Read Young Torless for Free Online Page B

same.”
    “No,” Törless said, looking out into the garden again. Behind his back-as though from a long way off-he heard the buzzing of the gas-lights. He was preoccupied by an emotion rising up in him, mournfully and like a mist.
    “It doesn't get you anywhere. You're right about that. But it doesn't do to tell yourself that. How much of all the things we spend our whole time in school doing is really going to get anyone anywhere? What do we get anything out of? I mean for ourselves-you see what I mean? In the evening you know you've lived another day, you've learnt this and that, you've kept up with the time-table, hut still, you're empty-inwardly, I mean. Right inside, you're still hungry, so to speak. .
    Beineberg muttered something about exercising the mind by way of preparation-not yet being able to start on anything-later on...
    “Preparation? Exercise? What for? Have you got any definite idea of it? I dare say you're hoping for something, but it's just as vague to you as it is to me. It's like this: everlastingly waiting for something you don't know anything about except that you're waiting for it. . . . It's so boring.
    “Boring. . .” Beineberg drawled in mimicry, wagging his head.
    Törless was still gazing out into the garden. He thought he could hear the rustling of the withered leaves being blown into drifts by the wind. Then came that moment of utter stillness which always
    occurs a little while before the descent of complete darkness. The shapes of things, which had been sinking ever more deeply into the dusk, and the blurring, dissolving colours of things-for an instant it all seemed to pause, to hover, as it were with a holding of the breath ...
    “You know, Beineberg,” Törless said, without turning round, '~when it's getting dark there always seem to be a few moments that are sort of different. Every time I watch it happening I remember the same thing: once when I was quite small I was playing in the woods at this time of evening. My nursemaid had wandered off somewhere. I didn't know she had, and so I still felt as if she were nearby. Suddenly something made me look up. I could feel I was alone. It was suddenly all so quiet. And when I looked around it was as though the trees were standing in a circle round me, all silent, and looking at me. I began to cry. I felt the grownups had deserted me and abandoned me to inanimate beings.... What is it? I still often get it. What's this sudden silence that's like a language we can't hear?”
    “I don't know the thing you mean. But why shouldn't things have a language of their own? After all, there are no definite grounds for asserting that they haven't a soul!”
    Törless did not answer. He did not care for Beineberg's speculative view of the matter.
    But after a while Beineberg went on: “Why do you keep on staring out of the window? What is there to be seen?”
    “I'm still wondering what it can be.” But actually he had gone on to thinking about something else, which he did not want to speak of. That high tension, that harkening as if some solemn mystery might become audible, and the burden of gazing right into the midst of the still undefined relationships of things-all this was something he had been able to endure only for a moment. Then lie had once again been overcome by the sense of solitude and forlornness which always followed this excessive demand upon his resources. He felt: there's something in this that's still too difficult for me. And his thoughts took refuge in something else, which was also implicit in it all, but which, as it were, lay only in the background and biding its time: loneliness.
    From the deserted garden a leaf now and then fluttered up against the lit window, tearing a streak of brightness into the darkness great future ahead of them usually go through a period abounding in humiliations.
    Törless's taste for certain moods was the first hint of a psychological development that was later to manifest itself as a strong