Читать книгу Five Weeks at Humanitas - Manfred Jurgensen - Страница 9

I saw it coming. It’s not as though it suddenly happened out of the blue. Nothing like it. Nor did it have anything to do with a mental breakdown, at least not in the usual sense.

For some years, especially the last two, something mysterious and horrific was taking place. It wasn’t the normal process of ageing everybody has to come to terms with. Although not unrelated to growing old, this thing was much more scary. Yet in a strange way I also found it exhilarating, fantastic and almost beautiful, close to what I’ve come to call magic. There are certain events in life, exquisite moments or lengthier developments that can only be described in those terms. That they are often accompanied by suffering and pain does not diminish the mystery or enchantment of the spell.

It began with memory. I remembered the fishnets hanging out to dry down at the small port of my hometown. The bigger trawlers were moored in the harbour, smaller boats dragged to a tiny stretch of sand and turned upside down. The fishing nets were hung across high wooden scaffoldings that looked like crucifixes. On summer days their green buoys caught the light in reflections of momentary starlight flashes giving the impression that the nets had somehow come alive. The image of their swaying in the breeze kept haunting me, usually at incongruous and inopportune moments. Drying nets descended above my head as if I was to be their catch. Was I an acrobat about to fall or was it something more threatening than that? Was it safety or peril?

Sometimes a spider I assumed to be venomous would climb out of the web’s centre trying to pierce my eyes. But its segmented body and long jointed legs merely moved to the outer circle of the network spinning a repair of damaged threads. After a while images of fishnets and cobwebs were replaced by something even more disturbing. There were moments when I felt my whole body turn brittle. I thought I could actually hear my skin rustle as it seemed to turn into a different layer. What was going on? At times it felt as if not only my outside cover was somehow transforming itself. Touching myself I discovered the presence of a strange crisp, starchy texture. When I used my fingers to check the nature of the new tissue its surface folded and creased. I seemed to have lost all physical resistance. In panic I thought of attaching a note to my body: PLEASE DO NOT BEND! Amazingly, people around me did not seem to notice anything different about me. Didn’t they hear me rustle as I approached? There were times when I heard it even in my sleep.

My wife Ulrike didn’t seem to notice her husband was in the process of some kind of metamorphosis. I was unsure whether to be pleased about her failure to realise it or not, and I believed it would be unwise to draw attention to it. How could she have understood my invisible transformation when I myself was unable to make sense of it? Yet there could be no doubt in my mind: I was actually in the process of assuming an altered state.

Could such a dramatic change really remain unnoticeable? Could there be individual mutations imperceptible to others? Was it real or just in my mind, a psychosomatic illusion? Even if it were all in my mind, it would still be real, wouldn’t it? I was more than confused. I was at a loss. What did it all mean?

In view of its apparent invisibility I made strenuous efforts to keep the mysterious conversion to myself. Upsetting my wife, colleagues and friends was the last thing I wanted. I resisted the temptation to consult the local GP, not least because he too was a friend. He would be bound to advise me to take things easy, spend a special weekend with Ulrike by the sea, relax, enjoy good food and indulge in what he liked to refer to as marital exercises. I had already done all of that, with no change in my condition. There was only one prospect that filled me with at least some hope. On the strength of my study on The Fictional I, I had been offered a visiting professorship at the University of Basle. Although Ulrike’s own teaching commitments would not allow her to join me — she was dedicated to her refugee students from overseas — she urged me to accept the invitation and travel alone. If I could just last a few more weeks lecturing my own students at university, I thought, this whole transformation business would most probably resolve itself. Perhaps it would prove no more than what some people call a midlife crisis.

Midlife crisis? Who was I kidding? If I ever had one, it passed unnoticed a long time ago. Surely I was well past midlife now! Yet now was the time when I noticed something was going on in my mind and body. Sometimes I wondered whether it could be similar to what women like to call their change of life. By the time I left for Switzerland I considered my condition a puzzle I had not been able to solve but managed to keep under control. Almost.

