“Peace be with us, Brother Schwab,” I said to the flower hill at my feet, “once again you’ve imparted a valuable lesson to me with your generous reconciliatory gesture under your white flowery splendor: we’ve got thousands of reasons, but no right and no occasion anymore to despise the burghers here, because all of us have died—you may be a little more dead than we are, here in your blossoming grove; but these are differences of degree; in essence, it’s the same: we are all of us dead. We—you and I and our true blood relatives, our contemporaries in the highway rest stops—we can now make peace with one another. Granted, they muddled up our lives with their shaman guiles, these burghers, these bastards of the bloody fucking middle classes, they screwed up our crèche period in Nagel’s garden house with their currency cuts, and in the insanity of their fictions they destroyed beautiful Babylon and all the even more beautiful plans for the New Jerusalem. But in all fairness, we have to admit that we, and those like us, eagerly beat our drums in accompaniment. The drumbeat was mostly confusing, and that only helped them. Yet it was never clear whether we weren’t just beating their rhythm, and indeed beating it most effectively whenever we thought we were drumming our sheer hatred of them out of ourselves.

“We can hedge all we like, but we are their brethren in this perishing world, and the more violently we rebel against them, the more firmly we follow the logic of our being and our decline. We follow this logic in any case, whether as revolutionaries or as conformists. For just as there is no escape from the cage of our SELF, so too there is no escape from the pens and prisons of our diverse Middle Kingdoms. No matter how isolated we may feel inside them, whether in the defiant pride of the individualist or in the misery of the lonesome man among too many, as a stigmatized reformer or as a cynical exploiter of the system—we merely express the prevailing trends and moods, we are merely witnesses to the state of affairs, symptoms, scale points on the fever curve, points on the life stages of our world within the world. As redeemers or wanton strivers, as geniuses or run-of-the-mill morons, we are tiny particles of some collective whole whose will we carry out—thereby fulfilling its destiny. None of our gestures can be dissociated from these states and currents, which furrow us like a wheat field in the wind—in the wind of the zeitgeist, which, in any Middle Kingdom, sets its own time.