Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg

So long as they’re your individual! Have the braveness of your personal nakedness! i used to be not anything, i'm not anything, i'll be not anything. yet i'm going to dwell out my lifestyles in freedom and allow noble and thoughtful souls percentage within the studies of this loose internal lifestyles, by means of placing them out within the such a lot centred shape on paper. i'm bad, yet i'm myself! totally and entirely myself! the guy with out compromises! How a ways do you get with that? 100 Guldens a month and some ardent admirers. good, that’s what I’ve received. My existence has been dedicated to the boundless admiration of God’s art, “woman’s physique! ” The partitions of my humble room are virtually papered over with ideal experiences of the nude. All are hung in oaken frames with captions. A fifteen-year-old bears the motto: “Beauté est vertue. ” underneath one other it says: “There is yet one indecency within the naked—to deem the bare indecent! ” lower than another it says: “This is how God and the poets dreamed you up. yet feeble little guy invented modesty and coated you, en-coffined you! ” whilst P. A. wakes, his look falls at the holy elegance and he is taking the difficulty and tension of life in stride, because he was once endowed with eyes to drink within the holiest loveliness in the world! Eye, oh eye, Rothchild-chattel of guy! however the others stare, they ogle real looking the toad ogles the water-lily. I’d like those phrases inscribed on my tombstone: “He enjoyed and observed. ” sure, certainly, to reside in internal ecstasies, to get your self all sizzling and troubled, piping scorching, to permit your self be set on hearth through the beauties of this international, that was once all we ever sought after, father and son, that used to be all. yet while the previous guy used to be nonetheless a little bit hooked up to lifestyle, from time to time colliding with it, the more youthful one fled instantly and and not using a moment concept from this dungeon of responsibility. real, i'm negative, terrible, yet my noble father gave me the treasure which few fathers of their light knowledge furnish their sons: “Time for improvement and freedom. ” That allowed my uncorrupted soul to lovingly abandon itself to the unattainable treasures which each and every hour of each day spill like pearls onto the desolate shore of existence, allowed it to desert itself to the tragic or the delicate occasions, and develop, grow—. My Mama was a really smooth, strikingly beautiful woman with advantageous palms and toes and narrow joints. Like a gazelle. as soon as my father introduced again from England a really lovely woman. He stated to Mama: “This, my pricey, is Maud-Victoria. She is the prettiest woman in England. ” My Mama observed that she used to be certainly the prettiest lady in England and stated in a downright sorrowful voice: “Will she need to stick with us to any extent further? ” Whereupon, my father used to be so moved that he despatched the “prettiest woman in England” again the place she got here from. while my father paid widespread visits to the Ashantee girls,* my dearly liked girlfriends, and gave them silk scarves as presents, everybody acknowledged: “The previous guy and his son are of a sort. ” As a boy I had an indescribable love for mountain meadows. The mountain meadow steaming lower than the blazing solar, fragrantly wafting, alive with insects and butterflies, made me downright inebriated.