in a word: something latent in the zeitgeist wants to be said and pushes out from the lips, pens, and typewriters of those who feel impelled to speak, even if it’s not what they originally wanted to say at all; forces them to say it in Pearris, Freanss only minutes earlier or later than in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Joimanny or Athens, Wyoming—that is to say, simultaneously—so that someone who has an idea that is extraordinarily interesting, because it is new and previously unuttered, that someone can be certain that at the same moment several dozen equally clever men all around the globe are having the same idea. And when you are about to write a particularly original and topical book, you can go right ahead and prematurely bet your probably meager income that at the same moment a good dozen other authors of the masterpiece of the era and future Nobel laureates are about to set down an almost identical book . . .

and by saying all this I had gotten Schwab to the point of letting the it in him, the demon urging him to do something different from what he was planning, drag him into the next bar in order to work out his spiritual equilibrium with as even a number of glasses as possible. While I, with innocent eyes, set about offering him various examples of the scurvy, often tasteless pranks played on me by my memory (so often admired by him).

30

Indeed, my esteemed patron Brodny, I cannot bank on any sort of selection being made here. I distrust my subconscious. My treasure chest of memories is filled by sheer chance. I have an excellent example of this, an example I held up to Schwab with great effect. An impression taken up quite by chance but, inexplicably, with extreme keenness, and preserved down to the last detail—I am haunted by it even today. It is the image of a family filling their faces at a highway rest stop, something I saw during one of my dashes to Dawn in Paris, accompanied by Schwab. The scene is branded in my memory. Quite ineffably horrible contemporaries they were. Schwab, needless to say, did not perceive them, happy man. (Or else his subconscious functions more selectively. I suggested this to him when he showed some anxiety about his forgetful ways; however, his answer was a desperately derisive snort.)

I, for my part, see them even now: informally grouped around the adjacent table among vegetable fritters, sandwich wrappings, plastic bags full of orange peels, beer glasses, and Coke bottles. Dortmunders on a weekend outing or something of the sort. (John would have said “white trash.”) They were eating. Wildly relishing whatever it was they were feeding on . . . and they clung to me like burrs; I couldn’t get rid of them, people who didn’t mean a thing to me, unable to arouse the slightest interest on my part: a paterfamilias with a beefy neck, chewing disgustingly, in a Lacoste shirt with a crocodile logo; a materfamilias, shoveling repulsively, with curlers under a kerchief turban; an aunt or housemate or friend, crocheting with a knife and fork, sporting pubic hair under her hat; four children like organ pipes, chomping dreadfully: in short, highway rest stop people, humdrum faces taking nourishment, the kind of people that pass us daily, hourly, by the tens of thousands, sucking on the caries in their teeth. People that one looks at without seeing, hence that one has never seen before and, if God be gracious, will never see again—