Fever or not, I always have such a buzzing in both ears that it can't get much worse. I've had it since the war. Madness has been hot on my trail ... no exaggeration ... for twenty-two years. That's quite a package. She's tried a million different noises, a tremendous hullabaloo, but I raved faster than she could, I screwed her, I beat her to the tape. That's how I do it. I shoot the shit, I charm her, I force her to forget me. My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots ... it never stops scolding ... it dazes me with blasts of the trombone, it keeps on day and night. I've got every noise in nature, from the flute to Niagara Falls ... Wherever I go, I've got drums with me and an avalanche of trombones ... for weeks on end I play the triangle ... On the bugle I can't be beat. I still have my own private birdhouse complete with three thousand five hundred and twenty-seven birds that will never calm down ... I am the organs of the Universe ... I provide everything, the ham, the spirit, and the breath ... Often I seem to be worn out, my thoughts stagger and sprawl ... I'm not very good to them. I'm working up the opera of the deluge. As the curtain falls, the midnight train pulls into the station ... The glass dome shatters and collapses ... The steam escapes through two dozen valves ... The couplings bounce sky-high ... In wide-open carriages three hundred musicians soused to the gills rend the air, playing forty-five bars at once...

For twenty-two years she's been trying to carry me off ... at exactly midnight ... But I can fight back ... with twelve pure symphonies of cymbals, two cataracts of nightingales ... a whole troupe of seals being roasted over a slow fire ... It's bachelor's work ... that's for sure. It's my second life. Anyway it's my business.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.