Moment of True Feeling Read Online Free PDF Page A

as a dream. And what now? How absurd that a panoramic view of this kind should correct the dimensions of things. What then were the right dimensions? My dream was true, he thought, and now I’ve betrayed it to this harmony that was drummed into me. Panoramic coward with the eyes of a glider pilot. That dream must have been the first sign of life in me since God knows when. I should have taken it as a warning. It came to me because I’d been looking in the wrong direction, it wanted to turn me around. To wake me up and make me forget my somnambulistic certainties. It has always been easy for me to forget dreams. It will be difficult to drop my certainties, because they will cross my path day after day—though in reality others have merely dreamed them for me. The certainty, for instance, of my vision as I look on swarming humanity from this hill, merely perpetuates someone else’s dream of life. What, thought Keuschnig, is my dream of life? I will forget my certainty by losing myself in a dream of life. Let us suppose
that last night’s dream was my dream of life.—Keuschnig had an impulse to follow the stream that was flowing down the gutter and would soon merge with another stream—to follow it across the whole city.
    From time to time, that day, he felt very cheerful, but never for long. In the moment of breathing easy, his breath caught, and everything became impossible. Even in his bright moments he couldn’t help wondering what would happen next. Always having to think of the future, yet unable to conceive of any future—that added up to hopelessness. Up until then he had seldom felt so cheerful and never so hopeless. And every time he felt cheerful he lost confidence in his feeling; his cheerfulness did not remain present to him, nothing remained present—not even the thought of a dream of life. Like a voluptuary he kept thinking of only one thing, though the one thing was not a woman’s hole but the unimaginable. Could it be that no one saw his obscene face? He couldn’t understand why after a first glance someone didn’t cast another, special sort of glance at him, or why no woman turned away after taking one look at him. Actually, a woman had turned away, averted her face in disgust. Maybe people would know him for what he was if he stood beside a clump of bushes in the park.
    He had a taste of blood in his mouth. The repulsive part of it was not that he had become different during the night but that everything seemed so eternally the same. And there was nothing repulsive about his showing himself as he did; what was repulsive was that the people around him didn’t do likewise. He tried to figure out how old he was, and counted not only the years but also the months and days,
until the minute now, in which he was standing on the top of Montmartre. He had already spent so much time! When he considered how just this last hour had weighed on him, it was beyond him that he hadn’t suffocated long ago. But the time must somehow have passed? Yes, somehow the time had passed. Somehow the time passed. Somehow the time would pass: that was the most hideous part of it. When he saw people older than himself, they instantly struck him as obsolete. Why hadn’t they gone out of existence long ago? How was it possible that they had survived and were keeping right on? There had to be some trick—routine alone couldn’t account for it. He admired them a little, but for the most part they disgusted him; he had no curiosity about their tricks. Undoubtedly that Dane over there in the car with the Copenhagen plates deserved to be admired for driving relentlessly across the whole of Europe instead of falling off a cliff on the way, but wouldn’t it have been more honorable of him to drive his car off a bridge before it was too late—on the Autobahn for instance? Because here he was just making a fool of himself with his Danish presence! —Altogether nothing