An imaginary comprises those shared meanings, symbols, values, narrative and representations of the world that we hold at a subconscious level. It’s usually inarticulate and unstructured, being expressed in images and stories rather than in theoretical terms. But it is our imaginary that allows us to make sense of the world in which we live and our place within it, providing an imaginative, narrative context that, in Alison McQueen’s word, emplots our shared lives, allowing otherwise incomprehensive events to make sense as part of a larger story.
My theme is the Gnostic imaginary, where I understand Gnosticism in the terms set forth by twentieth-century philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes (1923-87), as an inward relation to transcendence. Gnosticism, Taubes argues, originates in the early centuries of our common era as the result of thwarted apocalyptic and messianic impulses. We might understand the Gnostic imaginary (my term, not his) as channelled through human history, both religious and secular. My argument is that we can find Gnostic strategies of inversion in modern literary writing and literary criticism, as they help reckon with a world where meaning is no longer given. As we will see, the work of Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is exemplary here – a near contemporary of Taubes, who also grew up in Austria, and who likewise wrote in the wake of the Second World War.
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In order to understand the Gnostic imaginary, we have to understand the apocalyptic one. And in order to understand that, we will have to take ourselves all the way back to the political crises of ancient Palestine.
There was trouble back then. Conquest, foreign rule and pressures of assimilation, as well as exile and deportation, were not supposed to befall the Israelites, God’s chosen people. They had, after all, entered into a covenant with God, which guaranteed God’s protection so long as they obeyed his law.
The prophets claimed that the sufferings of Israel were evidence of disobedience and would cease once the Israelites returned to God. But this message, the opening of the prophetic imaginary, was no comfort for those Israelites who struggled most assiduously against cultural assimilation: for they had it worst of all.
How could God let this happen, if he was in ultimate control of the world? The prophetic imaginary gave way to the apocalyptic one in response to this question. The age of prophets came to an end in the excesses of persecution, when a new kind of writer and text appeared, using a rich, dense symbolism. The apocalyptic imaginary can be seen at work in the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelations, which are full of cataclysmic imagery of an ambiguous kind, including natural disasters, ravenous beasts, plague and fire. But they are also full of wild messianic hope. That hope lies in apocalypse.
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Etymologically, and as it is used in the Judeo-Christian tradition, apocalypse means an unveiling or revelation – a kind of vision. Cataclysm may well be imminent, but it opens onto a radical future, in which the evil forces of the present will be vanquished. There is promise in the end of the world.
The apocalyptic visions recounted in the books of Daniel or Revelations dramatize God’s temporary abandonment of control of the forces of evil as well as the promise of his return to reassert his dominion. The persecuted can look forward to their coming vindication, to the divine redemption that will bring an end to suffering and death.
The apocalyptic imaginary thus makes sense of the torments of the present. Suffering has an explanation; it happens for a reason. In the approaching end times, havoc will be wreaked upon the persecutors and the Messiah will triumph over politics, history, over all human institutions and practices – the entire worldly order. The dualism between God and the world will be resolved once and for all when the kingdom of God opens.
But what happens when the putative Messiah arrives and fails? What, when Jesus the Christ is nailed to the cross, leaving the worldly order apparently unaltered?
Taubes argues that Jewish messianic logic plays out through an inward turn: the opening of introspective conscience, of the domain of faith. The letters of Paul of Tarsus see the spiritual fulfilment which was supposed to follow from the apocalyptic ending of the present age is interiorised, taking place in the human soul. For Taubes, this inward messianic realm of freedom, of faith, suspends not only the Mosaic law, which is to say, the legal framework of the Roman Empire but also the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, that is, general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith.
For Nietzsche, this is a despicable move. The apostle is a nihilist! The Pauline revolution – Pauline antinomianism – expresses ‘a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty’. Paul nihilistically devalues the noble and the beautiful; more: he repudiates their very source. For Nietzsche, Paul and his followers hate this world because they fear it, placing their faith instead in a world beyond.
What is striking in Taubes’s analysis is that he embraces Nietzsche’s charge against Paul. Yes, the apostle is a nihilist. Who wouldn’t be when the Roman empire, with all its might and glory, crucified your Messiah? To take the love of the neighbour as your guiding principle, to turn to celebrate those persons regarded as outcasts, as refuse, was as far as possible from the imperial cult of the Roman world.
So how are these nihilists, the Pauline believers, to live? In what Nietzsche calls ‘holy anarchism’. But how are we to understand that?
We might find Paul’s answer in his notion of ‘as though not’ (hōs mē), in he calls for an adjustment to our investment in worldly relations and actions:
The appointed time has grown short. From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. (1 Corinthians 7:29, my emphasis)
As Paul notes, the world decays; the form of the world is passing. The Messiah was nailed to the cross, but he rose, and he will return.
So how then are the addressees of Paul’s letter to endure the corrupt and fallen world? Not by rising up against it, because it’s going to collapse anyway. In Taubes’s words, ‘There’s no point in raising a finger […] Sure it’s evil, but— what are you going to do?’ The messianic community has to stay alert! be vigilant! – to watch for the revelation of signs of the coming of the Kingdom. But it has to stay quiet for now.
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Taubes brings Paul very close to what he calls called Gnosticism. Some have argued that never really was a body of work that could be called Gnostic, this category being a phantasmic retro-projection of twentieth-century thinkers. An assessment of this claim is too outside my scope. I will follow Hans Jonas’s vastly influential Heideggerian reconstruction of Gnosticism, where the clear parallel between the Gnostic imagination and its prophetic forebear is evident: the strong sense of the dualism of human and divine realms. Crucially, the Gnostics reject the apocalyptic idea that this dualism can be resolved. Human history is not, for them, about to come to an end, which is the problem. It all goes on forever.
This means we are condemned to inhabit this world as strangers, in perpetual alienation. The true god is elsewhere – desperately remote. The cosmos – the world we see around us – is the work of the demiurge, a wicked deceiver god.
The Gnostic task is remember that this world is not our home, communing with the true God, who we can know only in his absence. The gnosis, knowledge – from which Gnosticism gets its name – is given in the relation to the true god, which helps the Gnostic to live against the grain of the fallen domain.
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The parallels between the apostle Paul and the Gnostics become clear in Taubes’s reading of his Letters.
For Paul, like the Gnostics, the cosmos is ruled by demonic powers; Satan is the prince of this world. For Paul, like the Gnostics, the aim is to achieve a kind of gnosis, or knowledge, that allows you to hold yourself back from full participation in the world, which remains ruled by the wicked ‘powers and principalities’. For Paul, like the Gnostics, very little can be said about God. As Taubes writes:
The negative statements about God—unrecognizable, unnameable, unrepeatable, incomprehensible, without form, without bounds, and even nonexistent—all orchestrate the . . . Gnostic proposition that God is essentially contrary to the world.
This suggests that what Paul calls faith is a relation to an empty transcendence, lacking determinate content and contesting at every turn the works that support the order of the world. God is what Hans Jonas called the ‘nothing of the world’, understood as the antithesis of worldly power.
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If Jonas is one important source for Taubes’s notion of Gnosticism, Gershom Scholem is another.
As Willem Styfhals shows, a scholar to whom I am indebted here (this essay is really just notes in his margins), Scholem regards the event we know as the ‘death of God’ –the rise of secularism, generalised disenchantment, etc. – does not mean the end of messianism. Indeed, the true content of religious messianism reveals itself only as religious traditions lose their authority in secular modernity. For Scholem, the disenchanted world is alive with religious energies, even they are usually in disguised form, unavowed and displaced. As such, the death of God, disenchantment, secularism, even modernity itself as a religious phenomenon – a moment in the history of religion.
A startling claim, since Modernity is supposed to reveal religious claims and systems of authority as human-all-too-human fictions that lack divine legitimation. Religion is supposed to wither away. For Scholem, this very must be understood as a religious gesture: the very groundlessness and contentlessness of the messianic call makes it superlatively religious.
Modernity, on this account, might be understood as the fulfilment of messianic thinking. The relation to the divine can now be revealed as an empty transcendence. By the same stroke, a whole theological vocabulary put itself out of use, ready for new appropriations outside traditional religious practice.
