Gardens by Lenôtre, where we ensconce ourselves with Hanau porcelain and Gothic two-pronged forks to feast on nightingale tongues prepared according to Lucullan recipes, and to sip at our Mouton Rothschild from Cellini’s crystal goblets, while behind the ornamental shrubbery, following a libretto by Herr von Hofmannsthal, a Klimt-costumed lady of the Viennese haute volée surrenders to a Böcklin faun. Is this not precisely the conception of Europe that you carry within yourself? Admit it: cultural history—that’s as surprising, as frightening, as the garden of Bomarzo. No matter where you go, no matter where you turn, the monsters of arts and artists come toward you, insanely multifarious, and drive you from reality into nightmarish unreality. Perhaps you now understand what makes my film piglets so dear to me. Too much culture is harmful to mental health. Just think of the sad fate of Huysmans’s des Esseintes. I, for my modest part (born under the sign of the Ram, with the Archer in my ascendant and half a dozen sputniks in my first house)—I was not made to live à rebours. I cannot exist in a world that I might continue rebuilding from the models salvaged from the rubble. I would rather do without the models. Probably I’m not schizophrenic enough for my cultural level. Either way I agree with Wohlfahrt: one must be able to decide in life. I don’t want to sneak out of the cities of my ancestral homeland Yuropp like a marauder in a disaster zone. Nor do I want to enter them like someone who doesn’t want to see what he must be ashamed of. I don’t want to shut my eyes in the suburbs, in the residential districts and principal avenues, only to open them at the Renaissance town hall, the Gothic cathedral, and the cement-propped remnants of the Roman walls. Memory is sin, you understand! Our kind are already sufficiently afflicted as it is. There are things I haven’t told even you. For instance: the way the trauma of art worship was inflicted upon me at an early age, thanks to my beautiful mother, whose life was so brief, and to my aristocratic uncles, so well versed in many kinds of splendors. Starting with Uncle Ferdinand’s coin collection and the countless pilgrimages to historic monuments in the hinterland of the Côte d’Azur, which at the time got me excited mainly because I was allowed to sit next to the chauffeur in Uncle Agop’s Isotta Fraschini or in Uncle John’s Rolls-Royce (Mama herself drove a Stutz). I would wear a little raccoon coat, a leather auto helmet, and far too large, simply enormous goggles, in which my head looked like a horsefly. But then of course came the art books lying around everywhere—of which Gobineau’s Renaissance, in a deluxe folio edition with tissue-covered illustrations, has remained vivid in my memory. Then the magazines—including one named La gazette du bon ton and published by a M. de Brunhoff, the same man whose King Babar was to elicit my three-year-old son’s first aesthetic judgment twenty-seven years later: ‘It’s so pretty, Daddy!’. . .