So often you did this, Max. People say. Freud says. Some philosophers say . . . Faced with a personal question, you reached into that endless trove of European literature for a line of poetry or Latin quotation, some perfect aphorism or anecdote. Herodotus, Dante, Walser, Hölderlin, your beloved Goethe. You never had to search for very long. In those first years I knew you, I was dazzled by the vastness of your knowledge, your easy summoning of the right words, the illuminating reflection, the obscure but essential detail. I wanted to take notes when you spoke, like the diligent student I was back then. Though never your student, you would have hastened to say, as if there were a hierarchy to transgression, an order of moral failings. For so long I felt I contained so little in comparison to your extraordinary interior universe. But it was a rather ruinous depository, this storehouse of history, full of human wreckage. I think that you saw yourself as Benjamin’s Angel of History, looking ever backwards into the past and perceiving not a chain of events but a single, unending catastrophe. History, you once wrote, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.

There were times when I hated this in you, this retreat into anecdote, into history. But later I realised that it was part of your habit of keeping people on the periphery. You used the words of others as a form of deflection, a way of distancing people from the truth of your own thoughts, your own heart. It struck me sometimes as a kind of dishonesty, but I find myself doing it more and more as the years have passed. Faced with a probing question, I reach for someone else’s words. Virginia Woolf about human happiness being found only in small daily miracles, matches struck in the darkness; or Paul Valéry on the way that a work is never finished, only abandoned. Sometimes I quote you, on the most important appointments being those we keep with the past, or on how history changes direction at the crucial moment because of some tiny, imponderable event. Little scattered clues, though clues too obscure for most people to notice, and too impersonal to incriminate even if they did. No earring left slipped between the bedsheets.