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One such appropriation occurs in literary criticism. Reading Styfhals’s study of Gnosticism in postwar German thought, critic Stephen Mitchelmore, who publishes his work at his blog, This Space, notes with surprise how words like apocalypse, messianism, transcendence and eternity, which he thought meant little to him, have come to bear a ‘charge of significance’. Literature, Mitchelmore argues, ‘marks the place where religious thinking recurs in a culture where it has otherwise withdrawn, in this case as anachronistic, and yet cannot be repressed’.
Mitchelmore reminds us how Scholem finds the ‘nothingness of revelation’ [das Nichts der Offenbarung] that is also the ‘revelation of nothingness’ in the work of Kafka, and how Jacob Taubes makes similar arguments with respect to the Surrealists.
(We might also include Blanchot’s ‘primal scene’ in these terms – that fragment of The Writing of the Disaster where a young child looks up to the ordinary sky and sees:
the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.
Might Blanchot’s ’nothing beyond’ be read in a similar way: not as an atheistic rejection of transcendence, but as a vertiginous gnosis of the beyond as nothingness? Can his literary practice an engagement with ‘empty transcendence’? I’ll leave this question open.)
There is one author of particular importance to Mitchelmore: Thomas Bernhard. I will extend Mitchelmore’s reading here.
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The fiction for which Bernhard is known consists of wildly hyperbolic, virtuosic rants by Geistesmenschen, intellectual men, engaged in obsessive artistic, philosophical or musical projects. Typically written in a single unending paragraph in musical, fugue-like prose, his novels lack description or direct speech, his narrators frequently taking up and performing grammatical variations on notable words or phrases. It all takes place, as the critic Michael Hofmann notes, ‘at a pitch where you don’t know if it’s wildness or control or somehow both’.
The fulminations of Bernhard’s narrators are full of inconsistency and resentment, revelling in varieties of often self-inflicted despair. They rail against post-war Austrian narrow-mindedness and ignorance. For this reason, Bernhard is often read rather quickly as a satirist, a scourge of Austrian life.
Hofmann, writing in the London Review of Books praises Bernhard’s novels as ‘sculptures of opinion, rather than contraptions assembled from character interactions’; each book ‘is a curved, seamless rant’. Hofmann fantasises that Bernhard could have added running heads on the pages of his work for the subject of each of his rants, e.g. ‘‘children’s education’, ‘the Catholic Church’, ‘the Austrian state’, ‘Heidegger’, ‘Mahler’, ‘sentimental regard for the working classes’’, etc.
But in a letter to the London Review of Books, writer David Auerbach objects that Hofmann misses out on what is significant about Bernhard’s novels, merely confirming the stereotype of the Austrian as the nest-besmircher who hates his country and its people. Sure, there might be ranting in Bernhard’s work, but it is [Auerbach writes] ‘never ranting for its own sake and the rants are never to be taken completely at face-value, no matter how appealing or justified the target’.
As such, Hofmann is wrong to claim that Bernhard’s texts are ‘sculptures of opinion’, each ‘a curved seamless rant’. Auerbach maintains that the ‘seams show, constantly’, particularly in [what he calls] ‘the constant lurch into the histrionic and the lack of proportion’ in Bernhard’s writing; [as he writes] ‘the way in which a Bernhard narrator will go from attacking Nazis to, say, attacking cheese’.
Auerbach’s point is that Bernhard’s narrators are not there merely to call out and satirise the hypocrisies of Austria. They inveigle against pretty much everything – including themselves. This is what makes his work more than a collection of satirical rants. Satire depends on old norms, on stable, dependable and authoritative values – on a shared sense of what is just and unjust, and ultimately of the position from which to make judgement. Bernhard’s narrators are deprived of this position, being implicated in their rhetoric, opening displaying their own weaknesses and resentments, their confused desires and foibles. As critic Gabriel Josipovici remarks, ‘for them there’s no escape, no position of invulnerability from which one can criticise others’.
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Bernhard simply does not do standard craft-of-the-novel stuff. His famous periscopic technique, which see, as W.G. Sebald notes, Bernhard’s narratives always at least one remove from what is supposed to have happened, supplant the sureness of plot, character and dialogue which secure the verisimilitude upon which more conventional novelists depend.
Bernhard’s monomaniacal intense word-torrents give expression to a free-wheeling negativity that foregrounds the unruly voice of the narrator, forever teetering on the edge of chaos. The excesses of Bernhard’s style – one translator professes to find his allegedly arbitrary use of italics to be simply embarrassing, rendering fewer than half of them into English – are inseparable from what he has to say.
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But what is it that Bernhard has to say? For Josipovici, Bernhard’s style evolved in the attempt to talk of what mattered to him:
the cleansing of language of its banalities; the articulation of complex and confused desires and resentments; the guilt and pain of our memories of what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945.
Critic Stephen Dowden claims Bernard is articulating what Paul Celan called a Gegenwort, a counterword, ‘against exhausted narrative ploys and poetic forms, against inherited cultural complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century’. The familiar techniques of novelistic craft – well-rounded characters, involved and complex plotting, fulsome description etc. – only deepen this complicity. The ’structural certainties’ of conventional novels reassure us that reality remains just as it always was. Dowden: ‘if the novel had not changed much after the catastrophe, then it must mean that the world, despite everything that has happened, was still pretty much the same too’.
But as Bernhard says on the occasion of winning one of many literary prizes, ‘the time for tales is over, the tales of cities and the tales of States and all the scientific tales … the universe itself is no longer a tale. Europe, the most beautiful Europe, is dead – that is the truth.’ Europe is dead – the European dream is over. And storytelling is over, too, if it isn’t to simply perpetuate tired old dreams.
What then, when all the theodicies and their secular offshoots have run aground; when there is no apocalypse to bring about the promise of renewal? What then?
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Thomas Bernhard keeps the faith.
His narrators lack the reassurance of old norms, of stable, dependable and authoritative values. They lack, furthermore, a safe position from which they can judge the world around them, coherent only in collapse, at the edge of chaos. They implicate themselves in their own rhetoric, wildly protesting against everything and nothing, from Nazism and the Austrian Catholic church to … cheese.
But they keep the faith – their version of the ‘obligation to express’ which Beckett professes in his dialogue with Georges Duthuit. ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’, says Beckett. With respect to Bernhard’s work, and perhaps that of the other literary writers I have mentioned, this this can be rewritten as follows: nothing to say in this world, nothing to express in this world, no means of expression in this world – nothing, except the obligation of the counterword, the questioning of what is and what is not complicit with the horrors.
Does this mean Bernhard dreams of an apocalypse that would put an end to this world? It does not. For him – like Beckett, Blanchot and others – there is no other world, which means that all the literary writer can offer is a way of writing against. For Beckett and Blanchot, this means ever-new strategies of stripping away literary figurations of selfhood, abandoning traditional plot until the obligation to write reveals itself, in Jeff Fort’s phrase as ‘an empty necessity that insists all the more brutally for being voided of its contents’.
Bernhard’s work does not show the same kind of narrative exhaustion, destituted personhood, but might also be understood to explore its impoverished conditions. Bernhard’s literary antinomianism is revealed in a famous phrase particularly important to Stephen Mitchelmore, indeed forming the main title of his second collection of literary essays: the opposite direction.
The phrase comes from a famous passage from, The Cellar, one of Bernhard’s autobiographical writings. Fifteen-year-old Bernhard, just emerged from his horrific schooling and looking for a job, presses the woman at the labour exchange for a job that might take him ‘in the opposite direction’ [die entgegengesetzte Richtung]. Here’s the passage:
I knew why I had made [her] take out dozens of cards from her card-index: it was because I wanted to go in the opposite direction. This was the phrase I had repeated to myself over and over again on my way to the labour exchange. Again and again I had used the phrase in the opposite direction. The woman did not understand what I meant, for I actually told her that I wanted to go in the opposite direction. She probably thought I was out of my mind, for I used the phrase to her several times. How can she possibly understand me, I thought, when she knows nothing about me, not the slightest thing? Driven to desperation by me and her card-index, she offered me a number of apprenticeships, but none of them was in the opposite direction and I had to turn them down. I did not just want to go in a different direction – it had to be the opposite direction, a compromise being no longer possible. So the woman had to go on taking cards out of her card-index and I had to go on rejecting the addresses on the cards , because I refused to compromise: I wanted to go in the opposite direction, not just a different one.
