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no attention to these bores. Relax! Ignore this fake audience, imagine yourself standing before hundreds of ecstatic faces and keep talking. It’s a circus. Every conference is a circus. The chairman coughed dismissively, as if to show he had no intention whatever of dancing to my tune. Then he exchanged a knowing glance with a bearded official seated beside him. I remembered that the two men had entered the room side by side. That official, thin as a nail, wore a matte black suit even though he wasn’t at a funeral. He began to speak without first asking permission: “Rejecting automobiles and worshipping bicycles: this is a sentimental, decadent cult already familiar to us from Western countries. The Netherlands is a good example. But supporting machine culture is a matter of the utmost urgency. We must provide rational connections between places of employment and residential areas. Bicycles create the illusion that one might ride anywhere one likes at any time. A bicycle culture could exert a problematic influence on our society.” I raised my hand to contradict this line of argument. But the session leader ignored me and announced the lunch break. I left the room without a word to anyone and dashed out of the building like a schoolchild running onto the playground. As a child, I was always the very first to run out of the classroom at recess, even when I was still in preschool. I would make a beeline for the far corner of the playground and act as if this tiny patch of earth held special significance for me. In reality, it was nothing but a shady, damp spot under a fig tree where brazen neighbors would sometimes secretly deposit their trash. No other child ever approached the spot, which was fine with me. Once one of my schoolmates hid behind the fig tree so he could sneak up on me as a joke. I threw him over my shoulder. It was an instinctual act of self-defense, I didn’t mean him any harm, but given my powerful build, he went flying through the air. Behind my back, the other children called me “snout face”
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