Max Frisch
Homo Faber
QUOTES
“Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”
“Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don't want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn't always fun, you can't always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you are not in form women don't remain in form either; as soon as they are bored they start complaining you've no feeling.”
“I've often wondered what people mean when they talk about an experience. I'm a technologist and accustomed to seeing things as they are. I see everything they are talking about very clearly; after all, I'm not blind. I see the moon over the Tamaulipas desert--it is more distinct than at other times, perhaps, but still a calculable mass circling around our planet, an example of gravitation, interesting, but in what way an experience? I see the jagged rocks, standing out black against the moonlight; perhaps they do look like the jagged backs of prehistoric monsters, but I know they are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, one should have to examine them to be sure of this. Why should I feel afraid? There aren't any prehistoric monsters any more. Why should I imagine them? I'm sorry, but I don't see any stone angels either; nor demons; I see what I see--the usual shapes due to erosion and also my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why get womanish? I don't see any Flood either, but sand lit up by the moon and made undulating, like water, by the wind, which doesn't surprise me; I don't find it fantastic, but perfectly explicable. I don't know what the souls of the damned look like; perhaps like black agaves in the desert at night. What I see are agaves, a plant that blossoms once only and dies. Furthermore, I know (however I may look at the moment) that I am not the last or the first man on earth; and I can't be moved by the mere idea that I am the last man, because it isn't true. Why get hysterical? Mountains are mountains, even if in a certain light they may look like something else, but it is the Sierra Madre Oriental, and we are not standing in a kingdom of the dead, but in the Tamaulipas desert, Mexico, about sixty miles from the nearest road, which is unpleasant, but in what way an experience? Nor can I bring myself to hear something resembling eternity; I don't hear anything, apart from the trickle of sand at every step. Why should I experience what isn't there?”
“She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension.”
“Come,” she said. “We’re married, Walter, married. Don’t touch me.”
“I called her a sentimentalist and artsy-craftsy. She called me Homo Faber.”
“The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.”
“Do you know,” she said, “that was the Ludovisi Altar we liked so much this morning. It’s madly famous!” I let her give me a lecture.”
“Everything happened exactly as I had intended it shouldn’t.”
“Hanna had Communist leanings, which I couldn’t bear, and on the other a tendency to mysticism, or to put it less kindly, hysteria”
“the streamers and the couples busily engaged in bursting one another’s balloons.”
“How many of the people I meet are interested in whether I’m enjoying myself, in my feelings at all?”
“Our journey wasn’t easy, though often curious: I bored her with my experience of life, she made me old by waiting from morning to evening, wherever we were, for my enthusiasm . . .”
“I can’t bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.”
“When I woke Herbert, he sprang to his feet. What was the matter? When he saw that nothing was the matter, he started snoring again—to avoid being bored.”
“I had said what I never meant to say, but what has been said cannot be unsaid, I enjoyed our silence, I was completely sober again, but all the same I had no idea what I was thinking, probably nothing.”
“Conversation was hardly possible; I had forgotten that anyone could be so young.”
“Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!”
“I don’t deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don’t need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I’m concerned.
Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the one will come up approximately 1,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.”
But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth”
“As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed.”
“In general, only the future counted for her, and to a slight extent the present; but she had no interest at all in past experiences, like all young people.”
“I stand still so as not to hear steps in my apartment, steps that are after all only my own. The whole thing isn’t tragic, merely tiresome. You can’t wish yourself good night . . . Is that a reason for marrying?”
“I confessed I knew nothing about art—she based her view on a saying of her mother’s that anyone can respond to a work of art except the cultured philistine. “That’s very kind of your mother!” I said.”
“What I heard was the usual story: marriage, a child (which I didn’t quite catch, obviously, otherwise I shouldn’t have asked again later on), then the war, a prison camp, return to Düsseldorf and so on; it shook me to think how time passes, how we grow older.”
“I waited, my hand around the stem, to clink glasses; I wasn’t in the least interested in Herr Piper, a man who lived in East Germany out of conviction”
“I ordered another half-bottle of Orvieto Abbocato, and then we talked about all sorts of things, about artichokes, Catholicism, cassata, the Sleeping Erinys, travel, the poverty of our time, and the best way to the Via Appia”
“She was seriously disappointed, a child I was treating like a woman, or a woman I was treating like a child, I didn’t know myself which it was.”
