“I hope I don’t have to spell out for you what consequences this has for the nervous system,” I said to Schwab. “People like us live like someone who’s hard of hearing, always tormented by the fear of missing something. The fear that something may be spoken of that we don’t know or aren’t supposed to hear. I tell you: Our eyes aren’t red just from scribbling by lamplight. Mainly they’re red because we keep peering around mistrustfully to see whether something is being scribbled behind our backs. Imagine what I am going to have to endure until I figure out why those chewing horlàs, those anthropoids who must have already anticipated the posthuman evolutionary stage—why they’ve stuck with me so solidly that I can’t get rid of them! All because you, of course, had been without alcohol for two hours and had to have a drink; otherwise the withdrawal symptoms would have hit you like epilepsy. It was you who lured me into that bloody roadhouse, man. It will probably take years now for this crop to grow before I can harvest its meaning. And until then that little group of highway people will stay with me: father, mother, aunt, four children, shoveling, chomping, chewing, swallowing—making me wonder what they signify. One has to be prudent as a writer. Live cautiously. A poet, as we know, is a mouthpiece through which a god speaks (mainly to tell what he is suffering). But even simple people like us are chosen to speak and at the same time frail, vulnerable, easily exasperated. After all, our kind too lead lives of devotion: we are tense strings over which the zeitgeist passes, making us quiver. And the zeitgeist strums quite vehemently, does it not? Il nous joue de la belle musique; we do not even know where to flee. However, the intrinsic feature of the zeitgeist, its exclusive peculiarity, which determines its style (and thereby ours), is something we do not hear so long as we remain in its tempestuous contractions; this is recognized only by those who come after us. Even we who are chosen to speak know it at best after it has urged us to express this knowledge. And he who wishes to hear the mystery of the zeitgeist, that which says itself through us but is not yet named—he who wishes to name it must make himself so taut that sooner or later he will snap. For the zeitgeist only whispers it; you have to filch it from its breath . . . Yet when we ultimately reach the point of jumping out of our skins at every fart because we mistake it for a breath of the zeitgeist, thinking we can hear something in it that no one else can hear, and when we absolutely want to be the first to express it . . . when our throats tighten with fear lest we are late with everything, forgotten by our zeitgeist, never its mouthpiece, when we are epigoni after all, adding only frills, unable to say anything fundamental to our era, then our situation will affect our souls, dear friend. No one could be more aware of this than you.”