—in literature too (militant since Dada) the tendency to emulate artificially the immediacy of involuntary production. Naturally, then, a reliable judgment on the aesthetic value of such products presumes a critic outside the species and genus, as remote from such products (and their authors) as the man is from the snail’s house whose beauty he recognizes: at the very least, it presupposes a person at a reliable distance in time—as, say, we to the art of Romanticism. Hence the question: How many centuries (or decades—the gap is shrinking visibly) must pass for us to be able to appreciate correctly the style of an era? the thing that adheres without exception to each and every one of its artistic creations, so characteristically that one can fairly recognize it at first sight; namely, the thing that is produced along with it, unconsciously and involuntarily, as if the zeitgeist were guiding the artist’s hands (so compellingly that a mediocre contemporary copy is harder to distinguish from the original than a masterful copy done in a subsequent era; and this later copy, in the different penmanship guided by the zeitgeist, reveals itself to be a copy no matter how brilliant the copyist or counterfeiter)?

So far so good: scolding idiots for cultural chatter: Europe transformed into prattle (which is what had made Christa yearn for America: “They at least have their feet on the ground”). The topic for a Round Table Discussion. Participants: the art historian Frau Doktor X, the sociologist Professor Y, the sculptor and Ernst Barlach Prize laureate Professor Z, and the successful writer Nagel as moderator . . . And now for the bubbling, foaming, and fermenting of the cultural experience:

We are blind to the peculiarity in the expression of our own era (its so-called style). Today, nothing enables us to discern what will subsequently make a painting by Kandinsky attributable to roughly the same time as one by Augustus John—while we can already see that Corot and Seurat were contemporaries, not to mention David and Delacroix. And the further back we look, the more clearly we see the common features in the character of this epoch’s handwriting, and the more modestly the individual distinctions in handwriting recede into the background. We also involuntarily retreat from the style of the immediately preceding era (when we have sufficiently detached ourselves from it to discern it). We regard it as unbearably mannered, dusty, trivial. A breaking of images commences, an iconoclasm—until the gradually increasing distance uncovers that era’s charms and lets us read between its lines, as it were. This too proceeds in undulations of presumably measurable frequencies and interfrequencies.

So much for the extant note: a pulverized feuilleton, which could be preserved in its dryness, ground into word-gruel, and stuffed into the mouths of characters in novels. Frail Calder mobiles orbit overhead, and the cybernetics man sits in the corner of the sofa with crossed legs and chats about art: “The phenomenon as such, mind you, is highly interesting—may I have a bit more sugar for my coffee, dear madame . . .”