To grasp the notion of the self physically, at least, I must bite heartily into my ham sandwich, chew, swallow, wash it down with a small glass of Bommerlunder or kümmel, smear a blob of liverwurst on crispbread, munch the hard, splintering crumbs well salivated with the soapy mass of liverwurst, push in a cheese stick, rinse my greasy mouth cavity with corn whiskey, counter its sharpness with that of a chocolate-covered peppermint. So I am eating dialectically at least, in boorish theses, antitheses, and syntheses of palatal stimuli. It helps me to feel that I do exist. How? This is given by the situation. Where? This is harder to establish. Hamburg is no longer what surrounds me here; it could just as well be Detroit or Sofia or even Minsk. It is purely and simply suburbia, a geographic superreality with no precise location. That too is an antiquated prejudice, an outmoded experience-cliché of the nineteenth century—Fridtjof Nansen struggling to get to the Pole, Mister Stanley I presume to the sources of the White Nile—but forget that nonsense, one cannot escape suburbia today, it devours the cities exactly the way it does the so-called (here truly) flatland. By tomorrow, I’ll be able to take the subway from here all the way to Palermo without leaving the jurisdiction of suburbia, without arriving anywhere but in suburbia, without experiencing anything but the sapping experience of the unreality, suffocating emptiness, abstractness of these death houses larded with a lemur people, the desolation around them, before them, behind them, beyond them . . . It’s to be had everywhere, in Palermo as well as Salonika, in the same consistent quality, the same picture here as there. No matter from what side one views the buildings, they have both a phallic and a sepulchral quality, always looming apocalyptically over the horizon—a horizon without foreland: a bare patch of curving earth. Like arm-amputated grave crosses seen from a frog’s-eye view, they bore into the sky, which soon bleeds to death.

But before this happens, I still have a good half hour. I usually come by around five in the afternoon; so on cloudless days, even in late fall (already early winter in the Alpine foothills but still a coolly restrained slum summer here), I’ve got at least one and a half hours of surrender to the magazines in the sterile light of an eternal Sunday-afternoon emptiness, while the broad, who has been in the kitchenette since four o’clock, prepares something tasty for supper: “No, no, dear, you really can’t help me, this is women’s work—besides, you’ve got something to nibble on, anyway. I’ve got smoked eel too, dear, really fresh, from Kiel.”

I could use it, thank you, I need something solid. Otherwise, the superreality will carry me weightlessly out into the void; my collective ego is in a moral clinch, so to speak, with my superego. Like Atlas, I carry the earth on my shoulders—and behold: it is light. Notwithstanding all the problems of determining a fair border for Manchuria, notwithstanding all the difficulties in Nigeria’s domestic politics, notwithstanding the mass slaughter of baby seals off the coasts of Newfoundland, even notwithstanding the peril of overpopulation, the globe does not press down on me at all. On the contrary, it is as weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble and carries me, floats with me, into space.