A favorite sentence of the 24 chapter-length sentences that make up Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novella The Assignment:
D. had listened to F.’s report and absently ordered a glass of wine, even though it was just eleven o’clock, gulped it down with an equally absent air, ordered a second glass, and remarked that he was still pondering the useless problem of whether the law of identity A = A was correct, since it posited two identical A’s, while actually there could only be one A identical with itself, and anyway, applied to reality it was quite meaningless, since there was no self-identical person anywhere, because everyone was subject to time and was therefore, strictly speaking, a different person at every moment, which was why he, D., sometimes had the impression that he was a different person each morning, as if a different self had replaced his previous self and were using his brain and consequently his memory, making him all the more glad that he was a logician, for logic was beyond all reality and removed from every sort of existential mishap, and so he would like to respond to the story she had told him but could only do so in very general terms: good old von Lambert had no doubt experienced a shock, not as a husband, though, but as a psychiatrist whose patient has fled, and now he was turning his human failing into a failure of psychiatry, and the psychiatrist was left standing like a jailer without prisoners, bereft of his subject, and what he was calling his fault was this lack, what he wanted from F. was merely the missing document for his documentation, by trying to know what he could never understand, he was hoping to bring the dead woman back into captivity, and the whole thing would be perfect material for a comedy if it didn’t contain a problem that had been troubling him, D., for a long time, a logical problem loosely involving a mirror telescope he had installed in his house in the mountains, an unwieldy thing that he occasionally pointed at a cliff from which he was being observed by people with field glasses, with the effect that, as soon as the people observing him through their field glasses realized that he was observing them through his telescope, they would retreat in a hurry, an empirical confirmation, in short, of the logical conclusion that anything observed requires the presence of an observer, who, if he is observed by what he is observing, himself becomes an object of observation, a banal logical interaction, which, however, transposed into reality, had a destabilizing effect, for the people observing him and discovering that he was observing them through a mirror telescope felt caught in the act, and since being caught in the act produces embarrassment and embarrassment frequently leads to aggression, more than one of these people, after retreating in haste, had come back to throw rocks at his house as soon as he had dismantled the telescope, a dialectical process, said D., that was symptomatic of our time, when everyone observed and felt observed by everyone else, so that a very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation-observed by the state, for one, with more and more sophisticated methods, while man makes more and more desperate attempts to escape being observed, which in turn renders man increasingly suspect in the eyes of the state and the state even more suspect in the eyes of man; similarly each state observes and feels observed by all the other states, and man, on another plane, is busy observing nature as never before, inventing more and more subtle instruments for this purpose, cameras, telescopes, stereoscopes, radio telescopes, X-ray telescopes, microscopes, synchrotrons, satellites, space probes, computers, all designed to coax more and more new observations out of nature, from quasars trillions of light-years away to particles a billionth of a millimeter in diameter to the discovery that electromagnetic rays are nothing but radiant mass and mass is frozen electromagnetic radiation: never before had man observed nature so closely that she stood virtually naked before him, yes, denuded of all her secrets, exploited, her resources squandered, which was why it occasionally seemed to him, D., that nature, for her part, was observing man and becoming aggressive, for what was the pollution of air, earth, and water, what were the dying forests, but a strike, a deliberate refusal to neutralize the poisons, while the new viruses, earthquakes, droughts, floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, et cetera, were precisely aimed defensive measures of observed nature against her observer, much the way D.’s mirror telescope and the rocks that were thrown at his house were measures taken against being observed, or, for that matter, von Lambert’s manner of observing his wife and her manner of observing him, in each case a process of objectification pursued to a degree that could only be unbearable to the other, the doctor turning the wife into an object of psychoanalytic scrutiny and she turning him into an object of hate until, struck by the sudden insight that she, the observer, was being observed by the observed, she spontaneously threw her red fur coat over her denim suit and fled the vicious circle of mutual observation, and met with her death, but, he added, after suddenly bursting into laughter and becoming serious again, what he was constructing here was of course only one of two possibilities, the other one being the precise opposite of what he had described, for a logical conclusion always depends on the initial situation: if, in his house in the mountains, he were being observed less and less, so rarely that, when he pointed his mirror telescope at people who he presumed were observing him from the cliff, they turned out to be observing not him but something else through their field glasses, chamois or mountain climbers or whatnot, this