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pointlessness and terminus of his falling, by the anxiety it caused, he would then miss all the fun and all the diversions available along the way.
    “Like that kiss from a stranger,” he said. “So let’s call it As-ifness. To live as if things mattered. Every action, every thought, every word. Without it, we are nothing.
As-ifness
. We’ll be talking a lot about that.”
    But that day in the park he was sitting alone on a bench, looking lost, looking like a fired salesman in an ill-fitting suit, when he could have played his As-if game and made the effort to walk a few steps to the flowerbeds and smell the roses. She stood watching from across the street, stood trying to learn from him while the sun moved an inch in the sky and cars and trucks passed noisily between her andhim. Since he was the master, this image she knew must contain something for her to understand and learn from. But she did not understand. Not then.
    As it turned out, Martin Heidegger could not complete the lecture series on
Thrownness
and
Beingness
he had planned. The government declared National Socialism illegal, and the university fathers found out about Heidegger’s outspoken support of some of the thinking in the party. First he was banned from Vienna University, then he was banned even from crossing the border into Austria.
    He was replaced by Dr. Roland Martin Emmerich, a middle-aged professor in workingmen’s clothes with bicycle clips on his trouserlegs and shirts without collars. But he had two Ph.Ds and he was brilliant. He taught Søren Kierkegaard in the German translation of his work called
Existenzphilosophie
; he taught Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche, and he spun out their ideas until they rang like bells in the auditorium. His lectures turned the crowded hall into something like an isolation chamber within a society still lost in the wreckage of the monarchy and looking to tradition and religion for support.
    “It’s all so very interesting,” she said to Albert. “So … 
liberating
, that’s it! The freedom to think that way. It’s fantastic.”
    It was the first time in her life that she heard a full and tenured university professor speak out loud the notion that God and all scriptures relating to Him might in fact be mere invention in the face of our own irrelevance.
    “A mere romantic fiction,” Professor Emmerich said to them. “A human wish and yearning in our blundering search for meaning and structure and guidance. Think about it.”
    She learned that the idea of God, in Nietzsche’s terms, had for centuries provided moral structure and rules on how to live responsibly. Now, in the Godless world coming to western society, the meaning in everyone’s life was that person’s own interpretation. As was the morality of all choices and actions.
    It was both liberation and obligation, because Nietzsche had also cautioned, and Heidegger and Husserl said more or less the same thing, that men and women by declaring the idea of God to be a fervent wish at best, a cry for help, had perhaps run themselves off the rails and had doomed themselves spiritually. They had doomed themselves either to hopelessness or to an everlasting effort to rise above their fears and weakness, to become an Übermensch and find other forms of meaning. They had blithely shouldered a responsibility that had theretofore been entrusted to God.
    THEN, SOMEWHERE along the course of her philosophy studies, something happened to her. This was not until the Emergency and the night they found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg on the sidewalk, but as though knowledge had gradually settled into her bones, she came to understand without a doubt that ideas could be firmstructures for intellectual and moral support. For survival. From this insight it was not a long step to the thought that moments of inspiration and courage had to be seized and anchored in some form of principle, in a certain inner attitude, if only so that they might be recalled