Days [ ) Childhood | Thomas Bernhard, 1963
Thomas Bernhard with his mother, Bavaria, 1938
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“Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who
now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on.” It
went along rivers, and down mountain gorges. If you gave it any assistance, the evening would construct
the most elaborate and costly lies. But it wouldn’t save you from pain and indignity. Lurking cats crossed
your path with sinister thoughts. Like him, so nettles would sometimes draw me into fiendish moments
of unchastity. As with him, my fear was made palatable by raspberries and blackberries. A swarm of crows
were an instant manifestation of death. Rain produced damp and despair. Joy pearled off the crowns of
sorrel plants. “The blanket of snow covers the earth like a sick child.” No infatuation, no ridicule, no
sacrifice. “In classrooms, simple ideas assembled themselves, and on and on.” Then stores in town,
butchers’ shop smells. Façades and walls, nothing but façades and walls, until you got out into the
country again, quite abruptly, from one day to the next. Where the meadows began, yellow and green;
brown plowland, black trees. Childhood: shaken down from a tree, so much fruit and no time! The secret
of his childhood was contained in himself. Growing up wild, among horses, poultry, milk, and honey.
And then: being evicted from this primal condition, bound to intentions that went way beyond himself.
Designs. His possibilities multiplied, then dwindled in the course of a tearful afternoon. Down to three or
four certainties. Immutable certainties. “How soon it is possible to spot dislike. Even without words, a child
wants everything. And attains nothing.” Children are much more inscrutable than adults. “Protractors of
history. Conscienceless. Correctors of history. Bringers-on of defeat. Ruthless as you please.” As soon as
it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with. Often—as it does me—it
gives him a shock, when he feels a sensation he had as a child, provoked by a smell or a color, but that
doesn’t remember him. “At such a moment you feel horribly alone.”
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Thomas Bernhard, Frost, 1963
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