It is another story altogether that the mutt ran off on me as I was making my way home in the dark, that when I passed the lonely border station in the no-man’s-land just outside Llivia I wanted to be there in place of the uniformed guard watching television in his bare room under the stars of the Pyrenees, and that I choked on the final sentence of my book all through spring and summer, from one city in Europe to another, with the last line finally typed in Munich or somewhere or other, on the day of the Blessed Virgin’s birth or some day or other, in the garret in the house of my reader, who later told me he had just made up his mind, after days of silence behind my door, to break it down, when finally the typewriter started up, then again nothing for a long time, and then Gregor K. with a packet of manuscript and his traveling coat asking where the nearest post office was.
And it is also another story that for at least the following year I considered my salvation or release into a new freedom, or this change, a delusion; I thought the verdict on me was still in force, and now, right now, the time to execute it had arrived.
That this relentless pressure finally let up I owe to reading, not Holy Scripture, but the poet Friedrich Holderlin, who filled my veins with new blood, and then Goethe, who could be counted on to raise my spirits. This reading provided me with roots in the air and the light; and only on this basis did I then develop a sense for the Gospels, and not only the Christian ones. And simultaneously, although at the time I clearly understood religion, no matter which, as a given, even in previously incomprehensible variations, I still felt it was the highest calling to be a storyteller.
As for my book on prehistoric forms, alias the chimerical world, I thought during my relapses that I had ended it wrong, and was thus a failure and at the same time finally in the place where I belonged, and then again that I could build the rest of my life on it, or at least a piece of my life.
My notion that no one would read it was not borne out. To be sure, many people, especially members of my own generation, distanced themselves from me and my project, wordlessly as a rule, almost considerately, and when someone did say something, he said he found the sentences too long, the words too archaic, the focus on nature too exclusive. But then, with the passage of time, new readers turned up, younger ones, and, something I had always wished for previously, above all older ones.
The reviews were nothing special. Only one of the critics, the cleverest and at the same time the most limited, a man who presented his limitations as simplicity, sniffed out something and offered the opinion that the longing for salvation that presses on one of the heroes’ eyelids was an infelicitous image, and wondered whether falling to one’s knees, which happens to one of the characters in the course of events, provided a suitable position for thinking.
During the following year I remained in my birthplace, Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, taking shelter like a child in the cottager’s house that had belonged to my parents, recently bought back by my successful brother, my almost-twin, the uncrowned king of our family, and yet again and again the loser (at the appointed time perhaps I shall write my first play about him, with the title “Preparations for Immortality,” a tragedy?).
Earlier I had thought of the house, which belonged to us three siblings, as my last refuge. Now it felt as though there I would finally make a real beginning. In my ancestral region, the world in the form of details now opened up to me as it had revealed itself to me in the suburbs of Paris. The way of seeing I had developed there had become so much my own that it persisted in this area, similarly simple and unpicturesque, as I now realized. At last Austrian objects, along with the spaces between them, showed themselves to me, and spread out to form an environment.
None of these things forced themselves on me any longer (which in my childhood had often made the impression of hypertrophy). Now on the plain the pines and firs stood there, and Globasnitz Brook and Rin-ken Brook flowed as all over the world, as above them much more than a purely Carinthian sky hovered blue.
And thus the place names in my more immediate homeland also acquired resonance and rhythm, even if only those of the villages: Dob, Heiligengrab, Mittlern, Bistrica, Lind, Ruden, and of course Rinkolach. The names of the towns, as small as they were — Bleiburg, Völkermarkt, Wolfsberg — remained mute, not to mention Klagenfurt or Villach. Only on the other side of the borders did it continue, with Maribor, Udine, Tricesimo.
And likewise the natives, though again only those in the villages — which in any case were almost all I saw during that year — struck me as people from anywhere, with the appropriate horizon as a backdrop.
All this I took in, and yet for a long initial period I was utterly incapable of having dealings with anyone. Even with my brother I could hardly get out a word. It was a kind of violence that forced me to hide myself from him as from the others, or to turn my head the other way.
And even the simplest daily tasks I seemed to have to learn all over again: to put my jacket on a hanger, to make my bed, to get on a bicycle.
Once, when I was swimming absentmindedly, I paused and almost went under. Another time, when with my brother I had set out after all for the town of B., he sent me off to do an errand, and secretly watched me from outside on the public square, and afterward described how I had suddenly stood there with a package of butter in my hand, not knowing what to do next, and the cashier had had to reach into my pockets for the money, and, when I finally found my way back to him, the butter had melted between my fingers.