everything just once that he so longed to recognize and utilize, sooner or later, though he rather wished it would be in the immediate future. As for unutilized favorable constellations, times, moments, etc., he had plenty of those to show in his life, most people were made up of such so-called unutilized favorable (or unfavorable) constellations, everywhere you looked you saw nothing but unutilized constellations, favorable or unfavorable in character; besides, who could decide whether a constellation was favorable or unfavorable, since one might be favorable precisely because the other was unfavorable and vice versa, the unfavorable being favorable for one (head) and vice versa, it depended on the individual (head, to turn an unfavorable constellation into a favorable one, or turn a favorable constellation into a favorable one, or a favorable into an unfavorable, etc.). Besides, Konrad did not have much time left, he is supposed to have said as long as two years ago, for one thing I shall not live much longer, and then I live basically in constant distress, and basically there is never enough time, and so forth. On top of all that it was quite clear to him that he was already an old man, an old man who had an old head on his shoulders. And here was another consideration: a work such as this might be rendered worthless by being written down too soon, even though it had been completely written down, it might turn out to be a wholly wasted effort; or else it might be useless, absolutely worthless, if written down too late. But there was no way of fixing the exact time for writing such a book, this precisely was what was so terrible about it, the unique, exact, correct moment had to present itself of its own accord. He could so easily destroy the labor of decades by choosing the wrong moment or even by misunderstanding the right moment. Or else: what if he had to break off writing the book in mid-career, stopped cold by the sudden terrifying thought that he would not be able to complete it? Another possibility: suppose the book is made worthless by being actually completed, in writing, just as worthless as it is now because it has not been written down? It could be ruined simply by being precipitately written, or by being written in too circumspect a way, written too late, whichever. Small wonder, then, that he had let every propitious moment come and pass him by, weakened further by each missed opportunity, so that he could foresee being altogether too weak to write the book down when the moment to do so actually came. He would rather not know how many extraordinary products of the human intellect had been lost by precipitousness, how many by procrastination, how many extraordinary lives had been destroyed by such precipitousness or procrastination in the mind. Of course it was known how many had failed through carelessness or inattention or because of overcautiousness or excessive attention. He, Konrad said, had invested everything he was and everything he had in his (unwritten) book. But to say so publicly, to make a public avowal that he had indeed invested his all in the book was more than he dared, more than he could permit himself to do. For one thing, he was a megalomaniac in the most fatal sense of the term, as his wife certainly never hesitated to inform him, actually her daily pointed remarks on the subject made him cruelly aware of the fact, as cruelly as only such a cripple of a woman could persist in her unsparing criticisms, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and yet, on the other hand, he had only been feeling his way for decades hampered by the enormous timidity and fearfulness inspired by his task and increased by facing up to it, creeping in terror from one possibility of getting hurt to the next. So that if he should actually say it, just once, that he had invested all he had in his work, in the book he had entirely in his head, no one would believe him, he could not hope to be taken seriously, he would simply be making a fool of himself once again. He had, in fact, said this very thing to his wife, day after day, namely, that he had invested all of himself in his book, which he had entirely in his head, as he took good care to emphasize every time, to which she responded day after day by calling him a fool every time, he was a fool, she said, and she was his victim. Well then: so she was the cripple who had become the fool’s victim, you might say that one cripple had been victimized by another, one fool fooled by another, she was a cripple of a fool while he was a fool of a cripple and so forth. The opposition, the enemy, he is supposed to have said, is always bound to be in the majority. Enemies are all there is, he is supposed to have said, because even our friends are enemies, we delude ourselves into seeing a friend by putting a mask of friendship on an enemy’s face to keep the enemy out of sight, we set up the stage and let the friend enter and sit down temporarily at center stage, because we happen to need to believe in his friendship, until the time comes when we drive him away, because we are suddenly able to recognize the friend as our enemy, as just another enemy among all the other enemies that populate our stage. More enemies disguised as friends keep emerging from backstage, Konrad is supposed to have said, from every side they keep coming, out of the deepest darkness, enemies as friends, friends as enemies, all enemies, in short, and we let them down ourselves in swarms from the flyloft. The loquacity of our enemies in the guise of friends (and vice versa!) populating our stage is only our infinitely cunning, snare-setting prompter all over the stage, a stage we designed ourselves with great skill in the service of our own self-deceiving hypocrisy. The curtain goes up, our enemies (as friends and vice versa) come on stage, said Konrad, until death drops the great iron curtain, instantly crushing most of the actors. It was his own fault, no doubt about it, that he had obeyed his parents in not taking up a regular course of studies at a university, not going through with it, not completing it, as he should have, because by doing so he made himself a lifelong outsider as a scientist, though on the one hand he enjoyed the advantage of pursuing his work quite independently, but on the other hand there was the disadvantage of being completely cast upon his own resources, in utter isolation, so that he could progress only by making the most arduous efforts, having to supply the missing foundation of a so-called regular course of studies by susbtituting for it as a foundation the most extreme personal effort in the area of his unquestionably greatest talent, his gift for the natural sciences, it certainly had not been easy, but luckily for him he had never lost courage or the sense of having to take a risk where his work, that is, where natural science and therefore his work was concerned, on the contrary, the more the apparently insurmountable difficulties had increased day by day and from one so-called scientific moment to the next, he felt challenged to surmount them, and it was precisely his greatest difficulties which had spurred him on to surmount his greatest obstacles, gradually, so that he had ended up with good data and a good conscience, well able to devote himself, or as he called it, to give himself up to working on his book, which he had entitled beforehand