kaspar hauser speaks

To be Kaspar Hauser is to long, at every moment of your dubious existence, with every fibre of your questionable being, not to be Kaspar Hauser. It's to long to leave yourself completely behind, to vanish from your own sight. Does this surprise you? It is if course what you have taught me to desire. And I am a diligent student. With your help i have furnished myself inside and out. My thoughts are yours. these words are yours. even my black and bitter tears are yours, for I shed them at the thought of the life I never had, which is to say, your life, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremburg. my deepest wish is not to be a curiosity, an object of wonder. It is to be unremarkable. To become you - to sink into you - to merge with you until you cannot tell me from yourselves; to be uninteresting; to be nothing at all; to experience the ecstasy of mediocrity - is it so much to ask? You who have helped me advance so far, won't you lead me to the promised land, the tranquil land of the ordinary, the banal, the boring? Not to be Kaspar Hauser, not to be the enigma of Europe, not to be the wild boy in the tower, the man without a childhood, the young man without a youth, the monster born in the middle of his life, but to be you, to be you, to be nothing but you!

from the story kaspar hauser speaks which is to be found in the rather excellent the knife thrower and other stories by steven millhauser