I know and have always known that the radiant maternal goodness that I think I recall, the smiling-Madonna quality (without the crushed suffering of Our Lady of Sorrow), the lightness, the serenity that made me think I was a favorite of fortune—I know that all these were figments of my imagination, daydreams, retrospective projections of eternally unfulfilled wishes onto a concocted phantom. But that is not what unsettles me now.

Gazing at the extremely elegant, extremely fashionably stylized young woman on the (incidentally, masterful) photo portraits I have found here (they are signed: Bill Brandt), I cannot learn anything about myself. But I can learn a great deal about an era that haunts me like a ghost stalking a house.

To my small surprise (and secret satisfaction), it is not an era of mothers. The young woman embodying it is not a mother. With her steep, narrow shoulders from which the fur has slid, with her stem-like throat displaying the severe emerald necklace, with her shingled black hair like a patent-leather cap, her oval face with its small corrupt mouth, and her radiantly innocent eyes under her thin, high brows—this is the most feminine form conceivable of an ephebe. If someone like this bears a child, it must be either a demigod or a homunculus . . .

At first, however, this strange, beautiful creature in which I only very remotely discover familiar features similar to my own, as if in ironical reflection, is as desirable as a sister brought up somewhere else and entering my life as an adult: I know both everything and nothing about her, but I can vividly picture her as an excellent lover, with expert hands, like a Japanese flower arranger. What I see is the Eros of an era, and I—or perhaps that stratum of my existence that felt itself to be my self (and that I now feel was me at that time, as remote, to be sure, as abstract as Nagel’s shot-off arm, my venerated Djakopp Djee)—this self is a child of that era and belongs to it more than my self of today does . . . and is no more and is merely an echo of something that has long since waned, just as tomorrow my self of today will belong to the echo of 1940 and will have waned and faded with it . . . if it does not emerge from me as an image and myth and live on as such.

And just as I am about to doze off with these thoughts, there is a banging in the big tiled stove, which is heated from the corridor. An old, familiar, deliciously cozy noise, announcing that Miss Fern is about to come in with a fresh, warmed-up bath towel in order to—but no. It means that fourteen years have passed; that my mother and ideal beloved is dead, drowned in the pond; and that I will now have to pull on my boots again, because Uncle Ferdinand, the spider, is waiting for me downstairs at the breakfast table (he hardly sleeps anymore) in order to weave me into his Middle Kingdom, so that it might live on as image and myth.