Fine: that would be relative child’s play. Unfortunately, you won’t be satisfied with this. You want to materialize, in Uncle Helmuth’s terms: from the vaporous or gaseous or ethereal state in which you find yourself as a deceased person (the pure soul, if you please), you wish to transform yourself back into the denser human state of flesh and bone and skin that holds this stuff together. In a word: you want me to bring you back to life. This involves great difficulties. You see, the few biographical strokes are enough only for an obituary. Johannes Schwab: the name is a full program equipped with a curriculum vitae, but by no means with blood-throbbing life, especially not a life lived in the melancholy of a Hyperion: heavy with thought and poor in deed. That’s what you need me for. Even your full reality has to be achieved in the OTHER ever since our colleague Sartre. You need me as a mirror, Schwab. Just as I need you as a mirror, as the Other, whom I must reach in order to be my SELF. Please don’t keep pestering me with metaphysical digressions. Don’t keep making me dash about in my own brain like a rat in a trap, with the cat pushing its face up close. Do not slit my skin in order to let me ooze off into the transcendental: that’s where I truly lose myself—and thereby you. That’s trying too hard, man. I can write you by writing myself as you would write me; I can be your mirror, your medium, through which you materialize, in Uncle Helmuth’s terms: I can make you come to life, for a writer’s quill can create life and certainly wake the dead . . . but it will be a different, new book that I must write, a book containing me and you . . . do not try to convince me that this would require a third party: the GOOD LORD. Do not force him into our overloaded, our bursting concept. With you alone as a mirror image and partner in the rat-dash for form, we destroy the wonderful vision that I had of my book during the drive from Reims to Paris: a glass cathedral, shaped according to organic laws, as clear and beautiful as a crystal . . . this, I say, shattered into fragments, extinguished, kaput, even without the Almighty as the third member of the trio. I fear I cannot manage it with him. It would be more honest, for the time being, to again halt my labor on the masterwork of the era, contrite and modest (ridimensionato, as the Italians so profoundly put it), take up my work with the movie piglets and my refuge with Nadine.

•

She’ll welcome me. We’re of the same stock, she and I. She too lives a literary life. Of course, not in the counterfeit promise of eternally unrealized potentials. She transforms family-magazine literature into the gold of life. As a first-rate second-class film star, she has long since stopped belonging to the cinema; she now belongs to vast audiences of magazine readers—