if I died (not necessarily today or tomorrow or the day after but perhaps in a couple of weeks, in six months, in a year), then I would be dead without having written my book—and that seemed like eternal damnation to me—

All at once, I knew what dying meant. This was no ineluctable biological phenomenon, no final decay of an organism, its dissolution and transformation into other kinds of matter; this was the death of my soul:

my book would never exist; it would be snuffed out with me, as though it had never existed (which indeed in an absurd way might be true: it didn’t in fact exist yet, of course, at least not in reality, but still actually did within me—but it would with my death lose even this actuality, not to mention its factual reality)—

And that would be as though I—my SELF—had never existed.

The evidence that I had ever been alive would forever be hidden in a dream.

•

Incidentally it was in my Hamburg days that I began dreaming the dream of my murder—in the first few years of my marriage to Christa at least, though it seems to me it started when I first started thinking about my book. Occasionally, the dream varied in structure. Sometimes, I had already killed the old witch, was about to bury her, and was trembling with fear at being caught; drenched with sweat, I was drudging away at forcing her unexpectedly bulky old-crone bones, and the tatters and tangle of poor woman’s clothing, misbegotten flesh, brains, and blood-smeared hair, into the narrow pit I had dug with the shovel—I know they’re on my trail, they’re about to look for me here, they’re already coming down the steps of the basement, whence I can no longer escape . . . Or else I had already buried the corpse; I was no longer in the basement but knew they were finding it there; she has moldered upward to bear witness against me, her carcass will expose me as her murderer—that’s what she wanted, she wanted me to murder her, she descended to the basement with me wittingly, intentionally, in order to become one with my murder, instantly, at the first stroke (with which I had by no means wanted to kill her) . . .

I learned all this by heart long ago. I knew the consequences: the taste left in my mouth for days, the enjoyment left in my mind for days—

I have grown accustomed to living with it. It has not recurred that often—perhaps four or five times during the past nineteen years (enough for domestic use). A few days later, the hunt (for big game, so to speak) ends, making room for the everyday snares and traps: the bird-catching of lived moments (sometimes there’s a parti-colored goldfinch; sometimes one begins singing; sometimes one even speaks: if I close my eyes, they whir about in my head—but the cage has holes: the ones I want to keep fly out and the others stay, even when they have died: decay with dusty plumage in the corners, piles of fusty tatters . . .).