"What is avoided only for fear of disgrace is already done." Ovid

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"The extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The simple way is the right way. The closer you get to the true, the less waste of expression you experience." Bruce Lee

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"Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it." George Foreman

Broadening the Spectrum

At a party, Diana suddenly embraces the security expert Kollermann. She cannot explain why she skips conventional forms of polite approach. She ignores the usual preliminaries, and the two withdraw to their hosts’ bedroom. What connects them is a sudden, overwhelming sense of familiarity and gentleness. An almost instinctive recognition takes place—an unspoken certainty of mutual presence. Like animals in the wild, they perceive one another without ceremony, acknowledging each other’s existence without ritual.

Broadening the Spectrum—Diana coined words such as divination and idiosyncrasy. She read James Joyce and Walt Whitman, pleased that her preferences were often met with incomprehension. She read intensely, learned passages by heart, and enjoyed the floating transitions between language, clothing, and self-conception. In the disguises of a student—the gown, the glasses, the ponytail—Diana explored the edges and heights of her perception.

From Diana’s notes

It was only affection (the term male desire is crossed out) that allowed me to experience my body as more than a neutral surface shaped by fashion and expectation. Until Kaplan, I had associated my body primarily with discomfort and restraint. I understood my connection with him as a meeting of minds. I embraced his spirit in a fragile physical existence—a formulation I later treated with irony. As confident and striking as I appeared to others, my relationship to my own body was marked by sadness. With Kaplan, physical presence gained a new seriousness. I experienced this closeness as a release. Only then did I stop feeling torn apart by countless expectations and recurring feelings of inadequacy.

At the beginning of our friendship, I bought a volume of black-and-white photographs. Today I understand why. I—still awkwardly—offered Kaplan an expansion of perspective. I sensed a wider scope of experience and unconsciously asked for permission to enter it.

I was suspicious of the effect I had on others. Everyone found me charming. I was considered a valuable member of society, even though I struggled to complete anything concrete. I kept returning to Mia—my literary alter ego. I met her in imagined places: a sailors’ hostel, a street born of my imagination while I sat in a lecture hall. I contemplated alternative lives, not as plans but as mental experiments. Mia was very close to me. Through her, I introduced words like divination and idiosyncrasy. I read Joyce and Whitman, pleased that my preferences were rarely understood. I read and memorized, enjoying the suspended transitions between language, clothing, and longing.

I wrote screenplays for myself. The camera followed me to university, observed me in an ancient lecture hall. I took notes in bullet points while fellow students looked at me. Every description stopped before action, remained implicit, and avoided explicitness. The rest was left unrecorded. I imagined encounters stripped of narrative embellishment and emotional framing. The scenes resembled woodcuts—reduced, schematic, grammatical.

Improving pleasure became my secret main theme—not physical pleasure, but the refinement of perception. It was linked to changes in my wardrobe, an interest in valuable objects, and an aesthetic discipline that concealed a deeper desire for linguistic power. I needed a high achiever of language—someone who would allow precision. Everything else—provocation, obscenity, self-assertion as gesture—meant nothing to me.

I understood that every playing field is a resonance space, an amplifier of experience. Someone had to open a door to a room in which I could be surprised by happiness. If I were to search for a comparison, I would think of a married couple who occasionally stay in a hotel simply to experience displacement. Strange smells, thin walls, unfamiliar routines—tested arrangements that renew perception.

Even that comparison falls short. As a student, I already knew that I depended on monumentality—on a dimension one refuses to acknowledge in daylight.

In the present day of the novel, set during the first pandemic summer, the Germanist Diana causes a stir beyond academic circles with her reassessment of a constellation long considered settled in literary history. She provides evidence that Aurora-Wanda Sacher-Masoch, traditionally cast as a dominant figure, acted largely in accordance with the wishes and scripts of her husband. Diana found her subject by way of James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce modeled Leopold and Molly Bloom on the Sacher-Masochs. Leopold Bloom became the prototype of the ridiculous man; Molly’s final monologue is often praised as the pinnacle of female psychology. Diana is on the verge of dismantling this interpretation. She exposes the monologue as a collection of clichés that primarily reflect male projections.

We see her in her supervisor’s office. Professor Goya is considered a Language Master—a title with historical weight, not only at Landgrave Philip University in Ederthal. Philip the Magnanimous owed his name not to gentleness but to political audacity. He was a central figure of the Reformation and played a decisive role in suppressing the peasant uprisings. Brecht called those uprisings Germany’s greatest misfortune because they came too early. Philip did not act out of devotion to Luther’s doctrine but to defend Hesse against imperial claims.

A bullet to the heart of time

At present, Diana enjoys awakening Goya’s intellectual appetite. For him, appetite is not mere display; it is expansive, almost encyclopedic. His ambitions recall the excesses of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Cornelius formulates his claims to dominance openly and without restraint.

Later, Diana sits at her desk, reflecting on a passage from Stefan Zweig’s Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Summoned to England in 1509, Erasmus found refuge in London with his energetic friend Thomas More, whose household resembled a laboratory of the future. In this environment, In Praise of Folly was conceived and first published in 1511.

Zweig writes that the unique brilliance of the work lies in its masquerade: Erasmus does not speak directly but let’s Folly praise herself, creating a playful misunderstanding that allows harsh truths to be spoken safely.

Erasmus defies clear classification. The question of who speaks obscures the subversive force of what is said. He protects himself from persecution through linguistic mastery. Zweig calls this a “sovereign art of masking,” a core shot into the heart of the age, delivered lightly. Erasmus appears as a diagnostician who has grown bitter before the gates of power yet remains untouched by revolutionary fervor.

In later editions, Erasmus commented on his intentions, describing the work as a pedagogical text. The pamphlet struck a nerve. Believers criticized clerical excesses and demanded reform according to the Gospels. Erasmus exposed abuses without stepping into the open. He called for a renewal of religion while fearing division. We admire his ability to hide behind words—to say with impunity what others could not dare to articulate.