remained operative for a while, everything else having long ceased to be operative); and however many and whatever sort of deadly boring dangers to life I might have to confront, the awareness that I had “treated myself” beforehand, the awareness of my foresightedness, my secret, even my
freedom
, that inhered in the couponless breaded cutlet and in the advance on my salary that I had procured to pay for it, about which nobody besides myself could have known, except perhaps the waiter (but then he knew only about the breaded cutlet), and perhaps also the cashier (but then she knew only about the advance)—that helped me through every horror, every ignominy, and every infamy visited on me thatday. For around that time the everydays, the everydays that stretched from dawn to dusk, were transformed into systematic ignominies that stretched from dawn to dusk, but how they were transformed into that, the formulation—or series of formulations—of that otherwise most certainly noteworthy process no longer figures among the formulations I recollect now and so, most likely, did not figure amongst my formulations at the time either. The reason for that, obviously, may be that my formulations, as I have already noted, served solely for the rehearsal of my life, for the bare sustenance of my life that stretched from dawn till dusk, while they looked on life itself as a given, like the air in which I am obliged to breathe, the water in which I am obliged to swim. Quality of life as an object of formulation was simply left outside the scope of my formulations, as those formulations did not serve to gain an understanding of life but, on the contrary, as I have said, to make life liveable, or in other words, to avoid any formulation of life. Around that time, for example, certain trials were grinding ahead in the country, and to the questions of the friendly gathering that had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, the pressing, badgering questions of this gathering, mustered mainly from amongmy former students, and so from people mostly twenty to thirty years younger than I, though by that token no longer quite so young themselves, heedless to the fact that with their very questions they were interrupting and distracting me from telling the story of the Union Jack—so to those questions as to whether I had, as it were, “believed” in the counts of the indictments laid out at these trials, whether I had “believed” in the guilt of the accused and so on, I replied that those questions, and most particularly the question of the credibility or incredibility of the trials, did not even cross my mind at the time. In the world that surrounded me then—the world of lies, terror and murder, as I might well classify that world
sub specie aeternitas
, though that does not even begin to touch on the
reality
, the
singularity
, of that world—in that world, then, it never so much as crossed my mind that every single one of those trials might
not
be lies, that the judges, prosecutors, defending counsels, witnesses, indeed the accused themselves, would not all be lying, and that the sole truth which was functioning there, and tirelessly at that, was not the hangman’s, and that any other truth would or could function here except the truth of arrest, imprisonment, execution, the shot in the head, and the noose. Onlynow do I formulate it all so trenchantly, in such decidedly categorical terms—as if then (or even now, for that matter) there had existed (or exists) any solid basis for any sort of categorisation—now that they were urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, and so I was obliged to tell it all from the viewpoint of a story, to attribute significance to something which has only subsequently acquired significance in the public mind—that bogus awareness raised to the status of generality—but which in the reality of those days, at least as far as I am concerned, had only very slight, or an entirely
freedom
, that inhered in the couponless breaded cutlet and in the advance on my salary that I had procured to pay for it, about which nobody besides myself could have known, except perhaps the waiter (but then he knew only about the breaded cutlet), and perhaps also the cashier (but then she knew only about the advance)—that helped me through every horror, every ignominy, and every infamy visited on me thatday. For around that time the everydays, the everydays that stretched from dawn to dusk, were transformed into systematic ignominies that stretched from dawn to dusk, but how they were transformed into that, the formulation—or series of formulations—of that otherwise most certainly noteworthy process no longer figures among the formulations I recollect now and so, most likely, did not figure amongst my formulations at the time either. The reason for that, obviously, may be that my formulations, as I have already noted, served solely for the rehearsal of my life, for the bare sustenance of my life that stretched from dawn till dusk, while they looked on life itself as a given, like the air in which I am obliged to breathe, the water in which I am obliged to swim. Quality of life as an object of formulation was simply left outside the scope of my formulations, as those formulations did not serve to gain an understanding of life but, on the contrary, as I have said, to make life liveable, or in other words, to avoid any formulation of life. Around that time, for example, certain trials were grinding ahead in the country, and to the questions of the friendly gathering that had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, the pressing, badgering questions of this gathering, mustered mainly from amongmy former students, and so from people mostly twenty to thirty years younger than I, though by that token no longer quite so young themselves, heedless to the fact that with their very questions they were interrupting and distracting me from telling the story of the Union Jack—so to those questions as to whether I had, as it were, “believed” in the counts of the indictments laid out at these trials, whether I had “believed” in the guilt of the accused and so on, I replied that those questions, and most particularly the question of the credibility or incredibility of the trials, did not even cross my mind at the time. In the world that surrounded me then—the world of lies, terror and murder, as I might well classify that world
sub specie aeternitas
, though that does not even begin to touch on the
reality
, the
singularity
, of that world—in that world, then, it never so much as crossed my mind that every single one of those trials might
not
be lies, that the judges, prosecutors, defending counsels, witnesses, indeed the accused themselves, would not all be lying, and that the sole truth which was functioning there, and tirelessly at that, was not the hangman’s, and that any other truth would or could function here except the truth of arrest, imprisonment, execution, the shot in the head, and the noose. Onlynow do I formulate it all so trenchantly, in such decidedly categorical terms—as if then (or even now, for that matter) there had existed (or exists) any solid basis for any sort of categorisation—now that they were urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, and so I was obliged to tell it all from the viewpoint of a story, to attribute significance to something which has only subsequently acquired significance in the public mind—that bogus awareness raised to the status of generality—but which in the reality of those days, at least as far as I am concerned, had only very slight, or an entirely
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