survive in fact, because I can’t escape from this gluttonous appetite of mine — for all the horror stories emanating from the Ballhausplatz, where a half-crazed Chancellor is at large, issuing half-crazed orders to his idiotic ministers, for all the horrendous parliamentary news which daily jangles in my ears and pollutes my brain and which all comes packaged in Christian hypocrisy. I must pack up as soon as possible and leave this chaos behind, I said to myself, and I looked at the cracks in the walls and in the furniture and noted that the windows were so dirty that it was not even possible to see through them any longer. How does Frau Kienesberger spend her time? I asked myself. At the same time I had to tell myself that we invariably made excessive demands of everything and everybody: nothing is done thoroughly enough, everything is imperfect, everything has been merely attempted, nothing completed. My unhealthy craving for perfection had come to the surface again. It actually makes us ill if we always demand the highest standards, the most thorough, the most fundamental, the most extraordinary, when all we find are the lowest, the most superficial, the most ordinary. It doesn’t get us anywhere, except into the grave. We see decline where we expect improvement, we see hopelessness where we still have hope: that’s our mistake, our misfortune. We always demand everything, when in the nature of things we should demand little, and that depresses us. We see somebody on the heights, and he comes to grief while he is still on the low ground. We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit. We are always bound to fail because we set our sights a few hundred per cent higher than is appropriate. And if we look, wherever we look, we see only people who have failed because they set their sights too high. But on the other hand, I reflect, where should we be if we constantly set our sights too low? I looked at my suitcases, the intellectual one and the unintellectual one, so to speak, from my armchair, and if at that moment I’d had the strength I could have burst into uproarious laughter at myself, or else into tears. I was caught up once more in my own personal comedy. I’d changed course, and once again it was simply a laughing matter or a crying matter, depending on how I felt, but, since I wanted neither to laugh nor to cry, I got up and checked whether I had packed the right medicaments. I had put them in my red-spotted medicine bag. Had I packed enough prednisolone, spironolactone and potassium chloride? I opened the medicine bag, looked inside, and tipped out the contents on the table by the window. I reckon I can manage for about four months, I told myself and put the medicaments back in the bag. We are disgusted by chemicals, I said to myself, half aloud, as I had become accustomed to doing through being alone so much, but to these chemicals, which we despise more than anything else in the world, we nevertheless owe our lives, our existence. Were it not for these chemicals we’re so ready to curse we should have been in the graveyard — or dumped somewhere else — many years ago; at least we shouldn’t be on this earth any longer. Now that there’s no longer anything in me for the surgeons to cut out I’m entirely reliant on these medicaments. Every day I thank Switzerland and her industries on Lake Geneva for the fact that they exist and that consequently I exist, just as no doubt millions of people daily owe their existence, however wretched, to these people in their glass boxes near Vevey and Montreux, who are more denigrated than anyone else today. Since virtually the whole of humanity today is sick and dependent on medicaments, it’s hardly too much to ask that it should reflect that it owes its existence, in the largest possible measure, to these chemicals which it so often curses. I shouldn’t have been around for the last thirty years at least; I should have missed all the things I’ve seen and experienced in these thirty years, all the sights and experiences to which my heart and soul are so fervently attached. But man is so constituted that he reserves his strongest curses for the very things that keep him together and keep him alive. People gulp down the tablets that save their lives, yet they are constantly marching through the streets of today’s run-down cities in their brainless urge to condemn and to demonstrate against these life-saving tablets. Man is so abysmally stupid that he continually attacks his saviours in the most loudmouthed and utterly unthinking manner, encouraged of course by the politicians and the politically controlled press. I myself owe everything to chemicals — to put it briefly — and have done for the last thirty years. With this thought I packed my medicine bag again — in the so-called intellectual case, not in the one with the clothes. Three days ago, I thought, sitting down again in my armchair, I hadn’t the slightest thought of leaving Peiskam. I hated it, it was threatening to crush me and stifle me, but the thought of simply leaving it never occurred to me, probably precisely because my sister was constantly hinting that I should leave Peiskam as soon as possible. She was continually mentioning place names; now I realise it was just to get me to react. She mentioned the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, often Rome, Sicily and finally Palma a number of times. But it all made me the more intent on starting my work in Peiskam. She goes on and on, I thought, and won’t go away. She should go somewhere else, God knows where. I don’t care if she goes to the south seas, so long as she goes away and stays away — she had got on my nerves to such an extent. And I wondered what she wanted in Peiskam, which she ran down all the time, continually calling it the morgue and the bane of both our lives, which she would dearly love to get rid of if only I would agree. Family homes are fatal, she said, everything one inherits from one’s parents is fatal. Anyone who has the strength should get rid of these inherited family homes and inherited property as quickly as he can and free himself from them, because they only strangle him and invariably stand in the way of his development. That would suit you down to the ground, I said — to make a profit out of Peiskam as well, and I was surprised to notice that this didn’t even hurt her. Now it occurs to me that she was concerned only about me and about coming to my aid, dreadful woman though I called her privately whenever I had the opportunity. It’s eighteen months since you last left Peiskam, she said a number of times. I was furious because she never let up in her attempt to get me away from Peiskam. No one is as fond of travelling as you, yet you’ve been sitting around here for eighteen months and are dying. She said this quite calmly, like a doctor, as it now strikes me. If you stay here you’ll never be able to start on your Mendelssohn Bartholdy, that I’ll guarantee. You’re determined to remain unproductive. For one thing Peiskam is a morgue, for another it’s a dungeon in which your life is in constant danger, she said. Whereupon she went on for a long time enthusing about the Timeo, which she had once visited with me fifteen years earlier. Can’t you just see the bougainvillaeas? she said. But everything she said annoyed me. She went on and on at me with no thought of leaving. Until in the end she got fed up because she had to recognise that I was not to be persuaded to leave Peiskam again in order to save myself. And so she left. But now she had her triumph.