Joseph Roth Quotes

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world." 96

[O]ur relationship with nature has become warped. You see, nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us. It no longer exists for its own sake.

There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly.

The good man believed that shortsighted people were also deaf and that their spectacles would become clearer if their ears heard more sharply.

Von der Humanität durch Nationalität zur Bestialität.

Only the small things in life are important

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.

What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.

Откакто съм възрастен, вече не плача и не се смея.

… insanlar ellerini pantolonundan güçlükle çıkardılar. Ceplerinin boş olduğunu ancak o zaman gördüler.” Joseph Roth, Toplu Hikâyeler

That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring--and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.

Погледнах за миг нагоре и в погледа ми се съдържаше цяла тирада. Три дни непрестанно да бях говорил, нямаше да мога да ѝ кажа толкова много неща.

Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing.

Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.

A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

Uno se pierde en la vida diaria como si entrara en un bosque. Se encuentra gente, se la pierde de nuevo, como los árboles pierden sus hojas.

On Sundays the world is as bright and empty as a balloon.

His heart was pounding. But his soul was easy.

Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself?

Our grandfathers didn't leave us much strength, not enough strength to live with, but just about enough to die a meaningless death. Ach!

If someone had the ability to sit at every table at once, he would hear nothing but good about himself, and yet even such contortions would pale in comparison to those of the others.

Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists.

Отнесено към живота на народите, това означава: те напразно търсят така наречените национални добродетели, които са още по-съмнителни от индивидуалните. Затова мразя нациите и националните държави.

I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain.

In no time, the platoon were on their feet in front of him, formed up into two ranks, and it struck him suddenly, and probably for the first time in his military career, that these men with their drilled precision were dead parts of dead machines that didn't produce anything.

Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it.

Er war so einfach und untadelig wie seine Konduitenliste, und nur der Zorn, der ihn manchmal ergriff, hätte einen Kenner der Menschen ahnen lassen, daß auch in der Seele des Hauptmanns Trotta die nächtlichen Abgründe dämmerten, in denen die Stürme schlafen und die unbekannten Stimmen namenloser Ahnen.

So they bring our poor Andreas into the vestry, and unfortunately he's no longer capable of speech, all he can do is reach for the left inside pocket of his jacket where he has the money he owes the little creditress, and he says: 'Miss Thérèse!' - and he sighs once, and he dies. May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!

A skyscraper is the incarnate rebellion against the supposedly unattainable; against the mystery of altitude, against the otherworldliness of the cerulean.

Vede, caro amico, la natura non è mai tanto benigna come quando ci regala un piccolo difetto. Se fossi venuto al mondo senza imperfezioni, probabilmente non avrei imparato niente.

Засаждам преживяванията си като диви лози и ги наблюдавам как растат.

As he spoke he stroked both sides of his mutton-chop whiskers as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the Monarchy

„Er übertraf die Erwartungen, die er niemals auf sich gesetzt hatte

Ora toda a gente entende sempre palavrões bem arrotados

Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them.

It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the "copy.

Voglia Dio concedere a tutti noi,a noi bevitori,una morte così lieve e bella

She looked like the dangerous proprietress of all the cushions and pillows.

Somebody cracks a joke, a whole row laughs, one witticism sets off another, and, like matches, they flare up and burn down.

And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity.

There is really nothing that people get used to so readily as miracles, once they have experienced them two or three times.

Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.

Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant.

E il mondo non era più il vecchio mondo. Tramontava. Ed era nell'ordine delle cose che un'ora prima del suo tramonto le valli avessero ragione dei monti, i giovani dei vecchi, gli stolti dei savi.

Therefore, the very large department store should not be viewed as a sinful undertaking, as, for example, the Tower of Babel. It is, rather, proof of the inability of the human race of today to be extravagant. It even builds skyscrapers: and the consequence this time isn't a great flood, but just a shop...

Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!

The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them.

He felt light, lighter than ever in all his years. He had severed all relationships. It occurred to him that he had been alone for years. He had been alone since that moment when desire had ceased between his woman and himself. He was alone -alone. Wife and children had surrounded him and had hindered him from bearing his pain. Like useless poultices that do not aid healing, they had lain upon his wounds and had merely covered them.

Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.

In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the living had been extinguished another did not at once take his place in order to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of his gap. When fire had eaten away a house from the row of others in a street, the burnt-out space remained long empty. Masons worked slowly and cautiously. Close neighbors and casual passers-by alike, when they saw the empty space, remembered the aspect and walls of the vanished house. That was how things were then. Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely.

Хубаво е, когато майките ни не са у дома, майките с недоверчиво питащи очи, тъжни и разплакани, строги и страшни, и все пак тъжни, клетите ни майки, които нищо не разбират и все ни се карат и които сме принудени да лъжем. Няма на кого да даваме обяснения и да изпитваме страх от лъжата, страх от принудителната лъжа и от разкриването ѝ.

