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 the topic myself, it was my professor’s suggestion. That was the first time that I experienced how someone else could open a door for me into my own reflections. I typed, looked out at the lake, typed some more. Whenever I wanted to change some part of the text, I would take scissors and cut it up into individual paragraphs, shuffle them around on the floor until the collage was just right, and then reach for the glue. A long-forgotten approach to writing, it was 1992, a time we now refer to as “the last century.” When my friends came to visit, they left me alone with my work in the morning, in the afternoon we would go for a swim together, cook, talk, lie in the sun. I was in my mid-twenties.