There, incidentally, the day is actually vanishing, rarefying in a way that makes me experience the forlornness of the planet in outer space. The sun is not setting, but has disowned its satellite forever, its light is now a mere echo fleeing after it, the sun steals away, slips behind the diagonally echeloned triple formation of the Western high-rise block, transforming it for brief seconds into the modernistic trinity symbol from the display window of a progressive shop for devotional kitsch, a few final preclusive rays even quickly imitate the monstrance, then the dazzling humbug is snuffed out, three angular, leaden-gray thorns stick bluntly in the flesh of the sky, making it decay, its vital juice decompose, its hemoglobin (horribly filled with pus) congests over the curvature of the earth, running out beyond it, into the universe, only lymph remains, watery so long as a final reflection of solar gold is still trapped in the 396 windows of the southern squadron wing, this final reflection oozes away upward, strangely (as if through a fine-meshed latticework), then comes the moment of tipping over, I have anxiously looked forward to it the whole time.

The instant I press the buzzer into the aluminum plate on one of the seventy-two entrance doors, I know: I have come to experience this dying of the world. The monosyllabic signal exchange by telephone (“Are you going to be home this afternoon?” “What time are you coming?”) is already the upbeat for this overture, the leitmotif for a tormenting poetry, a poetry with exchanged light values, as it were, a negative of poetry. It now drenches the essence of the final moments of a day whose borrowed light nevertheless simulated a possibility of life on the lost planet, a fata morgana play of definitive refractions. But now it’s past, the sky is a flinty polish, with three triple groups of thorn-shaped lead inclusions sticking in it, I feel its dead weight on me, it presses me into the rock where I lounge on a basalt chaise under the dome of a brazen sunshade with toadstool-shaped iron-oxide spots, it pushes me down with my last shriek of anxiety in my throat—I don’t want this, let anything happen, let the world petrify, but this must not happen, I must not be discovered in this geological era, this will lead to paleontological errors. I do not belong to this epoch of the world, it is not my epoch, it has swallowed me together with my former world and its various Middle Kingdoms, and it is deceptively using their myths. I protest. It was a human myth that designed ANTHROPOLIS, the city of mankind; it was the dreams of human beings, not of horlàs, that this nightmare stole for its own monstrosity. This is corpse robbery. Every cubic meter of concrete from which this Stone Age was formed contains a cynical utilization of rubble. Even its barrenness, its heartrending emptiness, was finagled; it has appropriated the tormenting poetry of the bomb-crater fields of my era; everything that might hint at the former presence of human life is stolen from my epoch and falsely taken over into this nowness, is abstracted, is doctored into its own negative. I must warn the twentieth millennium’s explorers of primordial times: if among my fossils, beneath the stony cigarette butts and petrified ashes, they find the affected figure of a Montgolfier on a porcelain shard, that cannot enlighten them about what a balloon in the sky meant to me in my childhood. The petrified spinning wheel that may be found in one of the honeycomb cells as a decorative old-fashioned domestic item (transformed into a flowerpot holder) does not belong here. The power shovels that dug the foundations of these gigantic death houses bumped into this spinning wheel, unearthed it with other junk, perhaps from houses that once upon a time stood in this place, and pushed the archaic (almost African) ornamentation of their half-timber gables from the blossom balls of the cherry trees into the melting of airy spring cloudlets in the blue sky—in a long-submerged past before the past.