Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of accepting things as they are without overcomplicating or adding unnecessary interpretations.
Thomas Bernhard suggests that the act of infusing our perceptions with excessive meanings and interpretations can lead to confusion and madness. He asserts that reality should be accepted simply for what it is, instead of creating complexities that distract us from the truth of our experiences and thoughts.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, one might reference this quote to illustrate the pitfalls of overthinking.
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Honour sinks where commerce long prevails.
The development of a kind heart, or feeling of closeness for all human beings, does not involve any of the kind of religiosity we normally associate with it...It is for everyone, irrespective of race, religion or any political affiliation.
But the fact a person denies that he is theorising is no reason for taking him at his word and failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements.
A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.
While we wait for life, life passes
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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