“We can hedge all we like, but we are their brethren in this perishing world, and the more violently we rebel against them, the more firmly we follow the logic of our being and our decline. We follow this logic in any case, whether as revolutionaries or as conformists. For just as there is no escape from the cage of our SELF, so too there is no escape from the pens and prisons of our diverse Middle Kingdoms. No matter how isolated we may feel inside them, whether in the defiant pride of the individualist or in the misery of the lonesome man among too many, as a stigmatized reformer or as a cynical exploiter of the system—we merely express the prevailing trends and moods, we are merely witnesses to the state of affairs, symptoms, scale points on the fever curve, points on the life stages of our world within the world. As redeemers or wanton strivers, as geniuses or run-of-the-mill morons, we are tiny particles of some collective whole whose will we carry out—thereby fulfilling its destiny. None of our gestures can be dissociated from these states and currents, which furrow us like a wheat field in the wind—in the wind of the zeitgeist, which, in any Middle Kingdom, sets its own time.

“We should never have forgotten these things—we who sought our salvation in writing. We would have become more tolerant, at least more reticent. We would even have found it, our salvation, if we had realized that this very search for salvation in the art of writing (or any other art) is a symptom of the times of our world within the world and not an individual destiny. It would have opened our eyes to the act of dragging the past into presence that we were committing by deluding ourselves into thinking we were something special—or even: especially alive: Artists, creative people—according to Dr. Sigmund Freud nothing more than neurotics, who are capable of healing their own neuroses—magari! Nagel for the Nobel Peace Prize! . . . We are quite simply the children of an artistic zeitgeist and not even its firstborn. We are chaff in the wind of time like everyone else in the world around us.

“We are about to wake up when we dream that we’re dreaming—isn’t that so? That was the utterance that made us brothers—do you remember? But did we actually awaken? Instead of resorting to anything (even the destruction of our artistic devices) to prolong our ever-frailer, ever-more-transparent trance, to keep dancing the shaman’s dance of artists, we late-born senile Young Writers, we sorcerer’s apprentices of the anthracite-gray magic of the Word should have realized what we were and what we were doing.