I am, evolutionarily speaking, just as obstinate, just as behind the times, just as anachronistic as the French. And yet, dwelling among them here, I feel as if I’d been cast away among the lotus-eaters. Here, Jaykob Gee, here in Paris, here in the brightest jewel in the diadem of cities that once crowned Europe, here in the one true metropolis left in Yurop, here I remain a stranger, and I become more and more of one the more I recognize it as spirit of my spirit, form of my blood, the more intimately I find it within me, the more ingrown every pissed-on cornerstone and little pile of garbage is in me. Homeland—its scent of exhaust fumes and empty vegetable baskets, its dove-blue and lemon-yellow light, the pale salamander bellies of its scrubby plane trees, its murderous car races in the streets, its witty sky above the dragon scales of roofs along the Seine . . . Under this sky, sir, in whose moods and whims I am greeted again by all the promise of my childhood, all the delights I expected of the world, all the yearning of my adolescence, all the urgent eroticism of my youth—under the sky of my life’s other half, which I refuse to give up for lost—under this sky, I and everything around me become more and more abstract, more and more unreal, lose more and more density. As though the world were stretching out, spreading its material thin, flying apart in something like a universal molecular expansion. The things that were solid are starting to flow and the things that flowed are volatilizing in the ether. The boulevard Haussmann—a white stream, shoreless like the Rio de la Plata. The place de la Concorde—a Turner bay in which an obelisk is melting. Do you still consider this Paris, monsieur? Do you still believe this is Pearris, Freanss, a place in the core and heart of Yurop, our old quondam Europe? Geographically at least still on this continent, built on terra firma, and not an island floating in the unfathomable depths and distances of no-man’s-sea? . . . I, for my half-part, am no longer certain. I cannot gain a foothold here. I’m lost here just as mindlessly as the German drunkard Schwab. His plight is my plight. I have nothing over him. True, I have lost half of my life, it was amputated. But I am lying when I say I have forgotten it among the lotus-eaters. It is a lovely phrase that is meant to be touching, the opening phrase of a book that has never been completed. In fact, I have forgotten nothing of the flesh-and-blood reality of the world of yesterday. I still carry my Europe within me. But a decade slips in between its image then and its image today—ten years that I likewise cannot forget, that afflict me in nightmares and daytime visions, all kinds of brutalities amid fantastic light effects, all kinds of incomprehensible events, which—alas! alas!—also belonged to the all too warm-blooded living reality of the world of the past. For instance: