I was the exception that proved the rule, if you please. I maintained the link with the emotional possibilities of our fathers, said Schwab. I was living proof that continuity had not been broken, at least in this respect—the “specifically European conception of love and capacity for love.” That is to say, love as a revolutionary act, as the revolt of the individual against the strictures of society. . . and not as an adolescent, mind you, no, as a mature, reflective, much-tested adult. Granted, this too a way of dragging the past into presence—but not merely passive, not merely in the act of experiencing; rather inherited action . . .

And now what? Now that I had reached the head of the class and now that—as foreseen—the whole emotion business lay in pieces, now I refused to take the next logical step? I didn’t despair, I didn’t shoot a bullet into my head, I didn’t join the Foreign Legion in order to vanish forever into the unknown? No. I was, I am, as cheerful and serene as ever.

It doesn’t help to tell Schwab that I am in a certain respect only partially involved, insofar as it is not my entire self that lost Dawn. Only one of my two souls is concerned. Her loss, I say, is entirely the fault of those traits and qualities of mine that were stamped on me by my formative years in Vienna: the disgusting eagerness to take moral possession, the desire to improve and help, the need to educate and alter. As though it were one of the tasks of love to develop the other person toward so-called normality at any cost. (For instance: my persistent concern about Dawn’s health, both physical and mental, my pampering and caring, my making sure that nothing happened to her, that she didn’t do anything to herself. The picayune morality, the anxious conformism behind all that, and of course the cannibalism, the eating of human flesh in mental and physical ownership. In short, everything that made John and Stella so violently hate the bloody fucking middle classes and their shitty morality and that had, alas, partly become my nature during twelve Viennese years with Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and Cousin Wolfgang.)

In contrast, however, I tell my friend, there is an entirely different side to me, namely, the side with which I won Dawn—in beautiful freedom: overlooking any craziness of hers, fulfilling every foolish wish, never correcting or criticizing her, approving of all her madcap ideas, even feeding her pills instead of foie gras, buying her mushroom-like hat-stumps instead of fancy hats, suffering with a smile when she dressed like a scarecrow. . . In other words, that in me which is of the artist, which tends toward the artistic, and on top of this the generosity, the elegant neutrality in handling human relationships that I had managed to copy from such outstanding personages as Uncle Ferdinand. The cautious live-and-let-live attitude of Uncle Agop Garabetian’s extraordinary amiability. The imaginativeness, the delicious playfulness of a Bully Olivera, whose acquaintanceship had been one of the most fruitful gifts of my unbourgeois childhood before Vienna . . . Had any of the three of them, I said to Schwab, learned that someone wanted to kill himself, he un-hesitatingly would have given that person the opportunity. . .