Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

saying “wordlessly,” because I am not willing to interpret as words the French mumbling that got caught in the bits of her graying mustache and of which I understood only the word printemps.

In a flash she had opened the double window. I wanted to register strong protest. But the draft coming in from the courtyard lifted my unpaid bill for April from the desk, then it fluttered for a while between the still life with tomatoes and the dusty floor lamp, until it fell right next to the calendar, just where the zero of the date was. (It was May 10.) So I didn’t say anything. I just stuck my index finger, which was blue from the cold, into my mouth and put my letter to Olive into an envelope, placed the April bill as a bookmark into the Jack London, took my hat from the hook, and left.

The hallway carried a distinct smell of oil. The landlady, her cousin, and the maid were standing in front of a huge open suitcase. With growing enthusiasm they were cramming whole piles of carpets, old clothing, and stuffed animals into the suitcase. The landlady herself commanded every movement, in her right hand she held a bag out of which she dumped some sort of white powder over the whole chose, the way confectioners’ sugar is poured over pancakes. I came closer and saw the women embalming my coat. At the same time it occurred to me that this obnoxious confectioners’ sugar bore the name naphthalene. Let them do so, I thought, and went to the café.

On Wednesday at 11:30 on the dot I sneezed three times. At Aschinger’s I left over half of my bockwurst and got my next-to-last handkerchief from home. I took my umbrella along, too. At Wittenbergplatz I thought I heard hail pounding on the pavement. And my coat took on the smell of naphthalene, far away, in the suitcase and on the floor.

Thursday. Hans brought me a thermometer: 103.2, not bad at all. I gargle with saltwater, they wrap their cousin’s wool stocking around my neck. The maid has been washing handkerchiefs since breakfast. My hot eyes see only the three Ice Saints, Mamertus, Pancras, and Servatius, juggling mothballs right next to my bed. Through the door in the hallway a stupid smell of oil seems to be penetrating once again. I think they’re unpacking.

Berliner Börsen Courier, May 13, 1927

Anything but Objectivity!

To the linguist interested in human communication, the little word “but” appears in an interesting light. From the outset—and everyone will readily agree with me on this—its function is to coyly introduce hitches into the smooth course of things and to kill off the hope created by the words “I would love to …” with candied poison. But then—and here I’ll want to step into more intellectual territory—the word “but” is the reprehensible vehicle of an unhealthy objectivity, especially when it comes to judging people. How often have even I replied to the remark by a friend that one person or another was a pretentious schmuck by declaring, “But he studied philosophy with Georg Simmel” and thus flung myself into the arms of an objectivity that unnecessarily complicates the world in a manner that bedevils life, plunges the mind into dilemmas, kills the impulse to act, and on top of that has the appalling effect of surrounding us, anywhere and everywhere, with interesting people.

The few true connoisseurs of the art of living among you know the sensual pleasure of calling someone an ass or cretin, plain and simple, without being constrained later to remark on how splendidly he plays the piano and thus undermine what you’ve said; of pronouncing an awkward person simply unbearable without needing to declare afterward that she is basically a shy soul with terrible inhibitions. Anything but objectivity! It unsettles your heart, makes your character fickle and ambivalent, and anyone who uses it excessively sooner or later descends into severe neurosis, as if an emotion had been jammed into you.

The public, our blessed public, doesn’t have this objectivity and is in excellent health. It knows how to invoke forceful words full of vivid imagery, fierce statements toward disagreeable individuals, apodictic judgments that by their very nature don’t allow for any ensuing “buts.” Even the most objective person couldn’t come up with a way to tone down a statement like calling someone a “monumental jackass,” making it seem as though the person thus characterized nonetheless has a good grasp of the subtlest stylistic nuances. Statements of this kind coming from straightforward, forthright individuals have the unassailable nature of mathematical axioms—a priori ideas are just there, not amenable to any explanation, any refutation, like mountains made of glass.

Actions like taking a dainty bow or turning the toes outward when walking gracefully, like harmful objectivity, stem from the world of courtly life, which provided the model for urban culture over the course of centuries. Objectivity was the virtue of a good monarch, was the benevolent ruler’s compassion for the weaknesses and strengths of his subjects, was the onset, the primordial cell of a democratic form of government that grants even the minority the right to throw in a word as they please, and that later, at around the close of the nineteenth century, reached its heyday with the catchwords “On one hand, on the other hand!” and “But still …!”

It seems only natural that in accordance with the march of history, so-called democracy always makes a point of contrasting itself with dictatorship, which leads to a change in the arena of personal objectivity; in short, that the fretful dithering when pronouncing judgment about this one or that one ultimately puts a stop to people cheerfully, heartily, and vigorously granting absolute validity to their judgments, as in a dictatorship, and returning to the method of nature, to an unspoiled, healthy populace from which all power emanates, and calling a nitwit a nitwit with a clear conscience even if he really does write the very loveliest