Yet after a couple of days in the Swiss village guesthouse of Riehen, near the German border, I woke up from my own rustling. I touched myself and found I had been transformed into paper. I got out of bed, picked up the Max Frisch novel I’d read before going to sleep and on the way to the bathroom stared at my image in an old-fashioned gilded mirror hanging in the corridor. What I saw completed my panic. I looked at a tiny human body trying to hide behind a large book. Whether by grotesque distortion of the mirror or my own deformed perception, the book and I merged into one. As I continued to stare at what was no longer myself, I began to recite entire passages of Frisch’s novel. The words poured out of me as if they’d been imprinted in my brain. The recitation continued for several pages until I screamed and ran away from the mirror. Under the shower I did my best to calm down and concentrate on the seminar I was expected to conduct later in the morning. Lathering my face, I found temporary relief in a curious discovery: at least parts of the body seemed to be recovering normal skin. It took me a very long time to pick up enough courage to leave my room and join the other guests for breakfast.

At my arrival no one raised a head. It seemed nothing extraordinary had happened. I dared not look at the large ornamental mirror between the two windows looking out on the sunlit road leading from Basle to the border. Summer was over. The new semester was about to start. If I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself, I had better pull myself together.

Early in the new millennium an Australian visiting professor at the University of Basle had to be forcibly removed from a doctoral seminar he conducted on literary fiction. As the subject of the discussion class was of little interest to the majority of citizens, the Basler Zeitung confined the incident to a couple of paragraphs in the local news section, reporting it as an unfortunate work-related accident. The real reason for the uncharacteristic restraint of the press was the Rector’s request for confidentiality. In particular there would be no need to reveal the identity of the visitor from Down Under. As he had been awarded a Swiss Confederacy fellowship some years ago his reputation deserved to be protected by government, universities and the media.

Much remained unknown about the occurrence. Students who witnessed the event merely confirmed they had at one point walked out of the seminar, more in sadness than in anger, because they didn’t know what else to do. Had something similar occurred in the science faculty, it would have reached the heights of academic controversy. Different interpretations or new discoveries concerning time and space, energy and light, gravitation and motion would have made headlines comparable to political scandals or sensational sporting achievements. Literary fiction, by definition unrealistic if not unreal, was hardly in that category. Campus gossip confined itself to whether the guest lecturer had to be carried off on a stretcher or voluntarily sought counsel from senior members of the university’s psychiatry department. Nobody seemed to know where he’d been taken. He disappeared between one day and the next, his lectures and seminars cancelled or taken over by local staff. Only members of the doctoral seminar were immediately affected by the disturbance. A delegation approached the Head of Department and the Dean, urgently asking what had happened to their professor, who was acting supervisor of their dissertations. They were advised that due to unforeseen circumstances the Australian professor would not return.

Apparently he had suffered a major nervous breakdown. It was whispered the man from Down Under had literally lost his identity. No one knew exactly what that meant. Members of the university’s Department of Psychiatry rumoured the visiting colleague had turned into a megalomaniac screaming at no one in particular that he was the world! Adding something about ‘unified sensibility’, ‘no more separation of idea and being’, ‘a world made up of monadic fictional I’s’. For professional reasons they didn’t make fun of his dementia but thought it legitimate to relate his collapse not merely to overwork (did a visiting professor really have to work that hard?), but also, perhaps more importantly, to the subject of his research seminar and the unscientific discourse of his discipline. In the Arts Faculty things like that were bound to happen from time to time. During early diagnostic interviews the Australian visiting professor spoke of a colleague in the Philosophy Department of his own university, who after a few years of teaching and research had decided ‘to change his name by deed poll from Peter Wertheim to Who. At the same time his loyal wife wanted to be known as What.’ The Swiss academics didn’t know what to make of that. It became increasingly difficult to decide how far their colleague’s psychological disorder had progressed. In many ways a psychosis could be likened to cancer. In cases of early diagnosis it might be nipped in the bud. Could they believe what he told them, or was what he was saying a made-up story, the delusions of an incurable schizophrenic? As academic and clinical psychiatrists they were of course fundamentally predisposed towards sympathetic deconstructions of mental breakdowns. What had happened to the Australian they’d met at morning tea was a tragedy. He’d seemed a nice enough fellow.

I can’t do this. What they’re asking me to do is impossible. I feel like a child again, learning how to write, rehearsing curves and lines that somehow, magically, convey meaning to someone else. As soon as I drew particular lines I recognised in them something outside the classroom and the exercise book. The J became a tree, the P a mushroom or an umbrella (depending on how I felt), the F a crane. That part of writing I liked. But my teacher back at primary school kept shaking his head. He called my efforts wilfully messy. If it was so, my later life followed the same pattern. Who, I wondered, had written its script?

