•

Happy days before the Fall of Man; before I was stricken with the passion for writing. Happy days in the Eden of immediately lived reality, of firsthand experiences that were real, even if these concrete experiences were merely a threadbare pretext for the more powerful abstractedness behind them. Days of innocence, before the vice of writing abstracted even the abstractness into material that could be experienced at second and third hand: into book-page reality, in which the pseudologic of art forges the infinitely multidimensional logic of nature into the theatrical metal of arbitrary, confected artifice. God-affirmed days, in which the world still fell into the self like a summer morning through a window, not mirrored out of the self as a multiply broken reflection of self, a spectacle making its own producer and lead actor and sole subject, performer and stage all at once and all in one: the world and the self were identical to the point of loss of the world, worldlessness of the totally isolated self lost to itself beyond measure . . .

•

I loved Christa then.

I loved her even though our marriage had become as bleak, as dreary, as hopeless as the ice-gray diurnal life in the rubble fields around us—which for me, however, for Nagel and our kind, and even for that fussy man Schwab, was a constant adventure, a frontier existence in a no-man’s-land to which we could lay claim, a deeper and deeper daily penetration into a state of unconditionality, which seemed precious to us because in its desert emptiness, open to all winds, it was full of possibility, hence full of promise, an undaunted Promised Land that we would build into a new Garden of Eden once we had fully reconnoitered it, once its borders were established and the claims were staked . . . but for others, of course, for Christa and her kind, it was damnation in limbo, an everlasting routine of poverty, joyless, colorless, with the ever same nagging necessities and miserable chores, a trudging on the treadmill of hopelessness, merely to deal with the same lamentable troubles and the same woeful needs.

It certainly saddened me that I had to count Christa among those others—the poor by nature, so entangled in their woeful needs and lamentable troubles, so doomed to the wretched daily routine that, as Nagel was to write later in one of his best sellers, “They could not brace their spirits for a festive tomorrow . . .” Nagel, the flatfooted poet! Christa appreciated him for that, had to admire him for his wonderful verbal power; it was part of her cleaving to workaday routine that she loved craftmanship; it was the only thing that took her out of it, the poor thing . . .