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there exists a great deal more besides and I even know that both can exist simultaneously. I no longer need my poems for that; in the books on my shelf it has all been said much better and more convincingly. But what would become of us if that were a reason for giving something up? Where should we all be? So I go on writing, though what I write often seems gray and wooden in comparison with the evening sky which is now growing spacious and apple green above the roofs while twilight fills the streets with a drift of violet-colored ashes.
    I go downstairs, past the darkened office and into the garden. The Knopfs' door is open, and inside the three daughters of the family sit around the lamp as though in a fiery cage, busy at their sewing machines. The machines whir. I glance at the window next to the office. It is dark; so Georg has already disappeared somewhere. Heinrich, too, has gone to the reassuring haven of his customary restaurant. I take a turn around the garden. Someone has been sprinkling it; the earth is damp and smells very strong. Wilke's coffin shop is empty, and there is no sound from Kurt Bach. His windows are open; a half-finished, mourning lion cowers on the floor as though it had a toothache, and beside it stand peacefully two empty beer bottles.
    Suddenly a bird begins to sing. It is a thrush perched on top of the memorial cross that Heinrich Kroll has bartered away. Its voice is much too big for that little black ball with its yellow beak. It rejoices and mourns and moves my heart. For a moment I reflect that its song, which for me means life and future and dreams and everything undefined, strange, and new, no doubt means to the worms that are working their way up through the damp garden soil around the monument nothing but the dreadful signal of lacerating death from a murderous beak. Nevertheless, I cannot help myself; it carries me away, releasing everything within me; all at once I stand there helpless and lost, amazed that I am not torn apart or that I do not rise like a balloon into the evening sky—until finally I pull myself together and stumble back through the garden and the nocturnal fragrance, up the stairs to my piano, where I pound and caress the keys, trying to be something like the thrush and to pour out what I feel. But nothing much  comes of it and in the end it is only a flood of arpeggios and shreds of sentimental ditties and folk songs and bits from the Rosenkavalier and Tristan , a hopeless medley till finally someone on the street shouts up: "Hey, you, why don't you learn to play?"
    I stop abruptly and steal to the window. A dark figure is disappearing into the night; it is already too far away to bit. And why, after all? He is right. I cannot really play. Either at the piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweeps us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Despair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?

Chapter Three
    3.
    It is Sunday morning. Bells are ringing from all the steeples, and last night's will-o'-the wisps have vanished. The dollar still stands at thirty-six thousand, time holds its breath, the crystal of the sky is as yet unmelted by the warmth of day, everything is clear and infinitely clean—it is the morning hour when even the murderer is forgiven and good and evil are empty words. 
    I dress slowly. Cool, sunny air sweeps