Not for sale – The mechanical cabinet at Lucca’s annual fair. The exhibition is held in an extended tent, symmetrically divided. Several steps lead up to it. The sign shows a table with a number of motionless dolls. Visitors enter the tent through the right-hand opening, leave it by the left. In the bright interior, two tables stretch into the distance. Their inside edges abut, leaving only a narrow space for circulating. Both tables are low and glass-covered. On them stand the dolls (twenty to twenty-five centimetres high, on average), while under them, out of sight, the clockwork mechanism driving each doll ticks audibly. A little step for children runs along the edges of the tables. Around the walls are distorting mirrors.

  Nearest the entrance are royalty. Each one is making some kind of movement: one with its left or right arm outspread in a sweeping gesture of invitation, others with a swivelling of their glass eyes; some move eyes and arm simultaneously. Franz Joseph, Pius X, enthroned and flanked by two cardinals, Queen Elena of Italy, the Sultana, Wilhelm I on horseback, little Napoleon III and the even smaller Victor Emmanuel as crown prince are all to be seen there. Biblical figures follow, then the Passion. Herod, making a great variety of head movements, orders the Massacre of the Innocents. He opens his mouth wide, nods in confirmation, extends an arm and lets it fall. Two guards stand before him; one slashing at empty air with his sword, a headless child under his arm, while the other, about to stab, stands motionless – except that his eyes are rolling. And here are two mothers, one shaking her head incessantly, like a melancholic, the other slowly, beseechingly, raising her arms.

  The Crucifixion. The cross laid on the ground. Executioners driving the nails in. Christ nods.

  Christ hanging from the cross, wetted with the vinegar-soaked sponge that a soldier slowly, jerkily, raises to the dying man’s lips and promptly snatches away. Meanwhile the Saviour, almost imperceptibly, lifts his chin. From behind, an angel leans over the cross with a chalice to receive the blood, presents it, then, as if it were now full, withdraws it.

  The other table shows genre-type scenes. Gargantua eating dumplings; from a dish set before him he shovels them into his mouth with both hands, raising his left and right arms alternately. Both hands hold forks with dumplings speared on them.

  An Alpine lass at her spinning wheel.

  A brace of chimps playing violins.

  A magician, facing two barrel-like containers. The one on the right opens and out pops the upper body of a woman. She sinks back. The one on the left opens and a male torso rises up. The right-hand container opens again, and now what comes up is a goat’s head with the woman’s face between the horns. On the left another figure emerges, but this time a monkey instead of a man. Then the show begins all over again.

  Another magician standing behind a table, each hand on an upside-down tumbler. Under the tumblers, as he raises them one by one, are by turns a bun, an apple, a flower, or a single die.

  The magic well. A peasant lad stands beside a well, shaking his head. A girl is drawing water, and the continuous thick stream of glass comes pouring from the well-head.

  The spellbound lovers. A golden thicket or golden flame splits into two wings that open. Visible inside are two dolls, turning their heads towards each other, then away, as if such mutual admiration threw them into a state of fazed astonishment.

  All the figures have, below them, a small piece of paper with the inscription. The whole collection dates from 1862.

  OUTPATIENT CLINIC

  The author lays the thought on the marble-topped café table. Prolonged inspection: he uses this time, you see, because the glass (the lens through which he eyes the patient) has yet to be placed in front of him. Then he slowly unpacks his instruments: fountain pen, pencil, and pipe. The crowd of patrons, disposed in curved rows, are his clinical audience. Coffee, carefully poured and as carefully drunk, puts the thought under chloroform. Now what it ponders has no more to do with the matter in hand than the anaesthetized subject’s dream concerns the operation. An incision is made in the scrupulous lineaments of the handwriting, the surgeon, moving inside, shifts points of emphasis, burns off growths of verbiage, and inserts, as a silver rib, a word borrowed from a foreign language. Finally, punctuation sews the whole thing up for him with fine stitches and he pays the waiter, his assistant, in cash.

  THESE SPACES TO RENT

  Fools, who bewail the decline of criticism. The fact is, its time expired long ago. Criticism is a question of correct distance. Criticism is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects matter, where it was still possible to adopt a stance. Things have now begun to chivvy human society much too urgently. ‘Impartiality’ and the ‘open outlook’ have become lies if not the wholly naive expression of straight non-competence. The name of the most intrinsic quality today, the mercantile look penetrating to the heart of things, is advertising. Advertising eliminates the free leeway of consideration, bringing things dangerously close, right in our face, the way a car, in the cinema, hugely increasing in size on the screen, comes quivering towards us. And as the cinema presents us with pieces of furniture and façades not in the fully formed, rounded figures of a critical consideration, only in their stolid, abrupt, sensational proximity, so will proper advertising speed things up to a tempo corresponding to that of a good film. With that, ‘objective reality’ is eventually left behind, and faced with huge illustrations on the sides of houses, where ‘Chlorodont’ and ‘Sleipnir’15 lie within easy reach of giants, recovered sentimentality is set free, American-style, much as people whom nothing moves any more, nothing touches, learn in the cinema how to cry again. For the man in the street, however, it is money that brings things closer in this way, establishing convincing contact with them. And the paid reviewer, handling pictures in the dealer’s art salon, knows if not something better at least something more important about them than the art lover seeing them in the window. The warmth of the subject comes across to him and renders him sensitive.

