•

It is night. The eighth since I have locked myself in this room. Eight nights and a goodly portion of the days (during which I prefer to get some sleep; the nights are quieter) I have spent rummaging through my papers. These are the notes for my book (though not all, sadly; I feel the absence of some with such agitation that I break into a sweat). What is here is chaos: countless beginnings, chapters worked out or drafts of outlines, fragments, the remnants of discarded drafts, attempts, outlines, studies, essays, ideas, thoughts—in short, all that piles up over nineteen years of, alas, all too frequently interrupted—but always with manic persistence recommenced—labor on a book: two suitcases and a few large cardboard boxes full of wastepaper, from memo pad paper with microscopic scrawls to sheets of A4 paper with lines of text crisscrossing them like saber strokes; from newspaper clippings to book pages filled with handwritten glosses on the margins of the printed text (there’s even a beer coaster among them, a few yellowed comments written on it that today are wholly detached from any conceivable context and thus unintelligible).

•

This is not the first time I’ve undertaken such a sifting. I’d say it occurs with periodic regularity. Whenever I delude myself into thinking I might yield to the hope that I could finally find enough time, concentration, leisure (or rather: freedom from pressing necessities) to produce something conclusive and whole out of this welter of eruptively hurled-out literary production, the compulsion to create order overcomes me. Needless to say that each time I have had occasion to lament how thoroughly I had acted in prior cullings. In the past I have destroyed the irreplaceable—in all likelihood this time as well. And not once have I managed to advance the new conception, for whose sake I so horribly mangled the old one, far enough that my manuscript found a clearly defined form.

Not this time either. Although this last attempt (and failure) was undertaken with a clearer notion than ever before, and, unlike the previous ones, was not stymied by some unforeseen and unavoidable obstacle. What prevented achievement was something completely unforeseen, something that lay not in the thing itself, in the conception of the book or in my shortcomings as its author. It came from outside (I emphasize this word in order to indicate that I mean something that in fact came from outside normal reality: see the notes on Uncle Helmuth’s spiritualist circles; also Gaia’s mother—in Folder C).

Its way was prepared in me by a state of unusual exaltation, likely as a result of my heightened state of expectation. Eight days (and nights) ago I set to working in a state of excitement such as had overcome me before now only in the most humiliating moments of love. (The same foolishly intensified existential awareness; the same heedless fixation: nothing matters anymore that isn’t connected to this one, this only true, this all-excluding love: the same immediate presentness.) Incidentally, en route here, in Reims, where I had spent the night, I had dreamed my dream.