He was pissed off: So why the hell are you even here!?

In fact, that’s a very touchy subject, I said. I couldn’t really tell you without hurting your feelings . . . Come on, don’t beat around the bush and play Mr. Sensitive, just spit it out if you can . . . all right then: I’m looking for a spiritual experience de profundis as well—in fact, I feel like a pig in shit at our evening discussions—but I don’t find it in what Hertzog has to offer (I have no intention of becoming a cabaret comedian). But I think it’s enormously worthwhile to observe the impression he makes on our friends and where it presumably will lead—that was a significant spiritual experience, wasn’t it? . . .

Nagel pricked up his ears: What do you mean, exactly?

Well, what it takes to make a new society. . . For instance, the development of a catacomb congregation into a church—

Come again?

The metamorphosis of spiritually impoverished people, touched by God’s finger, into staunch spiritual bookkeepers—

Nagel made a superhuman effort to control himself, but below the surface he seethed and rumbled alarmingly. The stump of his arm thrashed about involuntarily, making the empty sleeve of his dyed field shirt flutter, but he was listening—

And that was wonderful and amazing: persuading Nagel to listen seemed like a gift, a gift from the god of friendship. It made me serious; I dispensed with the cheap thrill of teasing him and taking it out on him instead of Hertzog. I even made an honest attempt to suppress my bile against Hertzog, my bitter rejection of him for intellectual—no, for physical, for physiochemical reasons with an admixture of straightforward schoolboy envy. I loved my friend Nagel but there was something about the man who called himself so pretentiously Hertzog with tee-zee that concentrated all my hatred, my hatred of the curse inflicted on this country, this people, and of what would soon return—relentlessly step by step—and one day change the world instantly and forever.

Sometimes I was so overcome by despair that everything within me was destroyed—literally: my will to live, my ravenous, wolf-like will to survive, the hungry, emaciated beast from the steppes that had kept me safe through the infernal madness of the Third Reich and its destruction and was determined to hang on by the skin of its teeth through the Ice Age that followed. Resigned to its fate, it sank impotently to the bottom of my being and lay there in feigned peace—

it was a remarkably happy feeling of dissolution, of being adrift in the current of time . . .

Why the hell was I here? No reason. I was washed up here. Uncle Helmuth would call it my karma—and he, Nagel, angrily returned to his garden house and wrote—wrote page after page of his first book with his left hand—how envious I was behind all my irony! How impatient I was to be seized too, seized somehow or other by such devotion to something, to be redeemed by a passion . . .