  What is it, ultimately, that makes advertising so superior to criticism? Not what the red electric text up on the moving screen says – the pool of fire that mirrors it on the asphalt.

  OFFICE EQUIPMENT

  The boss’s office bristles with weaponry. What captivates the visitor as comfort is in reality an arms cache. A phone on the desk is always going off. It interrupts at the crucial moment, giving one’s opposite number time to compose a reply. Meanwhile scraps of the conversation show how many matters are dealt with here that are more important than the one currently under discussion. One tells oneself that, and one slowly begins to retreat from one’s own standpoint. One starts wondering who is being talked about here, realizes with alarm that one’s interlocutor leaves for Brazil in the morning, and immediately feels such solidarity with the firm that the migraine complained of over the phone is deemed a regrettable business malfunction (rather than an opportunity). Summoned or not, the secretary comes in. She is very pretty. And if her employer is either immune to her charms or, as an admirer, reached an accommodation with her some time back, the newcomer will more than once follow her with his eyes, and she knows, thanks to her boss, how to behave. His staff move about, placing on the table card files in which the guest knows himself to be entered in a wide variety of connections. He begins to feel weary. The other man, however, with the light behind him, registers this with satisfaction from the features of the blindingly lit face. The chair, too, has its effect; the person sitting in it leans as far back as at the dentist, and ultimately, when all’s said and done, accepts the painful procedure as if it were the ordinary course of affairs. This treatment, too, is followed sooner or later by a liquidation.

  INDIVIDUALLY PACKAGED GOODS: CARRIAGE AND PACKING

  Early one morning I drove through Marseille to the station, and as on the way I was struck by familiar places, or by new, unfamiliar places or by others I could not recall in any detail, the city became a book in my hands in which I was casting a couple of quick glances before it went into the box in the attic, disappearing from my sight for who knows how long.

  CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS

  I dreamed I took my life with a gun. When the shot rang out I did not wake up but for a while saw myself lying there as a corpse. Only then did I waken.

  ‘AUGEAS’ AUTOMATIC RESTAURANT

  This is the most powerful objection to the way the confirmed bachelor lives: he takes his meals alone. Eating alone soon makes a man tough and rough. Anyone used to it has to lead a Spartan existence if he wants to avoid going to pieces. Hermits, if only for that reason, had frugal eating habits. The fact is, only when done communally does eating come into its own; it needs to share and be shared if it is to work. No matter with whom: in the past, each mealtime was enriched by inviting a beggar in. It is all about sharing and giving, not at all about sociable table talk. Astonishingly, though, good company will turn critical when not fed. Food and drink are great levellers, they bind people together. Count Saint-Germain, faced with a full table, never over-indulged, and if only for that reason controlled the conversation. But if everyone goes away hungry, rivalries arise, breeding contention.

  STAMP DEALER

  To anyone looking through piles of old letters, often a long-out-of-date stamp on a crumpled envelope will say more than dozens of perused pages. Sometimes one finds them on picture postcards and does not know what to do – soak the stamp off or keep the card as it is, like a page by an Old Master with two different drawings, both valuable, on recto and verso. One also, in glass cases in cafés, comes across letters that have a past and now find themselves pilloried in the sight of all eyes. Or have they been deported and must spend years languishing in this case, a glass-topped Salas y Gómez?16 Letters that stayed unopened for a long time have a brutal look about them; robbed of their inheritance, they silently, maliciously, plot revenge for long, long days of suffering. Many of them end up as the entires that one sees, covered in postmarks, in stamp-dealers’ windows.

  Everyone knows there are collectors who specialize only in franked stamps, and it is almost as if people wanted to believe that they are the only ones to have penetrated the secret. They keep to the occult area of philately: postmarks. For the postmark is the stamp’s nocturnal side. There are solemn ones that place a halo around Queen Victoria’s head, and prophetic ones that set a martyr’s crown on Humbert. But no sadistic fantasy comes close to the sinister procedure that covers faces with weals and rips through the soil of whole continents like an earthquake. And the perverse delight in the way this violated body of the stamp contrasts with its white, lace-trimmed chiffon dress: the perforation. Anyone studying postmarks will need, as detective, to possess codes for the remotest of post offices, as archaeologist the art of identifying the torsos of the most foreign place-names, as cabbalist the inventory of dates covering a whole century.

  Postage stamps are a mass of little digits, tiny letters, marks, and spots. They constitute graphic scraps of cell tissue. Everything seethes and teems and, like the lower animals, lives on even when shredded in pieces. That is why fragments of postage stamps, glued together, make such effective pictures. On them, however, life always carries a whiff of corruption as a sign that it is made up of dead matter. Their portraits and obscene groupings are littered with remains and heaps of wormcasts.

