My book is a promise that I’ve never made in words (not even to Gaia—and she certainly paid enough for it!) and that anyone who’s been blown into the birdcage of my existence and soon back out the other side (lovers within and without the bounds of law; growing and still unconceived sons; well-meaning people of all sorts, chief among them my friend Schwab) thinks he can demand from me like overdue rent. All because, while I never promised it in words, I have presumably pledged it with each of my bizarre actions, with each of my peculiar character traits, each of my far-fetched qualities—in short, with my alienating and rebellious way of being this-way-and-not-like-the-others:

—afflicted with the most annoying of all birth defects, which arouses no pity like other strokes of a stepmotherly Nature, such as a cleft palate, for instance, or a harelip, or other bizarre deformations and malformations: a hump, a hydrocephalus, all kinds of nervous and mental ailments, cretinism, falling sickness, and the like. No indeed. This is a far more repulsive handicap, which summons an arbitrary hatred against the altogether different, the fundamentally alien:

THE CAIN’S MARK OF EXISTENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

stamped on those who are condemned to recognize in themselves not just any human being but humankind itself:

as if the capsule of their individuality had a crack through which the individual leaked out into the teeming of his species, and further out into the swarming of past generations, along the entire family tree to the root ends at the origins of the genus, and then right into the cosmos: so that every experience has an echo from the universe . . .

but instead of a human specimen of salient character emerging from such profound depths, all that comes out is an uncertain, unsteady, unsettled seeker, who listens beyond things and cannot accept empirical reality in its givenness and its causality as a complete world, and who keeps countering it with skulking non-conformity, a pigheaded if-and-but, which in an insidious way dislocates and unmoors all that is conventionally established, generally believed and determined through unanimous agreement, until eventually nothing is reliable anymore, and reality knows as many redirections, subterfuges, and loopholes as a lawyer; and thus it is only fair that such a misbegotten troublemaker (if he does not wish to be counted among the dangerous fools and recalcitrant villains and be truly isolated behind bars) must ultimately accomplish something that will turn his stated ideas of interpreting the world and life into a model for a new kind of life, expanded by a new dimension

whereby, of course, my book might not have remained a private matter—and this is the dilemma that can destroy a conscientious man (for instance, Schwab).

•

I have been working on this book for nineteen years. Sometimes it blazes out of me. Then I can’t do or think of anything else. I drop everything else, I ignore what’s happening around me. Everything gets delayed and disorderly. Important deadlines are forgotten, excellent opportunities are lost. I fail to deliver promised work, I neglect bills, I’m sued, creditors beat down my doors. I won’t see anyone, I open no mail, I disguise my voice on the telephone. I barely sleep, I eat standing up or at my desk, I stop shaving, I don’t even scratch out the dirt from under my fingernails. I’m in a trance, the hours fly. . . until my writing stalls, until eventually I can’t go on, and my doubts about the whole thing return, and fear, rebellion, surfeit, and finally all sacred enthusiasm is snuffed out.