You will probably ask why this is weighing on my mind? Well, sir, it concerns a bizarre hobby (in the past, it would have been called spleen). I am seeking the other half of my life. Like Aristophanes’s lovers, I am seeking a lost part of my own self, the other half of what was originally a pair. I lost it at some point or other—I suspect on an icy-clear day in Vienna, March 1938. I was barely nineteen innocent years old. Those years were amputated, removed from my existence, like Nagel’s right arm. Since then, I have been on the trail of their feelings. For, like Nagel, who claims he can still feel the fingers of his missing hand move, I too can feel my then-self in an abstract way.

And so I am looking for that other part of my life wherever I might find it: in countries, landscapes, clouds, towns—yes indeed, especially cities, which, with their lights, fragrances, noises, colors, forms, moods, sometimes resurrect in me the totality of moods, forms, colors, noises, fragrances, light effects of an entire era (abruptly, with painful bliss and, alas, only for a fleeting microsecond).

In short, I am seeking the other half of my life in the vestiges—or rather in the echoes—of its time. A time that is growing more and more discernible as a style. To specify in fashionably art-historical terms: the era that developed art deco from art nouveau. The time of Europe’s flirtation with America (I could attend the wedding only as an onlooker).

I am seeking a Europe that might still be European.

Actually, you ought to sympathize with this, Mr. Jacob G. Brodny. First, as a nostalgic Jew. Like every good American province, Europe today is fairly judenrein. But things were different once, weren’t they? If not a promised land, Europe was at least a long-familiar and beloved land, a land in which you Jews saw fulfilled many of your boldest promises but, above all, found your most ruthless murderers. That makes for an unusually strong tie, doesn’t it? . . .

But aside from that: as an ex-European—Eastern European, to be sure—you too presumably had half of your life sliced off. You may have no reason to mourn it, but be that as it may, you’ve gone with the times. Whether sadly or eagerly, you jettisoned anything about yourself that was a vestige and echo of a past form of life and vigorously settled into a new one: you became an American. In the great collective of the United States of our Western World, your halved self was transubstantiated into a new, bursting fullness. The American in you practically leaps out for all to see.

I for my half part have allowed myself to be guilty of the unfortunately widespread offence of being behind the times, and thus dragging the past into presence. I could not wholly renounce something that was somehow still alive within me, albeit in an abstract, ghostly way, like Nagel’s shot-off arm.