My outrageous book without either a preconceived end or a comprehensible beginning, my single and yet infinitely ambitious book, simultaneously pursues two intrinsically practical and intertwined aims: on the one hand, it narrows my activity, my entire life, present and future, to something potentially, or at least hopefully, intelligible, by means of a reduction common to both reading and writing, that is, by means of something akin to metaphysical castration, or rather self-castration, which removes everything but that which can be expressed through and for the written language (not to mention the concomitant, resolute, and maybe also ruthless, abbreviation—conceived so as to enable myself, if not only myself, to effectively lessen the danger of debilitating and nauseating literary bulk); and, on the other hand, referring to the past (which always threatens to overtake me, or to define me, despite the fact that my project has hardly even begun), my lonely, proud, and rambling book leaves out a single trail, which should not be confused with a single string of letters and punctuation marks (regardless of all the perpendicular excursions which had to be, or still have to be, abandoned—due to my nearly suicidal sequential simplicity), that will eventually, sooner or later, no doubt greatly simplify the squaring of my accounts when I will be confronted with the unavoidable task of providing the final judgment of my own, thereby vindicating the entire project in terms of that blessed unity which would have otherwise escaped me (and perhaps mocked me from afar when it would be already too late to do anything about it but to curse, despair, and look askance through an open window), for the premeditated intention to invoke it, the unity, artificially and anxiously by a sudden and irrevocable conversion of faith only then, at the end, would simply be impossible to accept at this time as sufficient for, and appropriate to, an individual as pitilessly ambitious as myself, because there is no guarantee, and there could not at present be any such guarantee, that a belated invocation of unity could offer even the briefest of respites at the most crucial moment of one’s entire life, the moment of reckoning and reconciliation, when everything must be ready for definition. And, by then, everything will be ready.

Addendum (July 16, 1982)

But will I be blessed with the courage and grace needed to carefully select so many pages of no consequence, so many pages to be safely discarded and destroyed in advance, so many pages which I will have written for no apparent reason by the time of final judgment, when the appalling volume of my involuntary secretions will weigh upon my frail body like another and alien life; or will I hold onto everything with misguided love and feverish passion of an expiring parent, whose ugly, fat, and stupid children have long renounced any tutelage and gratitude imposed upon them against their sovereign and demented will; or will I bitterly shred and chew and spit out and trample upon and burn every single page accumulated in vain; or will I have to resort to cunning again and for the last time, and submit all the unfathomable pages to an appropriately designed randomization procedure, which will affect only a well-defined fraction of my writings, and which will blindly and justly extricate both myself and others from this divine act of merciful destruction; or will I send the bulky remnants of my past, transformed into meticulously wrapped and marked boxes of yellow paper, to supposed and understanding friends and acquaintances, in whose memory I will live forever and painlessly; or will I continue writing until the very last moment granted to me, hoping that I have forgotten or missed something or other of utmost importance; or will I abdicate and abandon my pages to the innocent elements, free from either intelligence of malice, and inexorable in their quest for a better tomorrow; or will I make an earnest effort to read my additive wisdom for the last time, before it will be too late, and in order to retain at least a part of it for thereafter; or will I invite a book publisher and talk to him amiably, just in case, offer him coffee and cookies, or maybe tea, show him a letter or two, just in case again, introduce him to my family and a friend, etc., as though I could not care less about his editors, printers, truck drivers, agents, and bespectacled secretaries; or will I simply and peacefully give up the ghost?