In an interview with an English-speaking newspaper—thank God, a small one that subsequently failed and faded into erasure—I explained quite seriously that I had, through an excitative celebration of higher brain functions and the intervention of illuminatory biochemical processes, attained awareness of an interstitial universe: the post-mortally persisting obtrusions of the collective human mind. Pick the bones out of that, if you can. I, certainly, cannot. I was a middle-class boy, which is to say that my father had served the Emperor in the war, with honour and some effect, and been therefore preferred to high but not heritable position. I had travelled as part of my nation’s eclectic student diaspora, with a scholarship that was meant to make me a lawyer but had somehow ended with my becoming a painter. I had shed along the way the belief in God which had been a defining aspect of my forebears’ education, and replaced Him briefly with Eduard Bernstein before concluding that the fury of politics was not the passion that lived in me.