(1)
In starting this book, what else can I take as my introductory precept (or desire) than this: I have no other aim than wild, absolute imitation; the suffocating, swooningly torrid air around me, in this steamy yet nevertheless certain gilded death the warbling darkness of a pair of sparrow throats and, above all, the million lines, the analytical richness, of foliage, grasses and nameless meadow flowers. These lines, the fantastic richness of this prodigal precision – they are what intensifies my desire for imitation into a mania. A Catalogus rerum, an "Index of Phenomena" – I am unlikely to free myself of this, the most primitive of my desires.

 

(2)
The eternal game: to get to know the world, to preserve the world. When I am excited by imitation, is that a sentimental fear of death guiding me, I wonder, a grandpawish fondness for knick-knacks, or some desire for universal knowledge, a Faustian gesture? You, you little blade of grass, here beside my pen, are you the graceful seal of ephemerality of a selfish moment of mine, a small witness of my frivolity, or are you a secret of Nature that is to be discovered?

 

(22)
The most mysterious, most powerful companion of my life (apart from a constant physical malaise and episodes of vertigo) is boredom. It is hardly possible, I think, for someone to become so utterly bored as I do. At such times I ask with crazed obstinacy, "What’s the other person doing now?" Such a ridiculously tiny percentage of books excite me and inspire me that I can quite safely exclude them from my life as an enjoyable experience: I am perennially prowling in front of the book stacks but they only induce atrocious tedium. That is a fairly important matter and symptom: a writer for whom books cause the least pleasure. Why? I have already read the really good books; and I so much expect from new literature precisely what I would like to accomplish myself that naturally I am unable to find it in anyone else. And here before me stretch these long, oh so long afternoons. I cannot write just any time –what am I to do? Only people truly excite me: female portraits. And architectural tricks, outrageous plans, though there again preferably things that I myself imagine. As to acquaintances, however, I have hardly any; I am not an engineer. How do I fill my time? In order to be able to see pretty portraits I ought to play sport, go to thrashes and dance, I need money, but I have none of those. I am unutterably happy if I can find one teeny-weeny reason to go out at times like that: I need to go to the barber’s to get my hair trimmed, or go to school in order to check some footling notice, drop in to see my mother, go to some far-flung shop (one that has no telephone) in order to cancel an order – those are my salvationary diversions.

 

Where, oh where on earth do I get this utterly suffocating potential for ennui? Have my nerves, my sensory organs and my logics unduly identified life with ecstasy and mystic wonders, so that if there in no Bacchic upheaval I am already bored? It could be. Or did I as a young boy become fatefully accustomed to endless impatient paling up to little girls, accustomed to the poisonous equation of "pleasure = receiving gifts", and that is why I am now dozy and sour even among so-called "good" books? Gift, relentless erotic need, relentless need for charity, ascetic-snobbish high-grade demands from art’s every moment, maybe also a mistaken career choice: literature instead of architecture – those kinds of things certainly may be the causes of my endless boredom. Not in any event, then, a book, but women: women as "inhumaine" formulas, biological architectural schemata – and women as "guests who like to be with me."

 

The "guest" is one of the central problems of my life, closely connected to the boredom. If someone (who is moreover a burden to me; indeed, whom I cordially detest) telephones to call off a visit or to announce that they can only come at a later time than we have agreed, my heart sinks and I become quite ill. If someone goes, I am barely able to disguise my abrupt desperation, for I know that afterwards comes the vacuum, the lethal gloom of tedium. These "afters" are the most intolerable. What am I to do, for instance, "after" an early afternoon film showing? Watching films is always a great pleasure, making me laugh and cry uninhibitedly at the most idiotic films. But then "after"!

 

I suppose a huge mass of petty-bourgeois primitiveness or vulgarity must have accumulated inside me, choked off and distorted by a smarminess with roots in the worryingly tragic, religious and self-tormenting – for trash is what corresponds to my inclinations, mechanical debasement to my form of life, but I forcibly threw myself at "great" works, which may have deflected me from potboilers but they leave me distressingly unmoved. Here I stand now between a parlour-maid’s romance and Heidegger’s philosophy, between the cinema and truth, with my one and only vocation: my boredom of mythical completeness.

