“There was a time in my life when I spent many months in utter darkness. I wasn’t really unhappy. In a sense, I was relieved. It was sad. It was bitter. But it wasn’t unbearable and I developed even something like a pride for my love and my pain. I lived in a cloud, shrouded in black veils. A nonsensical job in an office where orthographical and stylistic revisions where performed and which entailed long commuter trips to Düsseldorf and back, a lack of orientation after University, and a general uneasiness about life and my aims and further struggles in this world added to my state of mind. I saw so many rainy train stations; so many sad, shivering people waiting for something; so many desolate places, wet railways, shimmering in the yellow light of electric beacons, graffiti on lifeless train hulls that looked like helpless whales thrown onto the beach. While over me arched the constructions of a forgotten race of steel-builders, whose works of wonder and of genius served now as a brooding place for doves and gulls, and the faint echoes of machines and vehicles, once filling the beautiful halls, whispered from time to time between the cracks in the iron. The stars shone above, on the other side of the huge masses of metal, glass and stone. The walls were covered with symbols of a script of which no memory knew; and the shadows of the moonlight that seeped into the darkness drew whispering traces among the pillars. I was soaked with sadness, exhaling sadness, being blinded by sadness.
There was a dark and warming spell over me like the light steps of an angel at my side, an angel who cherished my pain and kept a hand over it, kept vigils to it, adorned it and clad it in bright garments. A dark angel with a sad heart who needed my consolation as much as I needed his sadness. I felt chosen to suffer. I had the feeling that what I had gone through had to show me something. And I felt in-the-world again, I could touch and see and smell; the cold was burning on my cheeks, the ice was glistening, the ground frozen hard. I was alive; and I was sure that everything made sense and that I would never be alone.”