It is there. At any given moment. And it is always elusive. One can never catch it, name it, live with it. One can never be one. So why is there this romantic notion that in writing you can be yourself? As if this was some holy sacrament of selfdom. The ultimate revelation. Write and be. And on the other hand, the opposite, the greedy collective, this mass of murderers, 20th-century thugs. That’s not how things work. And that’s not the lesson of the last century or the lesson of postmodernism or any modernism. Don’t let yourself be fooled. I understood why the cliche of Me versus Us was rekindled during the sad German election campaign, by people who had become bored by their former social-democratic self. “Das Wir entscheidet” was a stupid phrase, but so was the outcry about a comeback of collectivist ideology into German politics. That was that. What I don’t understand is why this fake dichotomy should be of any relevance to doing what you are doing, at a place of your choice. This is 2013. This is an experiment, and you can direct it any way you want. But to pretend that there is an option to be pure and single or vile and many, this is very much besides the point, I would say. To the contrary: There has to be public self-questioning, there has to be shared solitude. To the contrary: There is no proof that community or shared thought carry more destructive potential than any kind of individuality. To the contrary: The reason I sit at the table is to be in constant communication, and be it with the everyone else who is me. What is the boundary, Eva asked in her charming, evocative, she would say melancholic non-manifesto. I would say this boundary is the other. Which is much simpler to see and to describe than the self. Not to say more truthfully.