You’re alone in space, cast out like a raft at sea, exposed to it like a dartboard to its darts, and you can no longer run away from your destiny and anything can happen. You can expect eagles or hawks to swoop down from the stars and cast themselves over you in a frenzy, because you’re the only thing in the whole world that’s soft, something a beak can sink into, something a talon can dig into; you can expect meteors or whatever to slit open your bare breast, naked in the face of eternity; but the only thing that happens is that space starts singing, space starts singing out of solitude. ‘The only thing’ — but no, it’s more than just ‘only’, it’s pretty horrible.
The odd song, you think you could no doubt put up with the odd song; but that’s not how it is: you can’t put up with it, you just have to. ‘Space’, that silly little concept you like playing around with when you’re out walking through the reeds and the trees, in parks or refrigeration plants, or sitting in your rocking chair watching the sky flickering over the top of the lilac hedge; space, the little lake where idyllic cloud boats glide along before the wind; space as it seems to be when you’re still in the little hole on earth where you were born, grew up, were ill-treated or ill-treated others and where you’re going to die any minute — that space is just a lie for anyone who has experienced properly this enormous, all-consuming, embittered solitude, stuck on to a shiny metal field and with nothing around you and above you but the most gigantic, the loneliest of all wildernesses, the whole of space, the true extent of which you never dared think about while you were living in your hole on earth: it’s like a bottomless well, and you lean further and further out in the hope of seeing water, of seeing something tangible instead of just this terrifying emptiness, and in the end you lean so far out, you fall, and then you fall and fall and fall for the whole of your life without experiencing anything but this endless falling and you die while you’re still falling and although you haven’t come to any sign of a bottom you’re annihilated while you’re still falling and gobbled up by the darkness after your pitiful failed effort at filling it with meaning, the meaning that comes from looking for a bottom.
But even so, you don’t realize how huge this space is by falling or lying there stuck to the ground like that, feeling the pressure against your chest; it’s only when space starts singing you begin to grasp what you’ve had no idea about before, and you catch on with such shattering certainty that you’d burst like a balloon if only you could. But when you’re lying there stuck so hopelessly to the magnet, there’s nothing you can do about it: all you can do is listen, you can’t even raise your hands and stick your fingers in your ears, and in any case: that wouldn’t help either because when space is singing out of solitude, you’re changed into a big, tense, listening ear and if you don’t want to hear anything you’d need a meteor to stick into it, or a heavenly body might do, a star perhaps. As for the song — oh, it’s so beautiful and yet terrible, it’s the most beautiful thing there is and yet the most horrible thing there is. If only you could be killed by it, but all you can do is lie there alive and let the song flow through you like water through a turbine, and it will always be like that, you feel space will always echo with solitude and you yourself, a vulnerable ear, will lie there outstretched over a heartless, naked surface listening to a cruelly beautiful song made even more cruel by the lack of echoes, atmospheric turbulence and earache.
But somehow or other: you must have been cured of this solitude, or just simply fallen asleep; you wake up in your hole on earth and see the usual little glimpse of eternity smiling through between the roller blind and the bed-end.
So, you’re not alone any more, then, you think, all right, the awkward adventure, the desperate episode is over — and life goes on, a little bit less solitary all the time; but in fact it’s not over, it’s only just beginning. You sit in your room or you go out of your room, it doesn’t matter which, and you meet people or you don’t see a soul, it makes no difference, you talk to your wall or you don’t say a word to your wall, you write a letter or you just buy a stamp, you set off on a journey or you just buy a ticket, you go out dancing or you just go to the dance hall, you do something or you don’t do anything, you let things go or you don’t miss a trick; it makes no difference, no difference at alclass="underline" you’ll always feel this glass wall separating you from everybody else even so, this hard pane of glass you always carry around with you and look through and are seen through and which you brought back with you from your journey through space. You’re as isolated as a fever patient, and that’s only right: you’ve got a higher fever than most people; you could also say: you’re as isolated as a condemned man, and that’s also right: you’re more fit to die than anybody else.
You’re alone now as well, but in a worse way than you were before; space isn’t singing out of solitude, space isn’t singing at alclass="underline" it’s raining or snowing or it’s windy — but so what? You’re alone in a dirty way, in a miserly way, an unaesthetic way — and when there isn’t any way out in any case (if ceasing to feel alone is in fact a way out), don’t be surprised that you long to be back in that huge space with its devilish but sublime music, its heartless but hygienic solitude, its absolute freedom from any kind of life, that’s true, but at the same time an absolute freedom from any necessity to seek company, to open doors where no doors exist, to smile when you feel like crying, to caress when you feel like scratching, to look for friends when you have learnt that the world is full of enemies.
You long for moments of absolute self-effacement, of the most brutal and sublime solitude with as much intensity as you can muster, with all the fire of your dreams; you have become a party to a dangerous secret, you have been initiated into the use of a dangerous poison called solitude, and like a drug addict you now divide your life into two periods: intoxication and recovery. But what should you do when you’re in your hole on earth? Should you try and acquire close friends? — No, because you’re afraid, and probably rightly so, that having a close friend, even if ‘close’ is as relative as you like, will put you in an awkward position from the outset, for your chances of being flung out into wide, cold space will be all the fewer. You should keep people at arm’s length, then — and come to that, the glass pane or the membrane surrounding you is of considerable help. Should you get yourself a mistress? — Yes, but only so that when a suitable moment comes, you can terrify her with your coldness, get her to hate you, to push you away from her with the coldest of hands, give you a push full of hatred which flings you head over heels into space, that was just what you wanted — thank you very much! Or join the social whirl, perhaps, mixing with sympathizers and people of like mind, and letting yourself be bitten by the snakes slithering around the salons and claiming they admire you, respect you, etc. Or why not expose yourself to the contempt of the whole world, to the anger of the whole world, how you do it is irrelevant, and the result is irrelevant come to that as long as it can drive you into a state of absolute solitude, if only it can make you hear once again how space is singing out of solitude.