“Tell me, do you actually exist at all?”—Yes, alas, you’ll be surprised to hear that you can exist despite all that, one can exist. I can, for one, although I leave the question of deciding between Romain Gary and Robbe-Grillet, or who’s to blame for the First World War, up to King Solomon, while the question of whether the Protestant hymn has a future is best left up to the infallible wisdom of the pope or Marilyn Monroe—what do I care—WHAT DO I CARE?! . . .

Of course, this attitude comes with a certain loneliness: it has an isolating effect if you have nothing to say about the Hamburg Derby or the Formula One races on the Nuremburg Ring, much less the Berlin Festival or the launch of Sputnik I, II, III—

Incidentally, nowadays such events problems scandals threats are delivered abstractly right to our door by the press, radio, and TV. Their emotional effect is almost identical, their informational value in fact is even greater than when you’re an eyewitness, so why should I exert myself? There’s a few things I can even admit ingenuously, for example, that culturally I’m a philistine, I don’t travel, and so I’ve never been to Baalbek or Samarkand or Angkor Wat, or—to my shame—even Crete, although that shows up prominently in organized tours, but on the other hand, it’s strange that as a rule, in museums I only look at objects I’d like to steal and have no intention of following the traces of the Hittites or learning about the creators of Cycladic sculpture or pre-Columbian pottery. That’s odd for a so-called intellectual.

—but what is that anyway? A profession? What does “an intellectual” mean? Basically, it means I can’t come home with the housekeeping money on the first of the month, taxes already deducted and accident, life, retirement, and health insurance as well as burial fund all paid up; rent, telephone, light, and gas bills all automatically deducted from my bank account; installments laid aside for the new car, patio furniture, Mom’s fur coat, the dentist, the Klepper kayak, refrigerator, TV set, floor polisher, and electric iron. I was shamelessly delinquent on all that, left it up to the repo man. If I ever happened to have some money, it ran through my fingers like water, which led to terribly embarrassing scenes. (“The child asked me in front of everybody why the man had put seals on our furniture—he said you told him it was a trademark like his teddy bears with the button in their ears—what kind of nonsense is that? You’re giving him the wrong ideas. . .”)

to whom could I possibly explain that all that didn’t count, that I expected something else from myself, required it—as an intellectual, if you will—even if it was the book Schwab was demanding from me like an existential debt . . .

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