I can also tell you that, of course, there have been days of fulfillment. Days of euphoria, of creative ecstasy. The bliss of procreation, you know. When nuptially white paper is irrigated by myrmidons of script and becomes gravid with significance. A magical act of creation (which can bring forth not only literature but also newspaper articles, film scripts, cutthroat publishing contracts, love letters, death sentences, declarations of war). Here, however, under my pen, the book of my generation is emerging. Indited by the conscience of our race, Jacob. It is emerging out of such states of self-intoxication. The writing days . . . But these blissful moments are buried in weeks, months, seasons, years of weary indolence, incapability, irresolution, dullness. In days so sluggish as to make the daily life of Oblomov’s footman seem Stakhanovite. And he, Oblomov’s footman, has a totally un-burdened conscience about his indolence. People like us wouldn’t. For us, an unburdened conscience is theft of our own work. A carefree spirit is embezzlement. The man who works away toward a quick end is a saboteur.

You can, of course (like beautiful Maud), reply that the art of life consists in relaxing ever-new cramps before they actually appear. The same holds for the art of writing. Golden words, assuming that one lived a self-determining life and wasn’t in fact for the most part passively lived. It is not I who write, Brodny-leben: it writes out of me. Ask Uncle Helmuth about the torments that a medium suffers before the vessel of her physis is so utterly purified by her that an otherworldly spirit can slip into it and use it for a while as an earthly instrument of expression. But I do not wish to lament. Though hopelessly behind the times, I live the destiny of my era. Anyone who is not a performer in it will, presumably, have an even worse time.

However, you must understand that your blithe request for me to tell you my story in three sentences touched on things deep within me. It was as if you had met a mother who devotes everything to keeping her child alive despite its simultaneous malignant tumors, scrofula, and consumption, and you asked her how many seconds the child does the hundred-meter sprint in. I found you a bit tactless. A bit too forceful, Yankele Brodny. I approved of Uncle Ferdinand’s slightly vexed gesture of dismissal in Bessarabia. You were obviously buying too well, too cheaply, from the peasants. We were not certain whether you, clapping us on the shoulder, might not claim that the grain on the stalk was half-rotten. I felt you lacked savoir faire in dealing with grands seigneurs. In six thousand nine hundred forty days of alternating between compulsive expression and juvenile ink-retention—one hundred sixty-six thousand five hundred and sixty hours of testing and rejecting, of anxieties, flickering hopes, blazing certitudes, and ashen disappointments, as well as faith and courage—people like us achieve a certain dignity. After which you don’t squander your grain anymore. Just a few days ago—about a week before I received the message that you, the powerful literary agent Jacob G. Brodny, wished to see me and would be delighted to dine with me chez Calvet—a few days earlier, I tell you (I had just barely arrived here from Munich via Reims), I fancied I had something to say in my book. Despite all theoretical and particular doubts. During my drive here from Reims, it had suddenly emerged before me quite clearly. I had only to cheat my producer-piglets, who had ordered me to Paris, of a few short weeks; I had only to sneak off for a while, to some place where no one would suspect me of staying. I had only to unpack my papers there and launch into my shaman arts: with the anthracite-gray magic conjuring up spirits by means of black letters on virgin-white paper . . .