#259

“Great is the anguish of the man who becomes aware of his isolation and seeks to escape from his own memory; he is obsessed and outcast, flung back into the deepest animal anguish, into the anguish of the creature that suffers violence and inflicts violence, flung back into an overwhelming loneliness in which his flight and his despair and his stupor may become so great that he cannot help thinking of inflicting violence on himself so as to escape the immutable law of events” (id, 647).

#258

“Can this age be said to still have reality? Does it possess any real value in which the meaning of its existence is preserved? Is there a reality for the non-meaning of a non-existence? In what haven has reality found its refuge? in science, in law, in duty or in the uncertainty of an ever-questioning logic whose point of plausibility has vanished into the infinite?” (id, 559).

#257

“He who is mentally lonely can always escape into romanticism, and from spiritual loneliness there is always a way of escape into the intimacy of sex – but for ultimate loneliness, for immediate loneliness, there is no longer any escape into symbols.

(...)

“Ah,” says the romantic, drawing on the cloak of an alien value-system, “ah, now I am one of you and am no longer lonely.” “Ah,” says the aesthete, drawing on the same cloak, “I am still lonely, but this is a lovely cloak.” The aesthete is the serpent in the romantic Garden of Eden.

Children are intimate at once with everything: the thing is both immediate and at the same time a symbol. Hence the radicality of children.

(...)

The lonelier a man becomes, the more detached he is from the value-system in which he lives, the more obviously are his actions determined by the irrational. But the romantic, clinging to the framework of an alien and dogmatic system, is – it seems incredible – completely rational and unchildlike” (id, 540-541).

#256

“(...) in this fashion, in this absolute devotion to logical rigour, the Western world has won its achievments, – and with the same thoroughness, the absolute thoroughness that abrogates itself, must it eventually advance ad absurdum:

war is war, l'art pour l'art, in politics there's no room for compunction, business is business, – all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age” (id, 446).

#255

“The style of an epoch, it is certain, affects not merely the artist; it penetrates all contemporary activities, and crystallizes itself not only in works of art but in all the values which make up the culture of the age, and of which works of art constitute only an insignificant part” (id, 414).

#246

“Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?” (id, 374).

#245

“Great is the fear of him who awakens. He returns with less certainty to his waking life, and he fears the puissance of his dream, which though it may not have borne fruit in action has yet grown into a new knowledge. An exile from dream, he wanders in dream” (id, 303).

#244

“When desires and aims meet and merge, when dreams begin to foreshadow the great moments and crises of life, the road narrows then into darker gorges, and the prophetic dream of death enshrouds the man who has hitherto walked dreaming in sleep: all that has been, all aims, all desires, flit past him once more as they do before the eyes of a dying man, and one can well-nigh call it chance if that road does not end in death.

The man who from afar off yearns for his wife or merely for the home of his childhood has begun his sleepwalking” (id, 292).

#243

“Men have no feelings, and too much brains is just as bad” (id, 213).

#218

“Nevertheless after some eighteen months they had their first child. Ir actually happened. How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself” (id, 158).

#217

“Love meant to take refuge from one's own world in another's, and so in spite of his jealousy and shame he had left Ruzena in her world, so that her flight to him should be ever sweet and new” (Broch, 1964: 49).

#216

“The (...) novel no longer serves as “entertainment and instruction” (Broch) and its authors no longer relate the unusual, unheard-of “incident” (Goethe) or tell a story from which the reader will get “advice” (Walter Benjamin). It rather confronts him with problems and perplexities in which the reader must be prepared to engage himself if he is to understand it at all. The result of this transformation has been that the most accessible and popular art has become one of the most difficult and esoteric. The medium of suspense has disappeared and with it the possibility of passive fascination; the novelist's ambition to create the illusion of a higher reality or to accomplish the transfiguration of the real together with the revelation of its manifold significance has yielded to the intention to involve the reader in something which is at least as much a process of thought as of artistic invention” (Arendt, 1964: V).

BROCH, Hermann (1964). The Sleepwalkers. Translation by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.