To sit in a room on an evening and consider how to avoid thinking about madness, to sit for hours doing this, looking out of an old window not seeing anything because of the darkness of course, to look out not for that reason yet to continue looking and thinking further about how to avoid thinking about madness, about techniques of avoidance, or rather about whether the apparatus of such a technique might be inexhaustible, or rather about the possibility that the store of such techniques could be entirely exhausted, then to walk up and down in the room and, first, to consume what remains in the bottle of Unicum then to open one of beer, not thinking whether there might be another bottle of Unicum but to go on and on thinking with a glass of beer in one’s hand, sitting down in an armchair wondering whether avoiding madness might be like avoiding a heart attack and answering, yes, they are comparable…

 

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