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But then came those last, critical days in July, and every hour brought contradictory news [...] We sensed that matters were getting serious. All of a sudden a cold wind of fear was blowing over the beach, sweeping it clear. People left their hotels in thousands, there was a rush for the trains, even the most confident began to pack their bags in a hurry. As soon as news of the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia came I bought myself a railway ticket, and not before time, for the Ostend express on which I travelled was the last train to leave Belgium for Germany.

To be perfectly honest, I must confess that there was something fine, inspiring, even seductive in that first mass outburst of feeling. It was difficult to resist it. And in spite of my hatred and abhorrence of war, I would not like to be without the memory of those first days. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of people felt, as never before, what they would have been better advised to feel in peace—that they belonged together.

You only had to set eyes on those carriages to know in advance what had become of the country. The conductors showing us to our seats looked thin, hungry and shabbily clothed. Their worn-out uniforms hung lose on their stooped shoulders. The leather straps for pulling the windows up and down had been cut off; every scrap of leather was valuable. Bayonets or sharp knives had been hacking at the seats [...] The ashtrays had been stolen as well for the sake of their small nickel and copper content. [...] The light bulbs had been smashed or stolen [...] No-one dared let go of anything for as much as a minute in the dark.

There were days when I had to pay fifty thousand marks for a newspaper in the morning and a hundred thousand in the evening; anyone who had to exchange foreign currency did it piecemeal, by the hour, because at four o’clock he would get many more marks than at three [...] You paid your tram fare in millions of marks, trucks carted paper money from the central Reichsbank to the commercial banks, and two weeks later you could find banknotes to the value of a hundred thousand marks lying in the gutter, contemptuously tossed aside by a beggar. [...] Teenage boys who had found a crate of bars of soap forgotten on the docks drove around in cars and lived like princes for months on end by selling one bar of soap a day, while their parents, who had been rich, were now reduced to beggary. [...] Even the barely literate were dealing and speculating now, earning money with the secret feeling that they were all deceiving themselves and being deceived by some hidden hand, cleverly staging a scene of chaos in order to free the state from its debts and obligations.

I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad and with nothing to jog my memory; I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room. There is nowhere I can go for information, because all over the world postal services have been halted or are subject to censorship. [...] So I ask my memories to speak and choose for me, and give at least some faint recollection of my life before it sinks into the dark.

I was in Vienna during those three days, which makes me a first-hand witness of this deciding battle and with it the suicide of Austrian independence. But as I would like to be a truthful witness, I must paradoxically begin by admitting that I myself saw nothing at all of this revolution. [...] And nothing strikes me as more characteristic of the form taken by revolutions today, and the methods they employ, than the fact that within the huge area of a modern metropolis they take place only in a very few parts of the city, and most of its population never sees anything. [...] Every newspaper reader in New York, London and Paris knew more about what was really going on than those of us apparently well placed to witness it.

If I try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. [...] Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire.

Whenever, in conversation with younger friends, I mention something that happened before the First World War, their startled questions make me realise how much of what I still take for granted as reality has become either past history or unimaginable to them. And a lurking instinct in me says that they are right; all the bridges are broken between today, yesterday and the day before yesterday. I can only marvel at the wealth and variety of events that we have compressed into the brief span of a single lifetime—admittedly a very uncomfortable and dangerous lifetime—especially when I compare it with the life my forebears led. Both my father and my grandfather lived their lives in a single, direct way—it was one and the same life from beginning to end, without many vicissitudes, without upheaval and danger, a life of small tensions, imperceptible transitions, always lived in the same easy, comfortable rhythm as the wave of time carried them from the cradle to the grave.

He lies in the Paris cemetery of Pere Lachais, and on his grave, presided over by a sphinx, there is never any shortage of the flowers due to all martyrs.

Conrad was so irritable that whenever he dropped his pen, instead of picking it up at once and carrying on writing, he would spend several minutes exasperatedly drumming his fingers on the desk as if bemoaning what had occurred.

He was admired and read, but perhaps not very loved, although no-one ever said a word against him as a person.

