us on their consciences. Or they escape from us and slander and accuse us, spreading every possible lie about us in order to save themselves, I thought. We think our lives are finished, and then we chance to meet them and they rescue us, but we are not grateful to them for rescuing us: on the contrary we curse them and hate them for rescuing us, and we pursue them all our lives with the hatred we feel toward them for having rescued us. Or else we try to curry favor with them and they push us away, and so we avenge ourselves by slandering them, running them down wherever we can and pursuing them to their graves with our hatred. Or they help us back on our feet at the crucial moment and we hate them for it, just as they hate us when we help them back on their feet, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We do them a favor and then think we are entitled to their eternal gratitude, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For years we are on terms of friendship with them, then suddenly we no longer are, and we don’t know why. We love them so fervently that we become positively lovesick, and they reject us and hate us for our love, I thought. We’re nothing, and they make something of us, and we hate them for it. We come from nowhere, as people say, and they perhaps make a genius out of us, and we never forgive them for it, just as if they’d made a dangerous criminal out of us, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We take everything they have to give us, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and we punish them with a life sentence of contempt and hatred. We owe everything to them and never forgive them for the fact that we owe everything to them, I thought. We think we have rights when we have no rights of any kind, I thought. No one has any rights, I thought. There’s nothing but injustice in the world, I thought. Human beings are unjust, and injustice prevails everywhere — that’s the truth, I thought. Injustice is all we have to hand, I thought. These people have never done anything but pretend to be something, while in reality they’ve never been anything: they pretend to be educated, but they’re not; they pretend to be artistic (as they call it), but they’re not; and they pretend to be humane, but they’re not, I thought. And their supposed kindness was only pretense, for they were never kind. And above all they pretended to be natural, and they were never naturaclass="underline" everything about them was artificial, and when they claimed — in other words, pretended — to be philosophical, they were nothing but eccentric, and it struck me again how repellent they had seemed to me in the Graben when they told me they now had bought everything by Wittgenstein,just as twenty-five years earlier they had said they had bought everything by FerdinandEbner,with just the same tasteless pretense to a knowledge of philosophy — or at least to an interest in philosophy — because they thought they had to for my benefit, since they believed then — and probably still do — that I have a philosophical bent, that I am a philosophizer — which I am not, for to this day I really have no idea what the words philosopher and philosophize mean. At various times they pretended to know about French or Spanish or German literature. And it is of course true that I got to know the works of many Spanish and French writers, as well as most German writers, while I was staying with them, especially at Maria Zaal, where they have an enormous library, much bigger than the one in the Gentzgasse, though this too is fairly substantial — what one might call a representative library, even a scholar’s library, founded by the great-grandfather of Auersberger’s wife, also for show. The Auersbergers, who inherited this library, have probably taken out no more than twenty or thirty volumes in the past thirty years, whereas I positively fell upon these collections in the Gentzgasse and Maria Zaal with all the passion of the ignoramus, as I have to admit. And perhaps what tied me to the Gentzgasse and Maria Zaal was not so much the Auersbergers themselves as the extensive libraries which their forebears had founded merely for show, a show of scholarship, culture and comprehensive knowledge — the kind of wide-ranging knowledge that is deemed to go with metropolitan life — things that have always been in fashion. There has never, I think, been a time when it was not fashionable to pretend to comprehensive knowledge, and even if it has become somewhat less fashionable in the last two decades, it is now all the rage again. They’ve always gone in for show, I thought, because they lack any capacity for reality. Everything about them has always been show: their social relations amount to nothing but show, and the same is true of their relations with each other, their marital relations: they’ve always put on a show of marriage because they’ve never been capable of sustaining a real one, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And it’s not only the Auersbergers who’ve always lived a life of pretense: all these people in the music room have only ever made a pretense of living — they’ve never really lived, they’ve never for one moment led a real life, a life that had any link with reality. They’ve never had the courage or the strength or the love of truth that is required for real living. They’ve always lived in accordance with fashion,I thought, cloaking themselves in fashion and becoming slaves to fashion for the sake of show, I thought. When it was fashionable in Vienna to read Ferdinand Ebner they read Ferdinand Ebner, just as today, when it’s fashionable to read Wittgenstein, they read Wittgenstein, but of course they didn’t really read Ferdinand Ebner then, and they don’t really read Wittgenstein today. Thirty years ago they went out and bought Ebner’s works, just as today they go out and buy Wittgenstein’s; they talk about them but don’t read them, and they continue to talk about them, without reading them, until suddenly what they’ve been talking about continually — sometimes for years — goes out of fashion, and all at once they stop talking about it. Wittgenstein is now talked about in Vienna as much as Ferdinand Ebner once was, yet it seems to me that Wittgenstein was more a philosopher than a teacher and Ferdinand Ebner more a teacher than a philosopher, and that Wittgenstein will survive and go down in history as a philosopher, unlike Ferdinand Ebner, who has already gone down in history simply as a teacher. The Auersbergers always made a show of being grand, just as they made a show of being artistic, and of course above all they always made a show of being humane, indeed hyper-humane, I thought, though beneath all this show they were never capable of being anything but pathetic: they could never be what they really wanted to be — first-class citizens, aristocrats — and members of the highest ranks of the aristocracy at that. What was so grotesque about them was that they remained constantly wedded to this comic but distasteful view of the world and let themselves be worn down by it day and night. They also made a show of patronizing the arts, however, and whenever they invited anyone, no matter whom, from outside the ranks of the aristocracy, they felt this to be an act of patronage, I thought. In the end I dubbed them rural patrons of the arts