chloride? I opened the medicine bag, looked inside, and tipped out the contents on the table by the window. I reckon I can manage for about four months, I told myself and put the medicaments back in the bag. We are disgusted by chemicals, I said to myself, half aloud, as I had become accustomed to doing through being alone so much, but to these chemicals, which we despise more than anything else in the world, we nevertheless owe our lives, our existence. Were it not for these chemicals we’re so ready to curse we should have been in the graveyard - or dumped somewhere else - many years ago; at least we shouldn’t be on this earth any longer. Now that there’s no longer anything in me for the surgeons to cut out I’m entirely reliant on these medicaments. Every day I thank Switzerland and her industries on Lake Geneva for the fact that they exist and that consequently I exist, just as no doubt millions of people daily owe their existence, however wretched, to these people in their glass boxes near Vevey and Montreux, who are more denigrated than anyone else today. Since virtually the whole of humanity today is sick and dependent on medicaments, it’s hardly too much to ask that it should reflect that it owes its existence, in the largest possible measure, to these chemicals which it so often curses. I shouldn’t have been around for the last thirty years at least; I should have missed all the things I’ve seen and experienced in these thirty years, all the sights and experiences to which my heart and soul are so fervently attached. But man is so constituted that he reserves his strongest curses for the very things that keep him together and keep him alive. People gulp down the tablets that save their lives, yet they are constantly marching through the streets of today’s run-down cities in their brainless urge to condemn and to demonstrate against these life-saving tablets. Man is so abysmally stupid that he continually attacks his saviours in the most loudmouthed and utterly unthinking manner, encouraged of course by the politicians and the politically controlled press. I myself owe everything to chemicals — to put it briefly — and have done for the last thirty years. With this thought I packed my medicine bag again — in the so-called intellectual case, not in the one with the clothes. Three days ago, I thought, sitting down again in my armchair, I hadn’t the slightest thought of leaving Peiskam. I hated it, it was threatening to crush me and stifle me, but the thought of simply leaving it never occurred to me, probably precisely because my sister was constantly hinting that I should leave Peiskam as soon as possible. She was continually mentioning place names; now I realise it was just to get me to react. She mentioned the Adriatic , the Mediterranean , often Rome, Sicily and finally Palma a number of times. But it all made me the more intent on starting my work in Peiskam. She goes on and on, I thought, and won’t go away. She should go somewhere else, God knows where. I don’t care if she goes to the south seas, so long as she goes away and stays away — she had got on my nerves to such an extent. And I wondered what she wanted in Peiskam, which she ran down all the time, continually calling it the morgue and the bane of both our lives, which she would dearly love to get rid of if only I would agree. Family homes are fatal, she said, everything one inherits from one’s parents is fatal. Anyone who has the strength should get rid of these inherited family homes and inherited property as quickly as he can and free himself from them, because they only strangle him and invariably stand in the way of his development. That would suit you down to the ground, I said - to make a profit out of Peiskam as well, and I was surprised to notice that this didn’t even hurt her. Now it occurs to me that she was concerned only about me and about coming to my aid, dreadful woman though I called her privately whenever I
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