and while I chattered on, friend Brodny, filtering such shallow tidbits through the dull eardrums of an alcoholic into his extremely sensitive soul, I myself was afflicted with the most absurd anxieties about how I would never finish my book, and I invented a new reason every day to tell myself that I couldn’t possibly write it. No, it couldn’t be written—not as I wanted to write it.

In Gaia’s time, when I was living a luxurious life at her expense (I was used to it from Stella, of course), I had again hit upon the amusing idea that the novel of the era, in which everyone was to recognize himself, recognize his era, his destiny, was something I couldn’t write because I lacked the essential experience of my generation: the war. Yes, you heard me correctly, sir: I lack the experience of war. As far forward and as close to the whites of the enemy’s eyes as possible. An experience that had, after all, been granted to my colleagues Nagel and Schwab. Nothing of the sort had been allotted to me. I had laid down my arms when Bessarabia was peacefully handed to the Russians. While Nagel was gathering material for his stories, losing his arm in the process, and meeting God, I was carrying out the struggle as an interior experience in the beds of the homebound wives of warriors. The steel storms came down as aerial bombs upon a man with the most peaceful of intentions. Of course, Schwab (to whom I once indicated my qualms in this respect; to be sure, only in order to explain to Scherping why my book was making such little progress)—Schwab argued that this inexperience should have made me even more aware of the essence of that event of war, the hole that that suicidal madness had torn into the world, the corruption into which the time had decayed, that enormous void whose suction had demolished the entire past and driven apart the very molecules of the entire present and future, thus dematerializing them, making them unreal, implausible. But Schwab’s argument was, of course, merely one of his charming civilities, inspired on such occasions by his lovely envy. I rejected his amiability. Apperceptive occurrences that had to be explained with the aid of epistemological metaphysics were too abstract for me, I said tersely.

I also had fun refuting my own theories. By trying to show that it was madness to invent a reality out of causal connections in order to have it mirror a reality determined solely by chance, I set up a collection of crazy causes with completely nonsensical effects. I also looked for them in my own background and found a good number—for instance, my marriage to Christa, which had come about because her devouring mouth had so tormentingly drawn my notice in Nuremberg, in the canteen for German attorneys and witnesses at the Fürth Court of Law. This then led to fourteen years of mutual torture and a son who hates his father. Still, it led to “multiplying” me, to fulfilling my biological duty. From this too metaphysical connections can be deduced: a devouring mouth, the symbol of Great Mother Nature . . .