p. 1: For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, ad it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've coe to look like my encylopedias— and a good three tons
of them I've compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and
a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.

p. 2: When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying
through air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and
is not the blood of Christ.

p. 3: If I knew how to write, I'd write a book about the greatest of man's joys and sorrows. It is by and from books
that I've learned that the heavens are not humane, neither the heavens nor any man with a head on his shoulders—
it's not that men don't wish to be humane, it just goes against common sense.

p. 5: Last month they delivered nearly fifteen hundred pounds of "Old Masters" reproductions, dropped nearly
fifteen hundreds pounds of sopping-wet Rembrandts, Halses, Monets, Manets, Klimts, Cézanness, and other
big guns of European art into my cellar.

p. 6: I'm the only one on earth who knows which bale has Goethe, which Schiller, which Hölderline, which Nietzsche.
In a sense, I am both artist and audience, but the daily pressure does me in, tires me, racks me, sears me, and to reduce
and restrict my enormous self-output I drink beer after beer

pp. 7-8: When I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it's amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty,m I've been in the very heart of truth... I am now taking home books in my briefcase. So I walk home like a burning house, like a burning stable, the light of life pouring out of the fire, fire pouring
out of the dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes.

p. 9: I can be by myself because I'm never lonely, I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude,
a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me."

pp. 13-14: I took Mama's ashes to my uncle... And when I gave him the urn, he weighed it in his hand and declared she wasn't quite all there— she'd weighed a full 165 pounds when she was alive— so he weighed her on a scale and then sat down and worked out that there ought to be another one and three-quarter ounces of her... the part of the Talmud that says: "For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us."

p. 23: I could see how right Rimbaud was when he wrote that the battle of the spirit is as terrible as any armed conflict;
I could grasp the true meaning of Christ's cruel words, "I came not to send peace, but a sword."

p. 24: a reflection of everything Hegel and Goethe had dreamed of and aspiret to, the Greece in us, the beautiful Hellenic mode and goal. I saw Doric columns and frieze-covered gutters, I saw Corinthian columns with florid leafage, I saw Ionic columns with volutes and stately shafts. I saw garlanded cornices, templelike vestibules, caryatids and balustrades reaching
to the roofs of the buildings— and I walked in their shadows.

p. 27: It is evening, I'm at a dance, and in comes Marie (or Manca, as I call her), the girl I've been waiting for, ribbons trailing, ribbons braided in her hair, and the band plays and I dance only with her, we dance and the world swirls around us like a merry-go-round.

p. 31: Lao-tze's dictum: Know thy shame and preserve thy glory... Today was a beautiful day.

pp. 33-34: I watched Jesus, an ardent young man intent on changing the world, rise up and take over Lao-tze's place at the summit, while the old man looked on submissively, using the return to the sources to line his eternity; I watched Jesus cast
a spell of prayer on reality and lead it in the direction of miracle, while Lao-tze followed the laws of nature along the Tao,
the only Way to learned ignorance... Drinking from my mug, I kept my eyes glued to the young Jesus, all ardor amidst a group of youths and pretty girls, and the lonely Lao-tze, looking only for a worthy grave... I watched the young Jesus still suffused with mellow ecstasy and Lao-tze leaning sad and pensive against the edge of the drum and looking on with scornful indifference; I watched Jesus giving confident orders and making a mountain move, and Lao-tze spreading a net of ineffable intellect over the cellar; I watched Jesus the optimistic spiral and Lao-tze the closed circle, Jesus bristling with dramatic situations and Lao-tze lost in thought over the insolubility of moral conflicts.

p. 40: While the Gypsy girls were with me, Jesus and Lao-tze had been standing together in the drum of my hydraulic press; now that I was alone again, wound in wires of flesh flies but lefft to my own devices and the routine of my work, I saw Jesus as a tennis champion who has just won his first Wimbledon and Lao-tze as a destitute merchant, I saw Jesus in the sanguine corporality of his ciphers and symbols and Lao-tze in a shroud, pointing at an unhewn plank; I saw Jesus as a playboy and Lao-tze as an old gland-abandoned bachelor; I saw Jesus raising an imperious arm to damn his enemies and Lao-tze lowering his arms like broken wings; I saw Jesus as a romantic, Lao-tze as a classicist, Jesus as the flow, Lao-tze as the ebb, Jesus as spring, Lao-tze as autumn, Jesus as the embodiment of love for one's neighbor, Lao-tze as the height of emptiness, Jesus as Progressus ad futurum, Lao-tze as regressus ad originem.

p. 47: Neither the heavens are humane nor is life above or below— or within me. Bonjour, M. Gauguin!

pp. 49-50: Yesterday we buried my uncle, who had a stroke on the job, in his signal tower... I placed a volume of Immanuel Kant in his hands, opening it to a beautiful text that has never failed to move me: "Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder the starry firmament above me and the moral law within me," but, changing my mind, I leafed through the younger Kant and found an even more beautiful passage: "When the tremulous radiance of a summer night fills with twinkling stars and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn into a state of enhanced sensitivity made of friendship and disdain for the world and eternity."

