And thus the Walpurgisnacht celebration began, and lasted until dawn.

At ten thirty on the day that had thus begun, I strode through a completely deserted Vienna.

It unfolded very agreeably before my tearing eyes (tearing from cold, you see, and because I hadn’t slept and had seen all kinds of things through the night, things one sees in oppressive dreams; also, the light hurt my eyes).

Vienna flapped open before me in piercingly lucid, brightly colored individual pictures (the colors of Emperor Joseph’s time: yellow and copper-green and sky-blue and glacier-white and streetcar-red-whitered). The city flapped open like one of those panoramic folders sold at railroad kiosks to foreigners passing through, so that they know where they have been:

—a townscape in its own notation, so to speak: in which the extreme simplification limits itself to indicating tonal values, and in which, even with the most banal and most arbitrary chaos of heterogeneous and contrasting motifs and styles (cathedral and railroad station, soccer stadium and stock exchange, hero’s monument and zoo), a certain rhythm is inscribed, a rhythm that takes up the melodic moods of the individual views, combining with them into a musical theme that is ultimately the same as the one you hear in the complicated orchestration of the city after a lifetime of intimate acquaintance: just as the theme “chicken run” of course has a simpler and more pure sound to it in a children’s book than it does in paintings by all the Dutch masters who trained their eye on farm fowl; and especially than all the chicken runs that we have to put up with in real life.

This Vienna was painted by a highly conscientious Sunday painter with a frozen soul (a Danubian Vivin) and patched together into a booklet of picture postcards. And I wended my way through it and took it in one last time in its brilliance and empty glory: Vienna: capital of Austria and old Europe, now scoured by passing time and washed up on its strand.

I took it in, bidding it farewell, and filed it away with the things that had become a part of my being and had become abstract along with it:

its tenacious, buckhorn-button Middle Ages and its chamois-leather baroque; its edelweiss-starred rococo and postmasterly Biedermeier; its grand bourgeois Greater German kitsch and its whining petit bourgeois knavery:

—fanfare-loud, panache-sporting self-assurance petrified into state-chancelry emblematics; the ore of imperial sobriety forged into playful latticework; Spanish draconic severity wine-drunkenly dissolved in perioecian placidity . . . and proliferating from all these the amalgams of engineering and Wilhelminia: ungainly monumentality and frivolous intimacy, opera and operetta in cast iron and mortar: the Lay of the Nibelungen on apartment houses and the imperial double eagle hanging at trolley stops as a sign of Heuriger wine: in bridge arches, middle-class pride bloated into the swank of paunches bearing watch chains, and, in administration buildings, the grace of courtiers demeaned into the humility of pensioners . . . and, over the Virginia cigar, an insidious wink—