What I am seeking in the lost half of my life is not my then self but rather that within it that might connect in some way to my present self. Connect in such a way as to make me believe that it really was I and not just a legend, a literary invention, a fiction within me.

I am seeking myself in the European cities where I am cast away by my flimsy profession, as if they were not the cities and sites of my past but the cities and sites of my present. I seek my self in the airports, the highways, gas stations, Hilton hotels, supermarkets, movie studios, office high-rises of Madrid, Rome, Munich, Copenhagen, Milan, West Berlin, Paris. In seeking my self I seek a European continuity. This European continuity is to be found neither in the museum existence of these cities nor in my present self. Except, as I said, in an occasional split second of recognition which makes my search the more intense, and the more futile.

But in the airports, highways, gas stations, Hilton hotels, supermarkets, film sets, and office towers of the American province that Europe has become, I am nowhere to be found. I am nowhere whole, not in yesterday and not in this today, which is, however, an anticipated, fictitious tomorrow.

This has its consequences, of course. Split in two and equally far away from both past and future, I also have no true present. I am searching, my esteemed Mr. Brodny, for my identity, as you would call it. A typically American, a so to speak banally American phenomenon. However, as a hopeless European, I have cause to doubt my reality.

I am capable of illustrating this condition with several documents. Permit me to present you with two of them. Together, they should make the situation clear. The first is a sheet of paper, and unfortunately I can no longer say for sure whether it was part of a draft of a letter, in which I tried a while back (it was five, six years ago) to tease gently my late friend Schwab from afar, or whether it was one of the endless monologues that I delivered to him for the same reason when he came from Hamburg to visit me here in Paris, soliloquies intended to provoke a reaction from his dulled and yet at times doubly fine alcoholic’s mind. But ultimately it makes no difference whether it’s the one or the other. Let me give you the excerpt:

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. . . You remember that passage in Nietzsche where he announces a coming artistic age? Well, that age has arrived. Today, everyone must realize his potential—to wit, by producing art. Be creative! Produce! Give shape! Form! If you lack any distinct talent, make literature! One has the impression that for people like us, puberty drags on until the climacteric—and indeed beyond it. It is obvious that teenagers live with a sense of unreality and are looking for the meaning of life. But middle-aged bank directors collapse before me in sobs and confess, with their heads in my lap, that they would give all their wealth for my gift of literary self-expression. Every jackass feels the urge to realize his potential artistically. Statesmen like Winston Churchill and Amintore Fanfani find their true selves in painting. In Parisian society (which in my uncle Ferdinand’s day was not afflicted by self-doubt, no, sir; it was a homogeneous conglomerate of Guermantes, Verdurins, and Rastaquères) every beautiful lady at least does interior decorating if she doesn’t have her hands full being an archaeologist or running a gallery. You’d be amazed at what you can get into a film (and then into a bed) with a nod and a bit of celluloid. And if you expect a nineteen-year-old today not to find everything there is in life in throwing pottery (as I, incautiously, dared to expect with my son), you’ve got another thing coming.