And so on, over the next few pages, showing how the young Bernhard ended up as a grocer’s apprentice in a freezing cellar in a rough part of town.
In the opposite direction: The repetition of the phrase, Mitchelmore comments opens ‘a void in language’. ‘This may be the reason why Bernhard was unable to explain what he meant to the official at the labour exchange’, he explains. ‘The words become a void in which the infinite drops into the finite’.
A void in which the infinite drops into the finite: how might we understand Mitchelmore’s suggestive claim? Is it that the repetition of the phrase, ‘in the opposite direction’ has made it lose its denotative power – its referentiality, its power of description, its power to show or tell?
There might be something to this. I hear in it an echo of Paul’s ‘as though not’ – a suspension of relations and actions in the world in view of the Second Coming. Except that there is no coming messiah for Bernhard. There is no culminating apocalypse. Which means there’s no hope at all, or so it seems.
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The Cellar recounts how Bernhard catches a terminal lung disease contracted in the titular cellar, where he serves his apprenticeship. He ends up in a sanatorium, his illness destroying his dreams of becoming a singer. This is the same period in which he loses his beloved grandfather, and his mother. A grim volume, which follows the earlier one which recounts his terrible years as a schoolboy in wartime Salzburg, the town under constant aerial bombardment and the young Bernhard full of suicidal desires.
But Bernhard also recalls moments of joy in his autobiographies. One of them, chronologically the first in the sequence but actually written last, is a cycling trip taken on a borrowed bike. Bernhard is eight years old. He’s off to see his aunt in Salzburg, a trip of twenty-two miles – a forbidden journey! An exhausting journey! And he can’t even reach the pedals whilst siting on the saddle! Bernhard-as-a-boy worries about being punished, but he hopes his audacity will be so admired that his offence will be forgiven.
The eight-year-old grows weary. One of his stockings is torn and covered in oil. His bike-chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It’s dark, and there are several miles to go … For a while, cycling, he stood up into the wind like the protagonist of Kafka’s fragment ‘If one were only an Indian’, as if ‘on a racing horse, leaning against the wind’. His silver-painted bike became a steed without spurs, without reins … That was his joy: a fleetness of movement, a cycling away ...
And then there’s the passage I have already mentioned where fifteen-year-old Bernhard seeks out a job that really was in the opposite direction.
It’s here that we might see some intriguing parallels with Paul of Tarsus.
The apostle Paul transvalues the ugliness of death on the Cross into a symbol of triumph. Bernhard transmutes values of sober investment in the future, pursuance of a recommended career, etc. into comically perverse defiance. Paul celebrates what Taubes calls ‘a subterranean society, a little bit Jewish, a little Gentile, nobody knows, what sort of lowlifes are these anyway’. Bernhard goes out among the working-class of as an antidote to stifling hypocrisies of middle-class Salzburg.
Paul turns his followers inward, interiorising the messianic idea. The young Bernhard, turns to a passionate but groundless inward faith in the opposite direction. The comparison seemingly breaks apart in their respective styles. Paul’s letters show a command of rhetorical skill, arguably continuing the Hellenist tradition of homonoia or concord speech, designed to attain unity. Bernhard’s writing, with his passion for underlining, the idiosyncrasies of his use of tense, the complex syntax of his opening sentences, his direct speech within direct speech and reported speech within reported speech, might seem to be doing something very different, aiming at anything but concord. His work is held together at speed, at an eight-year old’s cyclist’s speed, at the speed of a fifteen-year-old bolting off in the opposite direction, at the speed of a mature narrator of Bernhard leaving the ghastly dinner party of Woodcutters. His work can often seem on the verge of simply falling apart. But perhaps we might discover a concern with concord.