There was of course no script. Things just happen and form their own wilful pattern. Now the shrinks are trying to force me into their design, ordering me to ‘just write down whatever I can remember’. What kind of direction is that! I know of course what they’re after. Psychiatry is the art of making the thickest fog transparent. I say ‘art’ because psychoanalysis or therapy surely is not a science, as their practitioners insist. From the first interview at Humanitas I not only saw through their questions, I anticipated them. Each time I was right in predicting the next, I triumphantly burst out laughing. Only that made the interrogation bearable. I guess my response didn’t endear me to my inquisitors. Following the subtleties of their discipline they would have taken it as further sign of my mental instability. How laughable my whole situation has become!

I’m told I’ve had a breakdown. Expert Swiss medical opinion has it I’ve been working too hard. As if I needed to be taken to this obscenely comfortable sanatorium to know that. Humanitas! Was its name an admission that, one way or another, all of us are nuts? Humanity residing in an escape-proof mental home? And people say the Swiss haven’t got a sense of humour! (Or was it the Germans? I’ve forgotten. Perhaps I’m ‘in denial’. One thing I will admit is that because I am, thanks to my mother, half-German, I’ve suppressed that part of my lineage. My mother, who died some years ago, was my nemesis. But isn’t it supposed to be the father who causes sons all kinds of psychological problems later in life? So much for the expertise of those who are in charge of an institute called ‘Humanitas‘!)

I know from experience that everything derived from universities relating to humanity is at best a profound misunderstanding. It’s as if social man had devised a thought factory to process the functioning of his own body and mind. It’s a university that has referred me to Humanitas on the assumption I am a sufferer from schizophrenia or a psychosis. I wonder whether the resident shrinks realise these mental conditions are not illnesses of an individual but generic to mankind. They are an inseparable part in the evolution of language acquisition. Swiss psychiatrists must be aware recent research into physical changes in the brains of psychotics has revealed they all relate exclusively to the area of language skills and acquisition. So schizophrenia and other related mental illnesses are conditions shared by all mankind. I don’t mind if the shrinks insist on turning the condition into a pathology, so long as they realise it is an ailment they too are suffering from. If I have to deal with psychiatrists I can only do so by treating them as equals. In most cases, I believe, that would amount to a compliment because a language-generated psychosis implies creative imagination at a very high level.

They want me to write down my life. In addition the plan is to subject me to regular panel interviews. I’m not saying every psychotic is by definition brilliant, at least in the area of language, but to read such a ‘patient’ requires a special intelligence. I’ve already decided I shan’t write about my life in what the shrinks probably call a normal way. Nor shall I reveal everything about myself. Some truths I intend to keep to myself, perhaps to share with a ghostly alter ego, whom psychiatrists no doubt will take as evidence of further mental disturbance. As if ghosts didn’t exist! Some may call them their consciousness or soul. We have all experienced their presence during what clinicians call sleep paralysis. It’s a prevalent condition generating hallucinations everybody experiences now and then. The old Anglo word for it was ‘nightmare’. The ‘mare’ gives its proper meaning away: it communicates a story. (The German word for tales is Mär, as in fairytales, Märchen ). Anyone who dismisses hallucinations will also disregard dreams, visions, apparitions and imagination. Yet that is the language in which mankind has expressed its profoundest values and beliefs. So how can I submit to treatments of the spoken and written at Humanitas ? Why would I diminish the magic and imagination of my otherwise quite ordinary life by succumbing to the bland and mundane? Didn’t Freud himself say quite categorically in one of his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis that analyst and patient are equal? In fact, he went further: he insisted the psychoanalyst was in constant need of analysis himself.

I won’t allow my life to be told or edited by professional psychotics whose lives are unknown to me.

But here I am, and there is no escape, the result of a momentary lapse of reason, a fatal error for an academic. In my discipline, the history of writing (another non-scientific branch of knowledge), professors adhere to a theory of spontaneity. It was a spontaneous comment of mine that got me to this place. Humanitas is, like most of Switzerland, a luxurious prison, a democracy built on alpine visions. Small is beautiful. Small creates wealth. It’s the mountains that are big. In this charitable confinement I am expected to find myself. Or, as the staff would put it, I’ll either be cured or remain institutionalised until further notice. Neither option is a prospect I look forward to. I just want to go home.

