while, in the meantime, everyone is making a leisurely effort to get his share of the pie baking in the fire of the Apocalypse, and all people have tranquilly resigned themselves to the fact that everyone’s actions are different from what he says and certainly different from what he thinks—

and thus the call of the angel to the Last Judgment is merely one more noise in the tremendous din of universal chatter, a tiny fiber in the overwhelming thread of sound that is caught by a few powerful, opinion-shaping institutions and twisted into the dog leash of the zeitgeist, which irresistibly draws us toward our collective fate—

These people could do just fine without me. They had more than enough cleaning woman fairy tale tellers and culture-pessimistic intellectuals. Their verbal gruel burst through the windows of bookstores and came to them every evening on the more uplifting radio and television programs; it fed the cultural sections in the weekend editions of their family papers (illustrated and unillustrated); it occupied the minds at congresses of their leading scientists and philosophers; it was the major discussion topic in their adult-education courses; it echoed through the utterances of their statesmen and began to break through even in movies (after America had courageously taken the lead, here, too)—

and went as smoothly in one ear as it did out the other. It was part of the sound track of their reality, an “integrating component” of the background noise that the present era used in its drive for self-perfection. And had I joined the concert, then upon my demise they might have treated even me to a hill of flowers, like that man up front there, and during my lifetime they might have paid me all sorts of gratis tributes, but never this eerie goodwill, which seemed to have a smarmy familiarity at its heart. What the hell did they want from me?

•

In bidding solemn farewell to a man who had nagged at their consciences not in the cultural division but in self-destructive reality, the congregation of mourners had, of course, hired a shepherd of the soul, a pastor (presumably a Protestant of the Augsburg Confession).

In order to greet the grief-stricken and take them into his care, the pastor stood facing his flock, with his back to the hill of flowers (where the deceased, always quite shy and unsociable, had finally found a refuge where no one could get to him); and the pastor, with an ardent assurance, emanated waves of solace as if to say, Do not despair, your beloved relative is really lying here. By way of demonstrating that he truly believed in the faith with which he wanted to fortify the faith of all the others, he had disguised himself as a mountebank at a medieval fair. His robe (raven-black and creased: the domino of a macabre heavenly carnival) flowed all the way down to his fashionable department-store shoes and was tied over the shoulders like a sack; over it, the buzz saw of a gigantic, chalk-white furbelow ruff decapitated him, so that he presented his head as though on a plate—virtually his own executioner. The head was anointed with the grease of the edifying word and was slightly tilted in a posture of humility. The skeleton of a Gioconda smile hovered around his mouth.