After all, he ardently envied me for it. His rhetorical question: “Who is still capable of such a thing!”

(I see his face before me as he exclaimed it. It was raised heavenward, as during a hymn. Cousin Wolfgang up in the church choir: “Queeheeheeheen of heaheaheaheaven, rejoice, Maa-haa-haa-rie-ha!. . .”)

Who is still capable of such a thing at the age of forty-five? In 1964, the second half of the twentieth century, if you please—who can still fall in love like a schoolboy? At best, a department-store executive having a midlife crisis. But in people like us—inhabitants of a crater landscape, an emotional world that has been analyzed to atoms—if anything is still stirring then it’s allergies . . .

So if someone like us kicks up such a splendid fuss, then there must be something exquisite behind it, don’t you think? The intention to transvaluate that experience artistically into something exemplary. If you don’t do that, you’re cheating and you’ll have to pay for it. You can’t just escape it by producing psychosomatic sugar in your urine. Nowadays, neuroses are children’s ailments. Anyone with any self-respect has to kill himself. Ni plus, ni moins.

Actually, S. has come to Paris because he has reached the end of his rope. Scherping finally went through with it and fired him. Fired him as well as his secretary, Fräulein Schmidschelm, which S. considers particularly insidious. But of course he has to admit that Schelmie is quite happy about it: now she’s free of the burdensome job of alternately rescuing the publisher from the claws of Gisela or lovely Heli in the whorehouse or tracking the editor down during a boozing tour with his terrific tante. Schelmie has settled down on her regular stool at Lücke’s Bar, clearing off only when the place is closed (all together six hours out of twenty-four).

He, meanwhile, has panicked. Not because he’s worried about his further material existence (although in such cases, a thoroughbred bourgeois probably can’t stop the involuntary tightening of his sphincter).

Of course, Scherping gave him—had to give him—a handsome amount of severance pay. Obviously he was forced to do so by a murderous contract (probably still fuming at the thought, grinding his teeth in woe and weal).

For now in any case, our friend S. is rolling in money. But fear is bubbling out of every pore. The “hour of truth” has come. He has no more excuses not to write his book.

And so first he came here. Hopelessly behind the times: still dreaming the dreams of the Futurists, the Constructivists. Sees their dreams as having come true here—in Paris of all places! Divine city of Reason on earth. This is where the human being first becomes human. Temple of the World. Ziggurat: hieratic tower connecting heaven and earth. Pure and simple: the City of Man: ANTHROPOLIS.

In truth it’s me he’s fled to. As usual, he wants to crib something from me. He’s looking for my secret motor, my special driving force—something he thinks I’ve got over him. Some perfidious secret of existence. Some crafty, not quite permissible, ethically and aesthetically not quite unobjectionable but incredibly practical, exceedingly effective trick for living. That, at any rate, which makes me appear livelier, more present, downright realer in his eyes than the phonies all around (including Nagel, delusively spawning best sellers). Livelier than he himself, en tout cas.