he said, that is one of your great qualities. If only you knew, he then said, what a bad night I had. I swallowed twice as many tablets as usual and still I slept badly. I constantly dreamt of my wife, I cannot get rid of those nightmares when I am dreaming of my wife. And I reflected about you, about how you have developed over these past few years. Strange how you have developed, he said. Basically you lead an unusual existence, a more or less totally independent one, allowing of course for the fact that there is no independent person on earth, let alone a totally independent one. If I did not have the Ambassador, he said, I would not survive the afternoons. Lately there have been so many Arabs going there it will soon be an Arab hotel when surely it has always been a Jewish hotel, Jews and Hungarians, especially Hungarian Jews, that is what has made the hotel so agreeable to me over the years, he said, I do not even mind the Persian carpet dealers who pursue their carpet trade at the Ambassador. But don't you also think that gradually it is becoming dangerous to sit at the Ambassador, could not a bomb explode there at any moment, seeing that the hotel is constantly populated by Israeli Jews and by Egyptian Arabs? Good Lord, I wouldn't mind being blown up, so long as it was instantaneous. Spending the morning at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the afternoon at the Ambassador, and having a good lunch at the Astoria or the Bristol, that is what I appreciate. Naturally I could not lead a life like this from The Times alone, he pretended, The Times more or less just sends me my pocket money to Austria. But the shares are not doing well, the stock market is a disaster. And life in Austria is getting more expensive every day. On the other hand I have calculated that, provided no so-called Third World War breaks out, I can without any problem easily live for another two decades on what I have. That is reassuring, even though it all shrinks from day to day. You are the typical private scholar, Atzbacher, he said to me, indeed you are the quintessence of the private scholar, you are altogether the quintessence of the private person, utterly out of step with our time, Reger said. That is what I was thinking again today as I climbed those frightful stairs up to the Bordone Room, that you are the genuine and typical private person, probably the only one I know and I know a lot of people who are all private persons but you are the typical, the genuine one. The way you can bear working for decades on a single book without publishing the least part of it, I could not do that. I must enjoy the publication of my work at least once a month, he said, this habit is an indispensable need and that is why I am happy with The Times for regularly meeting me in this habit and moreover paying me for it. After all, he said, I enjoy writing, those brief works of art which are never longer than two pages, which always means three and a half columns in The Times, he said. Have you never considered publishing at least a minor section of your work? he asked; some fragment, it all sounds so excellent, your hints about your work, on the other hand it is also a supreme joy not to publish, nothing at all, he said. But some time surely you will want to know what effect your work produces, he said, and you will publish at least part of your work. On the one hand it is magnificent to hold back, as it were, with the work of a lifetime and not to publish it, and on the other it is just as magnificent to publish. I am a congenital publishing person, while you are a congenital non-publishing person. Probably your work and yourself, and hence your work in relation to yourself and you in relation to your work, are condemned to non-publication, because surely you are suffering all the time by working on your subject without publishing your work, that is the truth, I think, you just will not admit it, not even to yourself, that you are suffering from this, as I call it, non-publication compulsion. Myself, I would suffer from not publishing my writing. But of course your writing cannot be compared to my writing. Admittedly I do not know any writer, or at least any writing person, who could, for any length of time, bear not to publish what he has written, who would not be curious to know the public's reaction to what he has written, I am always consumed with curiosity, Reger said, even though I always say I am not consumed with curiosity and it does not interest me. I do not care about the opinion of the public, I am in fact consumed by curiosity and I am lying when I say I am not consumed with curiosity when in fact I am consumed with curiosity, I admit it, I am always consumed with curiosity, ceaselessly, he said. I want to know what people are saying about what I have written, he said, I want to know all the time about everyone, even though I keep saying I am not interested in what people are saying, and that it does not interest me, that it leaves me cold, yet I am consumed with curiosity all the time and wait for it with the tensest expectation, he said. I am lying when I say I am not interested in public opinion, I am not interested in my readers, I am lying when I say I do not wish to know what people think about what I have written or that I do not read what is being written about it. I am lying when I say this, lying most shamelessly, he said, because I am ceaselessly consumed with curiosity to know what people are saying about what I have written, I want to know it always and at all times, and I am affected by it, by whatever people are saying about what I have written, that is the truth. Of course I only hear what The Times people say about it and what they say is not always only flattering, Reger said, but as far as you are concerned, as a philosophical writer, as it were, surely you should be just as much consumed with curiosity to know what people are saying about your philosophical writings, what they think about them, I just do not understand you not publishing your writings at least in excerpts, if only to discover for once what the public, or, as it were, the competent public, thinks about them, even though at the same time I have to admit that there is no such thing as a competent public, there is no such thing as competence, there never was and there never will be; but does it not depress you to write and write and to think and think and to write down what you think and write it down again, and the whole thing without an echo? he said. You are bound to miss a lot through your obstinate non-publishing, he said, maybe even something crucial. You have been working at your opus for decades now and you say you are writing this work solely for yourself, that is appalling, no one writes a work for himself, if someone says he is writing only for himself then that is a lie, but you know just as well as I do that there are no greater or worse liars that those who write, the world, as long as it exists, has not known any greater liars than those who write, none more vain and none more false, Reger said. If you knew what a frightful night I have had again, time and again I had to get up with frightful cramp from my toes upwards through my calves all the way to my thorax, from those diuretic tablets I have to take because of my heart. I find myself in a vicious circle, he said. Every night is a horror to me, whenever I think now I can go to sleep I get those cramps and have to get up and pace up and down my room. All night I have more or less paced up and down and when I have been able to go to sleep I was immediately wakened by those nightmares I mentioned to you. In these nightmares I dream of my wife, it is terrible. I have had these nightmares ever since her death, ceaselessly, I have them every night. Believe me, I always very nearly think that it might have been better if, with my wife's death, I had put an end to things myself. I cannot forgive myself for that cowardice. This continuous and by now pathological self-pity is unbearable to me, but I cannot shake myself out of it, he said. If at least there were a decent concert at the Musikverein, he said, but the winter programme is terrible, they are only doing stale and hackneyed things, forever those Mozart concertos and Brahms concertos and Beethoven concertos which by now get on my nerves, all those Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven cycles have become insufferable. And at the Opera dilettantism is rampant. If the Opera were at least interesting, but at the moment it is totally uninteresting, bad repertoire, bad singers and a miserable orchestra to boot. Think of the Philharmonic a mere two or three years ago, he said, and what are they today,