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 service of beauty, where nature is recorded and ordered and organized according to new categories, the narrator has an inheritance that provides him with an income for life, and he roams through the mountains collecting botanical samples in his vasculum, learns to arrange statues in the proper light, he studies the trades of men with equanimity and kindness, engages in philosophical conversations, contemplates cameos and paintings, and everything that he does is filled with meaning and order — and free from the constraints to which people are otherwise subjected in their earthly existence. The Rosenhaus is the vision of an elite existence in freedom, a secure existence within an orderly world, but that order is not imposed from without, it is self-created. But even here, the narrator’s freedom is not only spatial, it is also temporal. It is the narrator’s good fortune to be able to choose his own tasks, and to allow for each of these tasks as much time as he deems necessary. From the very first page, the book puts the reader at ease, the same sort of ease that the narrator enjoys thanks to the circumstances of his life. Perhaps it was this sense of ease — or the nearly autistic organization of the world in this book — that made it seem to me like a place where my own thoughts could find refuge, an inward escape, a utopia, leading away from a system that sought to explain all things in worldly terms, and into a microscopic infinity.