I shake my head and shiver They smile and they stab my back as they shake my hand Send out an SOS plea Come quickly, I'm marooned in Monkeyland Is there anyone there Who understands me? Anyone at all? I'm idly staring at the sky Did anybody hear me sigh? A million stars are a moving sight To all you out there hearing me tonight It's just a trick of the light Yeah, it's just a trick of the light I have to know what is real And what is illusion Oh, how does it feel Beyond this confusion?

Is there anyone there?

The Chameleons, “Monkeyland,” (1983)

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He was sitting off to the side next to a tiled stove and gazing past the tables in the yellowish light, which seemed duskily vibrant beneath arches that seemed to continue underground, and where to? A person who knew everything wouldn’t need to be anywhere on earth any longer. But you know little, and that is enough for you (so to speak); no, actually it isn’t enough for you. And once again he thought: wherever you are, you always feel ill at ease. But it doesn’t matter.

The next day they took the bus to Cobenzl and looked out at Vienna. As they were doing this, Eugen suddenly remembered Grillparzer’s couplet that went: “If the landscape round the Kahlenberg you have seen / You’ll understand both what I am and what I’ve been.” He couldn’t make out what Grillparzer had meant in this couplet, but perhaps the Privy Councilor had been trying to say that this expansive vista with its entangled river, its hills and distant mountain-chains, its church towers amid the orchard verdure of its little villages—all of this is my life…

And ultimately life was nothing more than a trick of the light [ein Spiel des Lichts].

Sir Adam [Fergusson] suggested, that luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON. ‘Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life as he pleases? SIR ADAM. ‘But, Sir, in the British constitution it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as to preserve a balance against the crown.’ JOHNSON. ‘Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough....’

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791); Tuesday, 31 March 1772.  

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Everybody noticed that his stepbrother Otto owned a factory [a small factory] and had married a pharmacist’s daughter, which was a bit difficult for him to take.  In the end only he, Julius, had become what was suitable for him to become, but why?  He had climbed no higher and no lower than he, a miller’s son could have expected, and his wife was a butcher’s daughter; her father had been a hotheaded fellow and after the revolution of ’48 he had sat in prison in Asperg for two years. But he didn’t understand how anybody could participate in anything like a revolution when the rulers were such awfully good-natured people.  What was more, his father had died in the smallpox epidemic of ’56.  And why after his years in America he, Julius Krumm, had been destined to spend his life within such a circumscribed circle was a question he couldn’t answer.  Because that was just the way things had turned out.  Because it’s your nature, he thought.

Once again he found himself thinking about his time in America; he saw the elegant Mr. Pfaender driving through Philadelphia, heard his bell sounding and him crying, “Buy some noodles!”  He had a factory over there now.  He’s made it further in the world than you in any case, but despite that you don’t envy him…And he was surprised that he didn’t envy anybody who had better luck than he did.  Probably because you think, He can’t take anything with him anyway, if he’s got to take off someday.

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Everyday thinking, conversations with yourself, emotions, and fantasies: these are more important to you than having to roam around, get things done, and blather…Opening one’s mouth was a bad idea most of the time.  What on earth was the point; all the worst idiocies happened thanks to blather; in any case, hardly anything worthwhile ever occurred to people, unless they happened to be somebody like Christian Wagner.  But he was an eccentric, and if everybody had been like him…yes, that’d be bad too.  And he pondered how long he would need to wait until he’d amassed his hundred thousand marks.  If things kept going as they were going now, he might have waited long enough in four or five years.  Then he would go on walks, see the forest, the walls of vineyards, the water of brooks and the clouds; nothing more would be necessary.  Because this was the most enviable thing there had ever been: roaming around, looking at something, getting clear about a feeling. 

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The most heterogeneous sorts of things stood cheek by jowl with one another, and everybody was in the right.  Or do you think you know what’s definitely right and proper?  The only thing that matters is getting your own clear view of something.  Pull that something out of the mud, set it down in front of you, and see what it’s all about.

You’ve got to take a good look around you, a good look in every which direction; whatever you happen to notice will be yours to keep.

Hermann Lenz Abandoned Rooms [Verlassene Zimmer] (1966), translated by shirtysleeves.

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I would then go on to tell my student that my mind consisted only of images and feelings; that I had studied my mind for many years and had found in it in nothing but images and feelings; that a diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns.

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As each year of my life has passed, I have become more interested in the workings of my mind.  In recent years, I have come to believe that I might learn all of meaning that I could ever need to learn if only I could learn why I remember certain images and forget other images.

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During my retirement, I would test each book once each year. Once each year, I would stand in front of the spine of each book and wait to see in my mind some of the images that had first appeared there when I had read the book.  No other sort of image would save a book as some books had been saved when I had first tested them in the early 1980s. […] I looked forward to my retirement whenever I thought of the work I was going to do with my books.  If, as I believed, those persons lived longest who had large or never-ending tasks to occupy them, then I was assured of a very long life.  I could foresee no end to my task.  For as long as I was alive, I would remember something at least from each of a small number of books.  My life would have been one continuous experiment as to the worth of books. Of course, I would record in writing the results of the experiment.  Readers of what I wrote might learn even before my death the comparative value to me of my best-remembered books or the comparative value of particular passages within one or more book.  Or, a reader of my writing might study not the books but the man who partly remembered them.  What sort of man, such a reader might ask, would remember this rather than that passage from this or that book? (If I had remembered wrongly, which is to say if I had believed one or more images in my mind to be connected with a book whose text seemed to another reader incapable of giving rise to such an image or images, then a reader of my writing would have a rich subject for study.) I need not write mere reports.  I should be able to find connections between some of the images that I connected with separate books.