state of not being observed would begin to torment him after a while, much more than the knowledge of being observed had bothered him earlier, so that he would virtually yearn for those rocks to be thrown at his house, because not being watched would make him feel not worth noticing, not being worth noticing would make him feel disrespected, being disrespected would make him feel insignificant, being insignificant would make him feel meaningless, and, he imagined, the end result might be a hopeless depression, in fact he might even give up his unsuccessful academic career as meaningless, and would have to conclude that other people suffered as much from not being observed as he did, that they, too, felt meaningless unless they were being observed, and that therefore they all observed and took snapshots and movies of each other out of fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence in the face of a dispersing universe with billions of Milky Ways like our own, settled with countless of life-bearing but hopelessly remote and therefore isolated planets like our own, a cosmos filled with incessant pulsations of exploding and collapsing suns, leaving no one, except man himself, to pay any attention to man and thereby lend him meaning, for a personal god was no longer possible in the face of such a monstrosity as this universe, a god as world regent and father who keeps an eye on everyone, who counts the hairs on every head, this god was dead because he had become inconceivable, an axiom of faith without any roots in human understanding, only an impersonal god was still conceivable as an abstract principle, as a philosophical-literary construct with which to magically smuggle some kind of meaning into the monstrous whole, vague and vaporous, feeling is all, the name nothing but sound and fury, nebulous glow of heaven locked in the porcelain stove of the heart, but the intellect too, he said, was incapable of coming up with a persuasive illusion of meaning outside of man, for everything that could be thought or done, logic, metaphysics, mathematics, natural law, art, music, poetry, was given its meaning by man, and without man, it sank back into the realms of the unimagined and unconceived and hence into meaninglessness, and a great deal of what was happening today became understandable if one pursued this line of reasoning, man was staggering along in the mad hope of somehow finding someone to be observed by somewhere, by conducting an arms race, for instance, for of course the powers engaged in an arms race were forced to observe one another, which was why they basically hoped to be able to keep up the arms race forever, so that they would have to observe one another forever, since without an arms race, the contending powers would sink into insignificance, but if by some mishap the arms race should set off the nuclear fireworks, which it had been quite capable of accomplishing for some time, it would represent nothing more than a meaningless manifestation of the fact that the earth had once been inhabited, fireworks without anyone to observe them, unless it were some kind of humanity or similar life form somewhere near Sirius or elsewhere, without any chance of communicating to the one who so badly desired to be observed (since he would no longer exist) that, in fact, he had been observed, and even the religious and political fundamentalism that was breaking out or persisting wherever one looked was an indication that many, indeed most, people could not stand themselves if they were not observed by someone, and would flee either into the fantasy of a personal god or into an equally metaphysically conceived political party that (or who) would observe them, a condition from which they in turn would derive the right to observe whether the world was heeding the laws of the all-observing god or party—except for the terrorists, their case was a bit more complex, their goal being not an observed but an unobserved child’s paradise, but because they experienced the world in which they lived as a prison where they were not only unjustly locked up but were left unattended and unobserved in one of the dungeons, they desperately sought to force themselves on the attention of their guards and thus step out of their unobserved condition into the limelight of public notice, which, however, they could achieve only by, paradoxically, drawing back into an unobserved obscurity again and again, from the dungeon into the dungeon, unable, ever, to come out and be free, in short, humanity was about to return to its swaddling clothes, fundamentalists, idealists, moralists, and political Christers were doing their utmost to saddle unobserved humanity with the blessings of being observed, and therefore with meaning, for man, in the final analysis, was a pedant who couldn’t get by without meaning and was therefore willing to put up with anything except the freedom to not give a damn about meaning—like Tina von Lambert: she, too, had dreamed of drawing upon herself the observing eyes of the world, so perhaps one could read her doubly underlined sentence “I am being observed” as a statement of certainty about the victorious outcome of her enterprise, but, if one accepted this possibility, it would be just the beginning of the actual tragedy, in that her husband did not recognize her flight as an attempt to make others observe her, but, interpreting it as an escape from being observed, failed to undertake an investigation, thus scotching her plans from the outset, and she, upon finding that her disappearance remained unobserved, which is to say, ignored, may have felt impelled to seek out more and more audacious adventures, until, by her death, she achieved the desired end, her picture in all the papers and all the world observing her and giving her the recognition and meaning for which she had yearned.
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