. (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014)., p. 114. An online version of the interview can be found here.