No, no. I shall not step out on the tightrope. I shall remain pious. (Please tell this to dear Scherping, too) I shall remain an obedient servant of Mother Nature. Living against one’s time—such has always been the attitude of the dandy. In this age of artists and self-realizers, I take the liberty of being a dandy in the purely biological form of existence. I run no risk. I perform my biological duties, nothing more. I realize my potential not in artistic creations like everyone else but rather in acts of destruction. Murder, though, is something I can do only in dreams. But for example I systematically lay waste to everything I have written over the past few years. Plus, incidentally, a lot of expensive food—come and join in! You can still eat well here in Paris—and you know how serious, yes downright fundamental my approach is to this activity. And of course in between I set my sights on even the tiniest possibility of a quick, pleasant act of copulation. On the off chance of procreating if my partner hasn’t taken the right precautions.

•

So much for the first document. The second might be dated a few months later. I found it among the papers for my book where it had slipped in, by goodness knows what accident. A similar accident played it into my hands a few days ago. Le voilà:

Paris in the blossoming of May. Printemps posters behind brightly greening plane trees. The first summer dresses. All the airy kitsch of Dufy.

Schwab has arrived unexpectedly. During the day, we sit outdoors in front of the Flore, the Deux Magots, feast at Lapérouse or Chez Anne, shuffle through museums. At night we play Russian roulette.

It doesn’t take much psychological flair (as in Professor Hertzog’s school) to guess why he sticks to my heels like that. My imperturbability is uncanny to him. He simply doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m dazed, in a kind of trance (like one of the mediums in my late uncle Helmuth’s spiritist circle in Vienna: outside myself and somewhere in space, only loosely attached to my body by an astral umbilical cord, while the emptied shell of my body is open to any spirit that wishes to sojourn within it—in my case, needless to say, the demon of despair).

He regards me as a character in a novel. Hence I have to act like one. A man who, after the end of a love affair in which he has carried on like a lunatic for three years, smiles and acts like nothing had happened—as if he had not personally experienced all the magic of insanity and happiness and misery and anxiety and senseless hope and foolish perseverance but had read about it in some pulp paperback, which he has only just put aside, or seen it in a movie. Such a character is convincing only if, behind his feigned imperturbability, he nurtures the intention of killing himself. And that is what S. expects me to do.