a troglodyte theodicy, which I supplemented in those days with my own mental flights into metaphysics—for example, when gazing from the window of our apartment in Vienna’s Twelfth District up into the rectangular chunk of starry sky revealed by the air shaft between the front and back wings:

primal situation of man: overwhelming juxtaposition of his nothingness with infinity:

there I sat in the window niche, gazing up into the immense silver-dusted firmament beyond the fire walls, staring bewitched, like a nixie who knows of a different world in the celestial circle above the well shaft, a world about whose alien life she has an inkling as it fills her with strange yearning: exiled, trapped in the narrowness of my self and tempted out of it and beyond it by an enigmatic something—

and as far and high as my imagination could carry me out of myself, it never brought me to where something beckoned.

For beyond myself, I was stretched over and above myself. My SELF dissolved, was absorbed in cosmic vastnesses. I flew over the city of Vienna and beyond, over all the beautiful cities that mankind has built and destroyed in the eternal conflict between good and evil, up and down, positive and negative, while incessantly dying within itself and rising again from within itself. I flew over continents and over the planet and into the universe, into the icy spaces of Creation, veiled and dimmed by astral whey, where light had not yet been separated from darkness.

And soon the earth was a mere speck of dust scattering with myriads of its kind in a tremendous explosion into infinity. I, my SELF, shrank accordingly, of course: so utterly into the microcosmic that ultimately I was hurled out again into the macrocosmic, as it were: I WAS THE UNIVERSE.

When I, my SELF, burst through my human dimensions, the whole world burst with me in the clattering shattering of categories—and the thing that rose again from it, like the phoenix, was I, my SELF. Though poorer by one universe than before . . .

My dead friend S. didn’t need to feel such anxieties anymore. Now, he knew. Now, he was freed from the monkey cage of his self, dissolved in the universe: with the possibility of peering into the plan of the Creator and Head Mechanic of the Universal Mechanism and understanding its wondrous ultimate meaning (or else the even more wondrous lack thereof) . . . It was regrettable, however, that this knowledge was no longer his: he had paid for it with the loss of his self (in accordance with Miss Fern, dispenser of wisdom in my childhood: “You can’t eat your cake and have it”), and it was confusing to reflect that a total consciousness is one that is totally released; that is: totally dissolved in everything, hence extinguished. Still and all, such a consciousness promises us a certain state of contentment, and I simply cannot understand why S. is bothering me so much. (So much that, for instance, I am now frightened because I have perceived S. as “something.”) Schwab’s presentness is a challenge, a demand I cannot evade. The holy terror that overcame me when I identified my sense of guilt about a murder with S. is a demand. It comes from where he is now.