my city. I love them all, Lisbon especially, and Warsaw and Krakow and Palma, even Vienna and Paris, and London and Palermo, but I couldn’t bear to live in any of them for long now. I’ve left them all behind, without feeling that I’ve lost something that belongs to me, that belongs to me absolutely. Sometimes I’ve thought I could spend as long in Lisbon as I’ve spent in Rome, but then I always recall Uncle Georg’s telling remark about Lisbon, which seems to me the most splendid city of them all. Indeed, Lisbon is more beautiful than Rome, but it’s provincial. The pleasantest years of my life were spent in Lisbon, but not the best years; these have been spent in Rome. Lisbon has a perfect blend of architecture and nature, such as you find in no other city. It’s a pity you’ve never had a chance to visit Lisbon, Gambetti. The years I spent there were my pleasantest and probably my happiest. But I have to say that Lisbon was not the ideal city for my mind, which is what matters to me most, whereas Rome always has been. Rome is of all cities the most congenial to the mind: it was the ideal city for the ancient mind, and it’s the ideal city for the modern mind — precisely for the modern mind, given the chaotic political conditions that prevail here today. No other city, not even New York, is ideal for the mind, but Rome quite definitely is, beyond all doubt. It’s explosive, and that suits me, Gambetti. It’s explosive, Gambetti, and that’s what I love. At this point it occurred to me that I had already gone quite a long way toward alienating Gambetti from his parents, and I wondered how far I could go, how far it was permissible to go, in alienating him from his parents and their world — that is to say, from their ideas. But this thought at once struck me as absurd. I was annoyed at having even entertained it, for my relationship with Gambetti naturally involves alienating him from his parents and their ideas. By teaching him German and getting him to read Siebenkäs and The Trial I am ostensibly acquainting him with German literature, but in fact I am quite consistently alienating him from his parents and their ideas, I thought, as if I were entitled to alienate him from them and remove him farther and farther from their world, a world that was diametrically opposed to mine. In other words, I thought, I’m now doing to Gambetti what I did to myself ages ago, when I removed myself from Wolfsegg. What was good for me then, I thought, is good for Gambetti now. I’m playing the role of Uncle Georg, who drove me out of Wolfsegg with all his ideas, with his revelations about Wolfsegg and all it meant, which finally made it impossible for me to remain there. Just as Uncle Georg drove me out of Wolfsegg, I’m driving Gambetti out of his parents’ world. But I haven’t deliberately tried to do this: it’s happened automatically, without my being aware of it at first, as a by-product of my teaching, so to speak. Gambetti has heard my views on how the world should be changed, by first radically destroying it, by virtually annihilating it, and then restoring it in a form that I find tolerable, as a completely new world — though I can’t say how this is to be done, only that the world must be annihilated before it’s restored, since it’s impossible to renew it without first annihilating it. Listening to my views, he becomes much more attentive and fascinated than when I hand him a copy of Siebenkäs and tell him to read it and then ask me questions about it. Gambetti’s mind has already absorbed a great deal from mine, I thought. It will soon contain more of my ideas than his own. His parents are uneasy about what they see happening, I thought. And they’re not as pleased to see me as Gambetti makes out. True, they invite me home for dinner, but basically they wish I’d go to hell, because for years they’ve considered me a bad influence on their child, who has meanwhile become an adult and outgrown them. They’re alarmed at having brought a budding philosopher and revolutionary into the world, which is not what they intended, someone who’s out to destroy them instead of evincing a lifelong, unquestioning attachment to them. They now blame me not only for possibly being the seducer of their naturally much loved son but for being his destroyer, and consequently their own, whom they have invited into their house and to whom they pay a great deal of money. For Gambetti’s tuition is not cheap. I charge higher fees than any other tutor, but the Gambettis are rich people, I tell myself, and I don’t have to have a bad conscience about relieving them of so much money, which in any case I don’t need, as I have plenty of my own. But the Gambettis have only an inkling of this, no precise knowledge. Gambetti of course knows about my financial position. He once said to me, If my parents knew how rich you were they wouldn’t pay you anything and wouldn’t allow me to be taught by you. As it is, they think they’re making a generous gesture and see themselves as patrons. For them this is an important element in my tuition arrangements, which they’ve found rather worrying for some time. They take refuge in their role as patrons in order to distract themselves from the idea that by paying you to teach me they might be conniving at something discreditable or destructive. Gambetti himself finds it quite in order for his parents to throw their money out the window, as it were, so that I can alienate him from them and implant in him ideas that will one day shoot up and pose a terrible threat to them and their world. Yet it was never possible for them to see me just as a harmless German teacher from Austria, I thought — it’s so obvious what I am and what I’m about. So I don’t reproach myself for the function I perform, which is to inculcate a knowledge of German literature in their son’s mind, along with my own ideas about changing, and hence annihilating, the world. After all, I didn’t