I don’t even have to ask what sense the whole thing makes. The answer is obvious: my piglets want to tap money, and some of it will be siphoned off to me—

what, then, should hold me back? my self-respect? the lamentable shred of dignity that we of the sad countenances reserve for ourselves in our work?

(to Schwab: “You needn’t look up at me all conflicted and embarrassed—I know perfectly well what you’re thinking: that it’s despicable of me to do this sort of thing—yet you can’t ignore the fact that I can do it, can bring myself to do it and not give a damn. Isn’t that what you’re thinking? . . . Irrefutable proof of the cynic’s energy: I can get away with it . . .”)

what in the name of all that’s holy would get in my way? my intellectual honesty? the certainty that I am deceiving?

whom?—and about what? . . .

Just reach into the throes of human life! The teeming of maggots all around. Into Hertzog’s Divine World and Neunteuffel’s New Reality, into the roaring torrent of commuters and highway rest stop people—what does reality look like in their brains?

A vortex of images, no doubt. A boiling noise-gruel. A flickering chaos of momentary impressions, eardrum sensations:

incident-fragments happening-tatters event-slivers occurrence-splinters—bubbling up and away in the effervescence of ceaseless and ubiquitous occurrence, the total superreality of illustrated magazines—involuntarily captured dissipated perceived interrupted chopped-up ripped-up spliced-up throttled arbitrarily jumbled-up incoherently superimposed like the trailer to a film that is never screened in its correct and meaningful sequence.

A day of the white maggot—how does it pass by? what is it like?—every morning a torturous everyday spawn:

Alarm clock-buzzing-instant-of-terror, everlasting and as explosive as an atomic bomb:

Dream-world demolition, dream-reality annihilation. Collapse of the logic of the multidimensional. Solutionless abruption of all events, identity loss, feelings of guilt for things not taken care of, frustration of non-coping—

Existential panic: tightening dimension-narrowing, powerlessness, primal sense of forlornness, fear, anguish, menace

Irruption of the outer world into the shredded inner world irruption of time into the timelessness of physicality into the world of gravity-defying nonphysicality space-confinement irruption of what is rigidly established into what is arbitrarily alterable exchangeable penetrable irruption of banal design of multiple experience into sovereignly unprecedented unique unheard-of

Reluctant renunciation of the freedom of unreality the uncommittedness of the ungrammatical helpless striving against being moved by the merciless causality of the factual fragile clutching at melting dream-formations a sense of being swindled humiliation of vulnerability degradation through coarsening

Fettering to the physical: mass load inertia bulk: hard things sharp-edged things hostile things—

Resistance to pain as a mediator of reality, defense, arousal of aggressiveness

Rediscovery of the physical sense of self: self-member-stiffness self-urinary-urgency self-hybrid-morning-erection self-bad-taste-in-mouth self-breath self-warmth self-smell

Gathering, finding one’s bearings, getting it all together: mosaic-like reconstruction of the human being who dissolves in sleep every night, mosaic-like reconstruction of the world of facts which is demolished nightly, blurry and bleary, partially snuffed—