literature, which has slid below the mark: the feuilleton amidst the mixed news items on the development of the cobalt bomb, the strategic importance of space travel, speculations on the outcome of the Korean conflict, the state of arms negotiations in the Congo and Indochina, the Vietnam War, the failure of disarmament negotiations, the fruitless conclusion of this or that world summit.

Stephen Dedalus would have had to be a reporter to make the front page. Otherwise, his self-realization as the “conscience of our race” remains a thoroughly private matter.

•

My book is a thoroughly private matter. Professor Hertzog (of Hamburg: Schwab’s psychopompous) would say it is the wish-fulfillment of my guilt complex

—final justification of an existence which isolated itself with nothing but a promise (which referred to nothing but itself): And sundering and sin are cognates. Hence (just as sinfulness contains an obligation to do penance and can escape itself only by willingly accepting its punishment) the arrogance of such an isolation, such a sundering, can be atoned for only with the arduous demonstration that it was justified—

My book is a promise that I’ve never made in words (not even to Gaia—and she certainly paid enough for it!) and that anyone who’s been blown into the birdcage of my existence and soon back out the other side (lovers within and without the bounds of law; growing and still unconceived sons; well-meaning people of all sorts, chief among them my friend Schwab) thinks he can demand from me like overdue rent. All because, while I never promised it in words, I have presumably pledged it with each of my bizarre actions, with each of my peculiar character traits, each of my far-fetched qualities—in short, with my alienating and rebellious way of being this-way-and-not-like-the-others:

—afflicted with the most annoying of all birth defects, which arouses no pity like other strokes of a stepmotherly Nature, such as a cleft palate, for instance, or a harelip, or other bizarre deformations and malformations: a hump, a hydrocephalus, all kinds of nervous and mental ailments, cretinism, falling sickness, and the like. No indeed. This is a far more repulsive handicap, which summons an arbitrary hatred against the altogether different, the fundamentally alien:

THE CAIN’S MARK OF EXISTENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

stamped on those who are condemned to recognize in themselves not just any human being but humankind itself:

as if the capsule of their individuality had a crack through which the individual leaked out into the teeming of his species, and further out into the swarming of past generations, along the entire family tree to the root ends at the origins of the genus, and then right into the cosmos: so that every experience has an echo from the universe . . .