“Not being shaved gives me the feeling I’m some sort of plant and I keep involuntarily feeling my chin.”
“They were obviously Americans, I could hear their voices as the party wandered around our tomb; to judge by the voices, they might have been stenographers from Cleveland. “Oh, isn’t it lovely?” “Oh, is this the Campagna?” “Oh, how lovely it is here!”
“The ladies’ mauve-dyed hair interspersed with the bald patches of the gentlemen, who had taken off their panama hats—they must have broken out of an old-age home, I thought, but I didn’t say it.”
“the Indians were far too gentle, too peaceable, positively childlike. They squatted for whole evenings in their white straw hats on the earth, motionless as toadstools, content without light, silent. The sun and moon were enough light for them, an effeminate race, eerie but innocuous.”
“I believe Ivy wanted me to hate myself and seduced me merely to make me hate myself, and that was her joy, to humiliate me, the only joy I could give her.”
“My life was in her hands .”
“War against puerperal fever. Caesarean operations. Incubators for premature births. We take life more seriously than in earlier times.”
“Hanna had no use for statistics, I soon realized that. She let me deliver a whole lecture—in the bathroom—about statistics, and at the end all she said was: “Your bath is getting cold.”
“Hanna had no use for statistics, I soon realized that. She let me deliver a whole lecture—in the bathroom—about statistics, and at the end all she said was: “Your bath is getting cold.”
“What’s the difference between contraception and abortion? Both are expressions of the human will not to have children.”
“How many children are really wanted? The fact that the woman would rather have it once it’s there is a different matter, an automatic reaction of the instincts, she forgets she tried to avoid it and added to this is the feeling of power over the man, motherhood as an economic weapon in the hands of the woman.”
“How many children are really wanted? The fact that the woman would rather have it once it’s there is a different matter, an automatic reaction of the instincts, she forgets she tried to avoid it and added to this is the feeling of power over the man, motherhood as an economic weapon in the hands of the woman.”
“Children are something we want or don’t want.”
“There is no physical injury, unless the abortion is carried out by a quack; if there is any psychological injury it is only because the person in question is dominated by moral or religious ideas.”
“To be consistent, those who argue that abortion is “unnatural” would have to say: no penicillin, no lightning rods, no eyeglasses, no DDT, no radar and so on.”
“Why should I be melancholy? England wasn’t in sight yet.”
“Boys!” she said. “You can’t imagine what they’re like—they think you’re their mother, and that’s frightful!”
“In Florence I rebelled and told her that frankly I thought her Fra Angelico rather mawkish. Then I corrected myself and said “naive.” She didn’t deny it, on the contrary, she was delighted; it couldn’t be naïve enough for her. What I enjoyed was campari!”
“We talked about constellations—the usual thing, when two people haven’t yet discovered which one knows less about the stars than the other; the rest is romantic fantasy, which I can’t bear.”
“Caresses in the evening, yes, but I can’t stand caresses in the morning, and frankly more than three or four days with one woman has always been for me the beginning of dissimulation, no man can stand feelings in the morning. I’d rather wash dishes! Sabeth laughed.”
“I really began to feel that the young were beyond me. I often appeared to myself a deceiver. Why? I didn’t want to undermine her belief that Tivoli surpassed anything I had ever seen anywhere and that an afternoon in Tivoli, for example, was happiness squared; but I just couldn’t feel that way about it.”
“a woman with time on her hands in the morning, a woman who wanders about before she is dressed, for example, rearranging flowers in a vase and talking about love and marriage, is something no man can stand, I believe, unless he dissembles.”
“on the one hand she had boundless trust in me, merely because I was thirty years older, a childish trust, and on the other hand no respect at all. I was vexed to find I expected respect.”
“The very sight of a double room, unless it’s in a hotel I can leave again soon, a double room as a permanent arrangement, sets me thinking about the Foreign Legion”
“I took pleasure in every moment that was in any real sense pleasurable. I didn’t turn somersaults, I didn’t sing, but there were certain things that I, too, enjoyed.”
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