It wasn’t till much later — long after the Great War, which people call the “World War,” and in my view rightly, and not for the usual reason, that the whole world was involved in it, but rather because as a result of it we lost a whole world, our world.

I might be capable of making figures that have heart, conscience, passion, emotion and decency. But there's no call for that at all in the world. People are only interested in monsters and freaks, so I give them their monsters. Monsters are what they want!

Отзвучала е сладката музика на неизвестността, хубавият примамлив напев на начеващия живот, избледняла е бляскавата далнина на безкрайните дни, охладняла е закрилящата топлина на младостта. Завършен е краткият ни път и чужд ни е мъжът, с всеки изминал ден става все по-чужд.

And the world was not what it had been. It was at an end. And it was in the disposition of these things that, barely an hour before its end, the valleys and the young and the fools would all be in the right, while the mountains and the old and the wise would all be in the wrong.

I’ve been reading the seventeen novels of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish novelist, some set in Vienna during the last years of the Hapsburg Empire. It is in the unimpeachable Efrussi Bank – Roth spells it in the Russian manner – that Trotta deposits his wealth in The Radetzky March.

Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e. e. cummings—who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to

The escalator seems to me to typify this: It leads us up, by climbing on our behalf. Yes, it doesn't even climb, it flies. Each step carries its shopper aloft, as though afraid he might change his mind. It takes us up to merchandise we might not have bothered to climb an ordinary flight of steps for.

Gradually too, Trotta's disappointment was replaced by a sweet melancholy. He made a pact with his sadness. Everything in the world was as sad as it could be, and at the very heart of this wretched world was the Lieutenant. It was for him that the frogs were bruiting so piteously tonight, and the pain-filled crickets were waiting on his behalf. It was for him that the spring night was filled with such a sweet and easy sadness, for him that the stars were positioned so unattainably high in the sky, and it was to him alone that their light blinked so longingly and vainly. The unending pain of the world fitted itself to Trotta's hurt.

Only on Sundays do you come across political scout troops with sandals, walking sticks, and knives. In the woods they do round dances, they rave about nature, and have big brawls with each other. It's a strange, baffling young generation. It covet's the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, but not his shy piety and love of nature.

So war es damals! Alles, was wuchs, brauchte viel Zeit zum Wachsen; und alles, was unterging, brauchte lange Zeit, um vergessen zu werden. Aber alles, was einmal vorhanden gewesen war, hatte seine Spuren hinterlassen, und man lebte dazumal von den Erinnerungen, wie man heutzutage lebt von der Fähigkeit, schnell und nachdrücklich zu vergessen.

De rails strekten zich uit tot ver in de wereld, als een ijzeren net omspanden ze de aarde.

He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral.

Nach der Art der Europäer, die geographische Begriffe literarisch werten, hielt er den Osten für rätselhaft, den Westen für gewöhnlich.

Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost.

Die gefährlichste aller Krankheiten ist die Frau

Perhaps one can see one’s destiny accomplished before one’s very eyes and still feel hungry.

El dolor le hará sabio. La deformidad, bondadoso. La amargura, tierno. Y la enfermedad, fuerte.

Los mendigos cayeron sobre él como una bandada de insectos, les dio dinero para rescatar su alma del pecado del dinero.

La famiglia Zipper abitava nel quartiere dei piccoli borghesi, dove gli appartamenti sono composti da stanze troppo anguste, hanno pareti sottili e contengono ninnoli inutili.

Every year, on the Emperor's birthday, he makes a resolution to begin a new life and not get into debt. And so he gets drunk. And comes home late at night, stands in the kitchen with drawn sword, and commands an entire regiment. The pots are platoons, the teacups are units, the plates are companies. Simon Demant is a colonel, a colonel in the service of Franz Joseph I.

But they bear the burden of being unpopular as proof of their importance - and these eminences turn the suspicion that less elevated customers are careful to disguise as courtesy into naked contempt and disdain. All the people one doesn't need right now are - for the person who will need them in a year's time - no more than air which he breathes but doesn't need to see.

Never yet has such furious movement brought in its train such slowness in the passage of time. Everything is spinning, only time stands still. The rotation goes on forever. And when the wheel finally stops spinning, the riders in their relief forget that they have paid money to enjoy themselves, and only had the fright of their lives. They feel glad to have gotten out alive.

Count Chojnicki was curious. No other passion than curiosity sent him out into the world, drew him to the tables of the great gaming halls, sequestered him behind the walls of his old hunting pavilion, sat him down on the parliamentarians' benches, determined that he would return home every spring, compelled him to throw his regular parties, and prevented him from cutting his own throat. It was curiosity that kept him alive.

Gradually she got used to seeing men come and go: a race of childish giants, resembling clumsy mammoth insects, fleeting and yet weighty; an army of awkward fools who tried to flutter with leaden wings; warriors who believed that they had conquered when they were despised, that they possessed when they were ridiculed, that they had enjoyed when they had barely tasted; a barbaric horde, for whom she nevertheless waited lifelong.

The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages - but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.

Er wies auf einen bequemen, ledernen Sessel, wie ein Arzt, bereit, zu horchen und mit jenem freudigen Interesse zu hören, mit der Ärzte eine Krankheitsgeschichte vernehmen, weil es ihr Studium auf jeden Fall fördern kann.

Carl Joseph kept silent. It was as if there were no answer to Dr. Demant’s question in the whole big wide world. One could have wasted years searching for an answer, as if human speech were exhausted and dried up for all eternity.

The windows in the soup kitchen are never opened, and for that reason the aroma of old meals lingers in corners and rises from the table tops - which are never washed - when the steam from the freshly cooked food brings them back to life.

…мислите ѝ отново се върнаха. Бяха я дебнали в неподозирана близост, като рояк мухи я нападнаха: дребни страхове, скокливи мъчителни грижи, зловещо стрелкащи се беди, заплахите на утрешния и следващите дни, безмилостни образи на безмилостни дни, и ужасът се сключи като стегнат ярем над потрепващата шия. Отлетяла бе сладостната музика на унеса, приятният, приспиващ напев на забравата, помръкна светлата шир на безгрижната пустота, изстина закрилящата топлина на слънчевия ден.

Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite.

I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often remark, that I fail to understand it. My comment is merely a pious one. Because I am easy-going I prefer not to be aggressive or hostile and therefore I say that I do not understand those matters which I ought to say I hate or despise. I have sharp ears but I pretend to be hard of hearing, finding as I do that is more elegant to feign this handicap than to admit that I have heard some vulgar sound

There still exists - even today - a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness - or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ - had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe. Patriotism is particularism. ... However, European culture goes back much further than the nations of Europe. Greece, Rome and Israel, Christendom and Renaissance, the French Revolution and Germany’s eighteenth century, the supranational music of Austria and Slavic poetry: these are the forces that have sculpted the face of Europe. All these forces have forged European solidarity and the European cultural consciousness. None of these forces know national boundaries. All are the enemies of that barbarian power: so-called ‘national pride’.

Es ist eines der Geheimnisse der Muetter: sie verzichten niemals, ihre Kinder wiederzusehn, ihre totgeglaubten nicht und auch nicht ihre wirklich toten; und wenn es moeglich waehre dass ein totes Kind wiederauferstuende vor seiner Mutter, wuerde sie es in ihre Arme nehmen, so selbstverstaendlich, als waere es nicht aus dem Jenseits sondern aus einem der fernen Gegenden des Diesseits heimgekehrt. Eine Mutter erwarted die Wiederkehr ihres Kindes immer: ganz gleichgueltig, ob es in ein fernes Land gewandert ist, in ein nahes oder den Tod.

God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestant's are establishing a "German church" and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing, Germanic war god.

Als hätte es noch eines Beweises bedurft, dass wird das geduldigste unter den Völkern der Welt sind – oder boshaft und medizinisch ausgedrückt: ein masochistisches. Wie in der Geschichte Berlins Absolutismus und Korruption, Tyrannei und Spekulation, Prügelstrafe und Bodenwucher, Grausamkeit und Gewinnsucht, Maskerade einer harten Korrektheit und windiger Schacher Schulter an Schulter Fundamente graben und Straßen bauen, und wie also aus Unkenntnis, Geschmacklosigkeit, Unglück, Bosheit und nur in selten günstigem Zufall die Hauptstadt des Deutschen Reiches entsteht, erzählt in fesselnder Weise Werner Hegemanns Buch ‚Das steinerne Berlin’.

This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nations-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. The Monarchy, our Monarchy, is founded on piety, on the faith that God chose the Hapsburgs to rule over so and so many Christian peoples. Our Emperor is a secular brother of the Pope, he is His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty; no other is as apostolic, no other majesty in Europe is as dependent on the Grace of God and on the faith of the peoples in the Grace of God… The Emperor of Austria-Hungary must not be abandoned by God.

Of course the merchandise appears to be cheaper. Because where there are so many things close together, they can hardly help not thinking of themselves as precious. In their own eyes they shrink, and they lower their prices, and they become humble, for humility in good expresses itself as cheapness. And since there are also so many shoppers crowded together, the goods make less of a challenge or an appeal to them; and so they too become humble. If the very large department store looked to begin with like a work of hubris, it comes to seem merely an enormous container for human smalless and modesty; an enormous confession of earthly cheapness.