  Is there perhaps a glimpse, breaking through in the colour sequences of long sets, of the light of some strange sun? Do the offices of the Postmasters General of the Papal States or Ecuador receive rays we know nothing of ? And why are we not shown the stamps of the better planets? The thousand shades of flaming red in circulation on Venus, the four large Martian greys, the priceless stamps traded on Saturn?

  Countries and oceans are merely, on stamps, the provinces, kings merely the mercenaries of the numerals that, at their pleasure, imbue them with colour. Stamp albums are magical reference books recording the numbers of monarchs and palaces, animals, allegories, and states. The postal service rests on their harmony, as the movements of the planets depend on the harmonies of heavenly numbers.

  Old low-denomination stamps with nothing but one or two large numerals in the oval.17 They look like those early photos in black-painted frames from which relatives we never knew gaze down at us: elderly great-aunts or other ancestors. Even Thurn and Taxis18 have large numerals on their stamps, staring out at one like bewitched taximeter numbers. It would come as no surprise if one evening the light of a candle shone through behind them. But then there are small stamps with no perforation and nothing to indicate currency or country. All they have, at the centre of a dense spider’s web, is a number. They may be fate’s real lottery tickets.

  Printed characters on Turkish one-piastre stamps resemble crooked, overly stylish, overly flashy tiepins – say, on the tie of a crafty-looking, only semi-Europeanized Constantinople merchant. They call to mind those postal parvenus, those large, poorly perforated, garish formats from Nicaragua or Colombia, all dolled up like banknotes.

  Excess-charge stamps are the spirits among postage stamps. They are always the same. Changes of monarch and form of government pass them by like ghosts, leaving no trace.

  The child espies distant Liberia through the wrong end of an opera glass: there it lies, beyond its strip of sea, with its palms, just as stamps show it. With Vasco da Gama the child sails round a triangle whose three sides are equal, like hope, and whose colours change with the weather. Travel brochure of the Cape of Good Hope. If it sees the swan on Australian stamps, then on the blue, green, and brown denominations too it is the black swan, which occurs only in Australia and which here goes gliding over the surface of a pond as over the calmest ocean.

  Stamps are the visiting cards that the major countries leave in the nursery.

  Gulliver-like, the child visits the land and people of each stamp. The geography and history of the Lilliputians, the whole store of knowledge of the little people with all its numbers and names is fed to the child in sleep. The child takes part in their transactions, attends their crimson-robed national assemblies, watches the launching of their tiny ships, and in the company of their crowned heads, who sit enthroned behind gates, celebrates jubilees.

  Notoriously, there is a postage-stamp language that is to the language of flowers as Morse code to the written alphabet. But how long will this floral abundance survive between telegraph poles? The big art stamps of the post-war years, with their wealth of colour – are they not already the autumnal asters and dahlias of this flora? Stephan, a German, and not by chance a contemporary of Jean Paul, sowed this seed in the summery mid-nineteenth century. It will not survive the twentieth.19

  SI PARLA ITALIANO

  One night, in some pain, I was sitting on a bench. Two girls sat down on a second bench opposite. Apparently wishing to talk privately, they started whispering. No one else was in the vicinity – apart from myself, and I should not have understood their Italian, however loudly spoken. The fact remains, given this unmotivated whispering in a language inaccessible to me, I could not help feeling that a cool bandage had been laid on the place that hurt.

  TECHNICAL FIRST AID

  There is nothing more wretched than a truth expressed as it had been thought. In such a case, its being written down is not even a poor photograph. In fact, truth (like a child, like a woman who does not love us) refuses, when confronted with the lens of writing, once we have crouched down under the black cloth, to keep still and smile. Abruptly, as if struck, truth likes to be roused from self-absorption, startled, whether by a loud noise, whether by music, whether by cries for help. They are countless, surely, the alarm bells with which the true writer’s inner self is fitted? And ‘writing’ simply means priming them to go off. Then the sweet odalisque starts up, grabs the first thing that comes to hand in the muddle of her boudoir (= our skull), throws it around her shoulders, and flees like that, almost unrecognizable, from us to our public. Yet how fit she must be, how robustly constituted, to be able, like that, jolted, harried, yet victorious and with kindly charm, to move among them.

  HABERDASHERY20

  Quotations in my work are like bandits on the road that leap out, brandishing weapons, and rob the idler of his certainty.

  Killing the criminal may be moral – its justification, never.

  The nourisher of all is God and their undernourisher the state.

  The expression on the faces of people circulating in picture galleries shows an ill-concealed disappointment that only images hang there.

  TAX ADVICE

  No doubt of it: there is a secret connection between the measure of commodities and the measure of life – that is to say, between money and time. The less richly fulfilled is the time of a life, the more fragmented, multiform, and disparate its moments, while the great era typifies the existence of the superior person. Lichtenberg quite rightly suggests that we should talk of making time smaller rather than shorter, and he notes: ‘A couple of dozen million minutes make up a life of forty-five years and a little over.’ Where a currency is in use of which a dozen million units mean nothing, life there will need to be counted in seconds rather than years if it is to present a respectable total. In which case it will be frittered away like a sheaf of banknotes: Austria cannot kick the habit of counting in crowns.