These are the sentences I repeat to myself. A bit utopian? Perhaps. But if you live without them, aren’t you missing something? You, who carry out your conversations with hands in your pockets, with shrugging shoulders while chewing gum. Treating irony as your insurance policy, your false bottom. You keep everything at arm’s length. At worst, you get agitated, but never serious.
Don’t you sometimes long for wilder thinking too? For ideas without structure, utopias without metrics, sharp edges and corners to get hung up on? Aren’t you ashamed to not have an answer to the question: “What is an opinion of yours that the majority doesn’t share?” Its goal is not provocation, but consciousness. To comprehend where one stands, and with whom.
I want to feel the desire for reality again, not just for realization. I want the courage for a bigger connection, for a whole narrative. We’ve admired the wrecking ball of Deconstruction long enough. Now the time has come for ambitious architects. For new developments not in danger of collapse.
Where are those of you with a passion for planning and dreaming? Why am I still sitting here alone, looking out into the dark? Enamored with the loneliness that I pretend to feel. Night thoughts on the second floor: prewar building, stuccoed ceiling, bar lock—a feeling for eternity.
Now and then, someone stumbles from the bar at the corner, yelling his drunkenness into the night. That gets the dogs from the neighbor downstairs barking. They don’t know of my thoughts, the dogs. If they did, they’d keep quiet and devoutly fold their paws underneath me.
I long for community because I’m not good at being alone. Because I’m not up to the “vast inner solitude” that Rilke praised in his Christmas letter to Kappus. Not yet. The world I carry within is sustained by dialogue, by exchange, by the bat of an eye. I need conversations, glowing faces. Freedom and friendship—these words have the same root. They belong together. It’s not too late to break through the virtual with a handshake, with a hug. There’s still time to band together, to start a group with the name “New Sensualism.” Memory can still become present.
So come to my table and fold your hands behind your head. I’m waiting for you. Because who else is still talking about sentiment? Who has a feel for their own heartbeat? Which mothers and fathers, which teachers and priests, which coaches and therapists encourage you to be overwhelmed? Who gives hope for another, wider world?
I dream of a long staircase that leads up to a secluded room. Entrance is only granted to those who make mistakes, take detours, experiment. This room contains nothing but a long table and wooden chairs. At the table is a group of would-be loners, at the fringe of the general public, only truly at home in this group. They’re not friends, they’re not close. Their tone is not yet trained. Their youth unites them. The criterion: Not yet thirty. And: to be a questioner, not a smartass.
To come together here means most of alclass="underline" to feel friction. It is a place where gazes are returned expectantly, not deflected in tired skepticism. A place where naivete isn’t looked down upon. Confident are those who have the strongest imagination, not the strongest rationality. A secret club for those who still believe in secrets.
But because I haven’t found it yet, this staircase, only dream of it (but frequently!), I’m left with nothing but fear. Fear of losing what I have. Fear of not getting what I want.
It is the first gift from the gods: Primus in orbe deos fecit timor—First the gods invented fear (Statius). Because fear is not simply the ugly flipside of joy. It has miraculous powers, motivating people to tame their world through language, myths and science. To fit it into a clear form. To give it an expression.
Fear can lead me to suddenly get up from my desk, on a night like this, to go out onto the balcony, shy at first, with an unsteady step. The rain has intensified. The branches of the chestnut tree crackle in the wind. A few crows are perched on the roof, looking down at them with contempt: No composure, these branches, always just going whichever way the wind blows. The fear gives me courage, makes me step out to the railing, call and shout and swear with outstretched fingers: “I don’t want to be a nobody.”
Before the moment of transition comes, before the future can incorporate me forever, I want to break free one last time from the fixed course. I want to hang on the hands of the clock, to try to be an agitator myself. Just once I want to feel what it’s like to take a deep breath, step out of the shadows and look down at the world below. I want to. And I can.
Because I have received an offer. Someone I barely know, whom I have met only recently, has sealed a pact with me. He’s going to lead me, he said, where I want to go. I don’t know why, but I told him everything, spoke of my despair, my deficit. And he listened, unabated, never glancing at his watch. He looked at me and led me into temptation. And in the end, after I finished pouring out my soul, he said, with a twitch tugging at his mouth, that he knew exactly what I was missing. And that he knew the way.
Every night at seven, he would get in touch to send me on a foray into the city. I would always encounter one sin, one of the seven deadly sins. “So that you may find one that suits you,” he said. “Or refrain from them forever.” For a night, I would have the chance to search for the storm, to cause it myself. But by daybreak, I would have to finish my writing. Until seven o’clock, seven pages, each time. I was told to think it over. I’d have a night to consider.
This night is over. Behind the crows, the sun is rising. I don’t know what he wants from me, what’s in it for him. This man, he’s on the other side. Older than thirty. He has a life and a path. I don’t know if I can trust him. But I have no excuse. No alternative. I will accept: I will be greedy and proud, gluttonous and lustful, will be wrathful, envious and slothful. I will pull seven all-nighters, to push off the moment of transition, to escape the impending future just for a little while longer.
Maybe I can only preserve my inner self by revealing it. For one night, for seven pages. The attack will make me attackable, but also protect me from too much protection. Since I don’t encounter danger anywhere, I’ll have to search it out myself.
I will sin. Seven times. Write seven times through the night, like I’m doing now. With this strange confidence, in this deserted silence, this spare light. No squealing tires. No ringing phone. No running washing machine. The distant is close. Almost tangible. Now I could become anything, say anything. That’s how it seems. No wound so deep that I can’t dig deeper. No pain so intense that it can’t be the key. Only I don’t yet know if what I feel at night will withstand the light of day…
But night is also a time of fear: Loneliness crawls out of the corners, chokes my soul and bites my nails. Narrows the focus back to only me, and the awareness disappears. A moment ago, I felt great, important. Now I’m smaller than small. A nothing, a nobody. Someone who pulls his nose hair and imagines his friends weeping at his funeral. Which music is played, what photograph stands in the background. At night, people don’t like to be alone—not only because it’s colder under the covers, but also because the ghosts don’t have to pick whose heart they’ll grip first.
The nighttime writer is ambiguous. Sitting on one shoulder is the fear of failure. On the other, the courage to take on everyone. Sometimes he looks across his possessions, regards the world from above, sees how to make things better, believes in the inherent thought, the deed, the meaning. Then he looks down at himself, and he’s only a small piece, a cog set in motion by external forces. He sees a young man with graying temples who drops his pen.