Certainly, this is an encouraging sign of a general ennoblement of mankind. An upward development toward the spiritual realm, which one ought to welcome. As my uncle Helmuth, an electrical engineer and spiritualist, might have understood it, we are already living in a different vibrational state, dematerialized and spiritualized. We have ascended one level closer to God. But I don’t feel quite right about it. I fear that we have once again failed to reckon with God’s less spiritual other half—namely, with Mother Nature.

This powerful lady is always on the lookout to catch the flies that have all too ardently swarmed onto the honey of the mind because they are under the delusion that this is the true reality. She will grab anybody by the scruff of the neck if he finds her rules too brutal, too monotonous, too idiotic and would rather ignore them. Anyone who prefers to follow laws other than those of the everlasting stupid cycle of procreation and annihilation is already playing on his own, and at his own risk. He should not be surprised if she raps him on the knuckles.

Yes, indeed, I too bow respectfully to the beautiful courage of the human race, which keeps creating new fictions in order that it may confront the perpetual threat of cruelly productive-and-destructive nature and claim undaunted that existence must have some other purpose than merely eating and being eaten. I admire the insanely courageous way mankind lingers in the as-if, its insistence that we could have other aims than to breed and to kill. But not everyone is up to staying awake during such sleepwalking. Art is opium for today’s people. Only a select few still consider it a vice, the hard lot of the damned.

Ask Nagel, he writes so nicely about it: “If any of the acrobats under the Big Top knows there is no net under him, he can still dare to try his stunt. But woe, woe unto him if he realizes it only when he is already on the tightrope . . .”

Here, I once again agree completely with our friend Nagel. A dangerously large number of dilettantes step out on the high wire nowadays. More and more of them, bolder and bolder. Everyone wants to get up there. This cannot end well. Certain experiences in Vienna make me feel that in the long run Mother Nature will not be content to watch this collective somnambulism and do nothing. I would not like to be called to account with the others when she intercedes to set things right.

My friend! I admire your courageous “Nevertheless!” I take my hat off to Nagel whenever another of his books appears on the market (as a best seller). I bow respectfully to you, Schwab, for still clinging to your intention, despite heartrending, soul-churning doubts, to write your book—even if you won’t admit to it at any cost. But I, for my modest little part, no longer indulge in the lovely illusion that I might thereby succeed in pulling myself (like Münchhausen by his own pigtail) out of the knowledge of the total absurdity of existence.