The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas

still there, now in my memory. I was on the balcony just long enough to establish a mental connection with the hotel annex, with the gloomy building next door that housed Sehgal’s room, a chamber I converted into a sort of lighthouse in the night, off in a direction I could look toward by going out on the balcony if I felt I was drowning in so much solitude (with ghosts) in my cabin.
    It was better to have that invisible lighthouse than nothing, though, true enough, the cabin still remained to be built. Or not, since the best way to construct it was to imagine a life of thought in that hotel room. I must do this without further ado.
    My model for the cabin was Skjolden, the place where Wittgenstein managed to isolate himself to hear his own voice and to prove he could think better there than from his chair in the university. Indeed, from the cabin, Wittgenstein began to address those wanting to start seeing things in a new way and not the scientific community or the general public. For him, thought could reach the level of an artistic gesture. His philosophical ideal was the pursuit of a liberating clarity, the opening up of consciousness and of the world; he did not wish to offer truth, but truthfulness; he wanted to offer examples rather than reasons, motives rather than causes, fragments rather than systems.
    While I was thinking about Skjolden, I lay on the bed with my hands linked behind my head, looking at the ceiling. And then I remembered a friend who once told me that any form of exile for a spiritual man became a prompt for inner reflection. How good that phrase could have felt if I’d thought of it or remembered it in the morning, when I tended to be in a better mood. Even so, it did help keep me going. In the long run, I thought, one realizes that attending to one’s personal matters in a productive way is the most important thing in the world.
    I looked at the clock and saw it was a good time to call Barcelona. My elderly parents told me the nationalist demonstration in Barcelona hadn’t been exactly nationalist but more pro-independence, at least that’s what the local television stations repeated ad infinitum.
    It suddenly occurred to me to think that you can’t defend the freedom of the masses, only your own. Perhaps because I found myself on the threshold of my inner reflection, of the creation of the cabin, it was logical that talk of mass movements should startle me, just when the move I was preparing to make demanded individuality.
    Then I phoned my wife and told her my day had in no way resembled an action novel, but things had constantly been happening to me. When she asked me what things, I could only say I had been joking. I didn’t want to tell her, for example, that I had no sooner arrived than the people of Kassel seemed to be expecting me, and this misapprehension had made me think of the day I drove to Antwerp with my nephew Paolo and, near the pretty train station, began to feel a wave of presentiment that the city would suffer some sort of retribution. These visions seemed anchored in reality, but from what ancestor’s remote past did they spring? Was it preposterous to imagine that I’d lived out previous existences in European cities and seen catastrophes coming? Was it crazy to sense I was back on streets I had traveled repeatedly in other times? Nothing could be ruled out in a place like Kassel, which, opening its doors to the ideas of the avant-garde, was implicitly rejecting any invitation to logic.
    I didn’t want to tell my wife any of this, perhaps because these were things you don’t say over the phone. So I said goodbye and soon afterward began to notice—no doubt this was brought on by the lonely state I’d plunged into—that from outside, through curtains stirred by a gentle current of air, could be heard isolated cries, cradled on the wind. The reflections of light dancing on the ceiling seemed to forecast that a crack was about to open all the way across it at any