… und zeugten von seinem modernen Geschmack, oder genauer: von der Mühe, die er sich gab, einen modernen Geschmack zu beweisen. […] Wenn Carl Enders in die Lage geriet, ein Bild zu kaufen, so achtete er darauf, dass es seinem Verstand und seinen Sinnen widerspreche. Dann war er sicher, ein modernes und wertvolles Kunstwerk gekauft zu haben.

Tu vida fue una vida llena de miseria, sin sentido. Cuando éramos jóvenes gocé tu carne. En los últimos años la he desdeñado. Tal vez fuera ése nuestro pecado. Como el calor del amor no estaba en nosotros, sino el hielo de la costumbre, todo a nuestro alrededor ha muerto, todo se atrofió y se echó a perder. Tienes suerte, Deborah. El Señor ha tenido compasión de ti.

Above all there's a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the other's enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won't help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, "traffic," for movement in the streets, and for people's dealings with one another.

The books were all first editions, some autographed by the authors. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, published in 1961; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948); John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952); Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961); Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959); William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967); Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929); Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965); and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

—You know, I’m no patriot, but I love my countrymen. A country, a fatherland, there’s something abstract about that. But a countryman is something concrete. I can’t possibly love every wheat and maize field, every pine forest, every swamp, every Polish lady and gentleman, but show me one field, one copse, one swamp, one individual, well, 'à la bonheur'! That’s something I can see and understand, that speaks to me in a language I am familiar with, that — because of its singularity — can be dear to me. And beyond that, there are persons I term my countrymen, even if they happen to have been born in China or Persia or Africa. Some are dear to me from the moment I first clap eyes on them. A true ‘countryman is immediately identifiable. And if he happens to be someone from my own patch as well, then, as I say, 'à la bonheur'! But there’s an element of chance there, the other is simple providence. He raised his glass, and called out: —Here’s to my countrymen, wherever they happen to hail from!

En especial, me gustaban las briznas de paja. De entre todos los objetos inanimados eran los que más vida tenían. A veces, cuando llovía, me ponía a mirar por la ventana. En las ondas de uno de los incontables arroyuelos que se formaban bailoteaba, giraba, coqueta y despreocupada, una pajita ajena al sistema de alcantarillado que se la llevaba y en el que acabaría por desaparecer. Yo salía corriendo a la calle. La lluvia, fuerte y rabiosa, me azotaba, pero yo corría a rescatar la brizna de paja y la alcanzaba justo delante de la rejilla del sumidero.

Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books Ghost-Managing Book List The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones Ceremonies of the Damned, by Adrian C. Louis Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice Father of Lies, by Brian Evenson The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah Beloved, by Toni Morrison The Through, by A. Rafael Johnson Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Savage Conversations, by LeAnne Howe The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth Songs for Discharming, by Denise Sweet Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

Professionals who've spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature's scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It's a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What's that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal. Adam—betrayed. Esau—betrayed. The Shechemite—betrayed. Judah—betrayed. Joseph—betrayed. Moses—betrayed. Samson—betrayed. Samuel—betrayed. David—betrayed. Uriah—betrayed. Job—betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don't forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn.

I have come to know one or two apartments near certain stations really quite well. It’s as if I’d often been to visit there, and I have a feeling I know how the people who live there talk and move. They all have a certain amount of noise in their souls from the constant din of passing trains, and they’re quite incurious, because they’ve gotten used to the fact that every minute countless other lives will glide by them, leaving no trace. There is always an invisible, impenetrable strangeness between them and the world alongside. They are no longer even aware of the fact that their days and their doings, their nights and their dreams, are all filled with noise. The sounds seem to have come to rest on the bottom of their consciousness, and without them no impression, no experience the people might have, feels complete.

The Church of Rome is the only brace in this rotten world. The only giver and retainer of form. By enshrining the traditional element "handed down" in its dogmas, as in an icy palace, it abstains and bestows upon its children the license to play round this icy palace, which has spacious grounds, to indulge irresponsibility, even to pardon the forbidden, or to enact it. By instituting sin, it forgives sins. It sees that there is no man without flaw: that is the wonderfully humane thing about it. Its flawless children become saints. By that alone, it concedes the flawed nature of mankind. It concedes sinfulness to such a degree even that it refuses to see beings as human if they are not sinful: they will be sainted or holy. In so doing the Church of Rome shows its most exalted tendacy, namely to forgive. There is no more nobler tendency than forgiveness. And by the same token, there is none more vulgar than to seek revenge. There is no nobility without generosity, just as there is no vengefulness without vulgarity.