Feeling very agitated, I smoked a lot. How did I get here? I recognized the faces, and especially the beards, of the “established writers” from our Province, who were sitting around the same table and talking quietly among themselves, and I felt the small audience in the darkness above as a threat, as a bad omen. Somebody was inspecting my face very attentively, but I could not identify him. The lights concentrated on the table were too bright, as though a camera was waiting somewhere behind.

I vaguely remembered the invitation to a round table on the method of writing. I found this invitation threatening for at least two reasons, which I hasten to elucidate. First, I am by no means an established writer, since I have not published a single piece of short prose I have written. Therefore, the invitation was puzzling. And second, I am certainly not a writer either, since I write solely for the sake of self-preservation. It is a means for averting a premature suicide, as it were. A personal matter. Therefore, I was almost insulted by the invitation. Or was I flattered? I came to clear this up, to find out why I was invited. In a clearly paranoid fashion I was convinced from the very beginning that all this, the entire parade, was set up to expose me, to catch me unprepared. The fact that somebody was staring at me contributed to this conviction.

And the show started. I did not listen. It was sufficiently clear from the tone of their voices that they did not have anything to say—my supposed colleagues. A parade, pure and simple. When it was my turn to speak, of which the established writer to my left had to remind me by pushing me softly at first, I said just a few words. When you write, you denounce, you throw away to rot, that in you which grew brittle and stale, that is, describable. In order to communicate with yourself, let alone with others, you must denounce yourself. Writing is a permanent suicide. The readers are vultures feeding on decapitated corpses. The method of writing consists in controlling the rate at which this permanent suicide unfolds. It must not be too fast, and it must not be too slow. The writer is a gladiator who must die, who is expected to die, and whose death is desired by the ignoble crowd above, but who must also provide a good show for the public, because the central character up there in the gilded box, the Caesar, is the writer himself. And so on.

After a short and unpleasant pause and some shuffling among the established writers, someone from the audience, whose face I was unfortunately still unable to see, said with quiet indignation: “You make it sound easy!” I jumped. It was him all right. He knew me! I almost panicked. But I shouted back, without a moment of visible hesitation: “Easy? You call this agony easy?” He was ready as well: “Yes, easy! Since you pretend that you are a born writer, that you have no doubts about that, to start with.” He knew me! I retorted immediately that he was basically right, but that the exact word was not “easy,” but “easier” instead, since I write when I am compelled. I start writing when the word is already suffocating me. That is the crux of my method, as far as I am aware. Not to write would be much more difficult. I do not know why this is so, nor do I care to find out.

I noticed that I was shouting… And I left the place, disgusted with the secret agent in the audience. I even forgot my pipe there, which I had not lit a single time during the show. I prefer cigarettes, anyway.