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but stages in the history of our League; further, that Zoroaster, Lao Tse, Plato, Xenophon, Pythagoras, Albertus Magnus, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Novalis and Baudelaire were cofounders and brothers of our League. He smiled exactly in the way that I expected.
    â€œWell,” I said, “I have not come here to instruct you, but to learn from you. It is my passionate desire to write, perhaps not a history of the League (even a whole army of well-equipped scholars would not be in a position to do this), but to tell quite simply the story of our journey. But I am quite unsuccessful in even approaching the subject. It is not a question of literary ability; I think I have this. Moreover, I have no ambitions in this respect. No, it is because the reality that I once experienced, together with my comrades, exists no longer, and although its memories are the most precious and vivid ones that I possess, they seem so far away, they are composed of such a different kind of fabric, that it seems as if they originated on other stars in other millennia, or as if they were hallucinations.”
    â€œI can understand that!” cried Lukas eagerly. Our conversation was only just beginning to interest him. “How well I understand! That is just how I was affected by my war experiences. I thought I had experienced them clearly and vividly, I was almost bursting with images of them; the roll of film in my head seemed miles long. But when I sat at my writing-desk, on a chair, by a table, the razed villages and woods, the earth tremors caused by heavy bombardment, the conglomeration of filth and greatness, of fear and heroism, of mangled stomachs and heads, of fear of death and grim humor, were all immeasurably remote, only a dream, were not related to anything and could not really be conceived. You know that despite this, I finally wrote my war-book and that it is now read and discussed a great deal. But do you know, I do not think that ten books like it, each one ten times better and more vivid than mine, could convey any real picture of the war to the most serious reader, if he had not himself experienced the war. And there were not so many who had. Even those who participated in it did not for a long time experience it. And if many really did so—they forgot about it again. Next to the hunger to experience a thing, men have perhaps no stronger hunger than to forget.”
    He was silent and looked perplexed and lost in thought. His words had confirmed my own experiences and thoughts.
    After a time I asked him warily, “Then how was it possible for you to write the book?”
    He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. “It was only possible for me to do it,” he said, “because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war-comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies—that is how the book was produced.”
    And suddenly he said—it was the end of our first conversation: “Forgive me, I cannot say any more about it, not a single word more. I cannot, I will not. Good-bye.”
    He pushed me out.
    At our second meeting he was again calm and collected, had the same ironical smile and yet seemed to treat my problem seriously and to understand it fully. He made a few suggestions which seemed, however, of little use to me. At the end of the second and last conversation, he said to me almost