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“I do not understand,” said Moro, “why this country lets all the people who amount to something run away, expels them, brazenly propels them to other continents…I do not understand this…but of course this country is dominated by the most appalling conditions, conditions that one cannot imagine, an unimaginable feeble-mindedness is winding the key of the machinery of our State…one must concede that much, indeed everything in this country is laughable…pathetic of course, theater…such that one is quite conscious here that one is dying, withering away, [that one] has decayed and must wither away…and such that I shudder whenever I think about it, my dear Zoiss…but everything is help– and powerless…when one cannot sleep under such appalling arrangements, cannot fall asleep and says to oneself that the fatherland is nothing more [or] other than an ordinary, brutal [idiotic] idiom…out of shamelessness…the children,” he said and looked down at the street, “play and live entirely alongside events, while the adults are brutalizing, withering away, are actually not present at all any longer…whoever succeeds in writing a comedy or a pure farce on his deathbed has succeeded in everything. Within the insane asylums is the universally recognized insanity, your esteemed guardian said, outside the insane asylums is the illegal insanity…but everything is nothing but insanity.”

From Ungenach by Thomas Bernhard, as translated by Douglas Robertson.