Who am I? O yes, of course. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m already being infected with the morale of the place. You see, that’s what they’re trying to find out: who I am. In fact, they’re keen to let me know that because they believe I’m confused and not in full control of my senses. I’ve been scribbling first-form variations of the alphabet on Humanitas’ exclusive letterhead stationery. Vandalising expensive handmade Swiss quality paper. That’s what I think of their instruction to write down all I can remember of my own life. As if! Would you be able to do that? I mean, how would you select the important parts, how suppress all the embarrassing and humiliating things that have happened to you? It’s impossible to do justice to one’s life simply by writing about it. Whatever we select and whatever we decide to leave out is a distortion of the facts. Or the truth, if you like. All writing is a kind of forgery. If you’re lucky, people will take it as valid currency. But that would only prove you’ve turned yourself into a work of fiction. I don’t have to tell you that in our Age of Facts fiction is equated with lies, falsehood and fabrication. Yet it is facts that have long joined the public culture of urban myths. The pollution of so-called reality shows on TV is only one example of contemporary society’s insidious infection destroying what’s left of human imagination. Those of vision, inspiration and creativity are left behind in a desert of consumerist apathy.

So, instead of doing what I’m supposed to do, I’ll talk to you for a while if you’re interested and haven’t got anything urgent to attend to. Pretend you are a ghost and I’m a writer. Speaking to a ghost makes a change from reading a ghost writing for another to pass off as his or her own. Whatever I’ll tell you will be off the record. When we talk the precious sheets I’ve been given will remain blank, virginally pure. I promise. I’ll use them only as ordered, to record parts of my life for the Medical Board of Humanitas . They don’t need to know I’ll have already told you what I remember. It’s clear they want a clinical version, unemotional, cool and detached. They shall have it, but it will be their own.

Like most children I acquired the habit of investing everything around me with special meanings I was quite sure only I could recognise. There was no doubt in my mind that the world I transformed into secret codes was mine alone. Yet soon a reverse process was taking place. Learning the alphabet, I discovered there was already a sign language I was expected to acquire. Putting the letters of my name together, I thought I would find out who I was, or at least who I was meant to be. What would my very own sequence of letters reveal about me? I wrote and read the names again and again. MANFRED JURGENSEN. It proved a frustrating and disappointing exercise. The words didn’t mean a thing. I had no idea what MANFRED JURGENSEN stood for. (But didn’t I already know who I was?) Exhausted and angry, I dismissed the alphabet as a con. Relying on letters didn’t really add up. It needed more to convince me it could tell me something I didn’t already know. I was ready never to fully trust them again.

But then Grandmother’s delicious alphabet soup revived my explorations into language. I found it deeply satisfying to swallow sweet milky spoonfuls of letters … not without first checking whether, contrary to my earlier experience, they might not after all, coincidentally or otherwise, carry a meaning, perhaps even a secret message for me. To my disappointment they never did. What I was gulping down was a meaningless conglomeration of chance. Was that the kind of reality they were preparing me for at school? Coincidence was a word often used by one of my uncles, a war veteran, who kept saying his survival was a fluke, a happy accident. I found it hard to believe that all those crippled men who’d returned to our city or came as destitute refugees had experienced a stroke of good luck.

My grandmother told me the name I was given meant ‘man of peace’. At first I thought that funny because I was born at the height of the Second World War. But then I began to realise my parents must have chosen it because, secretly, they were longing for peace, even if in company they praised the war as the historic destiny of the glorious fatherland. My given name continued to confuse me. It seemed reassuring that my parents appeared to be against the death, misery and destruction I saw around me. Yet I was told my father was ‘in the war’, heroically fighting to protect us from the Enemy. Who was he fighting for? Who was the Enemy? Why would he do that if he didn’t believe in it? Was that also just a matter of words?

And my surname meant ‘son of George’. According to my all-knowing grandmother. That was clearly untrue. My father’s name wasn’t George. I’m honestly surprised not more people complain about the names they’ve been given. Seems to me there’s a lot of falsehood and misinformation going on.

I’ve no idea why I’m telling you all this. It’s probably no more than an attempt to avoid doing what I’ve been asked to do, write about my life. And kill time. I can’t just sit here staring at blank pages, least of all in a place like this. It gets on my nerves. I wonder when they’re coming to collect my biographical notes. Without them they’re lost because they too have no idea what’s happened to me. If I weren’t a foreigner, they’d probably classify me a hopeless case along with the other demented and deserted rich patients, provided there was someone to pay for my being here.

