Honored reader,
it is unedifying to end with a word that has written itself into a text so persistently as if it did not belong to the question of style but to physiology; as if it were not an adjective but a small muscle reflex. And yet I want to begin with it precisely because I promised you not only to use this word, but also to question it in the end – the way one questions a guest who has stayed too long and whose coat is already hanging over the armrest.
“Unedifying” – that is, first of all, in the plainest sense: annoying. It is what, in modernity, is not the magnificent but the sticky. Not the technology itself, but its politeness; not the programs, but their constant invitation. It is these friendly diagrams that look as if they wanted to calm us, while in truth they only remind us that we have something to do. It is the notifications that always want to say something “just quickly” and then, like all unsolicited advisers, keep the inner self occupied as well. It is the fact that today even sleep – this last natural right, this ancient, animal sinking away – has been turned into categories, scores, percentages and a “readiness” that sounds like a virtue but feels like a duty roster.
Annoying is, in a word, the constant demand to be better – and not heroically, but hygienically: as if one had to scrub the soul with a brush and equip one’s character with an update. Annoying is that even pleasure, this old anarchic field, can no longer do without a concept: photo booth instead of photography, networking instead of chatting, longevity instead of life. Annoying is that people are now distrusted so much that even the flicker of the candle is imitated because real flickering is considered too unpredictable.
In this sense, “unedifying” was often a quiet sigh in the novel; a label for the small thing that disturbs. And the matter would be settled if the annoying were not – like so much that is annoying – only the surface.
For the word, as soon as it appears a second time, is no longer merely an annoyance but a method. It becomes a gesture of distance, a dry wink, a protection against pathos. I used it to prevent myself, while writing, from soaking the Sonnenalp, the mountain, the cold, the light, the domes, the rings, the promises, the mantras – all of it – in reverence. One can, honored reader, become just as sentimental in front of hotels as in front of cathedrals; and hotels are, if we are honest, the cathedrals of our present: they have their liturgy, their vestments, their sacred objects (card, key, band on the wrist, ring on the finger), and above all they have the possibility of treating us for a few days as if we were more important than our own mistakes.