pp. 51-52: I learned from Kant's Theory of the Heavens how in the silence, the absolute silence of the night, when the senses lie dormant, an immortal spirit speacks in a nameless tongue of things that can be grasped but not described. And these lines so shocked me that I ran out to the air shaft and gazed up at my starry patch of firmament.

pp. 52-53: It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd sen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence... Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, "The highest law is love, the love that is compassion."

p. 54: Anyway, there I lay, half asleep, overwhelmed by the gnawing going on above me, and, as usual when I drift off,
I was joined by a tiny Gypsy girl in the form of the Milky Way, the quiet, innocent Gypsy girl who was the love of my
youth and used to wait for me with one foot slightly forward and off to the side, like a ballet dancer in one of the positions,
the beautiful, long-forgotten beauty of my youth.

p. 56: At first I thought she put so much wood on the fire just to win me over, but then I realized it was in her,
the fire was in her, she couldn't live without fire.

p. 57: I always loved twilight: it was the only time I had the feeling that something important could happen.
All things were more beautiful bathed in twilight, all streets, all squares, and all the people walking through them.

p. 58: During the last autumn of the war I bought some blue wrapping paper, a ball of twine, and glue, and while the Gypsy girl kept my glass filled with beer, I spent a whole Sunday on the floor making a kite, balancing it carefully so it would rise, and I tacked on a long tail of tiny paper doves strung together by the Gypsy girl under my tutelage, and then we went up to Round Bluff, and after flinging the kite to the heavens and letting the cord run free for a while... then I handed it to her, but she cried out that it would carry her up to heaven— she could feel herself ascending like the Virgin Mary— so I put my hands on her shoulders and said if that was the case we'd go together, but she gave me back the ball of twine and we just sat there.

p. 59: Suddenly I shuddered all over, because suddenly the kite was God and I was the Son of God, and the cord was the Holy Spirit which puts man in contact, in dialogue with God... One evening I came home to find her gone... My childlike little Gypsy, simple as unworked wood, as the breath of the Holy Spirit— all she ever wanted was to feed the stove with the big, heavy boards and beams she brought on her back, crosslike, from the rubble.

p. 60: The heavens are not humane, but I still was at the time. When she failed to return at the end of the war, I burned the kite and twine and the long tail she had decorated, a tiny Gypsy girl whose name I'd never quite known.

p. 61: The heavens are not humane, but I'd forgotten compassion and love.

p. 68: going to Hellas knowing next to nothing about Aristotle or Plato or even Goethe, that extension of ancient Greece, no, they just went on working, pulling covers off books and tossing the bristling, horrified pages on the conveyor belt with the utmost calm and indifference, with no feeling for what the book might mean, no thought that somebody had to write the book, somebody had to edit it, somebody had to design it, somebody had to set it, somebody had to proofread it, somebody had to make the corrections, somebody had to read the galley proofs, and somebody had to check the page proofs, print the book, and somebody had to bind the book, and somebody had to pack the books into boxes, and somebody had to do the accounts, and somebody had to decide that the book was unfit to read, and somebody had to order it pulped, and somebody had to put all the books in storage, and somebody had to load them onto the truck, and somebody had to drive the truck here...

p. 76: so it was that Manca, with nothing but a bed and a clear-cut goal, built herself a house. And now she had taken up with an artist, whose love, though platonic, was such that he had undertaken a statue of her in the form of an angel...the hoary old man gave me his hand and said that Manca had told him all about me, that Manca was his muse, that Manca had rendered him so productive that he was now ready to continue the Almighty's work and make her an angel.

p. 87: what I saw was a large gilt upright bathtub with Seneca lying upright in it just after he had slashed the veins in his wrist, thereby proving to himself how right he was to have written that little book I so love, On Tranquillity of Mind.

p. 88: your brain is nothing but a hydraulic press of compacted thought.

pp. 94-95: two tons of books perched over my head, a daily sword of Damocles I've hung above myself.

p. 96: Why does Lao-tze say that to be born is to exit and to die is to enter? Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder— the starry firmament above me and the work I do, which is so terrifying it requires a divinity degree...
I shall go and see what Leibniz himself was unable to teach me. I shall cross the boundary of being and nothingness.

p. 97: The dust swirls up with a brisk fla of the wings. Lindbergh flew over the ocean. I make myself a little bed in the wastepaper, I still have my pride... holding my Novalis tightly, my finger marking the sentence that has always filled me with rapture. I smile blissfully, because I am more and more lie Manca and her angel, I am entering a world where I have never been and holding a book open to the page that says, "Every beloved object is the center of a garden of paradise." Instead of compacting clean paper in the Melantrich cellar I will follow Seneca, I will follow Socrates, and here, in my press, in my cellar and no one can turn me out, no one can dismiss me.

pp. 97-98: at the moment of truth I see my tiny Gypsy girl, whose name I never knew, we are flying the kite through
the autumn sky. She holds the cord, I look up, the kite has taken the shape of my sad face, and the Gypsy girl sends me
a message from the ground, I see it making its way up the cord. I can almost reach it now. I stretch out my hand, I read
the large, childlike letters: ILONKA, Yes, that was her name.