The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas Page B

estate in
Locus Solus
, or to the Alcarria, an Alcarria described by Roussel, for example. I’ve come to gain access to that instant when a man seems to take on, once and for all, who he is. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to leave my wife in peace for a few days. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to hesitate. I paused doubtfully. I’ve come to find out whether there is any logic in being invited to Kassel to pull off a Chinese number. I paused thoughtfully.
    I paused for even more reflection when I noticed that the pessimism that came over me so inexorably at that hour had begun to strongly take hold. I was beginning to see that the so famous aesthetic instant (I had thought that one day I would or wouldn’t know what it was) would never be within my grasp. Was it normal for my pessimism to increase so much in so few minutes? Unfortunately, yes. The onset of the black hours always erupted without warning, and straightaway I got to thinking that I didn’t have many years left and everything in my life had gone by very fast; why, just a few days ago, I was young and carefree, but it had all changed in a short time, this was now an incontrovertible fact, and I felt sad. When the black hours flared up almost punctually evening after evening, I could never avoid sliding relentlessly down the slippery slope of the most pessimistic and dangerous thoughts.
    To top it all, I remembered something a friend told me (not such a good friend, to judge by his actions) whenever he wanted to depress me. He’d do this when he noticed I was already depressed. He said that during the night the essence of night does not let us sleep. I have never understood very well what the sentence meant, but I found it terrifying. I turned it over in my mind a few times. Preventing us from sleeping. Was that something at the very core of the night? Did the night only make sense when it managed to stop us resting? It was early to go to bed, but I was worn out; the final punishment of the walk to platform 10 had been brutal, and the dawning of consciousness there was so intense it had left me in bits. I now thought only of sleep, though I was very afraid I wouldn’t be able to attain it. In spite of the desire to lie down, I found the strength for something that turned out to be very banal compared to Pavel Haas’s music on the platform.
    I found the strength for a final foray into Google, where I stumbled upon a photograph of Chus Martínez, whose face seemed to me essentially lively, making me guess (I wasn’t in the least bit mistaken) that this was someone who’d internalized her ability to have ideas as profoundly as someone once said that the whaler in
Moby-Dick
had internalized his harpoon.
    I don’t know how long I spent, half asleep, looking at the photo of Chus; she had invited me to Kassel and we still hadn’t met, though there was every indication I’d have dinner with her on Thursday. The more I looked at her face, the more I saw it brimming with ideas, and ultimately that made me think about them thoroughly—about ideas, I mean, and their presence and absence in modern art. I remembered that, in the mid nineteenth century, no European artist was ignorant of the fact that, if he wanted to prosper, he had to interest the intellectuals (the new class), which turned culture into the topic most often addressed by its creators, and the sole objective of art became the suggesting and inspiring of ideas. Strolling around Kassel, one was left in no doubt that there at least, things were still under the influence of that mid-nineteenth-century transformation. Elsewhere, no. Because almost all over the rest of the world the intellectual had taken a nosedive, and culture had become extraordinarily trivialized. But in Kassel a certain romantic and Duchampian aura remained; it was a paradise for those who loved intellectual conjecture, theoretical discussions, and the elegance of certain speculations.
    I’ve always been enormously