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Even the profession of general e X c e l 0 n c a l e 0 S S e s s m e n t e r 37 no longer offers adequate protection. No agreements, in ^ Fascist era, are binding enough to secure headquarters against aiattacks, and commandants observing traditional caution are hanged by Hitler and beheaded by Chiang Kai-shek. It follows directly from this that anyone who attempts to come out alive - and survival itself has something nonsensical about it, like dreams in which having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from a basement - ought also to be prepared at each moment t end his life.

And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself. 48 29 - It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the emb 'rrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author. f fruit. In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and jhe outcome was invariably vegetable. T h e French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

Traits o f malice are not alien even to authentic Marxist language, and today there is a growing resemblance between the business mentality and sober critical judgement, between vulgar materialism and the other kind, so that it is at times difficult properly to distinguish subject and object. - T o identify culture solely with lies is more fateful than ever, now that the former is really becoming totally absorbed by the latter, and eagerly invites such identification in order to compromise every opposing thought.