I admit I can’t remember exactly how I came to this place, a palatial building set in the grounds of a beautifully landscaped park, complete with ornamental fountains, classical statues and manicured lawns. But this epitome of luxury I knew was in fact a tastefully disguised Swiss psychiatric clinic, a home away from home for the mentally challenged. (That description, I discovered, included undiagnosed patients from wealthy families who’d decided they could no longer look after their own.) We entered the clinic on a wide gravel road leading to a cast-iron security gate bearing the inscription Humanitas. A couple of burly guards were trying hard to authenticate their camouflage as liveried hotel doormen. After exchanging a few words with the driver of the limousine who took me there, they cast a casual glance at me and smiled. I half-expected them to salute, but with the window down their polite beam was designed to assure me I had come to the right place. Despite their brawny appearance, they spoke soothingly in calm and gentle voices, to convey that all would be well from now on. I would be very comfortable here. The driver grinned conspiratorially and closed the electric window. Almost ceremoniously we glided through the splendour of the decorative park. I listened to the grinding noise of the tyres as we approached an overpowering doorway that would have done justice to a medieval palace.

Before I was brought here I stayed at my usual, much less grandiose guesthouse in the very heart of Riehen. I’ve often stayed there before, whenever I attended the university either for a week’s conference or as a visiting professor for an entire semester. I’d come to like the small hotel, located close to the German-Swiss border. All my life I felt most comfortable in the vicinity of frontiers. Did I mention I was born in a border town? People growing up near a boundary acquire a special sensitivity. Dividing lines and limits prompt in me illusions of escape, transgression or travelling. Living close to something foreign or different has always been my kind of freedom, the assurance that there was something other than where I was. From childhood on I was spurred into restless urges to explore, to search for something new, without knowing what I’d find. I was barely five the first time I ran away from home. Today there are hardly any frontier crossings, complete with customs clearance. In a united Europe the Danish-German border, so important to me that during my adolescence I could feel it in my blood, has all but disappeared.

I suspect the excellent service offered by Humanitas is just another cover to uphold the illusion of being a luxury hotel. My suite can only be described as obscenely comfortable, lavish with its furniture, chandeliers, thick carpets and large windows overlooking a pond almost totally covered in papyrus plants and water lilies. Even nature seems to choke on its own luxurious growth. An impeccably liveried, painfully polite young man guided me to my spacious prison. As we entered the lights went on automatically. While another uniformed assistant lifted my small suitcase to the luggage rack I was shown to the marble bathroom, the gilded Louis-quinze wardrobe and a matching ornate writing desk, complete with three silver frames that bore no photographs. After that I was shown how to operate the Bang & Olufsen audiovisual. Before leaving they looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for a sign of approval that everything was in perfect working order. Or did they expect a tip? Are there rules of etiquette in this five-star asylum?

As I had not asked to come here, I refused to unpack. Someone would join me soon, I was told, ‘to explain everything’. Threats like that make anyone who’s read Kafka shiver.

As if I needed to be told why they thought I’d suffered a mental breakdown and needed ‘rest’. It had begun so innocently at an end of semester party when almost all colleagues thought my response to a question put by the Rector merely quirky and original. Knowing I was about to retire, he had politely enquired what I intended to do with the rest of my life. My answer couldn’t have been more honest and straightforward: ‘Turn into a book.’ I said it with a smile, anxious to be affable and deferential. It was considered an honour to be invited to a party by the chief executive officer of a university as distinguished as this. Accompanied by polite laughter, a half-serious discussion followed assessing the validity of my metaphorical expression. Was reading, especially among academics, really that personal, devoted and cherished? Wasn’t it rather a matter of profession, rectitude and rules, maintaining distance in the name of objectivity? For subjective reading would surely reinforce bias and be at odds with the very principle of science!

I’d listened to what was being said and knew it was little more than an academic exchange of unrelated meaningless words and concepts. Hamlet was wrong: the rest is not silence but a sanctimonious commentary of linguists, philologists and philosophers reflecting their theories of spontaneity. When I said I wanted to turn into a book I meant it, quite literally and in every other way. What I didn’t say was that this book would logically turn into my life. In other words, I was talking about writing an autobiography.

