“Each plows his hard bow through the torrent, a figurehead of his loneliness, and gazes with stony eyes at whatever drifts past: that was you, that was what I was for you, a smashed bureau with gaping drawers between a hat and a collar, half a roof and perched upon it a cat that fled up the chimney between a shock of hair and an ascot, a mouth flitting past like a weary butterfly, unhappy, angry, obstinate, earnest, dreamy, disappointed, passionate, sensitive, whining, closed upon the soundless shriek for self-realization . . . And these too, as you see, are merely art-historical reminiscences.

“Let us pass them by. We are not attached to them, we are not sentimental—at least not in the long run. This too dissolves, everything dissolves into swatches, color strips, structures, patterns. It eventually turns monochrome: gray, the color of madness . . . And don’t tell me it doesn’t make you feel as happy as a pig in shit.

“But, of course, this is no vacation at a health spa to buoy up your soul so that you can go home to Hamburg fortified and endure life there for another six months. On the contrary: this place visibly sucks the marrow from your bones. It puts you into a different state of matter, as though you were still yourself but vaporized, as it were. Instead of being made of skin and fat and flesh and bones all welded into your Jockey shorts, you are just a tiny cloud, the astral phenomenon Schwab . . . But that is an elevation, believe me! The transubstantiation of ourselves into the abstract is an elevation. And how proud you should be that you, friend, are capable of such an elevation, such a transubstantiation of yourself—without the aid of writing, without having to commit yourself to paper! The others who write, and whom you so greatly admire—what are they if they do not realize themselves on paper? For example, your friend Nagel, our friend Nagel, if you insist. He’s a delightful fellow, after all, and a great one, isn’t he? But he’s important only on paper. Tolstoy was a creep, Proust a fop, Joyce a stigmatized petit bourgeois—if you take off his glasses and comb his hair to the side, he looks like Hitler. But on paper, oh my! What demigods they are! Do you follow me? Or am I too muddled—this wine is far stronger than one thinks. Also, I’m alone so much here that I’m not used to talking, especially in German. If you think my words are swarming like flies on the dung heap of my thoughts, then please tell me so, I’ll shut up . . . No? You’re much too kind! Well, as I was saying—an abstruse notion, you will think: the crystalline hardness of the French, their quality of being formed, their capacity for form . . . all this must be due simply to this abstraction and transubstantiation into a different state of density. . . Perhaps a human being first truly realizes his potential in pure abstraction. After all, the most forceful human image is, no doubt, that of the man at Hiroshima whose silhouette was burned into the stone by the atomic flash. . .