From The Lost Writings, a collection of fragments, which will be published next month by New Directions. Translated from the German.

I was sitting in the box next to my wife. We were watching a rather exciting play, all about jealousy, in a hall of gleaming pillars, a man was just raising a dagger to stab his wife as she was walking off. Tensely I leaned over the parapet; against my temple I could feel a lock of my wife’s hair. Just then we both shrank back; what we had taken for the velvet-upholstered parapet was the back of…