I am hopelessly miserable and reading Thomas Bernhard. Actually, I did not have it in mind to read him. I did not have it in mind to read anyone-I was too unhappy to think so clearly. To open a book, to read a page, to enter someone else's dreams-these were all excuses for dwelling on my own wretchedness, reminders that everyone else in the world had managed to avoid the well of misery into which I had fallen. Everywhere were people who flattered themselves about their successes and tiny refinements, their interests, their culture, and their families. It seemed that all books had been written in such people's voices. No matter what they described-a nineteenth-century Parisian ball, an anthropological tour of Jamaica, the impoverished environs of a great city, or the determination of a man who had dedicated his life to the study of art-the books concerned lives whose experience bore no relation to my own, so I wanted to forget them all. Because I could find nothing in these books that remotely resembled my mounting misery, I felt anger both at the books and at myself: at the books because they ignored the pain I was suffering, at myself because I had been so stupid as to throw myself into this senseless pain. I wanted nothing other than to escape my mindless misery. But books had prepared me for life, books were mostly what kept me going, so I kept telling myself that if I wished to pull myself out of my black cloud, I would have to keep reading. Yet whenever I opened a book to hear the voice of an author who accepted the world as it was, or who, even if he wished to change it, still identified with it, I would feel myself alone. Books were remote from my pain. What's more, it was books that had brought me to the idea that the misery into which I had fallen was unique, that I was an idiotic wretch like no other. This was why I kept telling myself, "Books are not for reading, but for buying and selling.” After the earthquakes, whenever books annoyed me, I found a 1 for throwing them out. And so I was bringing my forty-year war looks to an end in a spirit of loathing and disillusionment.

This was my frame of mind as I leafed through a few pages of as Bernhard. I was not reading them in the hope that they might ne. A magazine was doing a special issue on Bernhard and had would I please write something. There was a debt I needed to discharge and once upon a time I'd liked Bernhard very much.

I began to read Bernhard again, and for the first time since the dark had descended, I heard a voice saying that the wretchedness I my unhappiness was not as great or as bad as I thought. There was no particular sentence or paragraph that made this particular point; they about other things-a passion for the piano, solitude, publishers, or Glenn Gould-but I still felt that these were merely pretexts; they were speaking to my misery, and this perception lifted my spirits. The problem was not the misery itself but the way I perceived it. The problem was that I was unhappy but that I felt so in particular ways. To read Bernhard in this time of unhappiness was like a tonic, though I knew that the pages I read had not been written to serve as such, or even as a consolation for readers grappling with depression.

How to explain all this? What made reading Bernhard at a time of unhappiness seem like taking an elixir? Perhaps it was the air of renunciation.

Maybe I was soothed by a moral vision, wisely suggesting that it is not to expect too much of life .... But it might have had nothing to h morality, for a dose of Bernhard makes clear that the only hope lies in remaining oneself, in clinging to one's habits, to one's anger. There is in Bernhard's writing the suggestion that the greatest stupidity is to give up one's passions and habits in the hope of a better life, or the joy of attacking others' idiocies and stupidities, or of knowing that life can be more than what our passions and perversions make of it.

But I know that all attempts at formulation will be fruitless. This is not just because it is hard to find in Bernhard's words confirmation of what I've said. It is also because every time I return to Bernhard's books I

see that they defy reduction. But before I begin again to doubt myself, let me say this, at least: What I enjoy most in Bernhard's books is not their settings or their moral vision. I enjoy just being there, inside those to embrace his unstoppable anger and share it with him. That is how literature consoles, by inviting us to fulminate with the same intensity the writers we love.