But then, these latter events go beyond me, concern me only indirectly, as a consumer of destiny, so to speak. I no longer have the law of action in my hand. So why should this superreality be brought home to me in such a bewilderingly direct fashion, as if heaven knows what were contingent on my feeling involved in it? The illustrated newsmagazines leap at me, they almost harass me; like a total stranger grabbing my arm in the street and sputtering his conflict-laden experience-broth at me—from his marital problems to his philosophical ideas, his professional, athletic, and erotic perils, possibilities, prospects, his difficulties in raising his children, his traffic delinquencies, his thoughts on urban planning the fight against cancer food for the world ideas on American Russian Chinese Persian Venezuelan domestic and foreign politics Fidel Castro Onassis Anita Ekberg Karl and Groucho Marx—not because he mistakes me for an old acquaintance with whom he has often discussed such issues and problems (or because he recognizes me as especially open and receptive to them) but simply because he has pulled me out by sheer chance from several tens of thousands, and I could just as easily have been another passerby coming his way—he merely assumes in sovereign schizoid autism that whatever regards concerns occupies excites exasperates him is bound to regard concern occupy excite exasperate someone else, ergo that I must instantly be passionately moved and captivated—

okay, fine: Dostoevsky does the same to me, Henry Miller even employs my libido for this purpose, but with them I at least know that this is fiction, it is meant to pull me out of the reality of the here and now and transpose me into a different one, removed from time and space, a superreality that sovereignly fills its own time and space, so that experiencing it makes me realize all the more keenly what reality is, that I may grasp it all the more clearly, comprehend it all the more fully . . . This is splendid, my eyes ought to brim with tears in sheer gratitude: the poets want what’s best for me, they hand me keys that give me access to what lies in (and behind) my Middle Kingdom, beyond the pedestrian reality I can directly experience: its symbolism, its transcendence.

But that is just what the annoying sleeve-tugger on the glossy pages of the illustrateds does not do. On the contrary: he speculates with robust naiveté on the fascination of existence that is transmitted close to the skin, sour on the stomach, and warm as the breath (and granted: such fascination is huge in this modern world, which sails out into the abstract with concept-filled sails!). And it is certainly true of the magazines in this bunch—which I peruse, more and more excited, more and more addicted, more and more obsessed—that they present my pedestrian reality and no other; I cannot doubt it, it’s printed here in black and white and color; the camera, as we know, does not lie. To be sure, it has only a wraith-like similarity to what I actually experience (especially here and now: right at the edge of the world, lying on a yellow-and-white-striped chaise longue surrounded by pathetic flowerpots, under a green, toadstool-stitched sunshade, which stands in something that one can describe at best as the negative of a garden, ringed by roaring emptiness, from which 2,336 windowpanes, in front of me, over me, and at either side, gaze down blankly, and 540 concrete terraces are reproachfully held out to me like empty boxes, like beggar’s bowls of a humanity cheated of itself), but this reality in the illustrated magazines, parsed in still photos and served up like a well-shuffled pack of cards, is not entirely alien. On the contrary, it is even traumatically familiar, intimate; a déjà vu experience afflicts me several times on every page. I’ve seen all this before (indeed, many, many times), though most likely just in other magazines; still, I can imagine I experienced these things myself, and could re-experience them at any time at any step along the way—