Introduction: Pictures and Passages

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[edit] Kafka: Letter to his father (1919)

"You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning." (http://www.kafka-franz.com/KAFKA-letter.htm)

[edit] Thomas Bernhard An indication of the Cause (1971)

The adolescent boy, who had been condemned to spend his formative years in the city, against his will but by the choice of those responsible for his education, had been mentally and sentimentally predisposed in its favour, only to find himself a prisoner: on the one hand, a prisoner in the endless show trial staged to vindicate its world-wide fame-itself nothing more than a squalid device for making money and yet more money out of the exploitation of beauty-and on the other, a prisoner of the poverty and helplessness which afflicted his childhood and youth and became for him an impregnable fortress of anxiety and terror. Of Salzburg and the existence it afforded him at the time, he has-to put it neither too crudely nor too lightly-nothing but dismal memories, memories of experiences which darkened his youthful development and cast a fatal blight over his whole subsequent existence. In the face of lies, slander, and hypocrisy, he has to tell himself as he writes down this account, intended as an indication of what he experienced, that this city has shaped his whole nature, determined his whole way of thinking, and always exercised a malign and injurious influence on his mind and temperament, above all in those two decades of despair in which he was drilled and hectored into maturity, being constantly punished, directly or indirectly, for crimes and offenses of which he was not guilty--decades in which any sensitivity or sensibility he possessed was ruthlessly trodden under foot and not the least effort was made to foster his creative ability.