Any utilization for book dealers—as the first glance will reveal—is, to be sure, out of the question. The three folders, A, B, C, contain dismally fragmentary material. Needless to say, you have long since divined that these fragments are pieces, patches, sketches, notes for my book (the masterpiece of the era, right? the lifework of a potential Nobel laureate). May I take the liberty of leaving them with you as a legacy, not with a thought to any possible publication but as reparation for my regrettably poor behavior chez Calvet—

and with the hope that you may find someone to tell you the story in three sentences.

A

You must realize that writing is one of the most lamentable roads, leading to anything and everything.

—ANDRÉ BRETON, First Manifesto of Surrealism

The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Notebooks, 1914–1916

Chapter 3

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

Dipp’d me in ink? My parents’ or my own?

—ALEXANDER POPE, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

Fear is a female faint in which freedom loses consciousness; speaking psychologically, the Fall of Man always takes place in a faint.

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Fear and Trembling

I sort through my papers with a restlessness that nests deeper, closer to the breeding grounds of fear than the fidgety impatience I’ve retained from my damned formative years in Vienna, a restlessness like a nervous tic, the involuntary closing of an eyelid or the annoyingly recurring, dribbling twitch of a tiny muscle in a nostril, as if a tiny alarm clock there were ringing at unpredictable intervals. Those were the “years of my deepest humiliation.” At least that’s what I used to call them when I told my friend S. about them, quoting a once current phrase of Hitler’s—ironically, of course, but without any joy. Even today I see that time, in which those charged with raising me discharged their duties upon me like acts of revenge, trying to make me “get my head out of the clouds,” to teach me to “take life seriously,” as an attack (albeit one presumably undertaken with the best of intentions) on everything bright and true in my being (see notes on Cousin Wolfgang: my two-pronged relationship with him, my feelings of guilt towards him—and not just after his death).

•

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).