Makes me want to read Coetzee. I grew up on a diet rich in Weimar culture. As a child I used to listen to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Mahagonny and feel as if I were being ripped apart by the contradictions: between morality and decadence. This was a physical sensation, and a pleasureable one. Harold Pinter describes a similar experience, of a sort or esthetic bliss, reading The Jacobeans. When I spend too much time around philosophers and reformers, I need to remind myself of the world of things.