the Yuletide Ice Age in Hamburg: Christa and I holding hands and gazing down at our newborn son

Dawn, undressing an Indian doll here in this hotel room while Schwab and I watch in delight—and her stunned look, her sudden blush, when a giant vermilion penis appears on the undressed doll

Gaia dying and Professor Leblanc chatting away at her bedside

And none of these things really concerns me anymore. They could just as easily be made up and have never actually happened. They have passed away and could, told as several individual stories, become history. Without someone to tell it, it has no reality: as if it had never happened.

•

The ice-blue bit of sky over the air shaft was, in any case, wholly un-dimmed by any of this. It had swallowed it all up into its cold blueness: all of Nuremberg with all its spiritual dousing and crawling grave worms as well as the entire month of March 1938 in Vienna and everything I had been through, gone through, lived through, in between or before or after. True, I could wrest some of these things from that bit of sky, I could resurrect them and bring them back to life—with interest, raised to the level of narrative, an object of reflective contemplation, provoking our thoughts. The sky challenged me with a smile to do so, but this was sheer derision . . . It had swallowed up so many other things that I had not taken part in: the atomic mushroom of Hiroshima, for instance, and the smoke of the crematory ovens of Treblinka; the kiln glow of the bombing nights of Berlin and Dresden, of Hamburg, Würzburg, Rotterdam, and Coventry and Warsaw, plus the sweetly burgeoning stench of decay from the fields of corpses in the Ardennes and in the Donets Basin, at Monte Cassino and El Alamein and Singapore and Waikiki and goodness knows where else; the defoliated jungles of Vietnam, the Algerians blown up by a hose in their anus—this blue sky has sucked up all of it. Certainly, others were, fortunately, present in those places: they saw, witnessed, experienced, and are capable of wresting these things away from it, resurrecting them as narrative: on the level of an object of reflective contemplation. But this did not concern IT up above, it did not concern IT at all.

The bit of ice-blue sky over the air shaft (sixteen feet square): it had swallowed up all Babylon and was completely undimmed by this, without the slightest frizzle of a bellyache, silky smooth, crystal clear, and as deep as a well. And what if mankind were now preparing to hurl the entire planet after it, including itself? What concern is this of IT, what concern of mine? I have nothing to oppose it with but words.

•

Up there, in the blue, the man who experienced himself as the story of a man who experiences himself as the story of an adolescent who experiences himself as the story of a boy who experiences himself as the story of a child—I, my SELF, up there in the Arctic blue (still unborn as a story, still not wrested from the blue maws of oblivion, but about to be: always, destined to be so from early on, misborn to mislive my life as a story), with my image I also carried about a piece of human history—