[during a rather dreary, and, at times, abstractly theoretical evening conversation]during a rather dreary, and, at times, abstractly theoretical evening conversation(I don't recall the particulars now), I felt we were markedby a mortal moral disease:                                                            I had been talking about the degradationof everyday privacy: (and I should have been more insistent about our havinglet ourselves go like this, crushed between the pathetic and vulgar,locked in the deformed bourgeois experience):                                                                                                        maybe I exaggerate: yet something'samiss, even in the way we carry ourselves (see how you're sitting, for example,at this moment): as well as when I tell you about young Goethein Leipzig badgering everyone to find out what exactly Erfahrung was,that thing they all said he lacked:                                                                          (and how an officer on leave answered him): [I live like a mouse]I live like a mouse: (a real mouse): (that nibbles crusts): (with its toughgums): (and these days digest this 1700s plateau that ranges, I don't know,from Restif to Rousseau):                                                        and on the 8th inst the problem of happinessis floated once more: I return to lecturing you: the precept is: swim naturallyin history: (oxymoronically speaking): (like that day I lost you at the stationin Pisa): (in the pathetic scene): (with you among the young mob,amid the goodbyes):                                            (between pleasure and reality, betweendesire and false consciousness): naturally nevertheless: (i.e., befitting humannature): (i.e., befitting work): (daywork):                                                                                        you sounded rattled to meone Sunday morning on the phone: (excessively rattled): (excessively rattlingto me): (and: I can hang up, I thought): (and instead I told you: come on,hang in there): (navigating the inconceivable labyrinthe): (from a Duomotelin Milan no less): (du coeur humain):                                                                                (I spoke to Maria just now): (on the phone): (I evoke,I invoke): (over a lonely dinner): (and: if you must know, I've always sufferedfrom loneliness): (and: always will) (and: I nibble and spit):                                                                                                                                (my trap, I feel it, awaits me):(a basement brand, with a spring-loaded bar for the skull):                                                                                                                                (and, like that, snap, crack):