It took several weeks before my constant references to that unwritten book of my life began to irritate some colleagues. I admit I may have become obsessed with the idea because it had turned into a directional briefing for my future. A couple of colleagues mocked me, calling it structural thinking or a discourse for myself. When in a seminar of comparative cultural studies I was asked to list the literary milestones of 1940, I tersely replied: ‘Page 47’. In a lecture on Romanticism I introduced the concepts of longing and belonging by announcing: ‘Today I want to talk about the unity of separation, the correlatives of borders, the concept of home and self. Pages 89-103.’ At first it merely prompted some disquiet among students, no open revolt. When I noticed their laughter I joined in. But when I continued to quote from my as yet unwritten life the listeners grew restless and unruly. Some sitting in the front row turned around and shouted: ‘What’s he talking about?’ High up from the back rows came the reply, ‘He’s come to the wrong seminar.’ In vain I tried to regain control. After a while everybody was beginning to leave the room.

Questioned by the Dean about the incident, I listened carefully before replying: ‘Page 311, op. cit. All other quotations are the author’s.’ Puzzled, he tried another way to get to the bottom of what had occurred. Had anything happened, he wanted to know. If the recent workload had proved too much for me, an assistant would be available to take over. How was my general health, he enquired. I assured him I was perfectly well. In fact, I couldn’t recall having felt quite as energetic for a very long time. ‘You see, I’m busy turning myself into a book,’ I announced with foolish pride. The Dean gave me a long hard look before terminating the interview. With an uneasy, almost unapologetic smile he declared, ‘Thank you, Professor. That’ll be all for now.’

‘For now?’ I did not realise that, like my own comments, he’d meant it, quite literally. The intention of turning myself into a book was sufficient to have me relieved of all contact with literature, the art of letters held captive by academics in discourse and analysis. Fiction for dissection, writing that could be taught.

Suddenly various statements were attributed to me and reported to university authorities (by whom?). It was alleged I had repeatedly made disturbing remarks such as ‘I don’t open the door, I am the door’, and ‘I don’t use a pencil, I am the pencil’. I can’t recall having said that to them. To appease the university I let myself be examined by medical experts, including a staff psychiatrist who suggested my exotic behaviour was a case of autism, rather than dementia or psychosis. Things came to a head when a Faculty panel was established to interview me. ‘We need to get to the bottom of this,’ a concerned Dean had supposedly advised his colleagues. One outcome of the interview was that by agreeing I was indeed ‘not myself’ I had mocked the committee and shown disrespect to my host university. I had claimed my heavy workload resulted from a division of labour: during lectures I was professor and student, developing my thoughts as I spoke while busily taking notes. Again, I deny ever having expressed anything of the kind, but will admit it is a thought that seems perfectly sound and attractive to me. It made no difference. Discreetly and not so discreetly, everyone around me became convinced I had succumbed to insanity.

The phone is ringing. I’ll never get used to the shock of being caught unawares. It seems so intrusive, having to answer an unknown caller. Why should someone be able to demand my instant attention no matter what? Even my silent number back home fails to protect me from these invaders. There’s no more private life in the world today. And now here at Humanitas, where there’s no one I want to speak to! Haven’t I been taken here to get rest? But although I’ve lifted and replaced the receiver, the wretched thing keeps ringing. Suddenly I realise it’s not the phone but the doorbell. Hurriedly I look at the pages scribbled with illegible letters and lines. Surely I’m not expected to have finished my writing already! I feel ambushed and guilty. I rush to the door, open it and find no one’s there. The ringing still hasn’t stopped. Confused and annoyed I return to the room and discover the intercom.

Ah, you’re still here. It was nothing. A pre-recorded female voice informed me dinner would be served from seven to ten. To underline that this is a carefree kind of place her announcement was accompanied by jolly Alpine folk music.

Well, if you want me to, I can tell you a bit more. I trust you because I know you won’t use whatever I’m saying as evidence against me. The shrinks are convinced I’m mad and would think I’m talking to a ghost. Let them! I’ll just pretend you’re my reader, someone I can talk to on my own. Would you please pretend you’re reading my book? You know the expression: ‘I can read him like an open book.’ Well, I’m open, dear Ghost. To the author the reader’s always a phantom. All writers are looking for a soul mate. Well, then, please be the Ghost of Humanitas!

May I present you with some Strøtanker, a Danish word meaning ‘scattering thoughts’. Perilously close to scatterbrain, I admit. You may think the tales I tell are just wild and fantastic stories that don’t add up, but I promise you they are as true as us sharing this room. Perhaps you will find some of them interesting, even exciting, but in the end still unbelievable. But you see, that’s exactly how my life has been: compelling, dramatic and improbable. Let me begin at the beginning.