Psychology
For some time now I’ve judged people by the objects they lug around, hold dear and find attractive. These things comprise a “biographical essay” about their entire being! For instance, I am highly suspicious of men who tote around walking sticks with oxidized silver handles that represent something or other, like a dog’s head, a snake or even a ravishing little curly headed damsel. Of course, these fellows can resort to the excuse that they got it as a gift from a dear friend; but first of all, no one ought not to have such tasteless friends (two negatives, alas, make a positive), and second, you can also take a friend’s gift and knock him on the head with it. In any case, among cultivated people, I’m for the exchange of “coupons” in any given transaction! I’m also suspect of pink, light blue and screaming red silk, whereas satin, velvet or damask are to be counted among the “mild infractions against common decency.” Printed, not woven, ties are cause for considerable concern, although the “nature-peasant pattern” is a pardonable sin. To be dressed “in a single color” from head to toe is the “latest Aristocratic craze,” 1913! An open neck is highborn. High collars are nonsense, except for storks. Not to be able to make all the twists and turns of a first class acrobat from the “Apollo Theater” in any given garb is positively low class! Trousers can never be wide enough and are still far too tight! To leave the bottom button of a waistcoat open is a miserable lapse of etiquette. To anyone who claims he doesn’t want to appear too conspicuous I respectfully reply that even Beethoven’s Adagios were conspicuous, conspicuously beautiful! “In all things we must distinguish ourselves from the horde!” “That’s what they’re wearing these days—!” is dirty low-down drivel.
“Good morning, Sir, how’s the world treating you?!” I said to a stranger strolling up the “Upper Semmering Pathway” in a top hat.
“Very well indeed in this lovely mountain terrain; but from where, may I ask, do you know me?”
“I know you like the back of my hand since the day you were born, as I see you’ve donned a top hat here—.”
“I owe that to my position in the world, my good man—.”
“I was immediately struck by that too, that you owe something or other to someone or other—!”
Discovery
“The ‘most perfect woman’ on earth came to see me today at five P.M. at the café! Miss Mitzi Thumb.”
“Oh, I already discovered that number, two years before you on the Lido, Hotel Excelsior. So don’t flatter yourself in that regard!”
“Discovered, discovered? How did you accomplish such a feat? Wherein did your discovery manifest itself?!”
“Manifest itself?! It manifested itself quite simply in that I saw her in her silk bathing singlet with the red patent leather belt, and was enchanted by her perfection!”
“So that’s what you call discovery!? You kept it to yourself, swallowed your enchantment, deliberately made sure no one else noticed, especially not the lady on account of whom your pitifully cowardly instinct for self-preservation compels you to restrain yourself! You did nothing for this discovered perfection, just turned your head away from such splendor, which could only rock the boat of your paltry relationship! Do you know what it means to discover?!? To discover means to beat the drum for someone so that the whole world absolutely must take notice; it means to go all out for her so that everyone else grows pale, sick and poisoned with envy; to scream, cry and declaim, to disavow, demean, blot out and obliterate all others! That is: an exceptional, singular, complete discovery!”
“Peter, you’re the carnival barker of life! Not everybody is so inclined. It’s a profession like any other. But you have to have the nerve for it. You’ve got it.”
“Discovery means: to make the blind see, the deaf hear, to make the callous feel, and turn the greedy into squanderers! It means: to take the gamble that this goddess you discovered turns her attention to those who without you would never have ‘discovered’ her. It means: to see yourself all too soon abused and abandoned, the sole mark of gratitude that the discovered one will dish out! To suffer the destiny of the discoverer, ignominious as it is, that’s: discovery!”
Persecution Complex
Is it already the preliminary sign of a persecution complex if I take along on a trip twelve of my special mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, just in case? This premonition of a possible catastrophe concerning my perfectly flawless brand new shirt?! In any case, the brain that does not concern itself under such circumstances with this distressing eventuality is the healthier one, the less irritable, the less upsetable by life’s little ups and downs.
The obsession with “possible unpleasantries in the coming days” is indeed a consequence of persecution complex, weakening our resilience for life. Consequently every truly discerning soul suffers from persecution complex. He is always and in every situation a profound pessimist. Only in this way does he compel himself to elude conceivable perils. He need not dwell on fortuitous events. They happen by themselves. But to smell the pitfalls in every affair, that’s the important thing and that at the same time is what makes you mentally imbalanced!
“To step with the left foot on every sewer grating brings good luck, avoids bad luck. I don’t really believe in it. But what does it cost me to do it?! From that moment on, you’re in the snare of that unlikely trap. For if but once you fail to follow the rule, you will relentlessly trace each and every misfortune that befalls you back to that lapse. That’s why you concentrate with an almost feverish frenzy to make sure to tread on every sewer grating with your left foot. But this, in turn, makes you irritable, nervous, consumed by the fear that you might, nevertheless, if but once, have missed a grating. You put yourself to the test, try intentionally to overstep a grating, and soon enough you’re consumed by a curious disquiet, uncertainty; you reproach yourself, bemoan — the slightest mishap, and there you have the pernicious “logical consequence”! If only I’d stepped on the sewer grating with my left foot!
With every woman of whom you’re sincerely fond you run a billion risks at every hour of losing her for whatever reason. But the man not inclined to persecution complex, that is, the idiot, the nincompoop, doesn’t sense the danger, it does not enter his clear consciousness. He is blessed with the good luck, the healthy disposition to suffer an eventual catastrophe when it comes, but not the imperceptible and, therefore, all the more awful, things leading up to it. Any man not prone to a “persecution complex” in regard to a beloved never for a moment actually truly loved that person!
An old lady once said to me: “I am compelled from year to year to follow the solemn dictates of religion all the more strictly. For the closer I find myself to the final reckoning the more I fear it!”
Religion is a kind of “ideal application” of persecution complex on the human nerves!
I once said to a businessman: “You shouldn’t overextend your business out into the sticks, it’s financially dangerous, risky—.” Whereupon he replied: “But our whole business depends on that. You’ve just got to have the nerves to tough it out—.”
A year later he went bust. I reminded him of our conversation. Then he said to me: “You were right. But if I’d followed your advice I’d have gone bust long before!”
“My dear friend, you really ought not to leave your lovely young wife alone so long in the country—.”
“You’re right; but if I didn’t let her go I’d lose her all the sooner—!”
Persecution complex, in any case, has one advantage, at least you can’t accuse yourself of having been “a dunce.” And in these tough times that’s not something to sneeze at!