So now the doctor cuts this young dead woman open from top to bottom, the skull is sawn open, there's no cause for hope anyway, and a silver friendship ring is pulled from her hand, which once felt something, to be given back to her family. Death. It draws its terrors, I think, solely from its linking of individuality and no longer being. If we were all equal, we would be indifferent to death, because we could only die as species and not tell one another about it. Just look at this spirit, for example, it's a very new one, a group of people thought it up when they realized that they would never be more like God than in this film about pilots, in which they were able to achieve power over themselves and the likes of us by a kind of surprise attack. For once at least! You can see for yourself how the little bit of spirit that was produced will try in vain to reach us in further episodes every evening before the news, in order to outdo the news in advance in horrors, and so today, too, it rehearses it again from the TV set, because without rehearsal it can't do it: inflating itself. The spirit is unceasing rehearsal (one can tell its knowledge of the futility of its attempts from looking at it, I believe), desperate efforts, without success. If you don't understand it immediately, you can also read up on it in Austrian Broadcasting's Teletext service; the spirit is very concerned to make it exciting for us, so that we at last take note of whatever. Announced, e.g., today: Train crash in Norway, so you shouldn't travel to Norway. Have you understood that at least? But it's no use, because tomorrow there's something quite different again, even more horrifying, but somewhere else. The TV is the immortal spirit's favorite place to stay, perhaps even the place where it originated, because it doesn't seem to want to leave. No wonder, it's nice and warm, it's almost as if it were still inside the head. But perhaps television is also the only place where, against its better judgement, the spirit can still hope that we pay attention to it. And so it makes its compulsory contribution to the process of growth and decay, we watch the Universe program and see that the beautiful butterfly has already emerged and has inflicted a terrible fate on a cabbage leaf, and so we give it a good hiding. We would have managed that even without the television. But the spirit doesn't know that. Now it's offended! Yet I like it so much. You can also get by without it, but I don't say so. Basically everything can happen by itself. Once the spirit was the whole world, today it is, e.g., a family soap, which scorches its feet if it doesn't immediately keep on running to the next episode, always ahead of the advertisements, chased by them as by a bad-tempered lioness. Always keep moving, until we are allowed to see the Lord God, who will possibly provide a poorer picture, less clear (even though the set isn't broken!) than in the nice nature film before. Apart from that God's only on once a week, on Sunday evening before the prime-time film. And if he appears earlier, we switch him off. And if he nevertheless drops by unexpectedly, he sometimes comes disguised as a bishop, so that we can get used to the sight of him, and that in the shape of Mr. Horst "Derrick" Tappert, who has begun a completely new career, because this time he, too, would like to show a bit of spirit, at least more than before. It seems to be infectious. He would almost have died, this washout, he comes to us for bit of starch. Here I have to agree with Hegel's critics, all the pain, all the suffering, all the hardship, all the everything, all the death in itself, none of it will result in even one less innocent dumb sheep writhing on the slaughtering block of history. God created, and then he didn't waste another thought on what he had done, I'd risk laying a bet on that. I've gone on often enough about it, now that's that, once and for all, I have to accept it, and that is fortunately also the absolute end, and I don't ever want to write something down again. Now, poor child of this world that I am, I would at last like to meet the world spirit in person, so that it sends me a completely new bright idea, how I could shape my talent for invention-which I once, during carnival, in front of lay people, disguised as spirit, because for sure no one would have suspected that I was underneath-even more purposefully and ambitiously, above all in terms of content, that's my weak point, here I state a doctrine, which goes: I don't believe that myself! Or better, I avoid the spirit as I have done so far and instead show myself, quite stunned by my significance, personally, just as I am. I am I. We are we. I signify nothing, but I have a certain significance, as you see yourself. Perhaps I am even more important than you! Until now at least I've got quite far like that, and I don't have a car. If I don't believe it, why should you believe that one can get anywhere without ever putting anything in the tank? Your travel group met half an hour ago on platform four, but now this train, too, has left. So if contrary to expectations the world spirit does come after all, because I haven't come to it, I shall do everything to send it, which kept me waiting so long, back to where it came from, with a single haughty glance. Now I don't want it anymore. Off you go. To church. Because that's a place I never go to. So I shan't meet it and so will no longer have to relinquish my own thoughts. Bravo? Did I hear rightly? Bravo? So now I don't need the spirit at all anymore. I am acquitted, goodbye Rome, away, away to the Maldives, into the sun! To live at last, as a whole party with very many suntanned people in it shows us every day. I can't dive, don't swim very well. In addition I haven't maintained my species. I didn't, however, receive any child allowance for it, like the mother of Gabi, our young Snow White, whose awakening from a medical point of view is here formulated in an imprecise and scientifically somewhat shaky way, perhaps because she didn't wake up anymore at all. No dwarves, who cut a stay in pieces, so that the girl first breathes, then comes alive again. We have no mention, no indications of renewed activity of the heart in the wake-up phase, nor is there any breathing as further sign of a resuscitation process. Where is the corresponding opening of the eyes? Who hears the famous exclamation, with which the seemingly dead like Liz Taylor, she, too, a sister of death, return to life: I was only sleeping? Where are the journalists now that I want to awaken? No, our smaller, younger sister of death is not sleeping in her black wet coffin, in her green tarp. She really is dead. Absolutely. The absolute pure and simple. Eternal as the spirit, to whom unfortunately, although I have so little ability to believe in it, I've taken a fancy, as to malt cough drops, only: What did it do to me? She has, admittedly, been on TV several times now, but she can nevertheless no longer reach us, this young dead woman. In each one of us we all die, dies our quite unkind kind, but not mine, I did not found any nor carry any on. That others have decently done so is no comfort to them, when the scythe hisses round their ears. But usually we're not sitting comfortably anyway, why should we be just at the moment of our death, then we've got other things to do: weeping, breathing, praying, paying attention to heart activity, checking the funeral parlor, hoping for a resurrection scene and knowing that it won't happen this time either, taking leave, fighting against it, refusing to stand for interruptions, screaming and scratching the bed, water or snow blanket AND: at every, really every opportunity propping oneself up with a new significance, which is not due to one and will soon be replaced by a coffin lining, which is supposed to absorb bad smells and stinking fluids. One had no significance and does not have one now either, with the exception of one's nearest and dearest, to whom one meant something, who are also, however, pleased that we're gone at last and that they'll have no more trouble with us and we couldn't take our money with us and have left it behind.