A medical intern is about to walk into a bakery with his mentor’s brother. He must study the man’s every action.
At this point in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost, the young lad has come face-to-face with unfiltered lunacy.
The brother is an eccentric, perhaps bipolar or schizophrenic. The exact diagnosis is unclear.
With aspirations to become a great doctor in his own right, the intern is almost clinical in his assessment of the old coot:
"He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet who are continually driven to say everything. Who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out into suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens."
Officially, this article is done and no more needs to be said. It is a perfect quote that lays waste to all within its gaze.
It’s yours now, so take it. Bludgeon the you-know-whos with its relentless indiscretion. Let it serve you all your live-long days.
Bonus section
By now you must be curious as to what the mentor’s brother said to receive such a glowing review. Here is but a taste (emphasis mine; paragraph chunking not mine):
“‘One might go to the bakery, perhaps,’ he said. ‘But did you know the baker has tuberculosis? All the people here run around in a highly infectious state. The baker's daughter has tuberculosis too, it seems to have something to do with the runoff from the cellulose factory, with the steam that the locomotives have spewed out for decades, with the bad diet that people eat. Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs. All of them have tubercular abscesses somewhere on their bodies. The valley is notorious for tuberculosis. You will find every form of it here: skin tuberculosis, brain tuberculosis, intestinal tuberculosis. Many cases of meningitis, which is deadly within hours. The workmen have tuberculosis from the dirt they dig around in, the farmers have it from their dogs and the infected milk. The majority of the people have galloping consumption. Moreover,’ he said, ‘the effect of the new drugs, of streptomycin for example, is nil. Did you know the knacker has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That her daughters have been to sanatoria on three occasions? Tuberculosis is by no means on the way out. People claim it is curable. but that's what the pharmaceutical industry says. In fact, tuberculosis is as incurable as it always was. Even people who have been inoculated against it come down with it. Often those who have it the worst are the ones who look so healthy that you wouldn't suspect they were ill at all. Their rosy faces are utterly at variance with their ravaged lungs. You keep running into people who've had to endure a cautery or, at the very least, a transverse lesion. Most of them have had their lives ruined by failed reconstructive surgery.’
We didn't go to the bakery. Straight home instead.”
“‘People who make a new person are taking an extraordinary responsibility upon themselves. All unrealizable. Hopeless. It’s a great crime to create a person, when you know he’ll be unhappy, certainly if there’s any unhappiness about. The unhappiness that exists momentarily is the whole of unhappiness. To produce solitude just because you don’t want to be alone anymore yourself is a crime.’”
“Before he retired to his room, ‘not to sleep, but to howl to myself in the silence of horror,’ he said: ‘How everything has crumbled, how everything has dissolved, how all the reference points have shifted, how all fixity has moved, how nothing exists anymore, how nothing exists, you see, how all the religions and all the irreligions and the protracted absurdities of all forms of worship have turned into nothing, nothing at all, you see, how belief and unbelief no longer exist, how science, modern science, how the stumbling blocks, the millennial courts, have all been thrown out and ushered out and blown out into the air, how all of it is now just so much air
… Listen, it’s all air, all concepts are air, all points of reference are air, everything is just air …’
And he said: ‘Frozen air, everything just so much frozen air …’”
“The human race was the unfruitful thing, ‘the only unfruitful thing in the whole world. It serves no purpose. It can’t be made into anything. It can’t be eaten. It isn’t a raw material for some process outside itself.’”
Eternal truths hidden within stark, raving madness.
What a fun book.