This conclusion instantly stirred up a whole swarm of further questions, and I had a devil of a time luring poor Schwab into their midst and watching him flail about with them. I did it with vile pleasure. After all, he was acting as if the business concerned him purely in theory and for my sake. He was professionally interested only insofar as he was an editor for my publisher, Scherping, and thus obligated to dispel my doubts in myself and my work. Dispel them so thoroughly that I would speedily finish that book and earn back my advances. The fair man! The honest man! Yet he never concealed his distress when noticing how utterly I saw through him. He never resented me for using the grossest con man tricks (always pretending I had something far more profound in mind) to lead him to some relevant theme and snidely wait and see how long it took him to realize that he was dealing with some commonplace—after all, he was usually quite liquored up. For it must not be forgotten that in those days I was at the peak of my dichotomous existence. The potential author of the novel of the era and the future Nobel laureate—incessantly constructing new arguments for why it was superfluous, impossible, sheerly arrogant, and hubristic to want to write and yet never ceasing work on his book in his mind and on any available scrap of paper, nourishing his parasite’s egg with himself—this author lived in the most intimate symbiosis with the eager servant of the movie piglets, and each of the two personalities within myself kept an eagle eye on the other, each slyly learning useful things from the other—

and thus, in my existential form as a servant of swine, it warmed my heart to watch what happened to certain scenes of a script I had written, scenes written in the sweat of my intellectual’s brow and fixed on celluloid after murderous financial sacrifices, scenes tugged back and forth, back and forth on the editing table, and then, after a quick snip of the scissors, twisting and hissing into a wastebasket . . . scenes for which I had struggled with my producer piglets in the thick blue cigar smoke of all-night script conferences, had wrestled over like Jacob with the angel; takes for which directors had suffered heart attacks and world-famous actresses fits of hysteria; image sequences in which cameramen of international renown had seen the crowning of their careers; shots in which lighting artists had expected the final recognition of their earlier, so wretchedly neglected work . . . and snip! It was as if they had never been, like so many important, significant, decisive moments, episodes, situations in our lives. With no harm to the plot and no damage to the film’s artistic value . . .

When I told Schwab about this, he got very excited, and it was child’s play to lead him to the idiotic question of whether and to what degree people like us can rely on our apperception. Could we really trust our conscious minds to make the proper selection from what they perceive seamlessly and to retain whatever is worth remembering, to forget trivia and only trivia? . . . In what way, then, was that ominous it involved in this process, the it that urges us to express things we may not have had the wish to express at all? No doubt it is a demon pledged to the zeitgeist, determining our ideas in a manner that happens to us, so to speak, and leads us, much to our own amazement, to make statements revealing thoughts that are peculiar to the present era, thoughts of the zeitgeist, notions, insights, intentions, in the style of the era—