“Admit it: You feel that you share the guilt for the death of the city. You too have betrayed ANTHROPOLIS. So you skulk around here to find its corpse—and yet you’re too scared to look at it and see your own cadaver. Let me make a suggestion: Let us regard our existential changes as something positive. Simply as new steps. Metamorphosis existence. Butterfly existence. You’ve got to pass through the maggot stage. Who knows what’s coming afterward? Uncle Helmuth spoke of dematerialization. Let’s take the chance! It’s totally painless. Without the shock of physical death. First, it happens to our environment. A city dies away under our very noses, as it were. You wake up one fine day, stick your head out the window, peer into the air, sniff at the patch of heaven that you can see over the air shaft, and you ascertain that out there the weather is extraordinarily fine, golden-blue—the fine weather that on a foggy day can lie in wait with a sedate and superior smile—time has time, of course. The air is a bit crisp perhaps, but that’s good for your smoker’s bronchia. So you brush your teeth, shave, put on a particularly attractive necktie, and stroll out into the street—and all at once you notice that the city has died, and you with it, of course. True, everything looks exactly as it did the day before. The houses are standing in their places, the streets are teeming, the cars are rolling shinily along the boulevards, the street of man-in-the-street faces under hats, caps, all varieties of hair, unkempt or combed, meticulously curled or wind-tousled, flows, dances, whirls, halts, dams up, breaks out, ebbs, swells again—and they are all deceased in the LORD, and you are too . . . Fine and dandy! How interesting! How very literary! You have just sloughed off a form of being that was previously your SELF, and from now on you are a new SELF, forging ahead with new possibilities of experience. The old self sinks back like the dry husk of a larva from which a butterfly has hatched. The burned-out capsule of a rocket. You yourself plunge onto a new path with new bright eruptions of fire out of your behind . . . Are you disturbed by the abstractness of the new form of existence? It is consistent with our loss of gravity. Do we mourn it? Is it really true that we lost paradise yesterday? Is it true that we were more innocent yesterday? Just what is that anyway—YESTERDAY? A myth. A legend. A fairy tale about ourselves. Dreamed by those who cannot dream a tomorrow for themselves. Is that not the reason for our feeling of guilt? We know that we are a breed without a future. Yesterday, we could still dream ourselves into the future. Today, we dream ourselves back into our dream of yesterday. But keep your spirits up! How does Novalis put it? We are about to wake up when we dream that we’re dreaming. Why not as maggots? Without a past, if you please. Without a history. Likewise without a future. Creatures of the present. Highway rest stop people. Limited to a pure here and now. If that doesn’t appeal to you—then, dear friend, all you can do is escape by forging ahead: into perfect abstraction. The pure butterfly. Dissolve in absolute abstractness—like you up there in the icy sky-blue. Or like me in my literary existence: as a literary object. Whether my own or yours . . .”