After that, our hunger for reality ought to be comprehensible: the insatiable hunger for immediate realization, for tangible proof that we men, too, are real, that we, too, can achieve reality, actuality, with our own actions—

“. . . but you can,” said Christa, with her sapphire-blue, round, childlike eyes. “All you have to do is go and find a little wood to chop.”

“Saw, sweetheart, saw! You’re misquoting. The original goes: ‘Men saw wood—one pulls, the other pushes, but they’re both doing the same work; by decreasing, they increase.’ Granted, a rather silly image from the Corpus Hippocrates for the identity of creation and disintegration. But what can you do: statements about the archai can’t be worded in rational terms, because they are ir-rational and prim-ordial; such statements can only be figurative, isn’t that so? . . . But I for my part would like to take part in creation, and in a less destructive way than I am allowed by this so illustrative image, do you understand me? I do not care to limit myself to the male work of destruction in order to contribute to creation. At the risk of sounding like a screaming queen, I’ll say it loud and clear: I would like to give birth. Freud gave you women dick envy to explain your inconsistencies. Allow us men to envy your uterus. I do not wish to have to reinvent, reconstruct reality in order to experience it: I want it to be immediate . . .”

It was love’s labor lost. She understood every word, but not the meaning of what I was saying; she simply thought I was crazy. And I must admit, those were muddled thoughts I was voicing—voicing in my way, furthermore, which was an intellectual patchwork, figuratively speaking, stitched together from age-old commonplaces; I am almost ashamed to be writing this down now.