They were the princes of their time, whether or not their names were listed in the Almanach de Gotha. Their courts were no less arabesquely and hieratically composed of officials, sycophants, favorites and minions with kith and kin, flatterers, jokesters, porters, couriers, stooges of all kinds, than any duodecimo court at the height of the Renaissance. And these courtiers were no less devoted to the enjoyment of life, albeit less ethically ideologized, than any court of love in the days of Chrétien de Troyes.

Only, in the year 1940, all this was no longer so concrete. It was its own self in a different state, so to speak: like ice thawed into water, or water boiled into steam. Even this world within the world and this reality within reality were subject to the process of rarefaction, of abstraction, which affected the entire world of humanity, as though its molecules were flying apart (just as, as we know, the whole universe is supposedly flying apart).

Likewise, Uncle Ferdinand’s world of games and gamesters, the innermost circle of the shrewdest, hardest, most cynical possessors of reality, is on the verge of dematerializing. It would now take a Chosen Being to capture it in its new aggregate state and weave it together anew.

15

The vision of Uncle Ferdinand as a spider is thus perfectly valid as a symbol. Indeed, he is weaving the myth of his world. He is working on his Middle Kingdom, which needless to say is the middle of a pre-Copernican world; not a middle position between some higher and some lower world but a nuclear pole, from which the closer and farther circles of friends radiate and intersect and intertangle with the farther and closer circles of friends of other centers on the same social level. A kingdom of the extraordinarily wealthy, extending across many lands and girded by the Great Wall of Money, beyond which live those whom Destiny or Divine Providence or the random blindness of nature has denied the truly liberating, really propitious goods of this earth: teeming nations without money or happiness or names, without memorable faces, dwelling in areas that are unrecorded on the lovely maps and charts in the atlas of deluxe living—on sait que cela existe et on s’en fout.

This is the reason that Uncle Ferdinand does not even now (it is February 1940; the trees are covered in frost, the pond in the park is frozen, I could blissfully skate upon it like young Goethe on the Ilm, if I found pleasure in doing turns and waltz-wave-welling curves on my mother’s deathbed) . . . I say, this is the reason that Uncle Ferdinand does not even now realize how abstract, how virile, how artificial is the activity on which he concentrates all his high intelligence, his energy, all the persistence of his domineering character—a princely character that is accustomed to giving orders, brooks no contradiction, and will not be discouraged by any obstacle. He authors the myth of his world and himself.