John is immune to the babble the follows his words. He cold-bloodedly plays the bull in the china shop and doesn’t care if they openly accuse him of being a German sympathizer. He knows only too well that most people here agree with his most cynical statements, especially the anti-Semites among them. Besides, he’s invulnerable because all his encounters and contacts are open to view. He’s never alone with anyone but is always accompanied by officials of the relevant authorities. As his protégé, however, I hang around with the reptiles in the undergrowth of this jungle. What reports about them do I deliver to him? What messages do I carry back to them? . . . and yet I know that my activities don’t interest him in the slightest. They float above—or rather, slip below—the horizon of his concerns, are too far removed from the world of his thoughts for him to pay them any heed. Should he really need me for anything, he’ll make use of me (and devote about as much thought to me as he does to the bootjack in his dressing room), and if he should lose track of me as he did when Maud drowned in the pond in Bessarabia, he’ll make as little effort to find me as he did in the fourteen years after Maud’s death and the last seven years since we parted in Bucharest. Our encounters are planetary; each of us follows his own orbit and eons pass without them intersecting. And if they do, neither one is diverted. Uncle Helmuth would surely be able to explain that using Hindu cosmology. . .

• • •

A thought in the middle of the night (I’m having a miserable time falling asleep; I lie awake for hours and watch the sky turn gray):

Rub Scherping’s nose in Gertrude Stein’s “people are not interested in stories, people are interested in existence.” No more artfully dramatized sequences of events in which characters appear as “actors,” determining the flow of the story by acting and suffering. Instead, the weaving together of existences in the motionless time-space of the narrative—existence is pure present, has no chronologic development, is in the simultaneity of past, present, and future—

no thread is spun, but a static piece of fictive reality is woven; events that occur within it are subjectivized and no longer exist as something that can be generally experienced. Instead, they stand by themselves as a pattern, the pattern of the weave in each separate existence.

(The difference between Tolstoy and Joyce—with luck, Scherping may be familiar with their tables of contents.)

Centrifugal and centripetal narration—

To obtain nuances, highlights, etc., take up some things not germane to the action—

(Scherping’s almost unimaginable astonishment that I’m plagued by such thoughts even at night [and thus definitely outside office hours], as if I had a personal interest in them, and not just as a wage earner. In fact, they’re a blessed distraction from the swarming nightmares in the Brueghel landscape of insomnia [my murder!]