Currency of Paper. Alex Kovacs

were short-lived.

      In the period following his first moving into the bungalow, almost every single weekday came to follow the same pattern for Maximilian. He would wake up at 5 A.M. and consume a breakfast consisting solely of soybeans, perform his ablutions, and then leave the bungalow to pursue one or another of his projects. Lunch and dinner would usually be eaten in restaurants, but always in modest or lowly establishments, and then late in the evening Maximilian would return home and practice zazen for an hour inside his one entirely empty room, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring at a blank white wall for an hour whilst attending closely to both his posture and breathing. Afterwards, he would read for a while, and then go to sleep. Nothing other than a terrible emergency could break this routine. He would feel lost, even nauseated, at the prospect of making do without it—consumed by an overriding sense of displacement and confusion.

      Saturdays would see him dealing with all purely utilitarian chores and administrative activities. Cleaning, shopping, and exercising took most of the day. Afterwards, once evening had descended, he would avoid all revellers and go for long walks along the city’s back streets, solemn undertakings that might last until dawn, during which time Maximilian would contemplate the previous week’s labours, considering how they might be improved, made more efficient, more productive. Staring into the shadows and illuminated windows he came upon, he would seek solutions to his various predicaments.

      Sundays were reserved for reading. He experimented with many different reading venues and positions: cafés, trains, bathtubs, rooftops, and cemeteries; sitting, standing, leaning, suspended in a hammock, balanced against a wall on his head, but finally he came to the conclusion that he was happiest at home, lying on his back on the floor. Maximilian would stare at page after page for ten hours at a stretch, finding that this method allowed him to finish a threehundred-page book in a single day. Consequently, three-hundredpage books tended to become his favourites, and he found himself accumulating quite a few.

      From time to time, Maximilian wondered whether there was something wrong, even perverse, perhaps hypocritical about his reliance on routine. Yes, he did like to control every element of his domestic life, for every last detail to be planned, for every inch of his living quarters to be entirely under his control; and certainly many people would have criticised his lifestyle as being unhealthy, a subject worthy of mockery. But these doubts never lasted very long. Maximilian was content. This was how he wanted to live. The hypocrites were the ones who believed they were any different. (Not, of course, that he had ever actually conversed with any such people, nor been subject to their criticisms.) Most people’s lives were ordered to precisely the same degree. The difference was that he chose to order his life, quite consciously, and in a form that might be termed “idiosyncratic,” not at all on the model of “ordinary” life and its concerns.

      He never really asked himself why he had such a great need for solitude, feeling that there was no other way in which he could comfortably live. Social niceties would steal precious hours away from his work, leaving his creations neglected. A single sentence addressed to Maximilian—even those routinely fired in his direction by shop assistants—could throw him off balance and upset the rhythm of his work for the rest of the day. When he thought about the way in which most people lived, he could not help but recoil. The quotidian world sprawling about him in all directions was enormously depressing, if not terrifying. For him it was a place in which the imagination had been destroyed in favour of empty ritual; his rituals, by contrast, being heavy with purpose. He could not bear to open his mouth there, in that larger world. On some days even to walk down a perfectly ordinary street, populated with shops and traffic and pedestrians, would be enough to topple him into despair. After weeks of forgetting that the quotidian existed, he would come across a certain face or street corner and this would return him forcefully to the lives of others. So often he could separate himself from these lives, holding them at arm’s length, but when he could not continue to do so, however transient his lapse, it often felt as though the ugliness of everyone else’s realities had fallen upon him in some horrible, tumbling profusion, and he would retreat into himself once more.

Concerning the Utmost Privacy

       (1961)