what is spared in such encounters? What remains untouched, unstirred? Does so-called love dig deeper into the mire at the bottom of our souls? Does it unearth things more deeply hidden there—more essential, more fundamental things? And what is it that makes one encounter cheerful, well tempered, pleasant, enriching, carefree, while another, equally random, initially perhaps even more trivial, crashes into our lives with the full force of destiny?

Christa’s devouring mouth in the canteen of the Nuremberg law court . . . and years of our tortured efforts to reach each other, of my tormented attempts to reach her, like a deaf-mute trying to recite a poem taking shape within him . . .

and in contrast: Gisela, whom I first see as she crosses the bombed-out railroad terminal in Hamburg, her head high, her figure tall, slender, unapproachable—a queen. She strides through the mouse-gray teeming of refugees and belated homecomers, the war-damaged and the war-dazed, looking neither to the right nor to the left. More vision than tangible reality, she passes through the medieval misery of this crowded humanity of mislived lives, through the mob of rags and worm-eaten flesh, like a beautiful ship through brackish water, le beau navire of eternal boyhood dreams, a ship’s figurehead of possibilities of experience, scarcely believed anymore but now, with her, surging up again, new and powerful—

and I dare not follow her; I want to keep her as a vision, reserved for all possibilities of experience. Nor would it make sense to follow her, accost her: as wild, as adventurous as the time may be, this woman is beyond the vulgarity of such adventure.

It is futile to hope that I will ever see her again: the age is medieval, whole peoples are on the move, the wind of our time is driving them along like chaff, God alone may know where they come from, where they are going . . . only her majestic stride, long, swift, and light, is purposeful; even though her purpose and her destination may be unnameable and far away from here, she bears the certainty of reaching her goal—

and then, several weeks later (it is the year of OUR LORD 1947, the Ice Age is approaching its bitter end; before passing into the new phase of the world, it sinks its teeth one last time into the survivors’ rubble cities, coating their makeshift lodgings and their woeful rags and trash with ice, their hunger swellings and reconstruction dreams, the final hopes of the timid, the finest intentions of the valiant . . .

but the tougher souls will survive this too, will live to see the approaching year of OUR LORD 1948 and thereby the impure miracle of the new epoch:

the pitiless, the greedier and greedier souls, survive ever and always; and with them, those who are eternally outside reality, the eternal dreamers;

the former and the latter are destined to become the founding fathers of the mankind of tomorrow; fools and somnambulists, criminals and monks: