If I may perchance wish now, after all, to tell the story of the Union Jack, as I was urged to do at a friendly gathering a few days—or months—ago, then I would have to mention the piece of reading matter which first inculcated in me—let’s call it a grudging admiration for the Union Jack; I would have to tell about the books I was reading at the time, about my passion for reading, what nourished it, the vagaries of chance on which it hinged, as indeed does everything else in which, with the passage of time, we discern what, whether it be the consequentiality of destiny or the absurdity of destiny, is in any event our destiny; I would have to tell about when that passion started,and whither it propelled me in the end; in short, I would have to tell almost my entire life story. And since that is impossible, in the lack not just of the requisite time but also of the requisite facts, for who indeed, being in possession of the few misleading facts one deems to know about one’s life, could say of himself that he even recognises right away as his life, that process, course and outcome (exit or exitus) which is so totally obscure to himself—himself above all; so probably it would be best if I were to begin the story of the Union Jack with Richard Wagner. And though Richard Wagner, like a persistent leitmotif, would lead us with uncanny sureness, by a direct path, to the Union Jack, I would have to broach Richard Wagner himself at the editorial office. That editorial office exists no more, just as the building in which that one-time editorial office then (three years after the war, to be precise) was for me, for a while, still very much in existence has long existed no more—that one-time editorial office full of gloomy corridors, dusty crannies, tiny, cigarette-smoked rooms lit by bare bulbs, ringing telephones, yells, the quick-fire staccato of typewriters, full of fleeting excitements, abiding qualms, vacillating moods and, later, the fear, unvacillating and ever less vacillating, which seepedout from every cranny, as it were, to squat over everything, the one-time editorial office that had long since
not
conjured up long-bygone editorial offices, where in those days I was obliged to turn up at some execrably early hour, something like seven o’clock every morning, say. With what sort of hopes, I wonder?—I mused aloud and publicly in the friendly gathering that had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack. The young man (he would have been about twenty) who, through a sensory delusion to which we are all prey, I then considered was, and sensed to be, the most personal part of myself, I see today as in a film; and one thing that very likely disposes me to this is that he himself—or I myself—somehow also saw himself (myself) as in a film. This, moreover, is undoubtedly what renders tellable a story that otherwise, like every story, is untellable, or rather not a story at all, and which, were I to tell it in that manner anyway, would probably drive me to tell precisely the opposite of what I ought to tell. That life, that twenty-year-old young man’s life, was sustained solely by its
formulability
; that life ground along, with its every nerve-fibre, every fitful effort, solely at the level of
formulability
. That life strove with all its might
to live
, and in that respect stood in contrast, for example, tomy present striving, hence also my present formulations, these incessantly miscarried formulations, colliding incessantly against the unformulable, grappling—naturally, to no avail—with the unformulable: no, the striving for formulation, then and there, was actually aimed at keeping the unformulable—namely, the essence, which is to say this life, grinding and stumbling along in the dark, lugging along the burden of darkness—in the shadows, because that young man (I) could only live this life in that way. I engaged with the world through reading, that epidermis around the layers of my
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