Karl Kraus, Vienna ca 1920 -by Trude Fleischmann
Word and substance – that is the only connection I have ever striven for in my life.
When someone is about to accost me, I hope till the last moment that the fear of being compromised will keep him from doing so. But people are intrepid.
Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.
One’s need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well. If the waiter takes away a chair on which no one is sitting, I feel a void and my sociability is aroused. I can’t live without empty chairs.
I must be with people again. For this summer – among bees and dandelions – my misanthropy really got out of hand.
An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.
– Karl Kraus, in Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms. transl. Harry Zohn (University of Chicago Press, 1990)
photo from LA
Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin de siècle Vienna’s famously rich life of the...
“For this summer… my misanthropy really got out of hand.”