en bloc! All of them! The great quantifications are to me like blood brothers. And just what do you think — as Friedrich Nietzsche would say — and just what do you think? That you have taken off your glasses, and so you will escape with impunity? You won’t escape. Digging around in one’s own innards will not go unpunished. And that’s the second question. The breaking of a taboo. For the time being, it’s OK. Seemingly OK. After all, removing contact lenses for the night differs in no way from removing an artificial jaw — I understand that this can be OK. Barely, but it can be OK. For the time being, no sign of danger. For the time being. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not exaggerating in the least. You yourselves will see. You will see what you will live to see. And you will live to see women who, for the purpose of elevating their hygiene, will remove their wombs for the night. You will see it. You will live to see it. You. Not us. Just so that everything is clear: there is no conservatism here as far as the development of bodily embellishments is concerned. We know perfectly well that there is no need to improve on the Lord God, and that Katharina von Bora didn’t depilate her legs particularly carefully. We know this perfectly well, but we couldn’t care less. At the current stage, we are in favor of depilation. We are in favor of depilation in its most inventive places and patterns. We say yes to the most radical make-ups, tattoos, hair streaks. Rivets, studs, fake nails, wigs, hair extensions, body painting — by all means. Even an artificial tan — if it really has to be — well, OK. Even slight surgical corrections, if they are of the superficial sort, are acceptable in a pinch. But going beneath the surface? Crossing through the gates that lead to the center of the body? Of course, once you have shaved, tattooed, shortened, lengthened, painted, enlarged, diminished, sealed up, trimmed, pierced, bedecked everything that is on the surface with jewelry; of course, once you have done everything possible and impossible on the surface, the reflex is to go below. Once you have done cosmetic operations upon everything that is on the outside, why not correct the profile of your liver? Do what you like. I don’t reach any deeper than to the depth of contact lenses, and even so — I drown in that depth. I am lying on the sheets, waiting for her, and I can’t get rid of the ghastly impression that I am about to embrace, and that for the whole night I will be embracing, a body composed of fewer elements than an hour ago. My hands glide apprehensively along her skin, as if in the fear that any moment they will come upon a ghastly gap or expanse — like the hole in a tortoise shell. The decided majority of my potential victims are ephemerids, meteors, may flies. They flash and vanish like the seemingly not bad student of archeology. The world is now marching full speed ahead, and there practically isn’t a day when one doesn’t feel like killing somebody. Somebody new, of course. Because I also have a group of highly distinguished veterans, who have been waiting for execution for a long time. There is even a certain record-holder — his name, once entered and never deleted. My poor old man — indefatigable in his striving for perfection. Be ye perfect, even as your Lord which is in heaven is perfect. Not long ago, when the faucet in my kitchen broke, and when, almost involuntarily, I cut out a leather gasket from the end of an old belt, I realized that the invention of the leather gasket — truly much more durable than a rubber one — and the art of changing it, is the single thing he taught me. He tried to teach me probably all the arts known to man. In all of these skills, which were to be mastered by the path of exercises and grueling effort, I was supposed to be, if not the best in the world, then decidedly better than all my peers. Nobody is an Einstein or an Edison, but if you adhere to Lutheran principles — who knows? During breakfast yesterday I came upon an article in the newspaper about one of this year’s outstanding Polish lyceum graduates, who had learned to read and do sums when he was four years old, and from then on school went like clockwork. He won competitions and contests, he wrote works of scholarship, he had perfect mastery of five foreign languages, foreign schools were interested in him, and now he was setting off to study at a select university in America. The roll stuck in my throat, the coffee burned my mouth, I read with a twinge in my heart. A gray old fart, heading toward sixty — I read in growing panic, I looked around, and I felt the reflex to destroy and conceal the article, so that it not, by chance, fall into my old man’s mitts. Boy, what fortune you’re no longer alive. You can strive for perfection in every situation. Instruction is the way of life. We would be traveling — let’s say — wherever. We would be traveling — let’s say — by PKS Bus to Wąwóz, to some pious auntie. We would be traveling — let’s say — with this or that velocity, the road to be taken — let’s say — was known, the time — let’s say — was this or that. How many operations and calculations was it possible to perform on the basis of even such elementary parameters! And variations! And eventualities! And likelihoods! And what would happen if the bus moved at a uniformly accelerating pace? And, purely abstractly, let’s suppose that, on the way to Wąwóz, we pass from the first to the second cosmic velocity; then how, in terms of the laws of physics, would the course of such an intellectual experiment look? It wouldn’t be so bad if it were just those five kilometers to Wąwóz. But what about once the ritual roundtrips between Krakow and Granatowe Góry had begun, and it had become 145 kilometers one way? We made this journey a million, perhaps a billion times, and to this day I don’t know its roadside sights, because the entire time I was solving the problems dictated by my indefatigable old man. And when, God forbid, it was raining, and there weren’t any sights, then the real nightmare began. Then I had to determine which motions and which velocities gave the resultant that was the motion of the drops of rain gliding diagonally across the windowpane of the bus. And often it rained the whole way — and, with the PKS buses of those days, this was more than three hours. Poland is a rainy country. By the end, my head was thumping, I couldn’t understand a thing, I wasn’t able to solve the simplest operation. “Do I demand that you become an Edison or Einstein?” my old man seethed in a furious whisper. “Do I demand that you be a genius? No! The only thing I want is that you understand the basic things in the world around you!” Unfortunately, the world was in constant motion. Everything around me was moving. A dog of a specific mass ran with a specific velocity across a meadow with a specific surface area, trees swayed like a pendulum, clouds scudded according to vectors, the stone that had been cast sank, submitting to the force of gravity, even the seemingly motionless tea in the glass had a specific surface tension — the world was a ceaseless assignment for calculation and execution. I passionately cursed every movement of a reality that was in ceaseless flux. (