Erich Maria Remarque. Black Obelisk (№ 264619)

... Where is our original face? - I mused. - Initial landscape, before it becomes this landscape, perceived by our senses, Park and forest, house and person? Where the face of Bodindecha before he became Bodington? The person Wernicke, until it called his name? Do we still have some knowledge about this? Or are we caught in the net of concepts and words, logic, and the deceiver of the mind, and behind them the lonely burning of the initial flames, to which we have no access, because we turned them into useful heat in the kitchen and the furnace flame, deception and authenticity, the bourgeois and the walls and, in any case, in the Turkish bath sweating of philosophy and science. Where are they? If they still are elusive, pure, inaccessible, with life and death, as they were before he turned to us in life and death? Or they may now burn only to those who live here, in the rooms behind bars, who sits on the floor or sneaking silently, staring in front of him blankly, feeling the blood in his native storm? Where is the boundary separating chaos from harmonious order, and who can get through that and then come back? But if it is possible - anyone able to remember what he saw? Unless one does not extinguish memories of a friend? And who is insane, noted, rejected - whether we, with our insular and sustainable ideas about the world; or those others, in whom chaos is raging and lightning flashes of sparkles; those who sacrificed to the immensity, as if they were rooms without doors, without a ceiling, if it chambers with three walls and in which fall the lightning and the storm burst and the rain, while we proudly walk around his self-contained apartments with doors and four walls and imagine ourselves above those simply because slipped away from the chaos? But what is chaos? And what is the procedure? In whom they are? And why? And who ever of them to slip out?