Certain nights with his desire to understand himself, he would draw even more deeply from his depleted energy, he would gamble for knowledge by taking several cups of coffee and drugging them with sleeping pills, until like a cave explorer he would be able to wander into himself, the thread of his escape a bottle of whisky, for with the liquor he could always return when what he learned about himself became too large, too complex, too directly dangerous. And next day he would lie around, dumbed by the drugs. “I even compete with the analysts,” Eitel would think, “how competitive I am.” and feel that no one could help him but himself. For the answer was simple, he knew the answer. This movie of his was dangerous, he had so many enemies, they were real enemies—no analyst could banish them. Had he been so naïve as to think he could make his movie while men like Herman Teppis sat by and applauded? He needed energy for it, and courage, and all the wise tricks he had learned in twenty years of handling the people who worked for him, and to do that, to do all of that, perhaps a young man was needed, someone so strong and simple as to believe the world was there for him to change it. With rage he would think of all the people he had known through the years, and their contempt for the film. Oh, the film was a contemptuous art to be sure, a fifteenth-century Italian art where to do one’s work, one had to know how to flatter princes and lick the toes of condottieri, and play one’s plots and intrigue one’s intrigues, and say one’s little dangerous thing, and somehow delude them all, exaggerate one’s compromises and hide one’s statement until if one were good enough, one could get away with it, and five centuries later, safe in a museum, the tourists would go by and say obediently, “What a great artist! What a fine man he must have been! Look at the mean faces of those aristocrats!”