showed me this mankind en bloc in space and time: billions of tiny particles, coagulated into a gray mass that is moved by an invisible power and forced into the strangest ornaments. And this did not frighten me. Quite the opposite: it was an old, familiar thing, like a lullaby. I had hopped into the lap of the world spirit, as it were, and now, relieved (because I was released, for now, from personal responsibility), I curled up in metaphysical relish—

and I watched the grand spectacle purely through indolently squinting eyes:

It proceeded from the primal beginning and encompassed the entire universe. For the force that leads the teeming of mankind to and fro and occasionally pulls it together and drives it apart like iron filings on a piece of paper under which one moves a magnet, this force, operating on an inexhaustible play instinct of forms, was presumably the same one that formed the first cell from the primal slime and then went on to develop Brehm’s fauna and Linnaeus’s flora, ultimately crowning the astonishing variety of such creation with man, the untiring builder of the city ANTHROPOLIS. The planet was infested with mites, which first appeared in dots and specks, then spots and splotches, growing out, soon proliferating hypertrophically, covering the entire surface of the globular shape (slightly flattened at the poles) with mange . . . And it must have been the same unnameable power that had hurled this planet out into the universe among myriad others with their moons and satellites, making this powdering of the stars dance chaotically in a tremendous juggler’s act . . . Nor did it make any difference whether one of them or a million, with or without mites, died or burst like soap bubbles.

This potency toyed with such riches that if galactic systems emerged or perished in the cosmos, they did not need to be given even a fraction of the significance attached here on earth to the hatching or crushing of a louse. In light of this, it would have been childish to speak of free will, decision, the importance of any action or inaction—of ethical purpose and commencement, of moral action, of the causal relationship between guilt and atonement . . . And it would have been absolutely hilarious to imagine that one could, as an individual, produce something that was not already provided for in the collective expression; for instance: write a book that was not being tackled, indeed had not already been written, by a hundred, a thousand others with an urge to express . . . It was simply a joke of the world spirit that someone lay there in despair, racking his brain about a lost note—

It didn’t help. There was no way out anywhere. Man is free, but his will is not: anything he does takes place in terms of the all-creating, all-destroying divine game—and thus I am, thus you are, not only God’s most obedient servant and dearest menial but also HIS partner: we put our noses to the same grindstone . . . And I for my part lay satisfied in the bosom of the LORD and could hope that sooner or later, as his most obedient servant and dearest menial, I would do my biological duty by throwing Madame on her back in some corner of the Épicure and sticking a nice bun into her oven—a little French bastard who would soon be practicing with a plastic machine gun so as to take part in the game of the great world spirit . . . and if I writhed like a fly on flypaper because my conscience wouldn’t let go, whether because of a murder that I could not entirely forget, because of the lost promise from the catacomb era in Nagel’s garden house and Neunteuffel’s New Reality, because of my dead friend whom I had cheated, or even because of my book that I would never write—