Madame Carrier is already waiting for me here and now, in Paris, at the Hôtel de Crillon. Ready to participate in the treatment. Not only artistically (may the LORD preserve me!) but also personally: with an open Thou-soul striving toward my own self (and, needless to add, with the attendant hospitably open thighs). She’s already been waiting for eight days. That’s how long I’ve been lost to the movie world.

I’m playing a risky game. Of the eight weeks I’ve got for the treatment, I’m trying to use four for different ends. If nothing else it would mean twenty-eight days of peace and quiet. I’d live in a hotel (expensed, naturally): ideal conditions for a writer. The advance I’ve drawn is enough to cover Christa’s alimony and my son’s monthly allowance (my two most ruthless creditors). The piglets have to leave me in peace, it’s in my contract. It’s only Nadine I have to keep at a distance—both physically and, sadly, emotionally as well. But I’d have twenty-eight whole days and nights for my book! . . .

•

—My book—

That sounds as if I were carrying it within me like Nagel carries one of his: like a divine mission . . .

as if, in the flood of printer’s ink inundating us, I were chosen to create the maelstrom that could stir up the human race; I, the conscience of our race (as if this race still existed as a race and as if yet another pang of conscience might help it):

the book that bears witness to man in the second half of the twentieth century and to his heroic effort to save himself from himself:

—Prometheus as fire captain: using the brittle hose of humanity to put out the fire the spark for which he stole in its, humanity’s, name;

Daedalus astray in his own labyrinth: shouting warnings to others not to follow him;

Noah in the deluge of overpopulation: doubting whether he is truly the only righteous man to choose from,

the tragicomical hero at the end of a civilization, who (in order to carry out his mission with clean hands, hands that violence has not desecrated) has no way out other than literature—

literature, which has slid below the mark: the feuilleton amidst the mixed news items on the development of the cobalt bomb, the strategic importance of space travel, speculations on the outcome of the Korean conflict, the state of arms negotiations in the Congo and Indochina, the Vietnam War, the failure of disarmament negotiations, the fruitless conclusion of this or that world summit.

Stephen Dedalus would have had to be a reporter to make the front page. Otherwise, his self-realization as the “conscience of our race” remains a thoroughly private matter.

•

My book is a thoroughly private matter. Professor Hertzog (of Hamburg: Schwab’s psychopompous) would say it is the wish-fulfillment of my guilt complex

—final justification of an existence which isolated itself with nothing but a promise (which referred to nothing but itself): And sundering and sin are cognates. Hence (just as sinfulness contains an obligation to do penance and can escape itself only by willingly accepting its punishment) the arrogance of such an isolation, such a sundering, can be atoned for only with the arduous demonstration that it was justified—