Bernhard in an interview: ‘what I write can be understood only if one realizes that the musical component comes first and only then what I narrate. Once the former is established, I can begin to describe things and events. The problem lies in the how.’ And he goes on: ‘the musical element affords as much satisfaction as playing the cello, in fact more, as my pleasure in the music is compounded by my pleasure in the idea I want to express' …
The ideas I want to express: it might be here that we discover a desire for concord after all in Bernhard’s prose: a harmony between the hyperbole of the style and the hyperbole of the subject matter. And this is what we find in the musicality and relentless rhythm of his prose.
There is, of course, a danger to rhythm. Emmanuel Levinas warns us that it can effect ‘a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity’. Poetry and music threaten to captivate us, to lull our instincts. We might think here of the music of the prose of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, like Bernhard, threw out much of the familiar furniture of the novel.
Blanchot finds Heidegger’s Nazism particular repugnant because the German philosopher is a writer. The experience of writing, for Blanchot, delivers the author to an experience of depersonalisation that is a polar opposite to the certainties of authority and identity. Blanchot attributes his own turn from his far-right political affiliations to his writing of fiction.
What about Céline, whose ignominy is such that Blanchot never mentions him in his writings? Perhaps we could argue that his wartime writings utterly compromise the discoveries he made in his pre-war fiction. The latter, with their own rhythms their splintering of the traditional sentence, can perhaps be recuperated as offering a counterword, but his oeuvre remains tainted as Bernhard’s does not.
I want, in closing, to think about the ‘as though not’ of Bernhard’s writing, the empty transcendence, the hidden knowledge that might speak to us in our Gnosticism. I want to understand what Mitchelmore calls ‘a void in which the infinite drops into the finite’ might be understood affirmatively, even joyfully, despite what we might see as the grimness of Bernhard’s work.
‘Optimists write badly’, according to Paul Valéry. Blanchot’s rejoinder: ‘But pessimists do not write’. The worse is not, so long as we can say,’ This is the worst’, says Edgar in King Lear. Bernhard sings this is the worst. Bernhard renders musical the this is the worst. ‘In the dark times, will there be singing?’ asks a poem by Brecht. And it answers: ‘there will be singing about the dark times’.
Bernhard’s repeated phrase, ‘in the opposite direction’ is an intensifier, a force of active nihilation which becomes a rising, an acceleration, even a jubilation. There is the joy of outcycling or outstriding or outrunning the world. There is great joy in his work as it affirms its own virtuosity in hyperbolic invective, as it lets its blunderbuss scatter at some deserving targets. A joy of rhythm, not in the sense of a pulsed beat, but a dance of language, that Dionysianism that unites death and chaos with both desire and the affirmation of life. A music that creates as it destroys.
I’ll finish with a quotation from the very end of Woodcutters, the protagonist of which has escaped a dreadful dinner party hosted by an artistic couple in Vienna:
I ran through the streets as though I were running away from a nightmare, running faster and faster toward the Inner City, not knowing why I was running in that direction, since to get home I would have had to go in the opposite direction, but perhaps I did not want to go home. […]. It was four in the morning, and I was running in the direction of the Inner City when I should have been going home. I went on running, running, running, […] and as I ran it seemed to me that I was running away from the Auersberger nightmare, and with ever greater energy I ran away from the Auersberger nightmare and toward the Inner City, and as I ran I reflected that the city through which I was running, dreadful though I had always felt it to be and still felt it to be, was still the best city there was, that Vienna, which I found detestable and had always found detestable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own city, my beloved Vienna, and that these people, whom I had always hated and still hated and would go on hating, were still the best people in the world: I hated them, yet found them somehow touching—I hated Vienna, yet found it somehow touching—I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them—I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it. And as I went on running, I thought: I’ve survived this dreadful artistic dinner, just as I’ve survived all the other horrors. I’ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse, I thought, without knowing what I would write—simply that I would write something about it. And as I went on running I thought: I’ll write something at once, no matter what—I’ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse at once, now. Now, I thought—at once, I told myself over and over again as I ran through the Inner City—at once, I told myself, now—at once, at once, before it’s too late.