The exceedingly lovely, the wondrously beautiful city of Paris, la ville lumière, gives me not the least bit of help in my search. On the contrary. The devastating presentness of its history excludes me as much as its historical presence does. In the uninterrupted continuity from Charlemagne to Charles de Gaulle there is not the tiniest gap for me to squeeze into. And yet the half of the life that I and my kind lost in that March of 1938 belongs far more here than anywhere else. I mean to say: The European Europe from which that half was born, in which it grew up, and whose colors, forms, sounds, fragrances, moods constituted its pattern, is far more present here than anywhere else. Where else might I seek it, if not here? Here, I am incessantly on its trail, on the trail of my self—but only ever on its trail, and sometimes, for auspicious, breathtaking micro-moments, I am even on my heels. But I will never reach my self completely. And this is all the more agonizing, as everywhere I go I am always on the verge of some kind of identification . . .

How can I make this clear to you, my esteemed Jaykob Gee? As a man who has traveled the world over, you must, of course, know Sneek, the Dutch Venice? There, you can punt along in a heavy boat, infinitely slowly, through leaden canals. To the left and the right, the banks drag by with such sluggish drowsiness that one expects the houses to topple forward like the heads of exhausted people, their eyelids shutting.

Well, in a movie script I once wrote, which like so many others will remain an unrealized pipe dream (none of my producer-piglets will ever want to actually film it), I set a chase scene in Sneek. A man has to catch up with another man at any cost, and the other is several boats ahead of him and flees . . . very slowly flees . . . infinitely slowly and always just beyond reach . . . and that other man is, of course, himself.

3

I assume that you too, sir, are not unfamiliar with such existential conditions, slipping off into the dream dimension of slow motion (with a resulting schizoid personality split). After all, this is a phenomenon of the times; I mean to say, a special perception or awareness of time that is inherent in our era (and also, by the way, the first step hashish eaters, opium smokers, et al., make into their psychedelic wonderlands).

I would not be amazed to experience this in Vienna. That is where I lost the first half of my life, and for consistency’s sake I ought to look for it there—and never find it again. You will, I hope, understand me when I say that I lost it precisely because that half is present there. Like Vienna as a whole, it is there as part of a museum existence, and thus is thoroughly timeless, a dead thing in a dead city. On March 12 of the year 1938 Vienna died before my eyes and, with it, my then living and lived self. The two now belong together for all time—but no longer to me.