“When they’re making a movie and they want to give a modern cityscape a period character, they sometimes take small cardboard cutouts painted naturalistically—walls, merlons, gingerbread eaves, gables, oriels—and attach them to the camera lens, replacing or concealing whatever is missing in reality or destroys the illusion. That is, whatever does not fit in with the desired representation. Photographed together, the real city and the cutouts yield the intended image perfectly.

“I am expressing myself vividly enough, aren’t I? I mean, it would be wrong if you had the idea that this is a solid, closed world, a world of Frenchmen, to which you find no entrée because you yourself, true to the cliché of a German, are too formless, too weightless, too nebulous. On the contrary, you have to realize that here, beyond the cutout of Paris that you carry before your eyes, evolution has taken a step into another aggregate state. This different state of things doesn’t allow you to identify with it, because it’s you—yes sir, you, yourself—who has too clear a form, is made of too solid material, flesh, bone, a turtleneck sweater, corduroy pants. In short, it’s you who are too much alive. An act of dematerialization has taken place here, in Paris, which our kind still have left to us. A rarefaction of matter, as when water is transformed into steam. The molecules have moved apart, making contact and communication impossible—not really for psychological reasons but purely for physical reasons.

“I grant you, it’s not easy to accept this. The city of Paris is constructed of hard stone. The French are a hard people. Their roots vein the rock beneath their soil—a fine soil, a rich earth that brings forth wheat and wine grapes in abundance, and, one would think, an earth whose children are cheery, sociable, bighearted. But no, they have stony faces, their souls are frozen in the glacial coldness of a national culture that produces instant classics, that emits each classic with a helmet, a shield, and a spear, like Pallas Athena springing full blown from the brow of Zeus. They still have the gift of form, these French. They think and speak nothing but beautiful petrifacts. When they laugh it sounds like pebbles clattering . . . And if one is not made of stone as they are (and is a pederast in the bargain, for along with a few exotics, a couple of Balkanese, and some Russian Jewesses, pederasts are the ones who make the stone circus here dance to their tune)—if someone does not belong to their stony world, he is simply ground down into sand. Soon he no longer exists, no longer finds himself present, finds only rubbish left over from himself, the materia prima of which he once was made, now pulverized, scattered. He is no more than a humming in his own skull; that’s all that’s left of him. Well, that is true, and yet it’s still just another illusion. Reality is paradoxically the reverse. For all this is utterly abstract. It takes place in the concrete, but so entirely translated into the spiritual, so knowingly staged without any connection to the natural, that only lunatics can accept it as reality.