No-one can deny that Joyce was a scrupulous man with a love of detail.

I had always assumed that there existed in Australian intellectual culture a rough historical knowledge of what had happened during the Holocaust and a general awareness of the ideological forces which lay behind it. I had assumed that most Australian intellectuals still thought of the Holocaust as a central event in human history, as a deed so evil that the centuries would not wash its mystery and meaning away. I had assumed that we all knew that no-one worth reading would dare write about the Holocaust without humility and high seriousness, without a recognition of what was at issue here not for Jews but for all human beings. And I had, finally, assumed that all Australians - not only intellectuals - would find it easy to understand why an event like the Holocaust should matter so deeply to those of their fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish. As the Demidenko affair deepened, I discovered, rather suddenly, that none of these assumptions was sound.

The Nazi extermination of the Jews was unique because never before had a state, under the responsible authority of its leader, decided and announced that a specific group of human beings, including the old, the women, the children, and the infants, would be killed to the very last one, and implemented this decision with all the means at its disposal.

German historian Eberhard Jackel, 1986

Many situations should be forbidden, a

Many situations should be forbidden, all getting and losing of jobs, proposals of marriage, reception of love letters by either sex... all allusions to illness or suicide (except insanity), all quotations, all mentions of genius, promise, writing, painting, sculpting, art, poetry, and the phrases 'I like your stuff,' 'What's his stuff like?' 'Damned good,' 'Let me make you some coffee,' all young men with ambition or young women with emotion, all remarks like 'Darling, I've found the most wonderful cottage' (flat, castle), 'Ask me another time, dearest, only please - just this once - not now,' 'Love you - of course I love you' (don't love you) - and 'It's not that, it's only I feel so terribly tired.'

Forbidden names: Hugo, Peter, Sebastian, Adrian, Ivor, Julian, Pamela, Chloe, Enid, Inez, Miranda, Joanna, Jill, Felicity, Phyllis.

Forbidden faces: all young men with curly hair or remarkable eyes, all gaunt haggard thinkers' faces, all faunlike characters, anybody over six feet, or with any distinction whatever, and all women with a nape to their neck (he loved the way her hair curled in the little hollow at the nape of her neck).

For, open any textbook, any anthology: world literature is always presented as a juxtaposition of national literatures... as a history of literatures!...

And yet Rabelais, ever undervalued by his compatriots, was never better understood than by a Russian, Bakhtin; Dostoyevsky than by a Frenchman, Gide; Ibsen than by an Irishman, Shaw; Joyce than by an Austrian, Broch. The universal importance of the generation of great North Americans - Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos - was first brought to light by French writers ("In France I'm the father of a literary movement," Faulkner wrote in 1946, complaining of the deaf ear he encountered in his own country). These few examples are not bizarre exceptions to the rule; no, they are the rule: geographic distance sets the observer back from the local context and allows him to embrace the large context of world literature, the only approach that can bring out a novel's aesthetic value - that is to say: the previously unseen aspects of the existence that this particular novel has managed to make clear; the novelty of form it has found.

Do I mean by this that to judge a novel one can do without a knowledge of its original language? I do indeed mean exactly that! Gide did not know Russian, Shaw did not know Norwegian, Sartre did not read Dos Passos in the original. If the books of Witold Gombrowicz and Danilo Kis had depended solely on the judgement of people who read Polish and Serbo-Croatian, their radical aesthetic newness would never have been discovered.

"One must be absolutely modern," wrote Arthur Rimbaud. Some sixty years later Gombrowicz was not so sure...

In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then mankind was divided in two - those who sought to defend the status quo and those who sought to change it. Then the acceleration of History took effect: whereas in the past man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk: the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with history on the move! Which meant that a person could be progressive and conformist, conservative and rebel, at the same time!

Attacked as a reactionary by Sartre and his bunch, Camus got off the famous remark about people who had "merely set down their armchairs facing in the direction of History"; Camus was right, but he did not know that the precious chair was on wheels...

