I believe that you share my opinion that comfort acts detrimentally on our souls.
With respect,
W. K.
24.
The Pope complained to the Cardinals that a certain W. Kowalsky kept bothering him with letters full of blasphemy. Cardinal Panini, the head of the congregation for questions of faith, reported the unfortunate incidents to the papal nuncio in Tübingen. The papal nuncio complained to the chief of police, the chief of police invited my father in for a conversation…
25.
My father never wrote the Pope again.
26.
With my friend, Von Lukitsch, I began breaking clocks. First of all, we ritually smashed our own timepieces. Later, we did what we could. We did not buy watches so that we could break them — that is senseless — while a clock is in the display case it is harmless. We carefully waited (thinking quite slowly) for situations in which a clock simply offered to be broken.
Such situations are not rare. There is always a broken clock somewhere; you can always find someone who is dissatisfied because his watch is fast or slow. It is not difficult to find a clock to smash.
In four years, we smashed 4,268 timepieces of various sorts.
Why were we doing this?
To stop time? No, we were not that stupid. We wanted to prove that a logical system can be built into any sort of nonsense, that all nonsense takes on an enormous burden of karma that ultimately results in liberation.
27.
Von Lukitsch continued to smash clocks, but I went down another path. With his persistence in smashing those bothersome and fatal devices, through the refined art of the disintegration of mechanisms, Von Lukitsch became famous all over Europe. After several years, it became quite chic to send your watch to Von Lukitsch for him to smash it, and the cream of Europe competed to see who would send him the most expensive and beautiful timepiece.
Recently, I read the following news in the paper:
“In the Meinhof Palace near Glassbaden, in the presence of reputable guests and representatives of the press, Mr. Von Lukitsch broke a ‘Schaffhausen’ watch, the property of the Prince of Monaco.”
28.
“The bicycle is a vertical vehicle,” my father wrote in the preface to his treatise Theology and Bicyclism. “If we look at a simplified graphic representation of the bicycle,
we can see that the device has an abundance of religious symbols; two wheels, two circles, symbolizing the two faulty infinities (time and space) connected by the true eternity of the Trinity, represented by the triangle of the frame. At the same time, when represented like this, the bicycle has the shape of metaphysical glasses with which it is possible to correct spiritual myopia. But that is not all. If we take a birds-eye perspective (which is the viewpoint of the Holy Ghost), the bicycle has the shape of a cross:
where the handlebars are the crossbeam of the cross. A man who rides a bicycle, in fact, is crucifying himself. To the Holy Ghost who observes from above, it is clear that this man is gaining speed to fly into him (into the Holy Ghost), to fools who observe him horizontally, he is nothing more than a poor guy who does not have the money to buy an automobile; a fool who drives himself by the sweat of his own brow.
29.
My father bragged that he had solved one of the old scholastic problems: Habet mulier animam.
“The woman also has a soul,” he writes in his Confessions, “but her soul is different in several ways from the soul of a man, which can clearly be seen in the construction of the men’s and women’s bicycles:
The women’s bicycle, namely, has no crossbar. That insufficiency in the metaphysical construction of the soul is caused by the fact that woman was made from Adam’s rib: while they were one, that construction was stable and looked like this:
However, after the fall, souls became weaker, especially women’s.
“Ergo, today it is good to set off on the road to salvation by bicycle. However, a problem appears here. Because of the specificity of the construction of the female body and the shape of the bicycle seat, riding a velocipede can bring persons of the female gender into a state of autoerotism, and that is incongruous with mysticism.
“That is why women should head down that path with their husband or fiancée in order to fulfill the Evangelical teaching: the two shall be as one.”
30.
(part of the record of the investigation against my father)
INTERROGATOR: “Oh, Kowalsky, Kowalsky, books have muddled your reason. There is no exit from this world. There is no other world.”
31.
“That’s what the interrogator said,” my father wrote in his memoirs, “but I was laughing on the inside, I laughed out loud and nothing was clear to him. I knew that I would be leaving his office in a few minutes, and then I remembered a Jewish story; a description of the death of a righteous man. When Rabbi Meier died, said one Jew, it seemed like he went from one room to another. No, said the other, it seemed like he went from one corner of the room to another.”
PROCLAMATIONS
Anno Domini 1937, I proclaimed myself to be a count. During one single night (in which the decision was made), I designed a coat of arms, composed the genealogical tree of my spiritual ancestors and a short proclamation with which I informed urbi et orbi that I was joining the noble class. In order to prevent rumors, here I will present in depth my motives for scorning the vulgus. First and most important — because I am a supporter of legitimacy — it is not illegal; the constitution allows for the possibility that someone feels aristocratic. Reason two: it is absurd; to be a count in a democratic country means to be in a subordinate position. But I like the absurd. The third reason is of a literary-philosophical nature. In a moment of inspiration, I realized that as a count I will be able to expose a lot more filth than I could as a plebeian. The aristocracy and filth go hand in hand; later, I will explain why. The best example for that is one of my spiritual forbears — perhaps not the most noble, but certainly the most famous — the Marquis de Sade. Would some derelict, who is in despair because his roof is leaking, be able to write The 120 Days of Sodom? Would someone like Lenin ever author Philosophy in the Bedroom? But those are the most honest places in world literature; the most serious studies of the filth in the human soul. That is not depravity, that is brilliant scholarship. Angels told me that one night during a pleasant chat, in my dreams of course, because of the rationalists. You see, they told me, de Sade admitted everything, he exposed all his lewdness to the light of day, he purified himself and now he is at ease; meanwhile, respectable writers will have to pay the price for all the volumes of their lies. Herr Doctor Freud, with whom I corresponded till recently, for example. He feels an enormous need to do the same thing as de Sade, but since he is mediocre, he does not have the daring, and so he places his repulsive stuff in the mouths of his supposed patients, which is doubly usefuclass="underline" he gets the money that his patients pay him for his work, and then he gets his title, fame and reputation besides. So, now, for his title, money, fame and reputation to have value, in his works Dr. Freud must edify this world as the only, the real and the best world; certain contractual clauses require him to. This can be justified by the freedom of opinion or one of the other democratic prevarications, but in more scrupulous times it was called by its real name: a contract with the Devil.