This letter is a translation of the German original · Questa lettera in italiano

Masters of our fate

For long years of our lives we have, have, have the feeling of being masters of our fate. Of holding our life in our hands. Life, all the worlds that open up, the wonders, the abysses and the prospects, the encounters and the losses, the hopes, exertions, gratifications, all the running and wanting and needing and holding on, the taking and penetrating and holding, the risking, amassing and searching, the smoking and snorting and grafting and slogging and boozing so as to pass out and be able to come round again, all this fucking and clinging and craving, the breeding and deluding disillusioning ourselves destroying ourselves, the learning and the eternal trying to love, all this wanting and grabbing and gorging, hurting and bleeding and puking and laughing and bawling snot and tears bawling because the world is too small and too mean for life and because it will not bend to life and to what life owes us.

To master life, as the fine phrase goes, to subjugate the imponderables with money and power and violence (quiet and loud) and where they will not be subjugated then to go over to faith, which is nothing other than the subjugation of life by foul means, simply to whitewash all that shit with gold leaf but that is not the done thing.

Then you, the great master of your fate, suddenly step out in front of a car, fail to see the train. Suddenly cells derail and start proliferating in the unlikeliest places. The heart is crushed by its furred-up crown, the blood clots somewhere in the thigh and the bullet shoots synapses apart in the brain or one lung clean off.

You are not old yet, a scant or a good half-century, that is nothing, there are people who live to be almost a hundred, and suddenly,