Among the notes that his secretary (Fräulein Schmidschelm, called Schelmie) sent me after his death, there is one in which he says that once (during a lunch at Laget: he had seen me home; that is, here, to the Épicure), I inferred that he was planning to write “a book of a religious nature”; i.e., his theodicy. I had to check this: no doubt I made a note of it; after all, our Russian duel as each other’s potential biographer was in full swing. Still, I must congratulate myself upon my clairvoyance back then: this intention is now obvious. I feel the need to importune my dead friend with another of the monologues I’ve made for him. After all, what I have to tell him is in his interest—which he violates whenever he pushes me off into the transcendental. The point, I would like to tell him, is to draw borders: I seek my outline in order to find the outline of my book. Or, if you will, vice versa: I seek the outline of my book in order to outline myself. It comes to the same thing. Micro and macro are interchangeable here too; they are merely symbols of a multidimensional relationship. If, for example, my story is that of a man who carries within himself the picture of a man who carries within himself the picture of an adolescent who carries within himself the picture of a child, and the man and the adolescent and the child are one and the same SELF, then, quite logically, the child carries within himself a child who carries within himself an adolescent who carries within himself a man who is carried within himself by a man who carries within himself a man who carries within himself an adolescent who carries within himself a child and ad infinitum to and fro and on and on . . . and yet it always remains one and the same SELF. . .