insinuate or force myself into this role, I thought. Gambetti came to me at Zacchi’s instigation, and his parents expressly asked me to be their son’s tutor, telling me that I would be an ideal teacher. I too feel that I am the ideal teacher for Gambetti, and he shares this feeling. What his parents have come to regard as sinister strikes him as necessary and entirely natural. Gambetti has repeatedly told me that my teaching is consistent and logical, and that he regards German literature, which was a fortuitous choice on his part, simply as a pretext for everything else I teach him — meaning my ideas, which he has meanwhile made his own. Little by little we must reject everything, I told Gambetti on the Pincio, little by little we must oppose everything, so that we can play our part in the annihilation we envisage, putting an end to the old and finally destroying it in order to make way for the new. The old must be discarded and destroyed so that the new can emerge, even though we don’t know what the new will be. All we know is that it has to come, Gambetti — there’s no going back. Thinking in this way, we naturally have the old against us, Gambetti, which means that we have everything against us. But this mustn’t deflect us from our goal, which is to replace the old by the new that we long for. Ultimately we have to abandon everything, I told him, discard everything, extinguish everything. Looking down on the Piazza Minerva, I remembered telling Gambetti of a dream I once had, in which I was in a transverse valley of the Grödnertal with my college friend Eisenberg, Maria, and Zacchi. I first had this dream at least four or five years ago, I told him. In it I was still a young man, perhaps twenty. Eisenberg was the same age and Maria not much older. We’d taken rooms in a small inn called The Hermitage. I can still see the inn sign quite clearly. I had often recalled this dream and tried to fathom its meaning, but now I wanted at all costs to distract myself from thinking about the dreadful telegram I still held in my hand, and the dream seemed to provide the most effective distraction. I cannot say what made me recall the dream. Perhaps it was a remark that Gambetti had made two or three hours before I received the telegram, a passing remark containing the word Alps. Gambetti had mentioned that next summer he intended to go to the Alps with his parents, and of course with you, he had added emphatically. He loved the Alps, he said, and we could stay in a narrow valley that he had known since childhood and spend an extremely pleasant and profitable time pursuing our studies, away from the distractions that usually interfere with them. Quite incidentally he had said he would be going to the North Italian Alps with his parents, but above all he wanted to take me too, and if I didn’t mind he would invite me to join them on this Alpine study vacation, as he called it. We had just been talking about Schopenhauer, and about Schopenhauer’s dog, which he had placed above his housekeeper in order to be able to think out and finish writing The World as Will and Idea, and about how the dog and the housekeeper had guided Schopenhauer’s pen, as Gambetti put it. Then, to my surprise and apropos of nothing, Gambetti had suddenly talked of visiting the Alps next summer and taking with him a notebook with squared paper, though he did not explain the significance of the squared paper and I did not press him, but I can distinctly hear him uttering the words to the Alps with my parents and adding and of course with you. This, I fancy, is what reminded me of my strange dream, which comes back to haunt me, I may say, several times a year. I think I first had the dream four or five years ago, at Neumarkt in Styria, in a dark twin-bedded room in an old villa belonging to relatives of my mother, where I was to recuperate, they said, from an unidentifiable feverish illness. I lay with the curtains drawn in this house belonging to my relatives, who have a big furniture factory at Neumarkt. I do not know why I was visiting them, probably for no other reason than to catch cold in Neumarkt, which is one of the wettest and gloomiest places I know. I spent two days and nights at Neumarkt, a really ugly town, lying in bed with drawn curtains and no nourishment. I can no longer even vaguely picture the faces of my relatives. All I know is that I had this dream at their house. We had arrived in the rain in this valley in northern Italy, I told Gambetti — Eisenberg, who was my age, Zacchi, the philosopher, who was also my age, and Maria, my first woman poet, my greatest poet at that time. Maria joined us from Paris, not from Rome, where she already had her present apartment. But in those days the apartment looked different: it contained only hundreds of books, not thousands. And no carpets, Gambetti. But even in those days Maria spent most of her time in bed, where she received her guests. Maria joined us from Paris, dressed in a crazy trouser suit. She looked as though she were going to the opera or had just been to the opera. Black velvet trousers, Gambetti, with big silk bows below the knees, and a scarlet jacket with a turquoise collar. She naturally caused something of a stir when she turned up in that Alpine valley wearing this operatic outfit. Eisenberg went to meet her, and I watched from a distance as she walked toward The Hermitage, moving her arms, her legs, and her head in an operatic fashion, Gambetti, as though she were dancing toward the inn. At first, from a distance, her outfit couldn’t be seen so clearly. Naturally I didn’t think it was Maria. It had never occurred to me that she would come, and certainly not in such an outfit, either from Paris or from Rome. Eisenberg went to meet her, but neither Zacchi nor I did. It was as though Eisenberg knew she would be arriving at that time, while Zacchi and I didn’t. Standing at my window inside the inn, I assumed that Zacchi was in his room, still in bed but not asleep: he usually got up late, unlike Eisenberg and me, who have always been early risers. Eisenberg used to get up even earlier than I did, I told Gambetti, so it was natural that he, not Zacchi or I, should go out to meet Maria. Maria arrived very early, before five in the morning. I had had a sleepless night, as I always do in the Alps, and had spent more or less the whole night looking out of my window for hour after hour, until I had almost collapsed, I told Gambetti, though in fact I didn’t collapse. Then I saw Maria approaching the inn, where we had checked in the evening before in order to discuss Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems. In my dream this was our only reason for going there, and we had chosen what we regarded as an ideal setting, this narrow mountain valley, which is approached by a trail, not by a road, and can therefore be reached only on foot. Maria should have been with us the previous evening, and I can still see myself trying to mollify the landlord by repeatedly telling him he could rest assured that the chief guest, our friend Maria, was definitely coming. The landlord of The Hermitage was afraid that we intended to pay for only three people’s board, for we had booked not only our rooms but. full board, so that we could pursue our plan totally undisturbed, the plan being to compare Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea with Maria’s poems. Eisenberg, Zacchi, and I had agreed in Rome that it was a particularly attractive project. It was Eisenberg’s idea, and Zacchihad embraced it with enthusiasm. I had then booked the rooms at The Hermitage, and Maria had agreed to everything, so long as it’s not Heidegger, she said, so long as it’s Schopenhauer. She said she was looking forward to our enterprise but had to spend the night in Paris. She wouldn’t tell me why, though I begged her to. In my dream I told Maria that it was rather odd to go to Paris just for one night. There must be an