for money.
Content found on Wikipedia. He came here on a trip with his girlfriend, then set down roots, never returning to his hometown. More than twenty thousand dollars remained of the debt he’d accrued there, a sizeable amount at that time. Although he’d had no lawsuit taken out against him, even after having built a solid reputation as a writer he was unable to shake the stigma of having fled gambling debts. When he received the Andreas Gryphius Prize at the end of the 1970s, his creditors announced that they would officially write off his debts, happy to be magnanimous if it meant sponsoring a famous writer. The prize money and his success as a writer made it possible for him to settle his debts, but he didn’t, and never went back to his hometown, even after his last remaining creditor, who had at one time been his friend, died some time ago at the age of ninety, without a legal heir.
“The morning after I’d lost all the money I’d taken to the casino, I was strolling the dew-damp streets of the ruins; I thought I heard the blue-tinged sound of a bell coming from between the martyrs’ graves. Though there was no way of explaining whether I really had heard it, or whether it was only an auditory hallucination produced by the climate peculiar to that place. We both stopped walking at almost the same time. Sighing lightly, she described it as the cry of a greenfinch searching for its mate. Whatever it was, we’d both heard it at the same time, there in that place. Turning to me, she asked ‘what if we lived here . . . ?,’ speaking as though to herself. At that time I had failed at everything I’d attempted, my heart was constantly torn to pieces, and I had no money, so I felt as though each day brought me closer to the brink of disaster. Worse, I would think to myself that even she whom I loved so much might leave my side at any moment. Because she was beautiful, the daughter of a rich family, and young to boot, only just past twenty, while on the other hand I was a flat-broke writer in his forties who had experienced one setback after another. But the moment I heard her say those words, I felt an abrupt, unlooked-for assurance that I was not alone. If I lived here, why, I could have it all, that kind of thought. All meaning both her and writing. At that, a feeling of relief swept over me, filling me up. Fulfillment such as I’d never known . . . it’s been a long time since then, and now, as you can see, my circumstances are very different from what they were. I broke up with her, and married a Mandarin-speaking woman who came here after 1999. My wife writes poetry, you know. My life back then, and the way this place looked then, will sound strange to you as I describe it now. Over the past few years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of mainland tourists who descend upon this place. Though it’s true that I have no plans to leave, I don’t want to say that it became my hometown at some point. At least to me, ‘hometown’ has long been nothing more than a word in a dead language.”
At some point or other, I stopped loving the first writer. And the second writer became “my writer.” We made plans to go and visit the second writer just as we had with the first. This time you had a good knowledge of the locality where the writer was living. You called it the supreme land on earth; meaning, of course, that the natural environment was beautiful. In the meantime, I was drunk on anticipation. It swelled my body and tongue, made the rain fall endlessly in my dreams. Even while asleep, I had to wipe away the grass-scented rainwater flowing down over my forehead and cheeks.
One day you asked me what question I would ask the second writer if I did manage to meet him. I said there were two, and that one was about the relationship between writing and ecstasy. Of course not the drug ecstasy, I was referring to the word that derives from the state of religious rapture that can be achieved through meditation. And added that my question had absolutely nothing to do with everything that word generally connotes. You confronted me then, claiming that the state of religious longing that arises from piety—in other words, from the desire to be submissive that human beings have always known, and which can on the surface be something obscene—is also and thus a comic struggle to make a clear division between ekstasis and ecstasy, though in any case both have the same meaning, with the one being the Greek, Latin root of the other. “And one more vague thing that’s impossible to distinguish. I doubt whether your ‘first writer’ and ‘second writer’ are really two different people. I’m starting to think that the reason you so abruptly switched to thirsting for your second writer was that you were trying to overlay him onto the first writer, and thus conceal from yourself the fact of their separate existences. In other words, you selected both the first and second writers on the grounds of their being people you had never met, people with whom, from your individual point of view, your ‘association’ can only be indirect, given that they are both so famous, and who must always be plural, and fatefully far away, thus satisfying the desire for non-specificity; though you keep saying that it has always been your dream to meet them, deep down you fear that meeting them in person would bring to an end the sense of distance and one-sidedness that establish the relationship’s necessary tension. Of course, the reason you need these individually ordinary human beings to be vague and mysterious is that this will amplify and perfect their perceived greatness, a greatness that you deeply long for. Do you remember what your first writer said in one of his interviews? ‘The point in time at which writers like myself acquired a kind of greatness was that at which human beings stopped believing in a god, and came to want a substitute for divinity.’ Most ordinary people would call that nothing more than vague envy. Envy has always had the character of a daydream. And persistent envy is a flight from something inside oneself.” You continued. “To you, then, is it a flight from ecstasy, or an ecstatic flight?” I told you then that you were no better than a porn addict, that you were unable to talk about dreams without making them into something dirty and vulgar. I could see that you were pleased, though too shy to want to show it.
I spat out what was inside my mouth. The taste was unbearably poisonous and bitter. I didn’t know what it was, but its absolute inedibility was clear. The thing that I’d spat out was quite a large lump of excrement. I was shocked. The lump fell onto the widespread expanse of an enormous petal. The balcony was crowded with brilliant-hued flowers, but I kept feeling as though I would vomit . . . I thought. A while ago I put a poster up on the wall right next to my bed. It was a photograph in which the light-and-dark contrast of shade and sunlight was clearly defined. The shade was a black that looked deeper than darkness, thick and viscous, and the part where the sunlight shone was brighter than streaming sugar, and whitened as the real sun’s yellow light fell softly upon it. If I briefly woke up in the middle of the night, my eyes would always drift to that poster. Of course, in that kind of hazy dreamstate in which you haven’t completely woken up, I am never aware of it as a poster. It seems to be something other than the image I know from the daytime. And each time something different. It would generally be connected to something I’d seen in a dream, or an extension of the dream unaltered. If I started awake from a state of dreaming the bright part of the photo glowed a brighter white, jumping out at me as a different being each time. That night it appeared in the form of a luminescent well. The well from which light was streaming stretched slowly up into the air, becoming a huge pair of pale lips that seemed to suck me in. Though afraid, I stretched my hand out toward it. I don’t know why. But when I did, my fingers bumped up against a cold, hard wall. No, it was your wristwatch. A wristwatch with a large, round face. As soon as I took hold of it your wrist elongated like a butterfly’s feeler and before I knew it was pursuing me to the balcony, which was crowded with pots and planter boxes. I hurriedly gathered some petals to cover the disgusting excrement I’d vomited. But it struck me that I’d never be able to cover it completely, that you’d see it and I’d plummet into an abyss of shame and despair . . . There was only one way to avert disaster, nothing else for it but for me to swallow it back inside me. Making my mouth into the shape of a bird’s beak, I bent down toward it . . . Just then, the first writer carried tea into the room adjoining the balcony.
If the world were to become a place in which books are forbidden, and the only way for humans to have a relationship with literature was to learn entire books by heart—this is a hypothesis connected to Ray Bradbury’s novel—my first writer unhesitatingly gave two names when asked which writer’s works he would memorize, or which would be worth the effort even without such a hypothetical ban, and even though it would seem absurdly laborious: Shakespeare and James Joyce. But, he said, the writer I personally admire is Goethe. Though regrettably, he continued,
