“Sure, we knew all of this. But we kept on living as if we didn’t know it. After all, we had a promise to fulfill. HE WHO HATH, TO HIM SHALL BE GIVEN . . . A gift means having substance, so they say morality gives expression to this substance; talent means finding this expression in an interesting way, with the insight that the word spoken for communication separates more than it connects, that little else is possible but the flight into absurdity, into humor, satire, parody. Didn’t we act as if we didn’t know this, even though we gave ourselves to know with meaningful augur’s gazes that we knew all too well? . . . above all: that we aren’t ironicists and parodists by nature but rather stolid souls—but called by the zeitgeist to transform our sadness into mockery—of that which we secretly held to be our true calling: to become great writers: to speak beautifully of the world in which we live. Let’s leave that up to Nagel. He does it with so much devotion that he’s forgotten to say how this world truly is. Let’s be of good cheer, brother! The truth of this world in which we live now emerges only in caricature. We can hold our heads high. We are the Eulenspiegels of our time. We finally admit to being what we had always been before, unconsciously and with the ludicrous arrogance of various kinds of grandeur: the clowns and court jesters of the middle classes. Albeit with the fool’s privilege to say what’s on our minds. Now, we believe we’re finally doing for fun the things we had once done in holy beery earnestness: celebrating funerals. We anti-burghers thus carry ourselves to the grave in the universal carnival of ‘realities.’ As the clowns of the burghers, we are burghers in the final phase of a logical development. Just as parody is the final phase of an art, so too the burgher has to become his own parody as an artist and bohemian. Indeed, if possible, as a celebrated artist and bohemian. To recognize the burgher in his apotheosis, one must see the procession of the BIG ELEPHANT BALLYHOO as pompes funèbres. Only then do the values reveal themselves. This is the only way to show how awfully futile it was, the only thing we really wanted to do: take revenge.

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“He who writes takes revenge—wasn’t this too a discovery that mellowed our suffering, that gave us a feeling of majestic superiority? Now, we have the choice: either nobly to forgo revenge and hence final salvation and enter the icy void without further ado—like you, my dead friend—or else clamp our teeth into our neighbor and proliferate with him in the slow-motion explosion of metastases, and, as everyone knows, one’s neighbor is really oneself, right?