That was when a certain number of Rimbaud's heirs grasped this extraordinary thing: today the only modernism worthy of the name is antimodern modernism.

There were long periods when art did not seek out the new but took pride in making repetition beautiful, reinforcing tradition, and ensuring the stability of collective life... Then one day in the twelfth century, a church musician in Paris though of taking the melody of the Gregorian chant, unchanged for centuries, and adding to it a voice in counterpoint... Because they were no longer imitating what was done before, composers lost anonymity, and their names lit up like lanterns making a path toward distant realms. Having taken flight, music became, for several centuries, the history of music.

All the European arts, each in its turn, took flight that way, transformed into their own history. That was the great miracle of Europe: not its art, but its art become history.

Alas, miracles do not endure for long. What takes flight will one day come to earth. In anguish I imagine a time when art shall cease to seek out the never-said and will go docilely back into the service of the collective life that requires it to render repetition beautiful and help the individual merge, at peace and with joy, into the uniformity of being.

For the history of art is perishable. The babble of art is eternal.

Literature remains, unfortunately, the romance of older, subtle men in love with one another, who shower one another with favours! Break out of that m

Literature remains, unfortunately, the romance of older, subtle men in love with one another, who shower one another with favours! Break out of that magic circle! Seek new inspirations! Allow a child, a puppy, a halfwit to seduce you, bind yourself to people of other conditions. [...]

Yes! to be sharp, wise, mature, to be an “artist��, “thinker��, “stylist�� only to a certain degree but never too much. [...]

Herein lies the difficulty.

For if I had entered culture as a pure barbarian, an absolute anarchist, a complete primitive [...] you would break into applause immediately. [...]

But then I would be a manufacturer like all the rest: like they for whom the product becomes more important than they themselves are. [...]

The real battle in culture (about which one hears so little) does not take place, according to me, between enemy truths or between different life-styles. [...] The most important, the most extreme, and most incurable dispute is waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form.

Lately, we artists have allowed ourselves to be led around too sheepishly by philosophers and other scientists. We have proved incapable of being sufficiently different. An excessive respect for scientific truth has obscured our own truth. In our eagerness to understand reality, we forget that we are not here to understand reality, but only to express it. We, art, are reality. Art is a fact and not commentary attached to fact. [...] Science will always remain an abstraction, but our voice is the voice of a man made of flesh and blood.

I would like people to see in me that which I suggest to them. I would like to impose myself on people as a personality in order to be its subject forever after that. [...] To travel as far as possible into the virgin territory of culture, into its still half-wild, and so indecent, places, while exciting you to extremes, to excite even myself. [...] I want to meet you in that jungle, bind myself to you in a way that is the most difficult and uncomfortable, for you and for me. [...] I want to uncover my present moment and tie myself to you in our todayness. [...]

That is all. If only I could summon the spirit. But I don’t feel equal to the task. Three years ago, unfortunately, I broke with pure art, as my kind of art was not the kind that could be cultivated casually, on Sundays or holidays. I began to write this diary for the simple reason of saving myself, in fear of degradation and an ultimate inundation by the waves of a trivial life, which are already up to my neck. Yet it turns out that even here I am incapable of total effort. One cannot be nothingness all week and then suddenly expect to exist on Sunday.

Assuming that I was born (which is not certain), I was born to spoil your game. My books are not supposed to say to you: Be who you are. They say rather: You pretend that you are who you are. I would like that which you have long thought barren and shameful in yourselves to become fruitful. If you hate acting so much, it is because it is a part of you. For me, acting becomes a key to life and reality. If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature. In me, Polish immaturity delineates my entire attitude to culture. Your youth speaks with my lips [...] You hate that which you try to eliminate in yourself. [...] Ah, but I would like you to be conscious actors in this game!

Lightness �� this is perhaps the most profound thing the artist has to say to the philosopher.

How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.

9) The honest truth is that if we read Edgar Allan Poe that would be more than enough. 10) Consider that ninth point. Consider and reflect. It's not too late. You must consider point number nine. If possible: on your knees.