with my eighty-two years I have no need to conceal or to hide anything at all, Reger said, and I therefore do not conceal the fact that suddenly I wept and wept again, that I wept again for days, Reger said. I sat there, looking at the letters which my wife had written to me over the years and read the notes she had made over the years and just wept. Of course we get used to a person over the decades and love them for decades and eventually love them more than anything else and cling to them and when we lose them it is truly as if we had lost everything. I have always thought that it was music that meant everything to me, and at times that it was philosophy, or great or greatest or the very greatest writing, or altogether that it was simply art, but none of it, the whole of art or whatever, is nothing compared to that one beloved person. The things we inflicted on that one beloved person, Reger said, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of pains we inflicted on this one person whom we loved more than anyone else, the torments we inflicted on that person, and yet we loved them more than anyone else, Reger said. When that person whom we loved more than anyone else is dead they leave us with a terribly guilty conscience, Reger said, with a terribly guilty conscience with which we have to live after that person's death and which will choke us one day, Reger said. None of those books or writings which I had collected in the course of my life and which I had brought to the Singerstrasse flat to cram full all these shelves were ultimately any use, I had been left alone by my wife and all those books and writings were ridiculous. We think we can cling to Shakespeare or to Kant, but that is a fallacy, Shakespeare and Kant and all the rest, whom during our life we built up as the so-called great ones, let us down at the very moment when we would so badly need them, Reger said, they are no solution for us and they are no consolation to us, they suddenly seem revolting and alien to us, everything which those so-called great and important figures have thought and moreover written leaves us cold, Reger said. We always think we can rely on those so-called important and great ones, whichever, at the crucial moment, at the moment crucial in our lives, but that is a mistake, precisely at the moment which is crucial in our lives we find ourselves left alone by all those important and great ones, by those, as the saying goes, immortal ones, they provide us with no more at such a crucial moment in our lives than the fact that even in their midst we are alone, on our own in an utterly horrible sense, Reger said. Only and solely Schopenhauer helped me, because quite simply I abused him for the purpose of my survival, Reger said to me at the Ambassador. With all the others, including Goethe, Shakespeare and Kant, nauseating me I simply threw myself into Schopenhauer in my despair and sat down with Schopenhauer on my Singerstrasse-side stool in order to survive, for suddenly I wanted to survive and not to die, not to follow my wife but to remain here, to remain in this world, you understand, Atzbacher, Reger said at the Ambassador. But of course I had a chance of survival with Schopenhauer only because I abused him for my purposes and in fact falsified him inthe vilest manner, Reger said, by quite simply turning him into a prescription for survival, which in fact he is not, any more than the others I have mentioned. All our lives we rely on the great minds and on the so-called old masters, Reger said, and then we are mortally disappointed by them because they do not fulfill their purpose at the crucial moment. We hoard the great minds and the old masters and we believe that at the crucial moment of survival we can use them for our purposes, which means nothing other than misusing them for our purposes, which turns out to be a fatal mistake. We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives; but when we unlock our mental strong-room it is empty, that is the truth, we stand before that empty mental strong-room and find that we are alone and in fact totally destitute, Reger said. A person hoards things all his life, in all fields, and in the end he stands there empty, Reger said, also where his mental possessions are concerned. Think of the colossal mental possessions I had hoarded, Reger said at the Ambassador, and in the end I am standing here totally empty. Only by dint of a vile trick did I succeed in misusing Schopenhauer for my purpose, for the purpose of my survival, Reger said. Suddenly you realize what emptiness is when you stand there amidst thousands and thousands of books and writings which have left you totally alone, which suddenly mean nothing to you except that terrible emptiness, Reger said. When you have lost your closest human being everything seems empty to you, look wherever you like, everything is empty, and you look and look and you see that everything is really empty and, what is more, for ever, Reger said. And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else. And you stand alone in this realization and with this realization and there is nothing and no one to help you, Reger said. You lock yourself up in your flat in despair, Reger said, and from day to day your despair grows deeper and from week to week you get into ever more desperate despair, Reger said, yet suddenly you emerge from that despair. You get up and walk out of that mortal despair, you still have the strength to walk out of that deepest despair, Reger said, suddenly I got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool and walked out of my despair and down into the Singerstrasse, Reger said, and walked a few hundred yards into the Inner City; I got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool and walked out of my flat and into the Inner City with the idea of making just one single attempt, an attempt at survival, Reger said. I walked out of the Singerstrasse flat and I thought I will make one more, one single, attempt at survival and with this idea I walked into the Inner City, Reger said. And this attempt at survival was successful, I probably got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool at the crucial and probably the very last moment to walk down into the Singerstrasse and into the Inner City, Reger said. Naturally, back home in my flat I experienced one relapse after another, you will realize that this one single attempt at survival was not enough, I had to make several hundred such survival attempts, but I did make them, time and again, and I would get up, time and again, from my Singerstrasse-side stool and walk out into the street and actually back among people, among those people, and eventually saved myself, Reger said. Of course I ask myself whether it was right and not, after all, a mistake to save myself, but that is not the point, Reger said. We sincerely wish to follow someone into death and yet we do not then wish to go through with it, Reger said, that is the torment of despair in which I have existed, if you know what I mean, for over a year now. We hate people and yet we want to be with them because only with people and among people do we stand a chance of carrying on without going insane. We cannot in fact bear to be alone for very long, Reger said, we believe we can be alone, we believe we can be left on our own, we persuade ourselves that we can manage on our own, Reger said, but this is a chimera. Without people we have not the slightest hope of survival, Reger said, no matter how many great minds and old masters we have taken on as companions, they do not replace a human being, Reger said, in the end we are abandoned by all those so-called great minds and by all those so-called old masters and we realize that we are, on top of it, being mocked in the vilest manner by these great minds and old masters