thus, it is not directly my reality but, so to speak, its pedestrian superreality, meant to be experienced by me in its fullness, as I experience it here and now: from the void of an abstract superreality I have previously overlooked and failed to heed only for lack of sufficient attention and for want of a sense of the factual.

Okay, fine, I’m ready to accept this. My profane experiences hardly suffice to make me fully cognizant of the reality around me. Nor am I surprised that it is so full, brimming with the unexpected, the astonishing, the wonderful—but why are these unexpected astonishing wonderful matters presented to me as the most humdrum everyday matters (indeed, as my everyday experience)? I certainly don’t doubt that they have reality, are reality, but I am very far removed from it. The struggle of the gods over us mortals may also decide my destiny, but that doesn’t mean that I can intervene, that I can interfere and say, “Hey, fellas—calm down! This really won’t do!” Then why does the superreality of the magazines simulate this possibility for me? Why does it strike me with every picture (of oil sheikhs lunar-rocket passengers duchesses poisoners), with every report (of earthquakes jungle warfare atomic explosions floods) as the most up-to-date topicality I can encounter at any step of the way? Things become so grandly colorful and dynamic only in literature, in my dreams, at best. There, my hand meets Haroun el Rashid’s in the lamb pilaf, I fly to the moon, sleep with duchesses, am poisoned by green-eyed sorceresses, the earth quakes beneath me, machine-gun muzzles emerge from the thicket of fat tropical plants like the eyes of a Douanier Rousseau tiger and aim at me, and ultimately God’s wrath blows up the planet . . . But if I simultaneously experience myself as immobile, trapped in the vacuum of a void from which there is no escape, while a thousand voices whisper to me, shout at me, cry to me, “Do something! Get involved! Intervene! Stop the monstrous thing from happening! Prevent the horrible thing!”—if that happens, then the dream turns into a nightmare, the events pass over me, press down on me, crush me.

And that is exactly what the superreality does in the illustrated magazines on my lap. Their reality is not to be doubted, but it takes place beyond my immediate realm of experience, beyond my Middle Kingdom, it takes place powerfully, sovereignly, beyond any influence of mine; yet its topicality presses under my skin, and no matter how I turn and twist, I can ignore nothing that happens here, it happens to me, happens here and now—though it is a here and now that exists past me, growing beyond its own ephemeral self, of course. The NOW comprises not only the moment, the day, the week, but the entire epoch; the HERE is not limited to the front yard in the high-rise development where I am lounging, to my present Middle Kingdom, to Hamburg, to West Germany—no, it encompasses all realms, all kingdoms, the globe, the cosmos—