Fiasco Read Free Page B

everything in his power as far as he was concerned (for, as we have seen, at this very moment he was standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking).
    In recent days he had already gone through every one of his old, older, or still older ideas, sketches and fragments, which he kept in a folder furnished with the title “
Ideas, sketches, fragments
,” but either they had proved unusable or else he had understood not a word of them (even though he himself had been the one who noted them down some time before, or some time before that, or still further back in time).
    He had even undertaken lengthy walks in the Buda hills (contemplative walks, as the old boy called them).
    All to no avail.
    Now, with his ideas, sketches, fragments, and walks (contemplative walks, as the old boy called them) in turn, one after the other, all having come to nought, all that was left was his papers.
    It had been a long time since he had seen his papers.
    Not that he wished to see them.
    He had even hidden them in the farthest depths of the filing cabinet in order to avoid somehow catching sight of them.
    So the old boy had to be in a very tight spot indeed to be driven, for once, to place his ultimate trust—if previously it had been on a stroke of good fortune (which, for known reasons, we might better amend to the virtually impossible), then on the his ideas, sketches, fragments and his contemplative walks—in his papers.
    But at this juncture it is to be feared that if we do not break away a bit from the old boy’s train of thought, we shall never get to see in the clear light that is indispensable to what follows the subtle, but not inconsequential, difference between ideas, sketches, and fragments, on the one hand, and papers, on the other.
    It may be that we shall not be forced into too lengthy an explanation.
    Specifically, ideas, sketches, and fragments are only produced by someone who is driven to those resorts by imperative and pressing reasons; someone—like the old boy, for instance—whose occupation happens to be writing books (or rather, to be more precise, for whom things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).
    Papers, on the other hand, everybody has. If not a number of them, then certainly one: a scrap of paper on which one noted down something at some time, presumably something important that was not to be forgotten and was carefully put away—and then forgotten about.
    Papers which preserve adolescent poems.
    Papers through which one sought a way out at a critical period.
    Possibly an entire diary.
    A house plan.
    A budget for a difficult year ahead. A letter one started to write.
    A message—“Back soon”—that may later have proved to be portentous.
    At the very least a bill, or the washing instructions torn off some undergarment, on the reverse side of which we discover minute, faded, unfamiliar and by now illegible lettering—our own handwriting.
    The old boy had a whole file of such papers.
    As we have perhaps already mentioned, he kept them in the farthest depths of the filing cabinet in order to avoid somehow catching sight of them.
    Now that he wanted the exact opposite—namely, to catch sight of them—he first had to lift out of the filing cabinet his typewriter, several files—among them one labelled “
Ideas, sketches, fragments
”—as well as two cardboard boxes which held a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary) (at all events only the occasion of the particular moment could assign a firm ascription to those designations) (as a result of which the old boy could never know for sure which of these objects were necessary and which unnecessary) (a distinction that became all the more unclear, as years might go by without his opening the lids of the two cardboard boxes and so casting even a single glance over the variety of objects, necessary and unnecessary alike).
    This, then, was his way of ensuring that he caught sight of