perfect relaxation

"Some people are so constituted that they can sleep well all their lives, or during the best part of their lives, or at least a tolerably good part of their lives, I thought, while some others, those like me, can't sleep, they never sleep, they are condemned never to be able to sleep, for even when they are sleeping they are never really relaxed by nature and what they do can't be called sleeping, these people never sleep as long as they live because all thier lives, no matter how long they live, they have never had the advantage of a perfect relaxation of their head and body."

~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard

this totally decrepit modern world

"The very first lines of this effort, when I reread it, gave me the idea of editing a book-length collection of Roithamer's short descriptive pieces, in a time such as ours when everything but what is noteworthy, everything but what is truly original as well as most brilliantly scientific is edited and published, when every year hundreds and thousands of tons of imbecility-on-paper are tossed on the market, all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products, at such a time it is simply one's duty to bring out a work of art as unassuming and unadorned as the art of Roithamer's prose, to publish it, even though it would not be likely to make any kind of a stir, I think, but just to make sure that it would never be lost again, once it is printed and preserved forever, because these prose pieces of Roithamer's are indubitably precious gems and the greatest rarities anywhere, including our country."

~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard