“Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.” Thus the maniacal monologuing prince in Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, lately improving my evenings.
“The cold is inside me,” the prince said. “Therefore it makes no difference where I go; the cold goes along with me inside me. I am freezing from within. But in the library this cold is most bearable. Nothing but brains printed to death,” the prince said. “With every book we discover to our horror a human being printed to death by the printers, a man published to death by the publishers, read to death by the readers.”
