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I encounter such lost souls again as I read the Spoon River Anthology, in which Edgar Lee Masters gives the dead residents of a small town ten or twenty lines each to describe the lives they have led. Alcoholics, secret affairs, crooked business dealings, old maids, lunatics, as well as some people…

At the time, I assumed that these tales were supposed to end happily, so I approached them with that expectation, always prepared to keep searching for the Isles of the Blessed. And so as a teenager I arrived at the Rosenhaus in Adelbert Stifter’s Indian Summer, where life is arranged in the servic…

It was probably during that time that I learned to live with unfinished things, and with the knowledge that houses built for eternity aren’t really eternal. Only as an adult did I learn that when Hitler planned the major building projects for his Thousand-Year Reich, he intended them to be magnific…

I remember one summer in a house in the countryside, a house that hasn’t been our house for a long time now: I was sitting at the electric typewriter, writing a seminar paper on a fairly obscure topic, but one that had provoked me to intensive reflection and obsessive writing. I hadn’t even chosen …