But even if I had, could, wanted, and did achieve all of it: it would again only place me within another multitude, a likewise progressively growing collective like that of the anonymous. For of course the other purpose of these pages, no longer strictly informational but rather instructional, seems to be to pin down the extraordinary, to track down all those who in some way, positive or negative, stand out from the masses, who in some way distinguish themselves, to photograph them, interview them, publicize them as representative bearers of experience. Not necessarily in order to rake up the old notion of merit and achievement as a means of character building, but rather solely for reasons of indexing: to set reference points for the inventory of the super-reality. And it’s astounding what doesn’t receive notice, what doesn’t merit attention, the group grows, in line with the zeitgeist, in a process of explosive expansion. Amazing what this right-of-way-obeying humanity still brings forth! This of course in a certain respect cancels out the potential for recognition, even the distinguished criminal heads of government leaders, the banker’s faces of politicians and church dignitaries can scarcely be told apart from one another, begin to become interchangeable, not to speak of the mass-produced film beauties, celebrity mannequins, notable athletes, Nobel Prize winners. Even if I were seized with the mad notion of being extraordinary, I would find this extraordinariness multiplied and typified into the multitudinous—for example as one of a few hundred thousand simpletons who delude themselves into thinking they could, with a masterpiece among a few hundred thousand not completely worthless masterpieces, influence the fate of mankind. And were I too actually a writerly talent that united in itself the qualities of Henry Miller with those of Dostoyevsky, and were I actually to bring out a literary masterpiece that propelled me into the sphere of visibility of the illustrated press, I would only be allocated a place among yet another considerably proliferating group: namely, that of the successful literati; and my achievement would in no way raise me above that of the large-scale tax cheat, soccer goal scorer, or opposition politician. For in the super-reality of journalistic organs the concept of achievement is free of value, one’s rank is determined solely by topicality: what counts is its contemporaneity, be it the dynamic contemporaneity of a just done deed or—even better, more stable, more durable—the static contemporaneity of an exceptional condition. Consequently, the relatively speaking rare moral or ethical quality also pales before the more frequent topicality of the criminal or scandalous and of course the consistency of conditional extraordinariness: true, the song of the good man does occasionally get sung (the acknowledgment of beautiful souls is there in small print in the letters from readers), but what can this do next to the glamour of Jacqueline Kennedy, the demonic banality of Eichmann, the breasts of Anita Ekberg—these are existences, thank you very much, the Being ranks above the Doing; both can of course in a lucky case combine into peak-topicality as in the muscle-package of Mr. Schwarzenegger, but normally the conditional is the solid basis of contemporaneity in the super-reality: amidst all past achievement in fluttering topicality the extraordinary is more reliably established in radiation-intensities, vital superiorities, existential powers. But I possess none of these things. What I could in the best case bring to bear would be a book, and this would contain from me again only just the historical—thus the untopical; the account of a meandering career isn’t worth talking about in the all-American situation of today, especially not in the refugee-story-saturated German social solution. A Sinbad wouldn’t have anything special to tell here, world war and travel agencies deliver by the ton the experience of being geographically tossed around; at the level of a weekly magazine report no one would need such a thing. As a physiognomically recognizable, even name-bearing SELF, not even the fleeting topicality of a shooting star would be allotted me, not to mention the constant, if scarcely individualizable, contemporaneity of a fixed star in some galaxy or other. It’s more realistic to keep in mind that in reality I don’t exist at all: the super-reality of media is denied me, there no notice is taken of me, I don’t at all pass over the threshold of public consciousness, don’t take up even the slightest place in the superreal order of occurrences and am therefore actually not at all extant, a little particle in the giant collective of the anonymous without reality.