And I realized, something extraordinary had happened to the young man! And only then did it dawn on me:

Something extraordinary had happened.

•

I almost always append this episode to the tale of the flower woman: as a paraphrase to clarify the theme for the slow-witted and, for the quick-witted who grasp it immediately, as a gratis addendum to be gratefully received. And I quite regularly reap, with a sigh of metaphysical anxiety, the exclamation “Man! You ought to write about that!”

Yes indeed, I know I ought to write about it (and a lot of other things too). I ought to write about it for the sole reason that it has something to do with writing itself: it contains a formula that is as simple as it is foolproof. But it’s not so urgent as other things I ought to write down. It may be an extremely effective bit of narrative art (at least it’s seldom disappointed my listeners). But it concerns me only peripherally (although the end of an era back then—in March 1938—put an end to my era: so completely that my previous life seemed to have been lived by a different person than he of the later life: kind of like how my childhood before my mother’s death was lived by a different child than the one who then grew up in Vienna, ultimately experiencing that March in the year 1938). But the extraordinary thing that had happened in Berlin in 1944—and which the young man in his absent mental state had caused me to grasp as being extraordinary—this wasn’t my concern even then—no more than it was his.

I would venture to maintain that the issue is purely an external one. It was (by way of having happened) to have extremely far-reaching consequences—certainly not just for myself but, strangely, even enigmatically, for me in particular (although, for the time being, it altered nothing in the externals of my existence).

In any case, it sliced my existence in two again, pushing the earlier portion behind a glass pane, as it were. What now lay behind it was, no doubt, something I had gone through, lived through, at times even suffered through—yet it really had nothing to do with me now. I continued living with it as if I were keeping one portion of me like a tench in an aquarium: more as a hobby than as a necessity.

One portion of myself was entirely abstracted from me, existing in a different element. In a reality that had become unreal. I could observe it with scientific detachment. It no longer aroused my passion, only my occasional interest.

Like Nagel’s amputated arm, which lay buried somewhere in Russia while its owner industriously wrote with his left arm in Fuhlsbüttelon-the-Elbe, that era of my life was separated from me. And even though it sometimes seemed that I could identify with it in some way or other, this was not actually the case. I was prey to the same illusion as Nagel when some sort of nervous reflex in his arm stump led him to believe that he could move the fingers of his right hand.