“This was fascinating to observe in my vulnerable spiritual state, removed from my everyday life. I stood in one spot for almost twenty minutes, watching the sidewalk shaft with its art nouveau frame as it sucked in humans swarming like insects. Gradually, the trickle thinned out, grew sparse, while the sky slowly receded, duller and duller, more and more spacious, backing away from the earth as though wanting nothing to do with it, until at last the final stragglers were sucked from the street.

“With the same mysterious immediacy of the first star of evening appearing in the sky all of a sudden, the streetlights went on, pallidly dotting the pigeon-blue, which darkened as it flowed out into the evening. And soon the torrent of cars on the boulevard exhausted itself too. All at once the city was utterly silent. I stood alone in an empty world.

“Believe it or not, I found this so beautiful that tears came to my eyes. I felt like the Prodigal Son who has found his way home. I understood how very much we really are the children of this world, this stony world of termites; children of the artificial rocky wastes, of twilight before nightfall . . . Oh God! the heart-gripping courage of the wan streetlamps . . .

“I went to my car. The street was completely lifeless. All except for one good housewife who had slipped out of a building to walk her dog. She had her back to me while the dog pulled her along, the leash taut as iron, and the dog’s nose sniffed and scrubbed along the piss-black edge of the sidewalk. When she heard my footfall behind her, she was so startled that she jumped and let out a noise like a valve cap being sucked shut. A man on the street at this time of night could only be her murderer. Now let me ask you, Johannes Schwab, whether this isn’t our real home. I mean, what are you actually looking for when you come fleeing here from Hamburg-on-the-Elbe? After all, you’ve got enough folklore there—at least in the philistines around you, those provincials who still in large part have been thought up by Wilhelm Raabe or Wilhelm Busch or formed after Wilhelm II and for the rest are merely insects. You don’t mean to tell me that you come here from a world marked by the German soul in order to be uplifted by a Paris that begins as splendidly as the Eroica, with the beautiful notes of sky, Seine, and beautifully ordered city, and continues to build, soulful and stirring the spirit. No, no, my friend. The Paris of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of the bâteaux mouches and alluring luxury garments in the shop windows along the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine, whose stalls, as we know, can be combed for bibliophilic trouvailles (for instance, a copy of Nagel’s first novel, no?); the ville lumière of first-class whores and the charmingly authentic eateries in Montparnasse and around Les Halles, where one can feast on delicate (canned) snails dripping with garlic and all kinds of radioactive oysters—all this is not for our kind, it’s for Americans: a larger-than-life Disneyland. People like us are looking here for something completely different: namely, THE CITY, the metropolis with all its perverse charms and exquisite terrors, above all the unreal and the surreal. The abstract and the fictitious. The as-if of the human in the inhuman. We are intoxicated by the loss of reality here, under the bombardment of tattered impressions, the drumfire of the fragmented, the disjointed. Nowhere can we become so urgently self-aware as here in the frazzling stream of the crowd. Nowhere is our self so fully shaped as in encapsulated anonymity. Only when the world dissolves into disconnected entities drifting by like flotsam in a flood—an ear, a wheel, an umbrella, a dog turd, a shop sign, a gaze—only then do we realize how grand we are. Only here can we understand that we carry the entire cosmos within ourselves, that we must become artists so as to express our inner wealth—and are even more majestic when we refuse to impart it . . . Here, in the torrent of the anonymous crowd that overflows all shores, every man is sovereign.