Whenever things begin to look absolutely, unremittingly impossible and I find myself sinking into despair for myself and the human race, I read Thomas Bernhard. It always cheers me up. No one is more bitter, no one has ever lived in a bleaker world than Thomas Bernhard.
The only contender is Jonathan Swift, whose epitaph might do as well for Bernhard: “He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”
All Bernhard’s work is visible struggle: invectives against his Austrian homeland, combats occurring solely within the human mind and imagination, blustery dialogues that finally surrender pretense and paragraphs to become clotted, hundred-page soliloquies. And beneath it all, his certainty that language above all embodies humanity’s refusal to accept the world as it is, that it is a machinery of essential falsehoods and fabrications.
Unable to get back to sleep following Sergeant Travis’s visit that afternoon, having no Thomas Bernhard at hand and little prospect of finding any there in the hinterestlands, I did the next-best thing. I made a cemetery run.
Confederate cemeteries are scattered throughout the South, some with only a half-dozen or dozen gravesites, others sprawling over the equivalent of a city block. They’re often grand places, with elaborate headstones and inscriptions, generally well-kept and — visited. And one of the most celebrated, I knew, was not far from Clarksville.
It was almost dark when I got there. You turned off the highway just past Faith Baptist Church (I stopped twice along the way to ask), drove down a narrow asphalt road (pulling to the shoulder whenever vehicles appeared on the other side) and onto a wider dirt one, then through a modern graveyard of low headstones and bright green grass into a copse where half-lifesize statues of soldiers reared up among the trees. Still farther along lay a separate Negro graveyard with wooden markers.
The trees were mostly magnolias, mostly dormant now. Clusters of leaves, still green but curiously unalive, hung as though holding their breath, waiting.
Marble and cement soldiers, horses, angels, beloved dogs, pylons, pinnacles, sad women.
A squat obelisk of veined marble bearing the figure of a child, though he wore an officer’s uniform: Let Us Remember That After Midnight Cometh Morn.
A casket-shaped headstone with a central spire of wrought iron: Honor. Family. Faith.
And on a small, simple marker hand-carved to resemble a scroll, far more appropriate to New Orleans (where it would have indicated the young man died in a duel, not war): Mort sur le champ d’honneur.
Poor ol’ Tom Jefferson with his slave mistress Sally Hemings and his two hundred slaves at Monticello and his denouncements of slavery as a great political and moral evil, knowing all the time he would suffer economic ruin if his own slaves were freed. And that the neighbors would talk something awful.
Life, Mr. Jefferson, is an unqualified, neo-Marxist bitch.
Everything comes down to simple economics, however fine-spirited we are.
Looking up, I saw that a white boy of twelve or so stood off at the side of the field with a shotgun cradled in his arms, watching me.
I nodded his way.
He nodded back and kept watching.
As Robert Johnson said: Sun goin’ down, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.
Maybe not a good idea, even this late in the American game. So I mounted my Mazda and rode into the sunset, leaving the dead, those dead, forever behind.