notes from underground

Today I also spend some minutes in front of the store windows on Badestrasse. In a number of shops there, the guests at the spa can buy those articles that seem to be indispensable to them, postcards, bronze lions and lizards, ashtrays with portraits of famous men (so that the buyer can, for example, amuse himself daily by crushing out his burning cigar in Richard Wagner’s eye), and many other objects about which I venture no opinion since despite long observation I have been unable to fathom their nature and purpose; many of them seem suited to the cult needs of primitive tribes, but this may be a mistake, and all of them together make me sad, for they show me all too clearly that, despite the best will to be sociable, I nevertheless live outside the middle-class real world, know nothing about it, and despite all my years of writing effort, will never really be able to understand it any more than I can make myself understandable to it. When I look into these show windows displaying not things of everyday need but so-called gifts, luxury items, and jokes, then the foreignness of this world horrifies me; among a hundred objects there are twenty or thirty whose intention, meaning, and use I can only vaguely discern, and there is no single one I can imagine worth having. There are some that make me wonder for a long time: Do you put it in your hat? Or in your pocket? Or in a glass of beer? Or does it belong to some king of card game? There are pictures and inscriptions, mottoes and quotations that come from worlds of the imagination completely unknown and inaccessible to me, and again there are the revered and well-known symbols used in a way that I can neither understand nor excuse. The carved figure of Buddha or some Chinese divinity, for example, on the handle of a lady’s parasol is and remains for me puzzling, alien, and distressing, yes, uncanny; it can hardly be a conscious and intentional sacrilege—but what notion, need, or state of soul moves suppliers to make and buyers to purchase these idiotic objects, this is what I would be eager to know and what I cannot in any way discover. Or take a fashionable coffeehouse where people gather around five o’clock! I can fully understand that wealthy people might find pleasure in drinking tea, coffee, and chocolate with whipped cream accompanied by expensive, delicate pastries. But why free men in possession of their faculties should allow their enjoyment of these things to be disturbed by an intrusive, insinuating, oversweet music, by unspeakably uninviting, narrow, and uncomfortable seats in narrow, overfilled rooms crowded with superfluous ornaments and decorations or why they should experience these things not as disturbances, discomforts, and contradictions but rather as something to by liked and sought after—this I shall never fathom, and I have got used to ascribing my failing to my, as remarked, slightly schizophrenic mentality. But again and again it worries me. And the same wealthy and elegant people who sit in these cafés hindered from talking by sticky-sweet music, from thinking, almost from breathing, surrounded by thick clotted luxury, by marble, silver rugs, mirrors, these same people listen in the evening with apparent delight to a lecture about the noble simplicity of the Japanese way of life and have on their tables at home the legends of monks and the sermons of Buddha beautifully printed and bound. I certainly do not wish to be a zealot or a moralist, I am even easily tempted by many daring and dangerous sins, and I am pleased when people are happy, for it is pleasanter to live with happy people—but are these people really happy? Is all the marble, whipped cream, and music really worth anything? Don’t these same people, with plates full of fine, delectable cuisine, set in front of them by liveried servants, don’t they read in their newspapers reports of famine, rebellion, shootings, executions? Beyond the huge plate-glass windows of these coffeehouses is there not a world full of bleeding poverty and despair, full of madness and suicide, fear and horror? Well, yes, I know all this has to be, that all is in some way right, and God wills it so. But it is something I know only in the way one knows the multiplication table. It is not a convincing sort of knowledge. In truth, I find all this not right at all or according to God’s will, but mad and horrible.