Precursory Symptoms

Allow me to begin again:

I am double. That is the thought which keeps me up at night.

This may seem a strange way to introduce a man presumably of the imagination not quite ever known on earth by the name of Von Kriege and who so willingly departed from cooperating in efforts to deliver him to the literal hereafter. Seldom did its author enter into negotiations with the matter-of-fact novel based upon things actually seen or heard or heard of. He understood and insisted that no logic should be quite as important to the narrative as the implacable flow of the word.

The hope, then, of reporting a minutely detailed picture of one man’s brooding life in the manner of a respecter of facts is something I simply can’t consent to. If any reader reading this living autobiography of him—a modest space where he lived word for word for many years, a suitably melancholy tragedy—should eventually seed the door of indifferent hope, the door where some see the error of their way when sorrow overtakes them, the door from which he emerged and where they now entered, more attentive than usual, walking sister and brother as into two glass panes, reading along in a more generous spirit than the customary passer-by, then the pleasures and cares of the world will take root as in the seductive quality of a summer evening.

But the book is much more: the weight of sin meditated on, a rebellion by which he would rid himself of the other. In this way, the words are printed and disappear.