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for dutiful distraction)—the length, or shortness, of which longer or shorter text varied with the season: in winter he recited a longer text than in the summer, which finds a simple explanation in the physical fact that wax softens more rapidly in the warmth than in the cold.
    And so it was that on this splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning, all that the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, was “You fucking miserable, scummy, old Nazi bag …”, while carefully shaping the by now softened wad between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond the reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit—the entire world in effect (by virtue of which the modified situation is once again modified a bit, insofar as the old boy now carried on with his reading with two wax plugs in his ears):
    “… the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this, by the way not particularly original, perception disturbed me a little; it may be that it left a deeper impression on me than was justified, for how many countless others went through exactly the same mass justice, whether onthe same spot at the same time or at other times and other places in the big, wide world. Perhaps I was an oversensitive child, and even later on was unable to rid myself of my subtlety: possibly some sort of short-circuit occurred, a disturbance in my normal metabolic relationship with my experiences, even though I could only lay claim to essentially the same normally grubby experiences as any other normal being. Many years later—and many years before now—I knew that I would have to write a novel. At the time I happened to be hanging around, completely indifferently, in some indifferent office corridor when I heard an indifferent sound—of steps. The whole thing was over in a trice. In recollecting that moment, which I am otherwise incapable of recollecting, I have to suppose that if I had been able to preserve within myself its lucidity, some kind of distillate, as it were, of its content, then I would probably be able to grasp the thing that was truly always of greatest interest: the key to my existence. But moments pass and do not recur. I therefore supposed that I ought at least to remain faithful to its intimation; I started to write a novel. I wrote one and tore it up; I wrote it afresh and again tore it up. Years went by. I kept on writing, writing until I felt that I had finally hit upon a possible novel for me. I wrote a novel, in the meantime producing dialogues for musical comedies, each more inane than the last, in order to obtain a livelihood (hoodwinking my wife who, in the semigloom of the theatre auditorium at “my premieres,” would wait for me, wearing the mid-grey suit specially tailored for such occasions, to take my place before the curtains in a storm of applause and would imagine that our beached life would finally work free from the shoals after all); but I, after assiduously putting in appearances at the pertinent branchof the National Savings Bank to pick up the not inconsiderable royalties due for my claptrap, would immediately sneak home with the guilty conscience of a thief to write a novel anew, and in the years that I have just put behind me this dominating passion grew to be an obstacle even to my being able to present my public, avid for entertainment, with fresh comedies and myself with renewed royalties …”
    “Well now,” the old boy got up and began, with the pliable wax plugs in his ears muting the sound of his tread to the velvety glide of a panther, to pace up and down between the west-facing window and the closed entrance to the east (sidling a bit in the constricted space formed by the curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre covering the north wall of the hallway and the open bathroom door) (a door which was constantly open, for purposes