in short: I return to this lousy dump like a murderer to the scene of his crime.

You know the details of my stay this time: I spent over a week here (one day more or less makes no difference) as a voluntary inmate (solitary confinement). The cause, as indicated several times, was an illumination during the drive here from Reims: I finally had collared my pursuer. The it that wanted to be spoken through me had revealed itself. The parasitic egg that Schwab had once (nineteen years ago!) planted in me had hatched, had gotten through its caterpillar stage, and was now floating before my eyes as a richly colored butterfly. All I had to do was grab him. Only—since we’re dealing with such pretty metaphors—I had reckoned without zoology and without the relationship between the guest and the host.

The eggs of the parasitic ichneumon wasp, Mr. Brodny, never become butterflies; they are placed in caterpillars which, in turn, nurture the hope of becoming butterflies. The evil guests eat up their hosts from the inside; no beautiful metamorphosis ever comes about. All that remains is an empty shell into which (as into Uncle Helmuth’s mediums when they stepped out in a trance) an astral being, freely floating in the beyond, can take up residence and materialize at will. Should your kind interest in me go so far that you muster enough patience to skim through the papers I am sending you with this (far too lengthy, far too prolix—forgive me) epistle, then you will find the faithful notation of such an occurrence.

Any utilization for book dealers—as the first glance will reveal—is, to be sure, out of the question. The three folders, A, B, C, contain dismally fragmentary material. Needless to say, you have long since divined that these fragments are pieces, patches, sketches, notes for my book (the masterpiece of the era, right? the lifework of a potential Nobel laureate). May I take the liberty of leaving them with you as a legacy, not with a thought to any possible publication but as reparation for my regrettably poor behavior chez Calvet—

and with the hope that you may find someone to tell you the story in three sentences.

A

You must realize that writing is one of the most lamentable roads, leading to anything and everything.

—ANDRÉ BRETON, First Manifesto of Surrealism

The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Notebooks, 1914–1916

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

Dipp’d me in ink? My parents’ or my own?

—ALEXANDER POPE, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

Fear is a female faint in which freedom loses consciousness; speaking psychologically, the Fall of Man always takes place in a faint.

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Fear and Trembling

I sort through my papers with a restlessness that nests deeper, closer to the breeding grounds of fear than the fidgety impatience I’ve retained from my damned formative years in Vienna, a restlessness like a nervous tic, the involuntary closing of an eyelid or the annoyingly recurring, dribbling twitch of a tiny muscle in a nostril, as if a tiny alarm clock there were ringing at unpredictable intervals. Those were the “years of my deepest humiliation.” At least that’s what I used to call them when I told my friend S. about them, quoting a once current phrase of Hitler’s—ironically, of course, but without any joy. Even today I see that time, in which those charged with raising me discharged their duties upon me like acts of revenge, trying to make me “get my head out of the clouds,” to teach me to “take life seriously,” as an attack (albeit one presumably undertaken with the best of intentions) on everything bright and true in my being (see notes on Cousin Wolfgang: my two-pronged relationship with him, my feelings of guilt towards him—and not just after his death).