And thus, everything dissolves into nothing again—as in awakening. There it was, the massive rending—but before I could see what was opening with it, I lost its pain. I can still feel its far-off echo. This too vanishes.

•

Should I then try to summon up the individual events of my dream, it is to find it completely empty. What had been image has become verbal. I can say in words: that I have dreamed this or that—but it has lost all reality. My attempt to grasp it has robbed it of its magic. There I stand, empty-handed, a swindled swindler.

I then try to deceive myself with all sorts of childish maneuvers. I fake guilelessness. I pretend to focus my interest on something else, something peripheral, innocuous—for instance, I count up the women I have slept with in any seven fat or lean years—

for even our wealth of amorous adventures (as shown by the Leporello lists we secretly kept up in triumph and humiliation) is not due to skill in eroticis but occurs or fails as naturally as good or bad harvests (of course, the soil must be conscientiously tilled). And just as our fate, according to the mood or grace of the weather and the ripening, sometimes brings a shortage and other times leads us to abundance, and perhaps from prosperity soon back again to meagerness, so too we are granted a fixed quota of erotic success, inscribed in us, readable in our faces, so to speak, which, with its clear benchmark, ensures that it is neither exceeded nor unfulfilled. And you cannot trump it with any effort or skill, with any physical, much less mental, quality or quantity. Neither the beguiling eloquence of Cyrano de Bergerac will help you nor his long nose (or whatever other lengths or sizes can be brought to bear), because Nature has created poor and rich in every respect—and hence in this respect too . . .

Such are the things I busy myself with and write down, and thus end up among my papers again; that is, lying in wait for myself

and yet I know that I cannot escape my destiny; I am pressured by time: I’ll soon be fifty, I could be dead tomorrow, and I haven’t done my work! Here’s my book, proliferating before my very eyes, in horrible hybrid cell growth, turning into a monstrosity—hence, I yearn for the dreadful, pleasurable recognition to fall upon me just once more, one single and lucid last time, the recognition with which (albeit for only a fleeting moment) I can be certain that it is true, that old nightmare: that I have in fact murdered, shamefully and for no other reason than to conceal some baseness deeply rooted in me—

but when? how? where? and whom? That’s what I can’t grasp. I’ve repressed it.

Even without consulting Dr. Sigmund Freud, I realized long ago that my forgetfulness suggests disreputable sediment in the dark depths of my soul, and I wisely make a point of not trying to fish it out with what that great son of the literary nineteenth century recommends as a fishing rod: the biographical. My horror, which I fear to the point of lust and then desire again, is of the sort that cannot be pursued back to my parents’ bedroom. It springs from the sheer terror of existence itself. Such a momentary revelation of the totally unknown that lies behind and beyond all that can be known is what the primitive man calls GOD.