 

Or do I, perhaps, have undue regard for the scale and complexity of the big "problems" (pauvre mot): and simply dare not set about them when I am alone (= "when the guest has gone"), just mooch about? If boredom occupies my every minute and every hour (when does it not?) – the haphazard character of every biological performance stands totally naked before me – am I not one of the greatest haphazardnesses and "senselessnesses" (if indeed those words have any meaning in biology)? Nothing but a wild penchant for the mundane, yet at the same time a loathing of any mundane person. Nothing but wild intellectual penchant, yet at the same time an eternal flight from books and intellectual society towards the peasant, the amiable oaf. The only good thing about it all is that if this is a neurosis, then it is in no way a neurosis like Kierkegaard’s, or the kind that a state-lic. psychoanalytical organ-grinder would crank out if I were to fall into his hands.

 

Although I am suffering and sense myself as being tragic, I do that more out of convention that true instinct. I am a "figuration", a biological sample, a flower, and as to whether that is tragedy or success, value or lie, pose or revelation, illness or some absolute truth, I know not. "All sorts of things happen in life, this too has happened": I simply stick labels on such maxims for myself. It is never an aim in life that an individual should be happy. Neither blind "élan" nor the God of the Catholics wishes that each and every person here on Earth should be happy. That is quite evident. I was not born an architect or a writer, a rampaging Don Juan or a philosopher, but what I am – a nameless, indefinable variant. This is a matter of atavistic propensity and life necessity, intrinsic talent and a routine that has developed by chance in life, the interconnection of these facts is very complex. Someone is born an architect and becomes a writer under the active pressure of circumstances, and hence on the basis of a bunch of "inhibitions"; but if the circumstances could carry him that far, then in truth he had been a writer and not an architect. On the other hand, throughout life he carries architecture as an imagined salvation. Who, one may ask, decides that this "architecture" will be an eternal idée fixe or some quite different propensity in a randomly ad hoc mask of "architecture", or else the perennial wish of an atavistic "predestined" talent to break free of enforced literature? It is true that it is very easy to imagine of life, insofar as we know it, that it brings architects into the world who become writers: it was never the goal of life that individual flair should realise its full potential. The hybrid: that is life’s prime métier.

 

Might a religious instinct be at the bottom of my boredom? Invariably my one and only question, whether consciously or with Freudian discretion: "how to be saved?" It could be that books bore me because they do not transport me into the kingdom of heaven.

What do people do to occupy – not so much their afternoons as those five- and ten-minute gaps? For example, I come back to the house, my wife is not at home, and I have to wait quarter of an hour. What should I do in the meantime? "It’s not worth making a start on anything," I tell myself hypocritically. Although if just once a month it should so happen by chance that I should find something of interest (that adored mysterious, fugitive word!), then it does not bother me that I shall only be able to buckle to it for five minutes, I just buckle to it. I pace up and down, sit down, leap up again – is that what parlour-maids and private tutors call "nervousness"? These tormentingly unoccupied moments are the subtexture of my life, that is my body. How happy I am if some totally unproductive and irrational bit of business crops up: conversations or discussions with narrow-minded figures. These are occasions when heaps of my acquaintances whine, agonise and complain that "their precious time is being stolen away from them", oh, how I would love to ask them – enviously! – what, exactly what is it that they do with "their precious time"? The only option is to sleep through the spare time but that gives one the most horrible giddiness, headaches and nausea. One ought to chatter, chatter, endlessly chatter: women would come and women would go; their looks would be far more than indifference but much less than love.

 

Women: mobile architecture. Architecture: mathematised sexuality. What is my essence (which might also be a satisfactory explanation for my boredom)? My essence is a need for absolute and unbroken intensity (God, politics, a woman, perpetual chatter – it doesn’t matter what) and a perpetual need for form, pure or concealed plasticity, biological or geometric design. That too just goes to show that behind great vitality is a big neurosis, and behind big neurosis a great primordial élan.

 

Outprousting Proust: Szentkuthy, the Proteus of Hungarian literature