and these people were photographed by my memory, which obviously functions of its own accord. Photographed more sharply than any other face ever stamped on my mind; not the face of a beloved, not the face of my little boy, not Schwab’s face . . . and I don’t know why, I still don’t know why today.

All I know is that I carry the image of these feeding anthropoids around in me like the Zadir. I could have committed a murder and forgotten it, but I can’t get them out of my brain. My head could be chopped off—they could be detected in some sediment in my blood, my tissue . . . For God’s sake! A man sees a few things in his forty-nine (going on fifty!) years of life, especially since these years span the core of the twentieth century, from WWI through WWII and on up to today: forty-nine years, up and down and back and forth through Yurop, the heartland of our civilization, from the meadows of the Dniester to Pearris, Freanss, from Scandinavia to Syracuse, Sicily, yes sir . . . Years in which a great deal has happened. Admit it, Djay Djee: a thing or two has happened between 1919 and 1968, hasn’t it? Now, if a man didn’t make a ruthless selection from among the accumulated material, what would become of him?

It simply can’t be summed up in three sentences. Believe me! Not in our time. Not since everything has been growing frighteningly, running rampant, running riot, devouring the people, the cities, the objects, the events, the stimuli. Hybrid cell growth is also an explosion, after all, isn’t it? To be sure, a slow-motion explosion. Describing this sort of thing requires details. Abbia pazienza!

Needless to say, one strives to restrict oneself to the essential. One sticks to the tersest, most economical outline. One focuses on what one would like to say, as transparently and graphically as possible, and so one plies one’s craft decently and honestly, until—well, yes: until it suddenly urges you to say something that was not even foreseen in this outline, that does not even go into it, that has nothing to do with it, and that no amount of effort can visibly connect with it . . . yet it has to be said and it drives you until you finally say it.

One can only hope that the it is wiser than we are. That it says something more essential than what we are trying to say—or even: than what we have yet been capable of saying. Something we did not realize, whose meaning we did not grasp but which is instantly grasped by everybody once it is said because it is in the zeitgeist and was as yet unborn—and if you hadn’t said it, then someone else would have done so a moment later.