effect admiration might have on the pianist and as a kind of kamikaze operation, for his violent disappointment was patently visible, the pianist stopped mid-declamatory flow, brutally cut short, a stop put to his continued declamation by means of my declaration, his eyes emptied of all positive expectation, entirely filled with negative disappointment, I’d have liked to tell him, but couldn’t tell him, as I had thought to myself while saying I admire you, that it was for a laugh, that I didn’t actually believe in admiration and didn’t in fact admire anyone as a rule nor pianists in particular nor this one among them all but was truth be told unfit for admiration, I’m not fit to admire great men, admiring Kant and Bergson and Schoenberg, same with Mann, Proust and even Papa is not something I can do, yet I said I admire you that day to the pianist, I did wonder why seeing the pianist’s face and his disappointment, because I really didn’t admire him and had no intention of admiring him nor any likelihood of finding admiration in a future either near or far but I said it and when something’s said it’s said, I put it down to my suicidal education in collective happiness and have torn my hair out over this education which is always catching up with me, actually it arrives before me, I blamed my education but not my mother or my father who have nothing to do with it, I recalled in the plane, they managed to make a nice girl out of me, it’s pretty rare to get as nice as me never mind my sister. What I like about myself, I said to my sister who was watching the earth’s approach through the porthole, is that I’m a nice girl, and you too such a nice girl. I know my sister said and I knew she knew for she knows everything I like about her and about myself, as nice as us is exceptional, I was saying while shivering hot and cold all over, everything all at once, this flaw is our best flaw, I also said to persuade myself, niceness should not prevent us from being inventors of air brakes, my sinter’d lamented, I’d really love to have invented them myself air brakes but I was much too nice, between air brakes and niceness the line is you have to choose, I’dave had to stop being nice to do air brakes, I tried but I didn’t succeed, if I’ve one regret it’s having failed with air brakes, will you look at that handsome invention, an invention such as the air brake makes my head spin, the pianist could equally have invented it, that air brake, I said, he had everything going for him from the start, instead of which he makes do with playing the piano, but he could have done it too, not that he’s a bad person either, nothing bad in the pianist and absolutely everything non-bad but non-bad isn’t nice you follow. Of course I follow, my sister said although she couldn’t actually see the difference between being non-bad and being nice because she thinks absolutely everyone is nice. I didn’t feel like explaining my ideas on nice and non-bad to my sister, it wouldn’t have done my sister any good to change her world vision according to my notions of the nice and the non-bad, every aspect of my sister’s vision is all right by me because it works for her, one’s world vision can be a great and beautiful thing I thought as we went on flying although much lower, a great and beautiful thing when it’s my sister’s but otherwise not, if not hers a world vision would be better smaller-scale than so big, Weltanschauung I translated automatically and that took me straight back to Tannhäuser, I felt a chill rising through my legs and running under Adorno on one side and under Mann on the other, each warming the blood and returning the blood to me at about the right temperature by the time it flooded my thumping heart which has nothing to do with the open heart of heartiness, heartiness is found not in the beating heart but in the one that is disciplined, far from the blood and screams of a cow on losing its calf. The vision of Tannhäuser destroyed by the cow’s desperate love for its calf, this was a total Weltanschauung which rather screwed me up and by means of a recreated instant screwed up the time of the cow, which truly does see each second’s dying.
Weltanschauung is not one of the pianist’s words, it’s absent from the pianist’s vocabulary, I’d recognized and understood the pianist’s hostile stance to all Weltanschauung from the start and even before he conceived it, when the pianist came across the Blue Self-Portrait he really fell hard for the intentional absence of Weltanschauung in Schoenberg’s canvas, in which rather than both his ears the painter depicted just the one. For Schoenberg one ear is enough the pianist had observed and understood, the intensity of a single ear is the extent of what’s useful for Schoenberg, the pianist struck by the absence of the other ear and wondering, understanding, the whispers of contemporaries was enough for Schoenberg, two ears for a whisper is obviously far too many, a single one pressed to a wall enables better audition of contemporaries than two, one ear is enough to listen and two to confuse the whisper with noise and the noise with clamor and the clamor with the terror of undergoing collective Weltanschauung, the single missing ear, the ear missing an ear cut off and all the missing and cut-off ears, humanity no different from the cornered bull, ears mutilated so as to hear only the crucial whispers and not the clamor, mutilated and tossed in a heap like a pile of shoes is tossed, we could have avoided the heap of shoes by making
