No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.