Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent. - Christopher Isherwood

"The really destructive feature of their relationship is its inherent quality of boredom. It is quite natural for Peter often to feel bored with Otto - they have scarecely a single interest in common - but Peter, for sentimental reasons, will never admit that this is so. When Otto, who has no such motives for pretending, says, "It's so dull here!" I invariably see Peter wince and looked pained. Yet Otto is actually far less often bored than Peter himself; he finds Peter's company genuinely amusing, and is quite glad to be with him most of the day. Often, when Otto has been chattering rubbish for an hour without stopping, I can see that Peter really longs for him to be quiet and go away. But to admit this would be, in Peter's eyes, a total defeat, so he only laughs and rubs his hands, tacitly appealing to me to support him in his pretense of finding Otto inexhaustibly delightful and funny."

'All these people,' Bergmann continued, 'will be dead. All of them. . . . No, there is one—' He pointed to a fat, inoffensive man sitting alone in a distant corner. 'He will survive. He is the kind that will do anything, anything to be allowed to live. He will invite the conquerors to his home, force his wife to cook for them and serve the dinner on his bended knees. He will denounce his mother. He will offer his sister to a common soldier. He will act as a spy in prisons. He will spit on the Sacrament. He will hold down his daughter while they rape her. And, as a reward for this, he will be given a job as boot-black in a public lavatory, and he will lick the dirt from people's shoes with his tongue...'

The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.