But how am I to prove this? I will be dated not according to the memories under the potsherds of my cranium but according to the contents of my stomach. Remnants of black bread and cottage ham, liverwurst and country butter, kümmel and corn whiskey will corroborate the erroneous assumption that all these things belong together. No one will stand up to testify that this necropolis employed all kinds of anachronisms to feign life. Even the nature of this past before the past, long assassinated, still haunts the detergent-blue sunniness of the ads in the glossy magazines. What can I do to denounce this perfidious abstraction? It is too late, I did not depart from the evolutionary cycle in time, I neglectfully outlived myself and have been taken over as an anachronism into the new geological era. And now I’m paying for it. For three decades of life (misappropriated by the science of prehistory), I (along with untold other museum pieces) have served this stone world as a biological alibi. I will be ruthlessly counted as a part of it in the omnium-gatherum of its archaeological treasures; whether the investigators stumble upon a hand ax or the crank of a funnel gramophone in the stratum a few meters under me, not even a dog will be taken in; I’ve held both objects in my hands, either one could be my burial offering. Geologically, I belong to the era between the Neanderthal and the horlà that comes after man, a tiny span of time in the history of the planet, and whether I would rather be located a minimal fraction of a particle closer to the one than the other in this tiny splinter of infinity is irrelevant; given the spaces of eternity one has to factor into one’s calculations these days, half a dozen zeros more or less makes little difference . . .