wish to die, to commit suicide, as they say, but never was totally concentrated. He could never come to terms with being born into a world that basically repulsed him in every detail from the very beginning. He grew older and thought that his wish to die would suddenly no longer be there, but this wish grew more intense from year to year, without ever becoming totally intense and concentrated. My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide, so he said, I thought. We never forgive our fathers for having sired us, nor our mothers for having brought us into the world, he said, nor our sisters for continuing to be witnesses to our unhappiness. To exist means nothing other than we despair, he said. When I get up I’m revolted by myself and everything I have to do. When I go to bed I have no other wish than to die, never to wake up, but then I wake up again and the awful process repeats itself, finally repeats itself for fifty years, he said. To think that for fifty years we don’t wish for anything other than to be dead and are still alive and can’t change it because we are thoroughly inconsistent, so he said. Because we are wretched, vile creatures. No musical ability! he cried out, no life ability! We’re so arrogant that we think we’re studying music whereas we’re not even capable of living, not even capable of existing, for we don’t exist, we get existed, so he once said in the Währingerstrasse after we had hiked through the Brigittenau to the point of complete exhaustion for four and a half hours. Once we used to spend half the night in the Koralle , he said, now we don’t even go to the Kolosseum! he said, how everything has become absolutely unfavorable . We think we have a friend and in time see we don’t have a friend at all, since we have absolutely no one, that’s the truth, so he said. He clung to his Bösendorfer and still everything had turned out to be a mistake, an awful mistake. Glenn had the good fortune of collapsing at his Steinway in the middle of the Goldberg Variations . He claimed he’d been trying to collapse for years, without success. Went several times with his sister to the so-called Promenade in the Prater to improve her health, he said, so that she could get some fresh air, but she didn’t appreciate these outings, why only the Prater Promenade and not the Burgenland, why only the Prater Promenade and not Kreuzenstein or Retz , she was never satisfied, I did everything for her, she could buy every dress she wanted, he said. I pampered her, he said. At the height of being pampered, he said, she took off to Zizers bei Chur, to that awful place. They all run off to Switzerland when they’re short of ideas, he said, I thought. But Switzerland turns into a deadly prison for all of them, little by little they choke on Switzerland in Switzerland, as my sister will choke on Switzerland, he could see it, Zizers will kill her, her Swiss husband will kill her, Switzerland will kill her, so he said, I thought. Zizers of all places, that perverse creation of a place name, so he said, I thought. It may have been our parents’ plan, he said, my sister and I together for life, our parents’ calculation. But this parental plan, this parental calculation didn’t work out. We’ll have a son, my parents may have thought, and then a sister, and the two of them will live together till death do them part, caring for one another, destroying one another, that may have been my parents’ idea, their devilish idea, so he said. Parents make a plan, but naturally this plan doesn’t work out, so he said. My sister didn’t keep to the plan, she’s the stronger one, so he said, I’ve always been the weak one, absolutely the weak link, so Wertheimer. He could barely catch his breath going uphill and still outraced me. He couldn’t climb stairs and still got to the fourth floor faster than me, it was all a suicide attempt, I thought now while observing the restaurant, a futile attempt to escape life’s
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