The Play of the Eyes [antikvár]

Büchner in the Desert Kant Catches Fire, as the novel was then titled, had left me ravaged. I could not forgive myself for burning the books. I believe I had got over my regrets about Kant (later Kien). He had been treated so cruelly while I was writing the book, I had gone to such lengths repressing my pity for him, hiding the relief, the sense of liberation I felt at the thought of ending Kant's life. But the books had been sacrificed to this liberation, and when they went up in flames, I felt that the same thing had happened to me. I felt that I had sacrificed not only my own books but also those of the whole world, for the sinologist's library included everything that was of importance to the world, the books of all religions, all thinkers, all Eastern literatures, and those of the Western literatures that were still in any sense alive. All that had burned, I had let it happen, I had made no attempt to save any part of it; what remained was a desert, and I myself was to blame. Eor what happens in that kind of book is not just a game, it is reality; one has to justify it, not only against criticism from outside but in one's own eyes as well. Even if an immense fear has compelled one to write such things, one must still ask oneself whether in so doing one has not helped to bring about what one so vastly fears. Catastrophe had taken root in me and I could not shake it off. Seven years before, the seed had been sown by Karl Kraus's book The Last Days of Mankind. But now the thought of catastrophe had taken a personal form that stemmed from the constants of my life—fire, whose connection with crowds I had recognized July 15, and books, which