'Writing means JACK SHIT in the face of someone hating you.'

Wu-Tang are a lot more potent when you're already anxious and jittery, but then the words all blur by.

I spent ten minutes in front of the mirror last night, making faces. I make good faces. With practice, though, I could make great faces.

'he on some now you see me now you don't, you know what I'm sayin?'

'Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter might hurt his vanity; but the former hurts his heart and his sympathy which always says: "Oh, why do you want things to be as hard for you as they are for me?"'

'In a hermit's writings, you can always hear something of the echo of the desert, something of the whisper and the timid sideways glance of solitude. A new and more dangerous type of silence, of concealment, rings out in his strongest words, even in his cries. Anyone who has sat alone with his soul in intimate dispute and dialogue, year in, and year out, day and night, anyone who has become a cave bear or treasure hunter or treasure guard and dragon in his cave (which might be a labyrinth but also a gold mine): his very concepts will come to acquire their own twilight color, the smell of depth just as much as of mildew, something uncommunicative and reluctant that blows a chill on everything going past. The hermit does not believe that a philosopher - given that a philosopher was always a hermit first - has ever expressed his actual and final opinions in books: don't people write books precisely to keep what they hide to themselves? In fact, he will doubt whether a philosopher could even have "final and actual" opinions, whether for a philosopher every cave does not have, must not have, an even deeper cave behind it - a more extensive, stranger, richer world above the surface, an abyss behind every ground, under every "groundwork." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy - that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here, looking back, looking around, in his not digging any deeper here, and putting his spade away - there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy conceals a philosophy too: every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.'

'With hard people, intimacy is a source of shame - and something precious.'

'That this could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences says more than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in those fields themselves, in the autarky that is emphatically claimed for them. All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage. In restoring itself after the things that happened without resistance in its own countryside, culture has turned entirely into the ideology it had been potentially - had been ever since it presumed, in opposition to material existence, to inspire that existence with the light denied it by the separation of the mind from manual labor. Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be.

Not even silence gets us out of the circle. In silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie. When countries of the East, for all their drivel to the contrary, abolished culture or transformed it into rubbish as a mere means of control, the culture that moans about it is getting what it deserves, and what on its part, in the name of people's democratic right to their own likeness, it is zealously heading for. The only difference is that when the apparatchiks over there acclaim their administrative barbarism as culture and guard its mischief as an inalienable heritage, they convict its reality, the infrastructure, of being as barbarian as the superstructure they are dismantling by taking it under their management. In the West, at least, one is allowed to say so.'

'Ilsebill put on more salt. Before the impregnation there was shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, the season being early October. Still at table, still with her mouth full, she asked, "Should we go to bed right away, or do you first want to tell me how when where our story began?"

I, down through the ages, have been I. And Ilsebill, too, has been from the beginning. I remember our first quarrel, toward the end of the Neolithic, some two thousand years before the incarnation of our Lord, when myths were beginning to distinguish between raw food and cooked food. And just as, today, before sitting down to mutton with string beans and pears, we quarreled more and more cuttingly over her children and mine, so then, in the marshland of the Vistula estuary, we quarreled to the best of our neolithic vocabulary over my claim to at least three of her nine kids. But I lost. For all the ur-phonemes my nimble, hard-working tongue was able to line up, I did not succeed in forming the beautiful word "father"; only "mother" was possible. In those days Ilsebill's name was Awa. I, too, had a different name. But the idea of having been Awa doesn't appeal to Ilsebill.

I had studded the shoulder of mutton with halved garlic cloves, sautéed the pears in butter, and bedded them on boiled string beans. Even though Ilsebill, speaking with her mouth still full, said there was no reason why it shouldn't come off, or "take," right away, because she had thrown her pills down the john as the doctor advised, what I heard was that our bed should have priority over the neolithic cook.

And so we lay down, arming and legging each other around as we have done since time immemorial. Sometimes I, sometimes she on top. Equal, though Ilsebill contends that the male's privilege of penetrating is hardly compensated by the female's paltry perogative of refusing admittance. But because we mated in love, our feelings were so all-embracing that in an expanded space, transcending time and its tick-tock, freed from the heaviness of our earthbound bed, a collateral, ethereal union was achieved; as though in compensation, her feeling penetrated mine in hard thrusts: we worked doubly and well.

Eaten before the mutton with pears and beans, Ilsebill's fish soup, distilled from codfish heads that have had the hell boiled out of them, probably embodied the catalytic agent with which, down through the ages, the cooks inside me have invited pregnancy; for by chance, by destiny, and without further ingredients, it came off, it took. No sooner was I out again - as though expelled - than Ilsebill said with perfect assurance, "Well, this time it's going to be a boy."

Don't forget the savory. With boiled potatoes or, historically, with millet. Our mutton - as always advisable - had been served on warmed plates. Nevertheless our kiss, if I may be forgiven one last indiscretion, was coated with tallow. In the fish soup, which Ilsebill had made green with dill and capers, codfish eyes floated white and signified happiness.

After it presumably came off, we lay in bed together, each smoking his (or her) conception of a cigarette. (I, descending the steps of time, ran away.) Ilsebill said, "Incidentally, we need a dishwasher. It's high time."

Before she could engage in further speculation about a reversal of roles - "I wish I could see you pregnant some time" - I told her about Awa and her three breasts.'