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.I suddenly anticipated the sweetness of domination over lands and peoples, the thorn of that frustration that can only be healed by power.With Alexander of Macedonia, I wanted to conquer the whole world and not a square inch of ground less.5 Ignorant, eager, full of chafing desire, I took the march-past of creation, the parade of countries, shining processions I could see only at intervals, between crimson eclipses, caused by the rush of blood from my heart beating in time with the universal march of all the races.Rudolph paraded before my eyes those battalions and regiments; he took the salute fully absorbed and diligent.He, the owner of the album, degraded himself voluntarily to the role of an aide, reported to me solemnly, somewhat disoriented by his equivocal part.At last, very excited in a rush of fierce generosity, he pinned on me, like a medal, a pink Tasmania, glowing like May, and a Hyderabad swarming with a gypsy babble of entangled lettering.6 It is then that the revelation took place: the vision of the fiery beauty of the world suddenly appeared, the secret message of good tidings, the special announcement of the limitless possibilities of being.Bright, fierce, and breathtaking horizons opened wide, the world trembled and shook in its joints, leaning dangerously, threatening to break out from its rules and habits.What attraction, dear reader, has a postage stamp for you? What do you make of the profile of Emperor Franz Joseph with his bald patch crowned by a laurel crown? Is it a symbol of ordinariness, or is it the ultimate within the bounds of possibility, the guarantee of unpassable frontiers within which the world is enclosed once and for all? At that time, the world was totally encompassed by Franz Joseph I.On all the horizons there loomed this omnipresent and inevitable profile, shutting the world off, like a prison.And just when we had given up hope and bitterly resigned ourselves inwardly to the uniformity of the world – the powerful guarantor of whose narrow immutability was Franz Joseph I – then suddenly Oh God, unaware of the importance of it, you opened before me that stamp album, you allowed me to cast a look on its glimmering colours, on the pages that shed their treasures, one after another, ever more glaring and more frightening.Who will hold it against me that I stood blinded, weak with emotion, and that tears flowed from my eyes? What a dazzling relativism, what a Copernican deed, what flux of all categories and concepts! Oh God, so there were uncounted varieties of existence, so your world was indeed vast and infinite! This was more than I had ever imagined in my boldest dreams.So my early anticipation that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, continued to nag at me and insist that the world was immeasurable in its variety had been proven right at last! 7 The world at that time was circumscribed by Franz Joseph I.On each stamp, on every coin, and on every postmark his likeness confirmed its stability and the dogma of its oneness.This was the world, and there were no other worlds besides, the effigies of the imperial-and- royal old man proclaimed.Everything else was make-believe, wild pretence, and usurpation.Franz Joseph I rested on top of everything and checked the world in its growth.By inclination we tend to be loyal, dear reader.Being also affable and easygoing, we are not insensitive to the attractions of authority.Franz Joseph I was the embodiment of the highest authority.If that authoritarian old man threw all his prestige on the scales, one could do nothing but give up all one's aspirations and longings, manage as well as one could in the only possible world – that is, a world without illusions and romanticism – and forget.But when the prison seemed to be irrevocably shut, when the last bolt-hole was bricked up, when everything had conspired to keep silent about You, Oh God, when Franz Joseph had barred and sealed even the last chink so that one should not be able to see You, then You rose wearing a flowing cloak of seas and continents and gave him the lie.You, God, took upon Yourself the odium of heresy and 158 159SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGGN OF THE.HOURGLASS SPRING riches, these were the first random words that came to your mind.You reached into your pocket and showed me.like a handful of marbles, the possibilities that your world contained.You did not attempt to be precise; you said whatever came into your mind.You taught equally well has, said Panphibrass or Halleieevah, and the air among palms would flutter with motley parrot wings, and the sky, like an enormous, sapphire, cab; !ge rose, blown open to its core, would show in its dazzling centre you, frightening peacock eye, would shine with the glare of your wisdom, al d would spread a super-scent.You wanted to dazzle me, Oh God, :1 seduce me, perhaps to boast, tot even You have moments of van 'y when you succumb to self- co lgratulation.Oh, how I love these a oments! How greatly diminished you have bet., me, Franz Joseph, and your gospel of prose! I looked for you in vain: At last I found you.You were among the crowd, but how small, unimportant, and grey.You were marching with some others in the dust of the highway, immedi- ately following South America, but preceding Australia, and singing together with the others: Hosanna! 8 I became a disciple of the new gospel.i struck up a friendship with Rudolph.I admired him, feeling vaguely that he was only a tool, that the album was destined for somebody else.In fact, he seemed to me only its guardian.He catalogued, he stuck in and unstuck the stamps, he put the album away and locked the drawer.In reality he was sad, like a man who guesses that he is waning while I am waxing.He was like the man who came to straighten the Lord's paths.9 I had reasons to believe that the album was predestined for me.Many signs seemed to point to its holding a message and a personal commission for me.There was, for instance, the fact that no one felt himself to be the owner of the album, not even Rudolph, who acted more like its servant, an unwilling and lazy servant in the bond of duty.Sometimes envy would flood his heart with bitterness.He rebelled inwardly against the role of keeper of a treasure that did not really belong to him.He looked with envy on the reflection of distant worlds that flooded my face with a gamut of colour.Only in that reflection did he notice the glow of these pages.His own feelings were not really engaged.10 I once saw a prestidigitator.He stood in the centre of the stage, slim and visible to everybody, and demonstrated his top hat, showing its empty white bottom.Thus having assured us that his art was above suspicion of fraudulent manipulation, he traced with his wand a complicated magic sign and at once, with exaggerated precision and openness, began to produce from the top hat paper strips, coloured ribbons by the foot, by the yard, finally by the mile.The room filled with the rustling mass of colour, became bright from the heaps of light tissue, while the artist still pulled at the endless weft, despite the spectators' protests, their cries of ecstasy and spasmodic sobs until it became clear that all this effort was nothing to him, that he was drawing this plenty, not from his own, but from supernatural resources that had been opened to him and that were beyond human measures and calculations.But some people who could perceive the real sense of this demon- revealed this enormous, magnificent, colourful blasphemy to the world.Oh splendid Heresiarch! You struck me with the burning book, with that explosive stamp album from Rudolph's pocket.I did not know at that time that stamp albums could be pocket-size; in my blindness I at first took it for a paper pistol with which we sometimes pretended to fire at school, from under the seats, to the annoyance of teachers
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