Of course, the Aristides manuscript interested me from a literary standpoint. Like Wieland Haslitzsch, I see it as coming to grips with the problem of reality. The writer creates his own world, which for him is often more real than genuine reality, with which he then naturally loses contact. I therefore would like to suggest as an epigraph the following pretty quote which I found while leafing through a Chinese book:

I dreamed I was a butterfly that dreamed it was a man. Now I don’t know if I’m a man who dreams he is a butterfly or the man the butterfly dreamed.

Wiebke Keller-Wohlfahrt
Current address: Tutzing on the Starnberger See

Folder C

We are about

to wake up

when we dream

that we’re dreaming.

—NOVALIS

THE ICE AGE, 1947

If I would seek my ending

as well as my beginning

then I must sound out God

and fathom Him within me.

I must be what He is:

a gleam within His gleaming,

a word within His word,

a god within my God.

—ANGELUS SILESIUS

—.where’d you get that idea? you tell me, what should I tell you? please don’t start in again, please! I can’t stand it! well a person can say what he thinks, can’t he? you should be ashamed of yourself! stop it, you two! Just a sec—fine—well?—well if I understand you correctly—yes, go ahead, I’m dying to know what you think, that’s exactly what I wanted to do, to summarize briefly: if I understand you correctly, you wanted to say—I’ll express it very simply . . . yes? . . . that the precondition for a constructive conversation here this evening, but also in general with respect to our topic—eh, the precondition for such a constructive discussion of a new and yet-to-be-determined form of government here in postwar Germany, following the collapse of all values formerly considered worthwhile . . . yes? . . . eh, so the prerequisite for a form of society that conforms completely to all previously encountered psychic conditions—if not requirements—of man in genere is our agreement on the existence (whether objective or subjective plays no role at this point), anyway, on the existence of an object which, while not rationally comprehensible, can be psychically experienced—right? transcendental object, if I may, and it’s psychologically necessary to enter into religious association with it, which, in the event that such association is suspended or never existed in the first place, or only temporarily—in childhood, for instance, but not later—expresses itself in a need that can often increase to the point of emotional disequilibrium and neurosis, and as a consequence must absolutely be taken into account when creating a new state structure as an integral part of the—if I may—psychic environment in which we live, for better or for worse—agreed? That is the precondition, is it not? Did that sum up what you wanted to say?