And that brought him round to August; he apologized if he had talked too much already, he hated bores. For August too was part of the century’s great tendency. True, he had chosen an eighteenth-century form, one might say an obsolete form, but he had developed it so much further than the old automatists had done that in his hands it became almost new. He had simply carried their experiments to an extreme—and what more modern than this lack of a sense of bounds, this need to take something as far as it would go? The art of the automaton was a dead art—he hoped August did not deceive himself into thinking otherwise—but in August’s hands it had taken on a last, brilliant life, it had achieved a realism surpassing the old art of waxwork, for his fanatically imitative figures seemed to live and breathe. And because the age desired the illusion of motion, and because the devices that made pictures move were still in a crude state, and because the photograph had not yet been adapted to its final purpose—because of all this, the time was right for an automaton theater. He did not want August to think that he hadn’t considered the matter rather carefully.

August scarcely knew what to make of this speech, which he had not been able to follow in all its turnings—he himself was accustomed to thinking mostly with his fingers—but one thing struck him forcibly: he did not like to be told that he was out of step with his time, or in step with his time. He felt that his work had nothing whatever to do with such questions, which obscurely threatened him by ignoring everything that mattered most. What mattered was that one day in a drab green tent something had lit up in him and had never gone out. The art of clockwork was his fate, but clockwork was also a sort of accident; what he cared about was something else, which had no name and had only an accidental relation to time and place. He did not say any of this to Hausenstein, but he was grateful to Hausenstein for having made him have those thoughts. The long speech had another curious effect: somehow, and he could not quite say why, he felt sorry for Hausenstein, and knew that he must never reveal this to him. The evening exhausted August, but before it was over he had decided to go to Berlin. He would need six months in Mühlenberg to solve three clockwork problems. Hausenstein said that he himself planned to knock about for a few months before getting down to business. When he rose to leave, he drew on his gloves, picked up his walking stick, and remarked, “Amusing, isn’t it?” Suddenly the grimacing troll snapped its jaws shut. August was uncertain whether Hausenstein’s words had referred to the clever troll, to the automaton theater, or to life itself.